{"id":175218,"date":"2020-12-21T12:00:51","date_gmt":"2020-12-21T12:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=175218"},"modified":"2020-12-17T08:35:00","modified_gmt":"2020-12-17T08:35:00","slug":"the-planets-problem-from-hell-samantha-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/12\/the-planets-problem-from-hell-samantha-power\/","title":{"rendered":"The Planet\u2019s Problem from Hell: Samantha Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

16 Dec 2020 – <\/em>As head of USAID, Power will be in perfect position to wield foreign aid as a cudgel for beating foreign heads of state till they bow to US empire.<\/p>\n

Just when it seemed that Joe Biden\u2019s coming administration couldn\u2019t be more of a horror show,\u00a0Axios reported <\/a>\u00a0that he\u2019s likely to appoint another monster from the deep, violent know-it-all Samantha Power, to head the US Agency for International Development (USAID). I rescheduled my piece on contact tracing\u2019s potential to further empower the surveillance state for next year\u2019s first Black Agenda Report and instead updated my 2015 piece \u201cSamantha Power: Africa\u2019s Problem from Hell<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/em><\/strong>Having successfully advocated for US-led NATO wars in Libya and Syria, Power her sights set on the tiny, impoverished East African nation of Burundi.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As I said then, when Power was serving the second of her four years as President Obama\u2019s US Ambassador to the UN,\u00a0she was on a mission to save Africans from African savagery, but her largesse extends to all those who need American bombs to calm ethnic strife. She wants you to call\u00a01-800-GENOCIDE <\/a>, so she can alert the president to send in the Marines or other US Special Forces. As head of USAID, she\u2019ll be in perfect position to wield foreign aid as a cudgel for beating foreign heads of state till they line up behind US empire, which she understands as a never-ending campaign to stop genocide and defend human rights.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs head of USAID, Power will be in perfect position to wield foreign aid as a cudgel for beating foreign heads of state till they line up behind US empire.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, Power actually seems to believe this, unlike those who shamelessly invoke human rights but know full well that US foreign policy is about economic exploitation and\/or domination of any non-NATO nation that dares to raise an independent head. In \u201cThe\u00a0 <\/a>E <\/a>ducation of an Idealist: A Memoir <\/a>,\u201d published in 2019, she writes of how she all but immolated in her own burning self-righteousness while reporting from Bosnia in the 1990s:<\/p>\n

\u201cI had never been without opinions, but my certitude previously had to do with seemingly trivial issues like an umpire\u2019s bad call in a baseball game. Now, as I researched and reflected on real<\/em>\u2010<\/em>world events, I seemed unable to contain my emotions or modulate my judgments. If the subject of Bosnia came up and someone innocently described the conflict as a civil war, I would erupt: It is genocide!\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Antiwar activist and writer David Swanson wrote one of my favorite headlines of 2017:\u00a0Samantha Power Can See Russia from Her Padded Cell <\/a>. In the Counterpunch piece, he shared highlights of Power\u2019s overwrought\u00a0performance <\/a>\u00a0at the Atlantic Council where she railed at Russia for aggression threatening the US and the global rule of law, in Ukraine, Syria, France, Germany, Montenegro and beyond, and demanded that NATO be on hair-trigger alert.<\/p>\n

Padded cell indeed. On December 14,\u00a0CNN <\/a>\u00a0Pentagon correspondent reported that a Russian missile drill had just triggered a false alarm at a US military base in Germany, and I can only assume that Samantha Power was reassured that they\u2019re locked and loaded with all the latest world-ending nuclear weapons. If anyone knows of a psychological professional\u2019s analysis of Power\u2019s mind as publicly manifest, please send it to me at the e-address in my bio tag at the bottom of this article.<\/p>\n

David Swanson also cited William Blum\u2019s list of US attempts to overthrow governments (asterisks where successful), none of which soften Power\u2019s missionary zeal:<\/p>\n

China 1949 to early 1960s
\nAlbania 1949-53
\nEast Germany 1950s
\nIran 1953 *
\nGuatemala 1954 *
\nCosta Rica mid-1950s
\nSyria 1956-57
\nEgypt 1957
\nIndonesia 1957-58
\nBritish Guiana 1953-64 *
\nIraq 1963 *
\nNorth Vietnam 1945-73
\nCambodia 1955-70 *
\nLaos 1958 *, 1959 *, 1960 *
\nEcuador 1960-63 *
\nCongo 1960 *
\nFrance 1965
\nBrazil 1962-64 *
\nDominican Republic 1963 *<\/p>\n

Cuba 1959 to present
\nBolivia 1964 *
\nIndonesia 1965 *
\nGhana 1966 *
\nChile 1964-73 *
\nGreece 1967 *
\nCosta Rica 1970-71
\nBolivia 1971 *
\nAustralia 1973-75 *
\nAngola 1975, 1980s
\nZaire 1975
\nPortugal 1974-76 *
\nJamaica 1976-80 *
\nSeychelles 1979-81
\nChad 1981-82 *
\nGrenada 1983 *
\nSouth Yemen 1982-84
\nSuriname 1982-84
\nFiji 1987 *
\nLibya 1980s
\nNicaragua 1981-90 *
\nPanama 1989 *
\nBulgaria 1990 *
\nAlbania 1991 *
\nIraq 1991
\nAfghanistan 1980s *
\nSomalia 1993
\nYugoslavia 1999-2000 *
\nEcuador 2000 *
\nAfghanistan 2001 *
\nVenezuela 2002 *
\nIraq 2003 *
\nHaiti 2004 *
\nSomalia 2007 to present
\nHonduras 2009
\nLibya 2011 *
\nSyria 2012
\nUkraine 2014 *<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Africa\u2019s Problem from Hell<\/strong><\/p>\n

In my 2015 piece on Samantha Power, I focused on her human rights rage in Africa. Having successfully advocated for US-led NATO wars in Libya and Syria \u201cto stop the next Rwanda,\u201d she then had her sights set on the tiny, impoverished East African nation of Burundi, which had dared to\u00a0contract\u00a0 <\/a>with a majority Russian firm to mine its nickel and form strategic alliances with Russia and China. Wikileaks\u2019 diplomatic cables reveal that Western interests had had their eyes on\u00a0Burundi\u2019s nickel <\/a>\u00a0for decades before its government, under the late President Pierre Nkurunziza, signed with the Russian firm, which they said had offered better terms.<\/p>\n

Burundi shares the Hutu-Tutsi-Twa ethnic divisions with neighboring Rwanda and a highly geostrategic border with the resource rich Democratic Republic of Congo. Power, along with Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth, was stridently warning that Burundian President Nkurunziza and his political party were plotting Tutsi genocide.<\/p>\n

Power shrieked for regime change, but Russia and China had Burundi\u2019s back on the UN Security Council (UNSC), and it survived to celebrate its\u00a0removal <\/a>\u00a0from the UNSC\u2019s \u201cagenda\u201d this month, which means that its sovereignty is now relatively secure, and there was no new genocide.<\/p>\n

Much of Power\u2019s career is based on her historically inaccurate, decontextualized and grossly oversimplified account of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, during which, she alleges, the US \u201cstood by.\u201d From that point on, she moralizes, US citizens must be \u201cupstanders,\u201d not bystanders. \u201cNever again\u201d can we fail in our moral duty to stop the world\u2019s backward peoples from massacring one another over ethnic difference. She wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, \u201cThe Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide <\/a>,\u201d in which she expands on her Atlantic article on Rwanda, \u201cBystanders to Genocide, <\/a>\u201d and calls America to arms.<\/p>\n

\u201cPower shrieked for regime change, but Russia and China had Burundi\u2019s back on the UN Security Council.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Power fails to note that the US stood by intentionally, not indifferently, in Rwanda, until US ally Gen. Paul Kagame won a war of aggression begun four years earlier. The Rwandan death toll was many hundreds of thousands higher than the Pentagon had projected, but otherwise, everything went according to plan. Two years later, the Congo Wars began, and the US and UK unseated France as the dominant power in the African Great Lakes Region.<\/p>\n

US troops now appear only as \u201cadvisors\u201d south of the Sahara, although \u201cMass Atrocities Prevention, a Military Planning Handbook <\/a>\u201d describes the swift, surgical deployment of US Special Forces as a blueprint at the ready. For now there are plenty of African troops serving under US military command and grateful to receive the salaries that boost their class status in Africa, though they\u2019d be considered poverty wages here. In 2011, President Obama appointed Power to head his\u00a0Mass Atrocities Review Board <\/a>.<\/p>\n

All but a few African nations now have soldiers serving within\u00a0AFRICOM, the US Africa Command <\/a>, and Burundi\u2019s belligerent neighbor Rwanda is one of the greatest troop contributors. One complication of the Burundian situation is that Burundian troops serve in\u00a0AM <\/a>ISON <\/a>, the Pentagon-led African Union Mission to Somalia.<\/p>\n

Fighting and casualties had already taken place on Burundi\u2019s tense border with Rwanda in 2015, and five of Burundi\u2019s ruling party leaders, including the Burundian security and intelligence chief, were assassinated. This made it clear that President Nkurunziza, who was hugely popular with the country\u2019s rural Hutu peasant majority, could be the next target.<\/p>\n

That greatly alarmed all those who remember that the assassination of three Hutu presidents within two years, 1993-1994, precipitated the Rwandan and Burundian bloodbaths of the 1990s. Samantha Power decried the assassinations on both sides in Burundi and threatened sanctions, but she laid all the blame for the Burundian crisis on President Nkurunziza. Why? Because he had claimed the constitutional right to be elected twice by universal suffrage, then won by 69 percent.<\/p>\n

However, she spoke not a word of protest in 2010, when Rwandan President Paul Kagame claimed the same right and won by a thoroughly implausible 93 percent majority. Or in 2011, when President Kabila claimed the same right, then claimed a victory that\u00a0” <\/a>d <\/a>elegitimized all Congolese institutions,” according to the Carter Center\u2019s election observer mission <\/a>.<\/p>\n

The regional and ethnic tensions, which were then most fiercely focused on Burundi, are real and the mass violence often horrifying, but the world\u2019s industrial and military power elites are always in play behind the news and Samantha Power\u2019s latest African anxieties, however righteously and rabidly she conceives them.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University and is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. In 2014 she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize<\/em> for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at @AnnGarrison<\/em>, ann@kpfa.org,<\/em><\/a> ann@anngarrison.com.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 blackagendareport.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

16 Dec 2020 – Just when it seemed that Joe Biden\u2019s coming administration couldn\u2019t be more of a horror show, he\u2019s likely to appoint another monster from the deep, violent know-it-all Samantha Power to head the US Agency for International Development; a perfect position to wield foreign aid as a cudgel for beating foreign heads of state till they bow to US empire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":110030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[867,109,70],"class_list":["post-175218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-anglo-america","tag-politics","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}