Samantha Power Presents Credentials As US Envoy

[Purveyor]

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Samantha Power presented her credentials as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday, stressing the critical link between the global superpower and the world body.

The former foreign policy adviser to President Barack Obama told reporters before the ceremony that she was honored, thrilled and "incredibly fortunate to be able to come to New York to sit behind the placard that says the United States."

"I've worked with the secretary-general over the last few years at the White House, worked very effectively with him and I'm looking very much forward to a close working relationship now that I am up here in New York," she said.

Power was sworn in Friday by Vice President Joe Biden, a day after the Senate overwhelmingly approved her nomination by a vote of 87-10. She succeeds Susan Rice, now the president's national security adviser.

At age 42 and 10 months, Power is the youngest-ever U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The U.S. Mission said she is a month younger than Donald McHenry was when he was confirmed as ambassador by the Senate in September 1979.

MORE...

http://www.chron.com/news/us/article/Samantha-Power-presents-credentials-as-US-envoy-4708018.php

[Snowfield]

1. Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/06/samantha-power-and-the-weaponization-of-human-rights-2/

This profile of Power by lawyer Chase Madar ran in CounterPunch on September 10, 2009.

American liberals rejoiced at Samantha Power’s appointment to the National Security Council. After so many dreary Clintonites were stacked into top State Department positions—Dennis Ross, Richard Holbrooke, Hillary herself—here was new blood: a dynamic idealist, an inspiring public intellectual, a bestselling author of a book against genocide, a professor at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights. And she hasn’t even turned 40. The blogosphere buzzed. Surely Samantha Power was the paladin, the conscience, the senior director for multilateral affairs to bring human rights back into U.S. foreign policy.

Don’t count on it. “Human rights,” a term once coterminous with freeing prisoners of conscience and documenting crimes against humanity, has taken on a broader, more conflicted definition. It can now mean helping the Marine Corps formulate counterinsurgency techniques; pounding the drums for air strikes (of a strictly surgical nature, of course); lobbying for troop escalations in various conquered nations—all for noble humanitarian ends.

The intellectual career of Samantha Power is a richly instructive example of the weaponization of human rights. She made her name in 2002 with A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. In this surprise global bestseller, she argues that when confronted with 20th-century genocides, the United States sat on the sidelines as the blood flowed. Look at Bosnia or Rwanda. “Why does the US stand so idly by?” she asks. Powers allows that overall America “has made modest progress in its responses to genocide.” That’s not good enough. We must be bolder in deploying our armed forces to prevent human-rights catastrophes—to engage in “humanitarian intervention” in the patois of our foreign-policy elite.

In nearly 600 pages of text, Power barely mentions those postwar genocides in which the U.S. government, far from sitting idle, took a robust role in the slaughter. Indonesia’s genocidal conquest of East Timor, for instance, expressly green-lighted by President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger, who met with Suharto the night before the invasion was launched and carried out with American-supplied weapons. Over the next quarter century, the Indonesian army saw U.S. military aid and training rise as it killed between 100,000 and 200,000 East Timorese. (The figures and the designation of “genocide” come from a UN-formed investigative body.) This whole bloody business gets exactly one sentence in Power’s book. What about the genocide of Mayan peasants in Guatemala—another decades-long massacre carried out with American armaments by a military dictatorship with tacit U.S. backing, officer training at Fort Benning, and covert CIA support? A truth commission sponsored by the Catholic Church and the UN designated this programmatic slaughter genocide and set the death toll at approximately 200,000. But apparently this isn’t a problem from hell.

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A Diplomat From Hell: Samantha Power and The Quest For Eternal War

http://legalienate.blogspot.se/2013/06/samantha-power-and-imperial-delusion.html


Before Samantha Power is buried in shrill hysteria by the fantasy-obsessed GOP, it might be a good idea to recognize that she is a poor choice to be U.N. Ambassador not because she will aid Washington's enemies with her preoccupation with "human rights," but because she will continue anti-human rights policies that earn us enemies we needn't ever have had in the first place. Ho hum. What else is new?

Power, a self-styled "genocide chick," wrote the shelf-busting tome, "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," which places the problem of genocide squarely on the shoulders of others, a neat trick in a world regularly subjected to invasions and/or massacres by Washington and its client states, with quite a few of them meriting consideration as genocides under current definitions of that term. But you don't get to work on "human rights" for the President of the United States by stating the embarrassingly obvious fact that the U.S. opposing genocide is like Coca Cola opposing sugar.

A good place to bring Power's thought into focus is by contrasting it with that of a genuine human rights advocate. Here's how she characterizes U.S. dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky's work (which has its flaws, but not those claimed by Power):

"For Chomsky, the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed. America, the prime oppressor, can do no right, while the sins of those categorized as oppressed receive scant mention. Because he deems American foreign policy inherently violent and expansionist, he is unconcerned with the motives behind particular policies, or the ethics of particular individuals in government. And since he considers the United States the leading terrorist state, little distinguishes American air strikes in Serbia undertaken at night with high-precision weaponry from World Trade Center attacks timed to maximize the number of office workers who have just sat down with their morning coffee."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/books/review/Letters-t-1.html?_r=1&


To the Editor:

Samantha Power has done extraordinary work in chronicling the genocides of our time, and in exposing how the Western powers were complicit by their inaction. However, in her review of four books on terrorism, especially Talal Asad’s “On Suicide Bombing” (July 29), she claims a moral distinction between “inadvertent” killing of civilians in bombings and “deliberate” targeting of civilians in suicide attacks. Her position is not only illogical, but (against her intention, I believe) makes it easier to justify such bombings.

She believes that “there is a moral difference between setting out to destroy as many civilians as possible and killing civilians unintentionally and reluctantly in pursuit of a military objective.” Of course, there’s a difference, but is there a “moral” difference? That is, can you say one action is more reprehensible than the other?

In countless news briefings, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, responding to reporters’ questions about civilian deaths in bombing, would say those deaths were “unintentional” or “inadvertent” or “accidental,” as if that disposed of the problem. In the Vietnam War, the massive deaths of civilians by bombing were justified in the same way by Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon and various generals.

These words are misleading because they assume an action is either “deliberate” or “unintentional.” There is something in between, for which the word is “inevitable.” If you engage in an action, like aerial bombing, in which you cannot possibly distinguish between combatants and civilians (as a former Air Force bombardier, I will attest to that), the deaths of civilians are inevitable, even if not “intentional.” Does that difference exonerate you morally? The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial bombardment are indeed morally equivalent. To say otherwise (as either side might) is to give one moral superiority over the other, and thus serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time.

Howard Zinn

Auburndale, Mass.

[adirondacker]

4. thought it too good to be true. Thanks for posting these links. nt

[JaneyVee]

2. I think she'll make a great choice for UN Ambassador.

[KoKo]

3. That's nice. She's kind of scary when one sees her in action, though...

Hopefully she will calm down and work herself into her new position. And Cass will be comforting her so she doesn't come across in such a harsh manner as her last appearance.