67. Memorandum From the Global Issues Cluster of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Brzezinski)1
SUBJECT
- Evening Report
Daily Activities
Tuchman started a marathon day of meetings at Rand Corporation briefing for ERDA on nuclear fuel cycles—economic analysis of various possible cycles.
Tuchman attended the second plenary of the human rights PRM to hear comments on the second draft.2 Most agencies felt that this was a great improvement over the first draft. Defense, however, hated it, found the security assistance sections “totally unacceptable”, and the rest of the draft “unbalanced”. I felt that most of the relatively unimportant things were improved, but that all the important issues remain. I made the points that: (1) there is no discussion of objectives3 and that is absolutely central to everything else (the PRM defines the objective as: “to encourage the respect that governments accord to human rights” and leaves it at that; (2) it essentially considers democracy (or the approximate content of the Bill of Rights) as a basic human right, which I find completely4 unjustified; (3) the strategy content of 85 pp boils down to—“we have to do everything on a case-by-case basis”. I see real dangers in this. Everyone makes a point of saying that sometimes “other interests” will take precedence over human rights. This means that we will have in essence a country-by-country list of prior [Page 212] ities, and it will become clear over time that for Argentina (e.g.) human rights heads the list, while for Iran, it is down near the bottom. Can such a policy succeed over time? This is getting too long. I will do a separate memo for you and I will be submitting written comments to Christopher.5 There is an agreed need for another draft.
Later in the day, Tuchman spent a sobering two hours at the staff level meeting of the interagency group on Human Rights and Financial Assistance (i.e., the Christopher group). This was the first time I had attended the working level sessions. The discussions were alarmingly picayune—“It says here that 15 people were arrested in Togo in 1974 for distributing pamphlets, do we know what happened to them?” “No”. “Let’s find out from the embassy, perhaps we should make a demarche.” While the mechanics are vastly improved (in terms of background papers, etc.) the substance is not. Also it becomes very clear that you cannot separate financial assistance (even when you include both bilateral and multilateral) from all the other aspects of a bilateral relationship. For example, this group does not control security assistance decisions.
[Omitted here is information unrelated to human rights.]
- Source: Carter Library, National Security Affairs, Staff Material, Global Issues—Oplinger/Bloomfield Subject File, Box 36, Evening Reports: 5–7/77. Secret. Sent for information.↩
- Reference is to the second draft of the Department of State study prepared in response to PRM–28. Under cover of a July 7 memorandum, Nimetz sent Christopher the 85-page draft, noting that he had “tried to incorporate comments and suggestions from all of the Bureaus who submitted ideas. However, it was not possible to accommodate all suggestions made. In addition, I have cut the draft considerably, although I believe that little of real substance has been lost.” (National Archives, RG 59, Office of the Secretary: Mr. Matthew Nimetz, Counselor of the Department of State, Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science, and Technology, Lot 81D85, Box 1, MN Chron—Official July 1977–December 1977)↩
- Brzezinski underlined the word “objectives” and wrote “need” in the left-hand margin next to the paragraph.↩
- Brzezinski underlined the word “completely” and placed a question mark next to it in the left-hand margin.↩
- Presumable reference to Tuchman’s July 20 memorandum to Brzezinski, Document 69.↩