Why Did Hillary Clinton Defend Boko Haram?John HinderakerBoko Haram, the Islamic terrorist organization in Nigeria, is in the news because it kidnapped more than 200 teenage girls and now threatens to sell them into slavery. (That’s what a real war on women looks like.) This is just the latest of many outrages committed by Boko Haram, which is guilty of many acts of mass murder. But it has now come out that for two years, Hillary Clinton blocked efforts to add Boko Haram to the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations.
This wasn’t just an episode of bureaucratic indifference. The Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA and many in Congress lobbied the State Department to list Boko Haram, but Clinton stood firm in defense of the Nigerian terrorists. Now, with the kidnapping outrage in the news, Hillary is tweeting away on behalf of the Nigerian girls. (THAT will do a lot of good!) But where was she in 2011 and 2012?
Risch and seven other GOP senators introduced legislation in early 2013 that would have forced Clinton to designate the group or explain why she thought it was a bad idea. The State Department lobbied against the legislation at the time, according to internal State Department emails obtained by The Daily Beast.
In the House, leading intelligence-minded lawmakers wrote letter after letter to Clinton urging her to designate Boko Haram as terrorists. The effort in the House was led by then-Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King and Patrick Meehan, chairman of the Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence.
Meehan and his Democratic counterpart Jackie Speier put out a lengthy report in 2011 laying out the evidentiary basis for naming Boko Haram a terrorist organization, including the group’s ties to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and to Somalia’s al-Shabab terrorist organization.
But Hillary Clinton was unmoved.
Over the last day or two, debate has raged over whether adding Boko Haram to the State Department’s terror organization list would have made much difference. (It finally happened in 2013, after Hillary’s resignation.) But the more interesting question is why Hillary was so resistant to labeling Boko Haram a terrorist group, which they obviously were.
Her defenders have said that it was inappropriate to put Boko Haram on the list because they are a regional group that hasn’t acted against American interests. But that explanation holds no water. You can read the terrorist list here; there are a number of groups on it, like the Irish terrorists, who haven’t attacked American interests. Democrats have also suggested that Hillary didn’t want to name Boko Haram because doing so would add to the group’s prestige among fellow terrorists. But this is a ludicrous claim; if it made any sense, we should abolish the list entirely. (The point of the list, of course, is to authorize intelligence activities and efforts to choke off funding.)
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