youtube.com
>Rebel forces in southern Sudan began using child soldiers long before seceding from Sudan in 2011. The United States, on the other hand, passed a law in 2008 that banned providing military assistance to nations that use child soldiers.
>White House issued annual waivers that kept aid flowing to the world’s newest nation despite its use of child soldiers. Obama was the target of most of the criticism.
thinkprogress.org
>Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state when the first waivers were issued, was apparently never asked to comment on them, and the State Department never provided any explanations about its role.
>she does not appear to have publicly explained her role in allowing South Sudan and other countries to receive military support despite using children as combatants.
>Daniel Mahanty, who served in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor under Clinton, confirmed that the State Department, in consultation with the White House, controlled the process.
>The State Department drafted all waiver materials and all recommendations to the president were made on behalf of the secretary of state and with her full approval. “We will have already drafted the letter from the president to Congress that says what waivers he’s going to invoke,” Mahanty told me. “So it goes up to the secretary [of state], then over to the White House, and from the White House out to the public.”
>A 2012 report by Clinton’s State Department, for example, noted that in addition to recruiting child soldiers, South Sudan’s security forces also committed arbitrary or unlawful killings, tortured and raped women, arbitrarily arrested and detained people
