The Front

The Torturers' Lobby

While citizens in the United States may sympathize with the plight of Angolan children, plagued by low birth weight and malnutrition and immobilized by lack of prostheses and wheel chairs, few are aware that until last year, U.S. tax dollars bought up to $60 million a year in guns, ammunition and other military supplies - shipped into Angola via Zaire by the Central Intelligence Agency - to arm Jonas Savimbi's anti- communist, South Africa-backed rebel movement, the National Union for Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).

Savimbi's history of success in garnering U.S. aid is due in part to ideological support from powerful forces in Washington, and in part to the Alexandria, Virginia lobbying firm of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. The firm's services, bought for $600,000 a year, have resulted in favorable media coverage for UNITA and secured further political support and aid from U.S. politicians and lending agencies. While the firm works to generate publicity for its clients, it apparently shuns media attention itself; Black, Manafort failed to respond to repeated requests from Multinational Monitor for comment about its lobbying efforts for UNITA.

 According to The Torturers' Lobby: How Human Rights Abusing Nations Are Represented in Washington, a report based on the results of a year-long investigation by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Public Integrity (CPI), 10 major U.S. foreign aid recipients with a history of hideous human rights abuses spend $24 million on lobbying, legal representation and public relations in the United States each year. Many of the countries receiving U.S. aid through multilateral and bilateral lending agencies collectively receive billions of dollars in U.S. aid and other benefits.

 Pamela Brogan, author of The Torturers' Lobby, reviewed hundreds of pages of documents filed at the Justice Department by U.S. agents representing overseas interests and examined major U.S. foreign aid recipients, all violators of international standards of human rights, that pay Washington lobbyists to press the U.S. Congress for increased aid: Turkey, Nigeria, Morocco, Kenya, the Philippines, Indonesia, Egypt, Israel, Guatemala and Angola's UNITA. All 10 commit torture and other atrocities, according to the U.S. State Department and watchdog organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

The Torturers' Lobby also examines Colombia and Peru, which hire Washington lobbyists to boost their image and lobby for favorable trade and commercial treatment; and three human rights-abusing nations - China, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait - that receive no U.S. aid but have close political and commercial relationships with the United States and pay foreign agents to lobby Congress and the executive branch. The study found Kuwait to be the biggest individual spender, doling out more than $12.5 million in fees to U.S. lobbyists, lawyers and public relations firms.

Among the report's most shocking examples of corrupted Washington spending priorities are the following:

• Guatemala received nearly $91 million in U.S. assistance in 1991, despite the fact that U.S. military aid and commercial arms sales to Guatemala were suspended and the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala was recalled in December 1990. To maintain the money flow and gloss over its wretched human rights reputation, Guatemala spent more than $650,000 for Washington lobbyists and public relations experts. The law firm Patton, Boggs and Blow - at which Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was a former partner - was the biggest recipient, charging Guatemala $220,000 in 1991. Steven Schneebaum, chair of the pro bono committee and partner at Patton, Boggs and Blow, has been a member of the board of the International Human Rights Law Group for 12 years and says that the firm has done extensive work "in defense of human rights norms." As far as Guatemala is concerned, he says, "We have a client that's done some bad stuff, but I'm tired of taking the rap for every bad thing that a client has done." He attributes CPI's focus on Patton, Boggs and Blow to "a trend in the media now against successful firms."

  "I suppose people are resentful of a successful firm that is keeping the system working," says Schneebaum. "Led by the New York Times, the entire print media has been coming down on Patton, Boggs and Blow - but we're all big people, we can take it." David Todd, the attorney in charge of the firm's Guatemala account, declined to comment to Multinational Monitor.

• In 1991, Turkey received more than $800 million in U.S. aid, an exceptional return on its $3.8 million investment in Washington lobbyists. "We are very concerned because there has been a marked decline in the last year in the human rights situation in Turkey," says Maryam Elahi, Amnesty International's government program officer for the Middle East. "The newly elected Prime Minister has failed in his promise to end torture. Political killings rose from 50 in 1991 to over 300 in 1992, with serious allegations that government security forces colluded in many of these killings." The public relations firm Hill and Knowlton, which CPI found to be the company paid the most by human rights abusers, took $1.2 million to represent Turkey from November 1990 to May 1992. Frank Mankowitz, the firm's vice chair, declined to comment on Hill and Knowlton's representation of Turkey, but claims that "human rights [are] a factor in our decisions about whether to take on a country as a client. We have turned down countries recently because of human rights violations."

  International Advisers, Inc., another firm that was paid more that $1 million for representing the Turkish embassy in the United States, refused to offer any comment to Multinational Monitor.

• In 1991, Kenya received $38 million in U.S. foreign aid, spending over $1.4 million on Washington lobbyists to get it; Nigeria received $8.3 million and spent in excess of $2.5 million. Kenyan president Daniel Moi has a notorious history of violating the human rights of his government's critics; and the military government of Nigerian general Ibrahim Babangida continues to rely on force to remain in power. The bulk of those countries' payments went to Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly Public Affairs, which took $660,000 from Kenya in 1992-1993 and $1 million from Nigeria in 1991.

  Janet Fleishman, research associate at Africa Watch, says that human rights abuses involving use of the military, government manipulation of ethnic conflict, and particularly flagrant attacks "in rural areas against the opposition and the independent press," are prevalent in both countries.

 "Unfortunately, the governments of many of the countries that receive U.S. aid money are committing very serious, tremendously documented human rights abuses," says Brogan. The Torturers' Lobby cites critics of the lobbying and appropriations process, who suggest that Congress prohibit foreign-aid recipients from hiring foreign agents, or put a cap on the amount of fees that countries can pay lobbyists.

The author notes, however, that the work of CPI and the report have "already had a significant impact." Unlike past administrations, "Clinton has pledged that all of his top- level people are banned for life from representing foreign governments. Of course, he cannot correct the sins of the past," says Brogan, but it is a step towards "correcting the sins of the future."

 - Julie Gozan