Lack the Backbone
Nov 23rd, 2009 • Posted in: What They're Saying
“We just seem to lack the backbone to use this prohibition. In the rare cases it is used, no one at State was willing to talk about it.”
– Daniel Whitman, a former deputy director post at the U.S. State Department, talking to the New York Times about the lax enforcement of U.S. policy barring corrupt foreign officials and their families from receiving U.S. visas.
Despite the fact that U.S. policy requires “only credible evidence of corruption, not a conviction of it,” corrupt officials and their families rarely are barred entry, especially when they hail from oil-rich countries with contracts benefiting U.S. companies or wealthy accounts benefiting banks, notes the report.
The Times spotlights the case of Teodoro Nguema Obiang, an official of Equatorial Guinea and the son of its president, who flies to the United States several times a year to vacation at his $35 million estate in Malibu, California.
“The nation’s doors are open to Mr. Obiang … even though federal law enforcement officials believe that ‘most if not all’ of his wealth” derives from corruption, including, in the words of U.S. government documents obtained by the paper, “extortion, theft of public funds, or other corrupt conduct.”
“Senior State Department people, especially from Africa, kept saying that if something like this is used they wouldn’t have anyone to talk to in their home countries,” Otto Reich, former U.S. special envoy to the Western Hemisphere, told the Times. “It’s politically simply something they do not want to take on.”
Source: New York Times, Nov. 16.
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This story is very disturbing yet so common. Until there is sufficient public pressure to deal with situations like this, I don’t see it changing any time soon. Having said that, I do believe that things will change… it is just a matter of when.
I am very thankful for this newsletter and Global Ethics for bringing these situations to light.