Bill Clinton's Final Sell-Out

By Tony Palmeri

January, 2001

My dislike and distrust of Bill Clinton began in January of 1992, when he left the campaign trail to travel back to Arkansas to execute Ricky Ray Rector, a brain damaged black man convicted of killing a white police officer. The execution of Rector--who shot himself in the head after murdering his victims and whose mental state was such that he asked to save the dessert of his last meal for the day after the lethal injection--was supposed to make Clinton appear "tough on crime."

Later during the campaign, at an event at which he stood side by side with Jesse Jackson, Clinton singled out black female rapper Sister Souljah as an example of destructive and racist rhetoric, going as far as to compare her to David Duke.

The pattern continued during the presidency. When Clinton's nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Lani Guinere (an African-American woman), was dubbed the "quota queen" by Republicans and lambasted for her criticisms of "winner take all" elections, Clinton not only refused to stand by her but withdrew the nomination before Guinere could even get a hearing. And of course we all remember the case of Joycelyn Elders, the Surgeon General forced to resign for making the scandalous claim that masturbation is a part of human sexuality and should be taught as such. Bill Clinton--who would later put his underlings and supporters in a position of having to perform all sorts of mental gymnastics to defend the President's parsed statements--had not the courage to demand that Elders' words be placed in context.

Let us also not forget that the war on drugs and categorization of federal death penalty crimes were greatly expanded during the Clinton/Gore years, two policy choices with consequences that fall disproportionately on people of color.

Yet even considering all the aforementioned acts of political cowardice and opportunism, I still thought that Bill Clinton would see fit to grant executive clemency to Leonard Peltier, the Native-American convicted of killing two FBI agents more than 25 years ago. The government's case against Peltier has eroded significantly over the last two decades; Kevin McKiernan's Los Angeles Times op-ed on Why Clinton Should Pardon Peltier is as good a summary of the case as any. The government admits that it does not know who killed the FBI agents, and it also has admitted to fabricating evidence against Peltier. Add to that the fact that Peltier has in his corner of supporters scores of human rights activists around the world--including Nelson Mandela, the late Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama, nobel laureates, authors, academics, and even the European parliament--and the case for clemency is strong.

But Bill Clinton did not issue the clemency order, and on CNN an unnamed White House source was quoted as saying that clemency for Peltier was "never seriously considered."

Peltier is not Clinton's final sell-out, however. The final sell-out is the fact that Clinton did pardon John Deutch, former CIA director who had his security clearance stripped and faced criminal charges for having classified data stored on his home computer. What makes Clinton's pardon of Deutch so outrageous is the fact that Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos nuclear technician who was persecuted by the Clinton Justice Department for two years and jailed in solitary confinement for nine months in what is probably the highest level case of racial profiling in history, was in the end found to have done nothing worse than what Deutch was accused of. Judge Richard Parker, who finally released Lee, said: "I sincerely apologize to you, Dr. Lee, for the unfair manner [in which] you were held in custody by the executive branch." According to Robert Scheer's account in the Nation Magazine, Parker described Lee's imprisonment to a hushed courtroom as having been under "demeaning, unnecessarily punitive conditions," and he said that he was "sad and troubled because I do not know the real reasons why the executive branch has done all of this."

According to Scheer: "What is known is that the government's case against Lee crumbled, with the government agreeing to dismiss fifty-eight of fifty-nine counts that had been lodged against Lee, who faced life imprisonment for intending to betray the national security of the United States. Suddenly the government, which only a week before had said Lee's release could risk 'hundreds of millions of lives,' was willing to let him go for time served. As for Lee, the nine months of harsh imprisonment had taken their toll, and he was willing to plead guilty to a single felony count of mishandling classified data--a charge that defense lawyers might have been willing to settle on even before there was an indictment . . . Parker went on to tongue-lash 'the top decision makers in the executive branch,' who, he said, 'have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it.'" (Robert Scheer, "No Defense," The Nation, October 23, 2000).

And so there we have it: Ricky Ray Rector, Sister Souljah, Lani Guinere, Joycelyn Elders, and Wen Ho Lee--all in their own way victims of the "liberal" Bill Clinton's willingness to use race in the most cynical of political ways. What a classic Clintonian clemency legacy: pardoning Deutch while allowing Wen Ho Lee to serve as an Asian-American scapegoat in the hysteria over the alleged Chinese stealing of nuclear secrets, and ignoring direct pleas from social justice icons like Coretta Scott King to do the right thing as regards Peltier.

For all his grand rhetoric about diversity and unity, Bill Clinton to the bitter end was not able to match his words with actions. As regards Peltier, Clinton had to choose between nobel laureates and human rights activists on one side, and the United States national security establishment bureaucracy on the other. In true Clinton form, he chose the latter.

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