Hillary Clinton’s forgotten foreign aid fiascos by James Bovard

http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/12/hillary-clintons-forgotten-foreign-aid-fiascos/

washingtontimes.com

Hillary Clinton’s forgotten foreign aid fiascos

by James Bovard

Hillary Clinton is the most qualified presidential candidate in history, according to President Obama. Much of her managerial experience stems from her four years as secretary of State. The biggest program she oversaw there was foreign aid, which spent roughly $50 billion a year between 2009 and 2012. Mrs. Clinton stated in 2009 that “a lot of these aid programs don’t work,” lamented their “heartbreaking” failures, and promised fundamental reform at the Agency for International Development (AID).

But “see no evil” was often the Clinton State Department motto regarding U.S. aid. The Ethiopian government received more than $3 billion in U.S. aid while Mrs. Clinton was secretary. That regime has a simple recipe for democracy: Those who vote wrong do not eat. A 2011 BBC investigation “found villages where whole communities are starving, having allegedly been denied basic food, seed and fertilizer for failing to support Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.” The U.S. government knew of the abuses but muzzled itself to avoid offending the Ethiopian regime. A confidential Nov. 25, 2009 email from the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa to Washington noted, “Efforts to monitor food distribution are aimed at making sure vulnerable people are fed and cannot be expanded to include investigation of political pressures applied to those people without jeopardizing that primary mission.”