Tag: Bill Clinton

Elie Wiesel
Remembering Elie Wiesel

Remembering Elie Wiesel

By | | Comments 2 comments

The news of Elie Wiesel’s death reached me on the car radio last July 2 as I was driving through Banff and Jasper national parks in Alberta. The sun had come out after a very rainy Canada Day the previous day, but the news of Wiesel’s passing arrived as a shock that darkened even that bright Saturday. I had a most personal and moving encounter with the Holocaust survivor, Nobel laureate, author, teacher, and renowned advocate for the oppressed 17 years prior, and I knew I needed to write something of my memories of him. Unfortunately, circumstances were not conducive that day or in subsequent days as I made my way back to the U.S. and to Florida, and the months that followed proved far more tumultuous and challenging than I had imagined. But now, on the anniversary of his death, I feel it’s finally time I share my thoughts on this man who touched my life so profoundly.

In June of 1999 I was again posted to the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, Albania, returning there on TDY at my request from my then-permanent station in Brasilia. I couldn’t bear to read any more accounts of what the Serbs were doing to the Kosovar Albanians during their onslaught on the province of Kosovo – perhaps in part due to my own partially Albanian ancestry – and I asked to be sent on temporary duty back to Tirana, where I arrived in mid-May and was to remain through most of July.

It was during the first week of June 1999 that Elie Wiesel was sent as a personal representative of President Bill Clinton to visit the refugee camps housing the displaced Kosovar Albanians in Macedonia and Albania. The President wanted to get a first-hand read on what was going on, and what the state of the refugees was, and so he turned to the man who had spent so much of his adult life speaking out for the oppressed of the world. The man who himself had survived internship, at the age of 15, at two of Nazi Germany’s most notorious death camps, Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Perhaps because I constituted a significant part of the embassy’s collective memory, having been posted to Tirana from 1995 to 1997, including during Albania’s own internal descent into temporary madness following collapse of the country’s massive pyramid schemes, I was assigned as control officer to Mr. Wiesel. What that meant was that I was to accompany the visitor wherever he went, look after his safety and well being, oversee the translators, drivers, and other personnel assisting in the mission, serve as liaison to the embassy and whatever relevant agencies to assure that his requests were met, answer his questions about the country and the situation to supplement what knowledge he was garnering on his own, and to generally provide whatever support the President’s envoy might need or want. It struck me then as a great honor to be selected to fill this role, and it still strikes me that way.

Interestingly, in his report to the President, Mr. Wiesel said he was “accompanied by three able US government officials” during his visits to the two countries, and in acknowledging the role played by the embassies and the U.S. government agencies that assisted with the visit, he said, “They went out of their way to be helpful. They bring honor to our country.”

In truth, I felt that it was he who brought honor to us through his visit and, more than anything, the serious, sensitive, and intense manner in which he approached his role and the kindness he showed to everyone he came in contact with.

June brings heat to Albania, and the tents housing the thousands of refugees who had fled their homes in Kosovo were hot in the June sun. Elie Wiesel never faltered for a moment as we went from camp to camp, interviewing dozens of people in each camp, conducting the interviews in the tents, working through a translator, and listening intently to the unrelenting accounts of personal horror and loss that poured out. I sat in on most of these interviews, and hour by hour and day by day the strain and the sadness grew.

We got out into the areas where the camps had been set up, and this provided me with the occasion of my first-ever helicopter ride, aboard a U.S. Navy Sea Stallion that carried our entourage west out of the capital to our first stop. The schedule we kept up would have been grueling all by itself, but Wiesel was unstopping in his quest to speak with as many of the refugees as he could, seemingly disregarding any jet lag he might have picked up coming from New York, even at the age of 70 at the time.

We set up individual interviews as well as, as I recall, one or two group sessions, always in the big white refugee tents. For hours upon hours we heard women tell of watching their husbands and sons taken away and gunned down by the Serbs. We heard of parents separated from their children, of children watching their parents killed before theirs eyes, of the difficult and dangerous trek over the mountains and out of Kosovo to relative safety in Albania.

As Wiesel wrote in his report to President Clinton, “I listened to their tales of senseless cruelty and inhumanity which characterized Milosevic’s army and police; they have been reported in the international media. Still, it is different to hear it first-hand. One feels frustrated and powerless in their presence. And embarrassed. Pristina and Pec, Djakovica and Cecelija, Mitrovica and Glogovac, Kuraz and Izbica: eyewitnesses brought back harrowing detailed graphic reports from Kosovo’s killing fields. They go on and on. Forced expulsions, houses looted, villages burned, insults, threats, imprisonment, repeated rapes of young women, beatings of young men, separation of men and women, summary executions: everywhere, the process is the same. And the tormentors – who are they? Most of them are former neighbors.”

He heard again and again how it was former neighbors who were inflicting these cruelties, and I remember the interview Wiesel cites in his report: “ ‘A policeman came with his 5-year-old son,’ a man with an extraordinarily kind face told me. ‘He pointed at us and asked the boy to choose the prisoner to be beaten that morning.’ ”

When we took breaks, or when it was time to head back to Tirana at day’s end, we would watch the refugee children playing their games between the tents, as children will do.

“In this haunted world of Kosovo refugees, adults wept,” Wiesel writes in his report to the President. “Children did not. They sang. They played games. They laughed. And I no longer know what hurt us more: the children’s laughter or their parents’ tears.”

But what is not contained in those words is what we saw, again and again, which was children not just laughing and singing, but also pretending in their play to capture and execute one another, having picked up perhaps all too well what they had witnessed back home. I remember being at dinner in an open-air restaurant with embassy colleagues the evening of our camp visits and trying to describe what I had witnessed. But I was unable to get past the image of children forming guns with their fingers and using them to play-shoot their playmates in the back of the head, and breaking down at the table, not able to go on. The memory still haunts me and brings tears to my eyes even as I write these words.

It’s relevant to recall the details of Elie Wiesel’s life, being born into a town in Transylvania, a part of Romania that was transferred to Hungarian control for several years during World War II. And from there being hauled off with his family to the Nazi concentration camps as part of the Holocaust. Only Elie and two older sisters survived, their parents and younger sister killed in the camps, and the only reason Elie survived was by lying about his age, saying he was 18 and so able to work and prove useful to his captors. His life since then was marked with concern for the oppressed, and working to see that something like the Holocaust could never be repeated.

I think hearing the Kosovar refugees tell of the horrors that they were subjected to and witnessed brought back too many bad memories to Elie Wiesel. I could see it in his face, a look I can still see today, the effect all this was having on him. And in a low voice what he conveyed to me was his fear that this terror the refugees experienced was just going to carry on, was going to engender hatred and a desire for revenge, and the adults and the children playing their games were going to return to Kosovo with a desire to inflict on the Serbs what the Serbs had inflicted on them. It was this fear for the future that concerned him the most.

He writes in his report, “What I saw and heard there was often unbearable to the survivor that still lives in my memory. In fact, I never thought that I would hear such tales of cruelty again.”

His fear was that the victims would become the victimizers, seeking to wreak back onto the Serbs what their Serb neighbors had done to them. Toward the end of his report Wiesel expresses his concern for the future: “Their bitterness, indeed their hatred for [Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic] and his subordinates, will not fade away.”

When Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him “a messenger to mankind.” But at the entrance to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, it is Wiesel’s words that are carved in stone: “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”

Other words spoken by Wiesel must give us pause for thought, though. Lamenting that his father had no grave at which he might grieve, he said, “”What can I tell him? That the world has learned? I am not so sure.”

In June 1999 and afterward, Elie Wiesel bore witness to the suffering and cruelty brought down on the Kosovar Albanians, and I think it added to his uncertainty that the world had changed since the Holocaust. But for me, a lowly embassy control officer, I will never forget his presence or his concern. In those couple of days, my life was truly touched by him.

Read Elie Wiesel’s full report to President Clinton here.

Photo by Remy Steinegger, World Economic Forum. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on Medium. Follow me there, and here.

Threading the Needle Badly

Threading the Needle Badly

By | | Comments 0 Comment

Like many, if by no means all, Americans on June 8, I watched the testimony of former FBI Director James Comey before the Senate Intelligence Committee on live television. My perception was that Comey’s testimony was deliberately crafted to be self-serving and to deflect criticism from himself to his former boss, President Donald Trump. It also was my perception that, in trying to thread the needle of truth, he did it clumsily. In the end, he indicted himself at least as much as he indicted the President.

Comey has a disarming “gee-whiz” way about him that causes him to come across as a good guy – a characteristic of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn that he and Trump, according to Comey’s testimony, agreed on – and his reputation has been one of a straight shooter. I can’t say much of his previous service, but that reputation has to be called into question after his actions and public statements during the past year, the June 8 testimony not dispelling those questions. It’s been said Comey is not a political animal, but it is hard not to see so much of what he’s done and said in the past months as anything other than political. Ironically, Comey has garnered criticism from both Republicans and Democrats, was fired by Trump and lambasted by Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and yet his apparent leanings toward the Dems are hard (to be generous) to ignore. Harder to ignore is his apparently muddled approach to things that demand clarity, not confusion.

That is all back story to yesterday’s testimony. Watching it unfold, I heard a lot of statements that either seemed to not say a great deal or which could be read, alternatively, as exonerating the President of wrong-doing, or not exonerating him, depending on one’s view and predisposition. But the general tedium came crashing down, along – literally – with my jaw when Comey related how he had written a supposedly “private” memo about a meeting with the President in the Oval Office, which he subsequently provided to a “friend” with the expectation this friend would leak the memo to the media. I could hardly believe that an FBI director would do such a thing, and that he would publicly admit, apparently with some pride, to having done it was even more shocking.

There are times recently, just listening to Comey, I have had to wonder whether he was, in the vernacular, “losing it.” Some of his statements have sounded borderline deranged, or at least very much like whinging. But when he made this statement before the Senate committee, I was absolutely flabbergasted. Perhaps he saw himself as playing up to what he perceives as his audience in the media, but in the process he was admitting to the very real possibility that he had violated federal law. Comey also, as was pointed out by legal expert Jonathan Turley earlier today, seriously undermined his credibility as a potential witness in the unlikely event that any criminal charges eventually are leveled against the President.

This onion is so big it’s hard to determine where to start peeling it. For argument’s sake, had Comey felt the President was in fact trying to influence the outcome or direction or even conduct of an FBI investigation, he had an affirmative obligation under 18 U.S. Code Section 4 to report it. Not to a friend, not to a professor at Columbia University (that’s who this friend is), not to the New York Times, but to the Justice Department. Failure to do is arguably a crime. Surely the head of the FBI should know this. Surely he should know that, even if it doesn’t rise to the level of a crime, it represents an astounding lapse of judgment, a lapse further aggravated by going public with it under oath. Apparently Comey didn’t, and still doesn’t.

The next layer of this onion concerns how Comey went about this. Again under oath, he admitted to using a government laptop in a government vehicle to write a private memo, with the intent of leaking it, of an official meeting with the President. Comey insisted the memo contained no classified information, and that may well be true, but that is a peripheral issue. What Comey did as FBI director was in his official capacity as a U.S. Government employee – a rather highly placed one, one might add – and his notes and memos didn’t belong to him. They are the property of the U.S. Government and, by extension, of the American people. Whether these acts would qualify for prosecution is irrelevant. They were clearly improper and ill-advised, and they reflect more than poorly on someone in Comey’s position. Perhaps Comey was afraid of getting fired if he reported his suspicions about Trump through proper channels, but that is a flimsy excuse and indefensible. If the President was violating the law, that pales in comparison to fears for one’s job. What kind of personal cowardice was Comey acting from?

It’s little wonder that Comey, on March 20, said the FBI wouldn’t be going after government leaks to the media. No crime, no problem, as the old adage goes, but also perhaps another indication of Comey covering his own ass. It’s also little wonder that Comey, initially, declined to testify before the Senate committee and, after yesterday’s performance, maybe he shouldn’t have.

While most in the so-called mainstream media have been quick to jump on Comey’s testimony as damning of Trump, it was at least as damning of Comey. In fact, it was Comey himself who testified that he told Trump at least three times that he was not the subject of an FBI investigation. Yet, in the same session, Comey admitted that he agreed with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch to categorize the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s misuse of her official emails as “a matter” rather than as “an investigation.” While Comey said it made him “queasy” (as if we should care), he agreed to the request. Comey also made no official recommendation after Mr. Hillary “Bill” Clinton met with AG Lynch for half an hour in an aircraft on the tarmac in Phoenix while the FBI was looking into his wife’s actions. Obstruction of justice? Any more so than Trump saying he “hoped” the FBI would conclude its investigation of his campaign? Today Lynch is pushing back against Comey’s allegation, so we can assume it hit some nerve, perhaps a legal one, in the former AG.

Now let’s get real about all this. It really doesn’t matter whether Comey, or Trump, or Lynch, or either of the Clintons broke the law. It all comes down to politics, and the separate legal system that exists for people like that than for the rest of us. I am a former Foreign Service Officer and former intel analyst, and I have said all along that, had I done what Hillary Clinton did with her emails and email servers, I would be in prison. I have no doubt of that and, were I not prosecuted and imprisoned for such misdeeds as Hillary Clinton committed, there would be something radically wrong with the system. Well, guess what? There is something radically wrong with the system.

It was Comey who should be held personally responsible for putting his finger on the scale and letting Hillary off the hook. Even by his own extended public statement – itself unprecedented – last July, Clinton met every requirement for committing a felony offense under Section 793(f) of Title 18 of the federal penal code. Even with the most cursory look at what Hillary did, and the disregard with which she held either the law or the security of the American people, it would be obvious how she violated both the law and the high trust that was placed in her. And Comey made note of that. But then it was Comey who went on to invent a new legal concept (“intent,” something the actual statute does not require when gross negligence is involved, as it was) to let Clinton off the hook. He proceeded to extrapolate that made-up concept to postulate there were not sufficient grounds to mount a prosecution of then-candidate Clinton. Those of us who signed those agreements concerning handling of classified material at the State Dept. knew that was bogus, and the interests of the American people, ostensibly the basis for the statute, were tossed out to protect one privileged person.

I have to almost choke on the hypocrisy of those making such a big deal about possible Russian meddling in the U.S. election, something Comey dwelled on in his testimony before the Senate committee. If one ignores the fact that the Russians, and the Soviets before them, have always tried to meddle in our affairs, if one ignores the fact that the U.S. is guilty of far more meddling in other countries’ affairs – even to the point of overthrowing other countries’ governments – and if one ignores the more recent fact that the Obama Administration actively paid for and sent campaign advisers to Israel to work (unsuccessfully) against the re-election of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – all inconvenient facts studiously ignored by the mainstream media – there is little doubt that Hillary Clinton’s wanton negligence in handling highly classified information almost certainly did far more to jeopardize the security of the country than anything the Russians might have done during the campaign.

In fact, Hillary goes a long way toward proving the old adage that no good turn goes unpunished. While Comey single-handedly prevented her prosecution, that hasn’t stopped her from accusing Comey of tipping the scales leading to her defeat. She asks us to ignore the utterly crappy campaign she conducted, in her “blame-everyone-but-myself” crusade, while attacking Comey. While it’s sometimes true that being hated by both sides is an indication you’re doing something right, it can also indicate you’re going about things very wrongly. I would argue the latter applies in Comey’s case. Worse, I would argue that Comey was derelict in his duties as FBI director to pursue the law and justice and not involve himself in any extraneous issues.

Anyway, if anyone was expecting Comey to bring clarity to the current imbroglio engulfing Washington and on which the “all-Trump-all-the-time” media is fixated, they must surely be disappointed. We’re just at the beginning of this road, and Comey’s muddled testimony only confirmed and, if anything, assured that. Meanwhile, don’t count on anyone of note being brought to justice, and don’t count on much being done to fix the many things that need fixing in this country, now that Congress has yet another excuse to dither and delay.

 

This piece also appears on Medium. Follow me there, and here.