Nearly a week after a Politico report claimed CIA Director Mike Pompeo was a rumored favorite to replace Rex Tillerson as state secretary, the embattled ExxonMobil CEO turned cabinet official is in trouble for something else. This time, internal State Department documents obtained and reviewed by Reuters indicate that several of Tillerson’s own officials are formally accusing him of violating a federal law banning the use of child soldiers in allied nations.
Per the Reuters report, Tillerson violated the Child Soldiers Prevention Act when he opted to remove Iraq, Myanmar, and Afghanistan from an American list of offending countries. The state secretary made his decision, almost a dozen department officials charge, despite the advice of the heads of regional bureaus in the Middle East and Asia, the department’s human rights office, its in-house legal team, and the U.S. envoy on Pakistan and Afghanistan. The consequences of this decisions, their memo contends, aren’t great:
“Beyond contravening U.S. law, this decision risks marring the credibility of a broad range of State Department reports and analyses and has weakened one of the U.S. government’s primary diplomatic tools to deter governmental armed forces and government-supported armed groups from recruiting and using children in combat and support roles around the world,” said the July 28 memo.
If disregarding the advice of seasoned department officials wasn’t enough, Tillerson’s decision to remove the three countries from the list also flew in the face of a previous public statement acknowledging their continued use of child soldiers in combat. The possible reasoning, Reuters notes, may have to do with the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against the Islamic State (Iraq and Afghanistan) and its rhetorical strides against Chinese influence in Southeast Asia (Myanmar).
(Via Reuters)