That duality thing goes back to clinton, probably further.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/arms/"So, once elected, Bill Clinton did what he does best: He took advantage of the opportunity. Rather than insert human-rights concerns into the arms-sales equation, as did his Democratic predecessor President Carter, Clinton decided to aggressively continue the sales policies of President Bush, himself no slouch when it came to selling U.S. arms."
.....
" What we found is that while the U.S. obviously sells weapons to NATO countries and relatively democratic allies like Japan and South Korea, it also has a nasty habit of arming both sides in a conflict, as well as countries with blighted democracy or human-rights records, like Indonesia, Colombia, and Saudi Arabia.
All of this might be justified as a way to maintain a strong manufacturing job-base in the U.S., but some of these sales actually result in jobs being shipped abroad -- while arms manufacturers get tax breaks for merging, resulting in further layoffs here at home."
http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/arms/lobbying.html"n 1993 Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) proposed that arms sales to Indonesia be linked to that country's human-rights record. Lobbyists immediately went to work opposing Feingold's proposal. As one complained to the Legal Times, "Every time a human-rights issue comes up, they
jump on it and say, 'Let's cut off arms sales to Bongo Bongo.'"
The lobbyist then became defiant: "We'll fight Feingold; we'll fight each senator if we have to. The defense industry has to fight each one of these battles."
The Indonesian government's "registered foreign agents" -- its lobbyists in the U.S. -- disengaged from the fray and let American arms exporters do the fighting. The arms makers impressed upon legislators that tying arms exports to human rights meant the loss of jobs to foreign competitors. The State and Defense Departments phoned Feingold to let him know of the Clinton administration's opposition to the bill. The Feingold bill went down in flames."
And this is probably one of the reasons the Democrats tend to shit on McKinney.
"In 1995 Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) and Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Ore.) introduced the Code of Conduct bill , which would have tied all U.S. arms exports to the customer's democracy record, human-rights record, and its willingness to report arms imports and exports to the United Nations.
At a 1995 defense trade seminar, three influential arms export lobby groups recommended the bill "should be allowed to die in committees." Both the Senate and House versions of the bill were soundly defeated, with the 65 senators and 262 representatives who voted against it collecting some $4 million in contributions from defense PACs.
The undaunted McKinney, who in 1997 had said the U.S. "ought not to be in the business of supplying weapons to dictators," introduced yet another Code of Conduct bill in the House last September, with John Kerry (D-Mass.) doing so in the Senate. The bill passed in the House, but was not taken up in the Senate. McKinney plans to re-introduce the bill for debate by the 106th Congress.
And so it goes. The arms lobby pushes its interests. Occasionally a principled legislator comes along and tries to introduce some responsibility into the arms export process. The reformer quickly gets squashed, with the Clinton administration's help. "
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