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1/ Sorry, Dan, but you get the history dead wrong. Elliott Abrams during the 1980s tried to weaponize the Bureau of HR and turn it into an instrument of partisan warfare that would only target "leftist" regimes while defending HR abuses by right wing allies at all costs.
2/ Katherine Sikkink gives the best overview of US HR policy in Latin America in the 1980s. Almost every historian of human rights who has spent time working with archival materials has come to the same conclusion - Elliott Abrams hated the HR community: cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=801…
3/ In Congressional testimony and to journalists in the 1980s Abrams referred to HR groups and supporters as Communists and Communist sympathizers. More important, the State Department's annual HR reports in the 1980s during his tenure were sheer propaganda. They were *so bad*
4/ DOS HR reports on Elliott Abrams watch in the 1980s were *so bad* that America's Watch, issued annual counter-reports just to tally and correct the lies in the State Department reports. catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/holdings…
5/ Over time, and in response to voluminous public criticism, the State Department was compelled to start issuing reports that weren't filled with blatant lies and propaganda about the HR record of US backed right wing regimes. This was *despite* not bc of Elliott Abrams.
6/ Historians of human rights have been writing about this for years. Its an important story, bc it shows how the HR orgs of the day - Amnesty, HRW, America's Watch - established credibility by holding Elliott Abrams and the Reagan Admin accountable for demonstrable lies. END
7/ One additional note: we can usefully compare the Reagan Administration approach of co-opting and weaponizing the State Department’s Human Rights machinery, which Elliott Abrams exemplified, with the Nixon-Kissinger approach, which was to ignore or sideline it.
8/ @arakeys has written masterfully about Kissinger’s attempts to ignore Dept State HR machinery and Congressional HR legislation, which so outraged the latter that they strengthened each in response. barbarakeys.com/wp-content/upl…
9/ Reagan sought to destroy State Dept HR and Congressional HR system, but it was too deeply entrenched. So Reagan instead installed Abrams, who in ‘Trumpian’ fashion used the HR Bureau as a weapon to shield right wing allies from scrutiny and attack USSR and leftist states.
10/ END Activists of course fought back, and DOS HR machinery improved as a result. But Abrams did the exact same thing when he returned to the GW Bush Admin as an NSC special assistant for democracy and human rights in 2001. Abrams is a canary in the human rights coal mine.
Btw, @PatrickIber has anore detailed, outstanding thread on this:
