Biden Sold Out Soviet Dissidents

FrontPageMagazine.com has published a troubling article concerning Joe Biden's diplomatic priorities by Vladimir Bukovsky, the renowned human rights activist and former 12-year political prisoner in the Soviet Union, and Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile and translator living in London.
Titled Biden's Secret Diplomacy, it is a report about a secret document, first uncovered at the Gorbachev Foundation Archive in Moscow three years ago, that provides insight into Senator Joe Biden's true priorities and proclivity towards political double-speak during one of the most tense periods of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union - and who Biden thought was expendable.
According to the article and the document, Senator Biden led a delegation of Senators to Moscow for discussions about arms control issues in 1979. During that meeting, Biden told his Communist hosts "off the record" that in his esteemed opinion, the internal persecution of Soviet dissidents and the overall suppression of human rights was of no real concern and that bringing it up would only impede other, more important negotiations. Senator Biden did, however, request that his Soviet hosts put on a bit of a show for him - he indicated that it would help with his constituents back home if the Soviets publicly acknowledged that the current Vice-Presidential candidate did bring up human rights and the plight of the dissidents - particularly the Jewish refuseniks.
Remember hearing and reading about gulags, psikhushkas, and Soviet prisons? Remember the name Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? Those are the horrific practices, and the type of people, that Joe Biden was willing to ignore.
Via the article and from the original document:

The delegation did not officially raise the issue of human rights during the negotiations. Biden said they did not want 'to spoil the atmosphere with problems which are bound to cause distrust in our relations.' However, during the breaks between the sessions the senators passed to us several letters concerning these or those 'refuseniks'.
Unofficially, Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for 'human rights'. They must prove to their voters that they are 'effective in fulfilling their wishes'. In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.
In the same conversation, Biden asked us to ensure that senators' appeals on those issues are not left unanswered - even if we just reply that the letter is received but we cannot do anything.

No wonder the Soviet Union thought they were beating us in 1979.
It was Ronald Reagan's laser-like focus on human rights in the "evil empire" - the Eastern Bloc controlled by the Soviet Union - that led to the popular uprisings throughout Eastern Europe and broke the back of Communism. The Soviet Union as it existed from after World War II to its fall was an empty vessel - the West was vastly superior to the East economically, militarily, and above all concerning the issue of human rights. What was needed to give hundreds of millions of people their freedom and hope back was for a courageous leader of a strong nation to confront the Soviets with those facts.
Documents show that Joe Biden was not one of those courageous leaders. In fact, he opposed Ronald Reagan every step of the way.
Joe Biden is knowledgeable about foreign policy "facts", but the true measure of foreign policy effectiveness is how one turns knowledge of those facts into successful policies. Senator Biden has been, in the end, on the wrong side of every major foreign policy issue since he has been in politics. Having said that, I am still surprised by this story. His cowardice in the face of true evil is despicable.
And this is the person who is supposedly giving Barack Obama foreign policy credibility? God help us all, especially those currently persecuted around the world.

via conspiracysquirrels.com