I'm still trying to comprehend why Hillary Clinton thought it was advantageous to telegraph the Chinese leadership the message that human rights don't matter. Few diplomats unilaterally give up leverage, and  it seemed a gratuitous slap at human rights NGOs.

It was during the Academy Awards that it hite me. Maybe her real target is George Clooney, the Oscar-winning actor who has been globe-trotting recently as the UN's spokesperson on Darfur.

Hillary's shot about human rights was aimed at Clooney. She let him know, fairly brutally, that she's in charge of Obama's foreign policy when it comes to dealing with China over Darfur and Tibet, not him.

So what does she have against Clooney? Maybe this is payback because Clooney started using his media appearances as early as 2006 to boost Obama -- and thereby torpedo her chances of becoming the first female president. Reports last year in Britain's Daily Mail newspaper said that Clooney was exchanging text messages and phone calls regularly with then-candidate Obama about matters ranging from stage presence (where Clooney is an expert) to the Middle East (where Clooney is just another guy with an opinion.) For the record, Clooney's spokespeople denied that he was giving such advice to Obama. Nevertheless, the United Nation's decision to use Clooney as a global ambassador for human rights in Darfur pitted the popular actor against China, so maybe Hillary chose her Asia debut as Secretary of State to send her own message to Clooney -- butt out. 

I used to work in the White House and spent sixteen years in Washington, D.C. I know from experience that personal pique and payback accounts for a lot of what happens in politics. We like to think statements like Hillary's about human rights in China are carefully thought-through and reflect some deep strategic thinking, but as often as not they're blurted out, motivated by ego, envy, anger, retribution -- and turf-spotting. Too bad that to tell Clooney to back off, she had to dash cold water on Chinese and Tibetan democracy activists.            

If you've never heard of the National Intelligence Council, listen up. It belongs to the CIA's analytical wing, and does a lot of scholarly work. You can see a lot of this product on www.cia.gov. It's public information. This group also produces highly-classified reports, specifically, the intelligence community's National Intelligence Estimates, called NIEs. Maybe that rings a bell -- it was a flawed NIE on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that set the stage for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Get the picture why the National Intelligence Council matters? 

Here's the ominous trend. In the same week that President Obama's Secretary of State conspicuously demoted the importance of human rights in our dealings with China -- and wasn't rebuked by the White House -- we hear that Obama intends to make a diplomat named Charles "Chas" Freeman head of the National Intelligence Council.

Why is this bad news for human rights in China and Tibet? Because Freeman apparently supports China's right to crush dissent. So says Gabriel Schoenfled, writing in today's Wall Street Journal, who characterizes Freeman as a "China apologist." Schoenfeld says Freeman wrote the following in 2006 regarding Tiananmen Square on a confidential website called ChinaSec:

"Tiananmen stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership....I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be."

Oh really Mr. Freeman? Should the U.S. military have used tanks to disperse the crowd at Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech in Washington, DC? Is there any difference between what the Tiananmen protestors wanted from their government and what the civil rights rallies wanted from ours?

It's an ominous trend. First Hillary lets China off the hook, just days before an official US State Department report -- released today -- blasts China's human rights as worsening, especially in Tibet. Now we learn the man who will oversee NIEs for the new Administration thinks crushing dissenters (literally) is "acceptable."      

I'm embarrassed for Hillary. Last year she urged Bush to boycott the 2008 Olympics because of China's brutal repression of the March protests in Tibet -- not to mention China's flaunting its Olympic promises to improve human rights. When Hillary says human rights can't interfere with China's greenmailing us on the dollar and global climate treaties, all I can think of are the two septuagenarian Chinese women who protested last year over the low compensation they got when their homes were razed for Olympic construction. They're spending 10 years each, probably the last ten years of their lives, in labor "reeducation" camps (isn't that a prison?) for their audacity in questioning authority. Imagine how they must have felt when China's state-controlled media pummeled the populace with press coverage of Madame Secretary's flip-flop on human rights.

Okay, so what did Hillary get right? When she said the actions of millions of people can influence civil rights in China more effectively than those of leaders, she lurched into the truth. During the Reagan Administration (and Carter before him)  the official foreign policy of the US toward South Africa's apartheid regime was "constructive engagement." Well, engaged citizens decided that constructive engagement wasn't liberating South Africa's black majority, so they launched boycotts, divestment campaigns, and ultimately economic sanctions and -- guess what? Government leaders came around in capitols across the world, and the Afrikaaner regime was eventually forced to concede and hold free elections. 

So stop looking to leaders to solve everything. They aren't going to do it. Hillary was telling the truth when she said so, painful as it is. America's bipartisan foreign policy establishment (and business elite) is locked into a failed policy of engagement with China in which human rights has been pushed not to the bottom of the list, but actually has been crossed off the list!

So, what to do? Get mad about it, and take action ourselves. That's the part Hillary got right. Today, right now, stop buying anything that comes from China.