U.S. government called Rwanda killings "genocide" in April 1994
In a visit to Rwanda in 1998, then-president Bill Clinton apologized for not acting quickly to stop the country's genocide four years earlier. The reason, he said, was that he didn't know it was going on.

"It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror," he said.

But according to newly declassified documents, it seems that wasn't true. Within days of the Hutu death squads' first killings, the CIA's daily briefing was referring to "genocide" in the country. And a state department intelligence briefing to Warren Christopher, then Secretary of State, not only talked about "genocide and partition," but also Hutu declarations of a "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis."

"Diplomats, intelligence officers and systems, and military and defense personnel yielded enough information for policy recommendations and decisions,," says a report from the National Security Archive, which pursued the documents. "That the Clinton administration decided against intervention at any level was not for lack of knowledge of what was happening in Rwanda."

Human Rights Watch has a backgrounder on lessons learned from the genocide. And, in case you missed it, we have several articles on our web site today noting the 10-year anniversary of the mass killings.

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