by Rand Paul
Mrs. Okail had been the victim of her own government. She was separated from her husband and children. She was taken from her family and threatened with jail. She was hauled before a kangaroo court and put in a cage in front of the judge. She was humiliated by a prosecutor. She was threatened with five years of hard time in an Egyptian prison, not generally regarded as a safe place for a young and attractive woman. She was unsure whether to return to Egypt and face her harsh prison sentence or stay in the United States.
Okail was one of the international democracy workers who had been detained in Egypt in late December 2011 by that nation’s military dictatorship. The charges were completely fabricated. She had done nothing wrong, nor had the nineteen Americans who had also been held.
Thankfully, I helped secure these innocent people’s freedom in a battle that went from the cloakroom of the Senate to the halls of power in Cairo. Allow me to explain.
In December 2011, Egyptian and foreign activists (including the nineteen U.S. citizens) were detained by the Egyptian government. They were charged with running an “unregistered NGO” (nongovernmental organization) that had allegedly received foreign funding for their activities.
For years, groups like Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, and the National Democratic Institute have used a combination of private funds and State Department funding to help promote democracy and civil society abroad. This has been an ongoing effort since the Reagan administration, and these groups’ activities have always had broad bipartisan and international support.
These organizations are not partisan. They do not choose political sides. They do not provoke or become involved in the politics of any country they work in. They do not encourage or cause dissent. They do not advocate against government.
When Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was ousted from office in 2011, various Egyptian factions struggled to assemble and consolidate power, from the military to the Muslim Brotherhood and leftovers from the Mubarak regime.
It was a member of Mubarak’s old guard who decided to charge these agencies and their workers with the “crime” of doing something they had been doing legally and with full permission for years.
American and Egyptian citizens were arrested. Obviously my first concern was the detained Americans, whose plight I immediately trumpeted. After later hearing how the Egyptians were treated, I wish I had fought harder for all involved.
One of the Americans arrested was Sam LaHood, the son of Obama’s secretary of transportation, Ray LaHood. No doubt this helped the story gain initial traction and attention. I spoke to my colleagues about this issue, particularly those with plenty of experience in foreign affairs, in an attempt to see how to best address the detainment of the Americans.
I waited patiently, while I was also being told that we had to be careful. I was told that the situation in Egypt was volatile and that we had to make sure whatever we did actually helped the situation.
While I understood this, I also couldn’t help but feel that there was an alarming lack of action. I felt like some involved were more interested in protecting their political turf than in protecting American citizens.
I do not have forty years of foreign policy experience. But I do know that if you want a take on a bully, you can’t be meek. You don’t pull punches, but swing as hard as you can, preferably with a blunt object.
My blunt object was foreign aid. Due to a near criminal degree of corruption, abuse, and waste on the part of many recipients—not to mention the fact that we can’t afford it—I had long been in favor of eliminating foreign aid altogether. But since the aid existed, I thought it gave Congress the perfect tool to help the detained Americans.
I looked for an opportunity on the Senate floor to take action. There was no obvious vehicle. Therefore I did what any good, sensible, and responsible senator would do—I attempted to attach an amendment to freeze aid to Egypt to the Postal Reform Act. Some of my colleagues were confused. Some were amused. Others were angry. It just depended on who you spoke to.
Once on the floor, I offered to simply hold a vote on my amendment with only ten minutes of discussion. I was honestly trying to make it easier on Majority Leader Harry Reid. I knew he didn’t want to discuss this and would likely claim lack of time as the reason.
So I offered to vote immediately at any time—and made the point that it was well worth ten minutes of the Senate’s time to discuss the plight of U.S. citizens being held illegally in Egypt. Indeed, what American would find ten minutes of discussion too much to ask concerning whether or not Egypt should receive U.S. aid while also detaining our citizens? We had sent Mubarak’s regime over $60 billion and now a member of that same regime was responsible for arresting and holding American citizens against their will—nineteen U.S. nationals who had traveled to Egypt to help that country embrace democracy, to have an elected government so that Egyptians might enjoy the same kind of freedoms we do.
Some of the Americans arrested sought refuge in the U.S. embassy. This was tragic. This was something the United States should make a clear and unequivocal statement about. Did Egypt wish to be part of the civilized world or did it want to continue to descend into third-world lawlessness?
I proposed an amendment to end all foreign aid to Egypt—economic aid, military aid, all aid—in thirty days unless the American citizens were released. We give over $1.5 billion to Egypt annually. Fiscally, we can’t afford this. Morally, with Egypt detaining our own people, we couldn’t afford this.
If Egypt or any other country wanted to act against the interests of the United States, particularly harming our citizens abroad, they needed to know that America does not tolerate it. Such countries needed to know that we mean business.
That’s what this debate was about.
We have sent billions of dollars to Africa to authoritarian regimes that rape, pillage, and torture their own people. We continue to give them more money each year in the hope that they might one day change their ways. It hasn’t worked.
We need a firmer hand. We need a stronger voice. We need to say no more aid to countries that do not have democratic elections, no more aid to nations that terrorize their own people—and no more aid to anyone who detains innocent American citizens!
We continue sending billions to Afghanistan, yet Afghan president Hamid Karzai says that if neighboring Pakistan and the United States went to war, his country would side with Pakistan. Why exactly are we sending so much money to Afghanistan?
Pakistani leaders have made similar comments, that if the United States goes to war with Iran, Pakistan will side with Iran. Yet we continue to send Pakistan billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Why?
We cannot continue to try to buy allies or pay off our enemies. So many of the countries we send aid to dislike us, regularly disrespect us, and openly tell the world they will side with our enemies.
America doesn’t even have the money to send them. We’re borrowing the money from China to aid people who don’t like us. This is illogical. It’s an insult.
And it should end.
Egypt had to be put on notice. The president and the State Department were not making any substantive attempts to lead on this issue. Just a few weeks prior, the president’s undersecretary of state Robert Hormats stated publicly that the Obama administration wanted to assure the Egyptians that the United States intended to provide continuing aid and benefits.
Do you think that was the right message to send Egypt? That although Egypt was detaining nineteen U.S. citizens, preventing them from leaving, preventing them from coming home—that the Egyptian government could be assured that U.S. aid would continue?
American citizens were essentially trapped in our embassy in Egypt and the Obama administration was assuring the Egyptians that they would receive their benefits immediately.
The day before my floor speech about my amendment, the president introduced his new budget. Guess what it included? One and a half billion taxpayer dollars for Egypt.
What kind of message are we sending the world?
President Obama was not leading the country. He was not exemplifying what most Americans would obviously want—to send a clear and unequivocal message to Egypt that we would not tolerate this behavior, certainly that we would not subsidize this behavior.
Yet we did. We do. American taxpayers subsidize a government that detains innocent U.S. citizens. American taxpayers subsidize Afghanistan, a nation that would side with Pakistan over the United States. American taxpayers subsidize Pakistan, a nation that would side with Iran over the United States.
We do this as we bankrupt our own country by running up trillion-dollar deficits with borrowed money.
The Senate unquestionably needed to discuss this. The country needed to discuss this. Fortunately, I was in a position to do something about it.
My efforts were certainly worth it for the nineteen detained U.S. citizens. If it were my child in Egypt, working there for a pro-democracy group, I would want to think that the U.S. Senate had at least ten minutes to devote to discussing my child’s fate abroad. I would want to think that the Senate could also spare ten minutes to send the Egyptians an unequivocal statement: The United States will not stand for the detention of its citizens, their imprisonment, or unreasonable travel restrictions. The United States will not send aid to a government that so casually abuses our own people.
I knew some would say that I was holding up the business of the Senate—but I was saying that this should be the business of the Senate! The Constitution grants these types of foreign policy decisions to Congress, and that we would ignore this particular case was an ominous reminder of just how much we have abdicated our proper constitutional role.
When I gave my floor speech, instead of agreeing to the ten minutes of debate and taking a vote on my amendment, the Senate literally shut down. Majority Leader Reid simply refused to allow the Senate to even consider the issue, while simultaneously accusing me of all sorts of horrors. His absurd and disjointed accusations had something to do with old liberal bugaboos about Republicans like me hating old people and the poor. Reid simply didn’t make any sense.
After the Senate shutdown, I had several discussions with prominent senators who took an interest in this area of the world. While they had publicly said that perhaps I was being rash, and that perhaps we should hold off on trying to stop foreign aid, privately these senators were telling me a different story. They were telling me that while they disagreed with ending aid, they lauded my tactic of putting pressure on Esypt. They told me they were happy I was willing to take this particular stand.
At the end of that week, several of those senators left Washington for Egypt in order to attend previously scheduled private meetings with Egyptian leaders that weekend. After these meetings, these senators told me that my amendment was a topic of discussion, and that the Egyptians had become very concerned about keeping their foreign aid. The senators, in a bit of international “good cop/bad cop,” explained to the Egyptians that they had held me off for now, but when they returned it was unlikely they could continue to stop my amendment from coming up to a vote. They told the Egyptians that if my amendment did come up for a vote before the Senate, it might just pass.
It certainly would be a tough vote. What senator would want to publicly vote to give foreign aid to a country that was holding American citizens against their will?
After the Senate recessed on the day my amendment was prevented from being voted on, I took to the floor to chastise the Senate leadership and my colleagues. Here is an excerpt from my remarks:
Dependency often leads to indolence, lethargy, and a sense of entitlement and ultimately to a state of insolence.
Egypt has been receiving welfare from the United States for nearly forty years now. America has lavished over $60 billion on the government of Egypt, and they react with insolence and disregard by detaining nineteen of our U.S. citizens.
For several months now, these Americans have been essentially held hostage, unable to leave Egypt, held on the pretense of trumped-up political charges, held in order to display them in show trials to placate the mob.
The United States can respond in one of two ways. We can hang our head low and take the tack of Jimmy Carter. We could try to placate Egypt with concessions and offer them bribes in the form of more government aid.
Or America could respond with strength.
The president should today call the Egyptian ambassador in and send him home with a message—a message that America will not tolerate any country holding U.S. citizens as political prisoners.
Congress should act today to tell Egypt that we will no longer send our annual welfare check to them; that this year’s $1.8 billion is not on the way.
America could put Egyptian travelers on notice that the welcome sign in America will temporarily expire unless the Egyptian government lets our people go. Or America could hang her head low, promise to continue foreign aid to Egypt, and apologize for supporting democracy. Which will it be?
So far, the signals sent to Egypt from the president and from the Senate have been weak or counterproductive.
In late January, the president’s undersecretary of state said that the administration wants to provide “more immediate benefits” to Egypt. Let’s speed up the welfare checks. The president’s budget this week includes the $1.8 billion for Egypt without a word of rebuke or any demand for our citizens to be released.
The president went one step further. He actually increased the foreign aid to the Middle East in his budget. And now the Senate refuses to even hold a single vote to spend ten minutes discussing why U.S. citizens are being detained in Egypt.
One might excuse the Egyptians for not believing we will cut their aid. You can’t lead from behind.
Senate leadership appears unwilling to address this issue head-on. So the Senate won’t act to help our citizens this week. But I hope when senators return home this week to their constituents in their state, I hope their constituents will ask them these questions:
Senator, why do you continue to send our taxpayer money to Egypt? Why do you continue to send our money to Egypt when they detain U.S. citizens?
Senator, why do you continue to send billions of dollars to Egypt when twelve million Americans are out of work?
Senator, why do you continue to send welfare to foreign countries, when our bridges are falling down and in desperate need of repair?
Senator, how can you continue to flush our taxpayer money down a foreign drain, when we are borrowing $40,000 a second? The money we send to Egypt we must first borrow from China. That is insanity and it must end.
Mr. Senator, I hope your constituents ask you this when you go home: When working families are suffering under rising food prices, when working families are suffering because gas prices have doubled, how can you justify sending our hard-earned taxpayer dollars to Egypt? To countries that openly show their disdain for us?
There were national news stories about this issue, and I returned to Washington the following week more determined than ever to get the detained Americans out of danger and end this crisis.
I made sure to let the leadership of both parties know that there was no backing down. They would not move anything through the Senate without my consent until this mess was straightened out.
The senators who had been to Egypt returned and told me of their conversations with that country’s leaders, who not only wanted the aid, but also seemed to want the NGOs to return to operation as they had done for years.
On that Monday, Senator Reid announced that my amendment would in fact get a vote that week in order to move Senate business forward.
Word apparently traveled fast to Cairo. Reading the political winds and heeding the warnings of the Senate delegation, the Egyptian government announced the release of the American detainees the next day.
While there are obviously many things going on at once in a situation like this—many moving parts, many players—I was glad that I could help,
in my capacity as a U.S. senator, those who needed it.
But some battles can’t be won simply from our Senate offices. Those that call for pushback against a government, whether ours, abroad, or both, often require pressure that must be applied before the public. I can inform the public—and an informed public can help apply the political pressure necessary to overcome the inherent inertia of Congress.
Making battles public gives us all greater influence. When the grassroots loudly engages, it can even trump seniority on the Hill. Nothing pleases me more than to give voice to millions of Americans who rightly want me to champion certain causes—from ridiculous light bulb bans to illegally detained Americans—that ordinary Americans would if they were in my position.
Sometimes this baffles my colleagues, and understandably so. Though I like and admire many of my colleagues, they are not ordinary Americans.
Concerning the Americans detained in Egypt, ordinary Americans—through me—were able to vent their frustration over an indefensible situation. And indefensible situations that are exposed to public scrutiny have a much better chance of getting fixed.
On March 1, 2012, the problem was at least temporarily solved: The Egyptian government announced that the detained Americans were free to leave Egypt.
I say it was “temporarily” solved because it later came to light that our State Department had in fact paid “bail” (more like a ransom) for our citizens’ release, and that they had all agreed to return to Egypt should there be a trial, an agreement I am sure few, if any, intended to keep.
So was this issue really solved?
My focus, as I noted earlier, was wholly on the release of the Americans. But as I mentioned earlier, the threat did not begin, nor did it end, with the American citizens.
Nancy Okail, the Egyptian woman I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter who sat in my office relating the horrible events that had occurred over a span of just a few short months, bravely decided to return to her country to face trial.