David Corn writes:
As I’ve written about (or, obsessed about) before, Clinton visited Rwanda in 1998 and issued something of an apology. Speaking of those terrible months in the spring of 1994, he said, “All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.” He conceded that the United States and the international community had not moved quickly enough in response to the horrors under way.
(my emphasis)
While this is no doubt true, not a single one of those other people was also the President of the Unites States of America, sitting in the OVAL office, receiving daily briefings from the CIA, with both the legal obligation and the military means to do something about that “unimaginable terror”.
How typically slick of him to try camouflage himself in a crowd mostly innocent people he has nothing important in common with. And observe the lawyerly “did not fully appreciate” in the place of an actual excuse like “was unaware of” (which would have been a flat-out lie). My translation: “I’m so sorry - of course I knew there was genocide being perpetrated. Had I but realized it was the kind of genocide that might tarnish my legacy if I ignored it, I would have done something.”