Are Muslim Syrian rebels driving Christian Syrians out of their homes and murdering them?

Generally I wouldn't pass along this story, which comes from an organization called Special Guests, because it's unsourced; it doesn't provide even one link to support the claims of a Christian activist named Wendy Wright about persecution of Syrian Christians under cover of a rebellion in Syria.

However, the gist of Wright's claims has been borne out in other countries, including Egypt and Iraq, where the Christian population was left helpless after the secularized regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Saddam Hussein were overthrown. And, after I dropped everything else to attempt to find a reasonably authoritative source for the Special Guests story (below), I see that the Los Angles Times has reported that 90 percent of Christians in Homs have been expelled from their homes by the rebels.

So if CNN could rip itself away for a few minutes from the role of Voice of the International Community and ask some hard questions about the present condition of Christians in Syria, then report on the answers, it would be helpful given the extent to which CNN has been propagandizing for U.S. intervention in Syria.

(Memo to self: ask Congress when it's going to stop clowning around and start procedures to make CNN an outright government agency.)

There's no way to prevent the American government from supporting the rebels; President Obama and Secretary Clinton have already clearly indicated they want Assad's regime gone. But since the White House has now taken the first step in direct intervention, it does have a responsibility to make help conditional on the rebels refraining from persecuting the Christians in the country.

From Special Guests:

Human rights organizations are reporting that Syrian rebels are actively involved in slaughtering hundreds of Christians and driving out tens of thousands from their homes--without even allowing them to bring their personal property.

This horrific escalation of “ethnic cleansing” of Christians from Syria must be exposed and stopped.

Telling this under-reported story is Christian Freedom International spokesperson Wendy Wright who shares how Barack Obama and many in the media continue to portray the uprisings throughout the Middle East as “freedom fighters.” In reality they are often sects of radical Islam overthrowing existing, sometimes more moderate regimes.

Wendy stated, "Christians are being slaughtered in Syria, yet world leaders are siding with the killers. The minority Christian population -- which is not taking sides in the current conflict -- is being kidnapped, used as human shields, tortured and executed.”

“Yet their plight is ignored by the media, UN, and the Obama administration. Their silence allows the genocide to continue. It will only get worse if the killers gain control of the government," concluded Wright.

Egyptian mob near Israeli embassy attacks CNN, PBS and other journalists, accusing them of being American spies

1. First, a correction to the "Two photos" post. From the following CNN report, journalist Mohamed Fadel Fahmy is "a producer working for CNN." So this corrects -- at least tentatively -- my original guess, in the earlier post, that he was an independent reporter.

September 10, 8:42 PM EDT:

Angry crowd turns on journalists reporting embassy attack in Egypt
From Ivan Watson, CNN
September 10, 2011 8:54 p.m. EDT

Cairo (CNN) -- An angry crowd lingering near the Israeli embassy in Cairo after an attack on the building a day earlier turned on journalists reporting the incident Saturday, accusing at least one of being an Israeli spy.

As a CNN crew filmed the embassy from across the street, another crew from American public television -- led by Egyptian television producer Dina Amer -- approached the building.

The crew's Russian cameraman was preparing to film the embassy when a woman in the crowd began hurling insults at the TV team, Amer said.

"There was this older lady who decided to follow me and rally people against me," Amer recalled.

"She said 'you're a spy working with the Americans.' Then they swarmed me and I was a target."

A growing crowd surrounded Amer and her colleagues, as they tried to leave the scene.

Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, a producer working for CNN, rushed to help escort Amer through the angry crowd. But suddenly the two reporters were pinned against the railing of an overpass by young men who were accusing Amer of being an Israeli spy.

Yelling "I'm Egyptian," Fahmy managed to pull Amer another 10 meters down the road, until the pressure from the mob overwhelmed the pair.

Amer screamed as she and Fahmy were knocked to the ground and the crowd started to trample them.

Other CNN journalists tried to reach in to help, but were pushed back by a wall of angry men.

Fahmy lay on top of Amer, shielding her with his body.

"I was thinking, how powerless I was because there was no police to save us," Fahmy said. "I was worried that they were going to rape her."

At that moment, a student bystander named Mohammed el Banna called out to the journalists and pointed out a nearby car.

Somehow, Fahmy managed to carry Amer to the open door of the public television crew's car, where two of her female colleagues were waiting just a few feet away.

The mob pounded on the windows and tried to reach into the vehicle as the panicked reporters fumbled and struggled to get behind the steering wheel.

When Margaret Warner, a correspondent with the PBS program "Newshour" managed to get the vehicle moving away from the crowd, men threw stones at the departing vehicle.

Amer had few words to describe the terrifying ordeal.

"They were animals," she said.

Other Egyptian journalists told CNN they were also attacked Saturday while trying to report near the Israeli embassy.

Ahmed Aleiba, a correspondent with Egyptian state television, said he was pursued by civilians and soldiers.

"I had to run because obviously they were targeting journalists," Aleiba said in a phone call with CNN. "They attacked two other TV crews."

"I was in the car getting ready to film. A soldier knocked on the window with his stick and said 'if you don't leave by midnight your car will be destroyed,"" said Farah Saafan, a video journalist with the English-language newspaper Daily News Egypt.

Journalists have been targeted before in Cairo.

On February 2, dozens of journalists of different nationalities were beaten and pursued around the city while trying to report on pro-Mubarak demonstrations. The day descended into one of brutal street violence, as pro-regime supporters backed by men on horses and camels attacked opposition demonstrators on what became known as the "Battle of the Camel."

And CBS News correspondent Lara Logan suffered a brutal sexual assault in Tahrir Square while covering the celebrations that followed former President Hosni Mubarak's resignation on February 11.

On Saturday, as some journalists ran for their lives from the Israeli Embassy, the interim government was holding crisis talks with Egypt's ruling military council and top intelligence chief.

The emergency session concluded with a pledge to honor Egypt's international treaties and defend foreign embassies. The government also announced plans to re-activate the country's 30-year-old emergency law.

Application of the law had lapsed since the overthrow of Mubarak, according to a senior official in the National Security Directorate, who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity.

One of the five measures announced after Saturday's crisis talks calls on authorities to make "media and political powers accountable for inciting security lapses."

"It's obvious that there is some sort of plan leading to military rule in this country," warned Egyptian state TV's Aleiba. "The next step will be martial law."

Note (UPDATED 10:43 PM EDT

UPDATE September 10, 10:43 PM EDT
From a CNN report published at 8:54 EDT tonight (Angry crowd turns on journalists reporting embassy attack in Egypt), journalist Mohamed Fadel Fahmy is "a producer working for CNN." So this corrects my original guess in the 'Egypt photos' post that he was an independent reporter. I note from the CNN report above Fahmy is a producer who risked his life to save a female reporter who was being trampled by a furious mob.
*************
I just added an extensive update to the 'Egypt photos' post. (See following post). Over and out for the rest of the weekend.
Pundita

Two very different photos of the attack on Israel's embassy in Cairo (Updated 3X)

UPDATE September 10, 10:40 PM EDT
From a CNN report published at 8:54 EDT tonight (Angry crowd turns on journalists reporting embassy attack in Egypt), journalist Mohamed Fadel Fahmy is "a producer working for CNN." So this corrects my original guess that he was an independent reporter. (See the post below.) I note from the CNN report above that he is a producer who risked his life to save a female reporter who was being trampled by a furious mob.
UPDATE September 10, 5:00 AM EDT
1. The Associated Press photo featured in the discussion below, showing a fire/fires outside the Israeli embassy, was indeed taken during the Friday attack on the Israeli embassy. Here are two other AP photos of the same incident from a nine-photo galley of the unrest in Cairo on Friday. The fires seem to be from torched vehicles. (Google hosted website link):


The photo caption reads:

A protester holds the Egyptian national flag as a fire rages outside the building housing the Israeli embassy in Cairo, Egypt, Friday, Sept. 9, 2011. Hundreds of Egyptian protesters, some swinging hammers and others using their bare hands, tore down parts of a graffiti-covered security wall outside the Israeli embassy in Cairo on Friday. Thousands elsewhere protested for the first time in a month against the country's military rulers. (AP Photo)

A second photo from the gallery that shows fire:


2. The AC-360 CNN news show made no mention of Friday's unrest in Egypt nor of the attack on the Israeli embassy, not even during the news break at the bottom of the hour, and even though the news featured an update on the unrest in Syria and Libya. This doesn't mean the attack wasn't mentioned earlier during CNN's news broadcasts, but that all mention was omitted from AC-360 suggests the Obama White House/State Department were struggling at the time of the broadcast with how they wanted the unrest/attack on the embassy to be framed.

A potentially serious issue that's been building since Thursday in Egypt is that the government has stopped foreigners from being able to purchase visas when they arrive in the country (see report below); there's confusion about the ruling, which government authority imposed it and why.

In short, the situation behind Friday's unrest might be more serious than the Obama administration wanted to acknowledge last night and/or it was still collecting intelligence on the fast-moving and chaotic events on Friday and their implications.

**********************
Associated Press Photo for AP report via (U.K.) Guardian, Egyptian protesters break into Israeli embassy in Cairo, published Sept. 10, 00.08 British Summer Time


Below, photo accompanying CNN report, Protesters in Egypt breach wall, enter Israeli Embassy, published September 9, 6:58 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Photo caption: "Workers paint Egyptian colours on the wall built to protect the Israeli Embassy in Cairo (File picture)"


It goes without saying that the AP photo gives a very different impression of the attack on the Israeli embassy than the CNN one. And the "File picture" caption for the CNN photo suggests it could have been taken after the last riot against the Israeli embassy.

Is it possible that the AP photo is also from an earlier riot at the embassy? From Bikya Masr's September 9 report (no time stamp) filed by Joseph Mayton, Egyptians storm Israel Embassy archives, documents fly out window (emphasis mine):

CAIRO: After knocking down the wall aimed at securing the Israeli Embassy building in Giza, Egyptian activists stormed the embassy’s archives late on Friday night and sent documents flying out the window. One image shows the embassy, or an archive apartment, on a high floor of the building, in flames.

It is unclear what exactly is happening, but reports from the area indicate the embassy has been breached and Egyptian protesters are destroying the place.[...]

I don't think the Guardian would deliberately publish an old photo, and while mistakes can happen in publishing, from the Bikya Masr report it seems a fire was set.

All else I can glean is that while there is no byline on the AP report (a common occurrence, particuarly when another news organization is posting a newswire's report), I know that Hamza Hendawi is the Cairo Bureau Chief for AP. I consider Hendawi's reports on the Cairo protests that brought down Hosni Mubarak's government to be the most informative and accurate of all the mainstream reporting on the situation.

The above-mentioned CNN report is bylined "From Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, For CNN." From a Google search Fahmy is described as a Cairo-based journalist, which suggests he is an independent reporter, or at least not a CNN employee.

Is there any significant difference between the AP and CNN reports that are published with the photos?

Well, Fahmy's report says:

Egyptians have been angry about the killing of police officers by Israeli soldiers last month when Israel went after militants who had attacked civilians near the Israeli-Egyptian border.

The AP report says:

Anger increased last month after Israeli forces – responding to a cross-border attack – mistakenly killed five Egyptian police officers near the border.

There are additional less obvious differences in the two reports, but I'd say there's the answer.

Also from the closely-followed Bikya Masr site, another troubling report today from Joseph Mayton:

Confusion as Egypt says no visas on arrival

CAIRO: In the past 24 hours, foreign nationals living in Egypt have become increasingly concerned over the reports that the Egyptian government has ended the ability to purchase a visa upon arrival in the country. It comes on the heels of reports of visa extensions also being turned down in recent months.

Despite the reports, Egyptian consulates and embassies across the globe appear to know little to nothing about the new restrictions.[...]

See the rest of Mayton's investigative report on the situation.

Also, (Iran's) Press TV has reported (Sep 10, 1:36AM GMT) gives a brief update on the situation in Egypt:

The Israeli ambassador to Egypt has flown out of Cairo, a few hours after demonstrators stormed the Israeli embassy.

Yitzhak Levanon boarded a plane before dawn on Saturday morning.

Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak called US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in the early hours of Saturday morning Tel Aviv time and urged Washington to help protect the Israeli embassy in Cairo.

Egyptian protesters stormed the embassy on Friday, destroying a part of a barricade wall around the building in the process.

Egyptian police used tear gas to disperse the crowd, and one person reportedly died due to asphyxiation after inhaling tear gas.

A protester tore down the Israeli flag at the embassy, to the cheers of thousands of demonstrators on the scene.

In addition, tens of thousands of Egyptians once again gathered at the iconic Liberation Square in Cairo to demand that the military government hand over power to a civilian administration. The protesters gathered in the square after Friday prayers to participate in the "Correcting the Path" demonstration.

I can't wait to see what CNN's AC-360 show will report tonight on the situation in Egypt. Given all that CNN did to promote Egypt's 'revolution,' I am very interested to see what they will have to say about the big breaking news from Cairo.

9/11 ten-year anniversary terrorist bomb threat against New York and Washington: What did you do with the bunny, Mr Obama?

A cautionary tale about media manipulation in the Age of Obama


This evening, minutes before President Barack Obama spoke to a joint session of Congress to put forward his "American Jobs Plan," I emailed a correspondent ("X") to warn him about breaking news that had just been announced on FNC (Fox News Channel) about a "credible" but officially uncorroborated terrorist threat specific to New York City and/or Washington, DC.

This post shows my email, the correspondent's responses, and my subsequent replies and updates. Before I begin, the brevity the language in the email communications requires a little unpacking, particularly for readers outside the United States:

FNC, along with CNN and MSNBC, is one of the three '24/7' national cable news stations in the USA. The parent company of FNC is Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp, which has been in hot water because of a phone hacking scandal.

Translations of the email shorthand

> "ops" is shorthand for operation/operatives; in this case political operatives at the White House.
> "AQ Central" refers to the al Qaeda command.
> "ailes" refers to Roger Ailes, chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group.
> "Brennan" refers to John O. Brennan, chief counterterrorism advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama; officially his title is Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and Assistant to the President.
> "CNN gofer" refers to CNN being an unofficial "go-fer" or propaganda outlet for the Obama White House or to be more precise the U.S. Department of State -- a situation that goes back many years (check out CNN's key role in shaping U.S. news coverage of the 'color' revolutions in Eastern Europe) and is too complicated to explain here, except to note that although many American's assume CNN is 'left' leaning politically, close attention to its reporting over a period of years reveals that it is really oriented toward promoting State Dept. policies, which are oriented to mesh with European Union policies. And so in my estimation only within that parameter does CNN support Liberal political US agendas -- a situation that deepened this year to promote the Obama administration's spin on the 'Arab Spring' and U.S. involvement in the bombing of Libya. As I noted, it's complicated.

Now to the emails.

6:36:32 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
Breaking - new intel credible AQ planned attack NYC or DC
Just now: FNC Jennifer Griffin report from the Pentagon. Intel not from Abbottabad. Threat "more than aspirational" but they don't have names. [*]
Pundita ["P"]

6:50:48 P.M
ailes drivel. murdoch despair. griffin tabloid rubbish.
X

8:03:52 P.M.
NO. WHITE HOUSE OPS!!! First, WH pulled fast one on GOP by telling them in advance that the speech would be 43 minutes longo w/o applause but speech was actually 32 minutes (Shep Smith reporting just now.) In other words, ops wanted to discourage GOP from making TV response to jobs speech so response wouldn't interfere with football game opener. so WH ops faked out GOP.

THEN: WH, Homeland Security, DOJ put out info about credible but unconfirmed threat so news aired JUST BEFORE job speech.

Then, right AFTER O's speech ended came WH statement, reported by Shep Smith from news wire and/or WH source:

"New statement from WH just now: WH official: "the president was briefed on the threat this morning and has been briefed on it throughout the day. Information is 'unconfirmed.' intel community has not yet confirmed. Shep Smith added but threat is specific, from overseas, from AQ Central, and involves a car bomb or car bombs."

2 breaking news reports on the threat - ABC news (Australia) 'Credible' threat of 9/11 attack anniversary and Fox Federal Authorities Probe Possible Terror Threat Around 9/11 Anniversary. CNN, other news orgs now piling on with their reports on the threat; story sprouting more legs than a centipede.
P

9:03:54 P.M.
"Awaiting NYC news conference on threat" - CNN just now
"threat quite credible -- security community became aware of threat 2 days ago. Brennan has been in touch with Obama throughout the day"
P

9:08:46 P.M.
CNN, Obama playing bomb threat like a fiddle
CNN analysis of Jobs Speech bumped from opening of CNN's Piers Morgan show 9-10 PM. Fox not caught napping; sticking with analyses of speech in their 9 PM leadoff.
P

9:06:28 P.M.
Gofer CNN making HUGE issue of bomb threat
P

9:10:11 P.M
Upcoming Presser from [NYC Mayor] Michael Bloomberg
"potentially a very serious threat" WH briefing security committee and other key members of House on why they're taking terrorist chatter more seriously than in the past and why they're alerting US public of risk. [presser began at 9:42]
P

10:53:45 P.M.
no worries. no chatter. noise.
X

10:54:44 P.M.
Thank you. BASTARDS. white house ops forced bloomberg, nypd to call presser w/in hour of obama speech.
P
__________

Here, my all-time favorite observation about Barack Obama; it's from the comment section for an April 11, 2008 report at the ABC News (U.S.) news blog site.

The report details Obama's attempts to explain away contemptuous, patronizing remarks he made about white, low-income Pennsylvania residents while he spoke to a private fundraising gathering in San Francisco and was unaware that his remarks were being recorded.

The ABC report prompted more than 200 comments, including this gem from one Ms. Sonia Trevino:

obama reminds me of a magician i saw as a little girl. he put a bunny in a hat and then pulled out a quarter. i was 7 y.o and i was not fooled i stood up and screamed where is the bunny, where is the bunny, what did you do with the bunny.

Yes, Mr. Obama; what did you do with the bunny?

I offered the email exchanges about the terrorist threat as a cautionary tale about government manipulation of information and the policies of major news media outlets, which make it easy for governments to influence public opinion without having just cause to do so. ("Just cause," in a genuine democracy, is a very high bar, usually relating to national security issues.)

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has clearly revealed himself, since releasing hundreds of thousands of unredacted classified documents, to be a monster. He's a kind of terrorist who is less interested in honest, transparent government than in destroying the governing institutions of free societies. And yet the machinations of governments within free societies, with regard to manipulation or "shaping" of information for the public, help Assange and those who support him to rationalize the hacking of government websites.

* Around 9 PM CNN began reporting that the government did have 3 names but the names were such common Arabic ones that it couldn't use them to indentify the persons associated with the threat, which reportedly involved a car bomb or bombs.

Juan Cole's "Top Ten Myths about the Libya War" and Chase Madar on the weaponization of human rights

Juan Cole's list of what he calls the top ten myths about the Libyan war, published August 22 at CNN's website, stays away from addressing the key issue, which is that neither France nor the governments that followed France into bombing Libya made a sincere attempt to first establish a peacekeeping mission in the country.

Cole's list also avoids the key question for Americans, which is how the U.S. government managed to rationalize an obvious decapitation strike against the Gadhafi regime as a mission to protect Libyan civilians. However, the answer was spelled out far in advance of the bombing of Libya by an American civil rights attorney named Chase Madar in an essay, Care Tactics: Samantha Power and the weaponization of human rights (September 2009), and which he elaborated on in a June 2010 essay, How Liberals Kill.

Because both essays were first published in the American Conservative magazine, I asked an American attorney whose Leftist credentials are impeccable and who's long been involved with human rights issues to read and comment on them; this as a way of checking whether political bias might have greatly influenced Mardar's arguments. He replied that for the most part Madar was spot on.

"Spot on," in this case, is nothing short of horrifying because Madar is describing how a perversion of the concept of protecting human rights became institutionalized and then weaponized. In fact, I found his points so frightening that the only way I got through the essays was by telling myself, "Nah, they wouldn't dare go that far."

In Libya, they did.

What's more, support for the U.S. bombing of Libya from certain Conservatives brought out a point that Madar didn't specifically address in his essays, which is that certain Liberals are not the only Americans who've recognized the usefulness of weaponizing human rights.

In the piece for CNN Juan Cole attempts to head off critics of the issue by arguing in his introduction, "You can’t protect all victims of mass murder everywhere all the time. But where you can do some good, you should do it, even if you cannot do all good."

A more pointed version of the argument is expounded in an August 22 opinion piece for the Atlantic magazine by the Brookings Institution's Shadi Hamid:

When you have the ability to act, doing nothing is no longer a neutral position. To be sure, this is not a time for settling scores. But it is a time for arguing for the utility, necessity, and morality of a doctrine -- the Responsibility to Protect...

You can gain a good introduction to the doctrine from Wikipedia's article, which Hamid links to in his piece. But readers who've seen the 1997 American action film, Air Force One, can get in the ballpark fast about the doctrine by recalling the speech that Harrison Ford, in the role of a U.S. president, gave at the film's opening.

I do not know, and I am sure I do not want to know, whether Samantha Power was inspired by the movie speech. I do know that what started as lines in a scripted fiction came horribly true. In the name of protecting human rights, it is now perfectly possible for foreign powers to overthrow any government and get away with it, provided the powers have enough heavy metal at their command and do enough horse trading at the United Nations.

Below is Chase Madar's September 2009 essay in its entirety. As to how I can see fit to present his criticism of the Iraq and Afghan Wars, given my strong support for both -- I supported war, and nothing else. That's the entire point, the point that Juan Cole seemingly refuses to confront. War is awful but it turns fiendish when it's made to pass for something else; I think no other American, and perhaps no one else writing in this era, has done better than Chase Madar at bringing home the point. That he's done this in one short essay is a tour de force.

September 01, 2009 Issue
Copyright © 2011 The American Conservative
Care Tactics: Samantha Power and the weaponization of human rights
by Chase Madar

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.

The selective omissions compound. Not a word about the CIA’s role in facilitating the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian Communists in 1965-66. (Perhaps on legalistic grounds: Since it was a political group being massacred, does it not meet the quirky criteria in the flawed UN Convention on Genocide?) Nothing about the vital debate as to whether the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths attributable to U.S.-led economic sanctions in the 1990s count as genocide.

The book is primarily a vigorous act of historical cleansing. Its portrait of a “consistent policy of non-intervention in the face of genocide” is fiction. (Those who think that pointing out Power’s deliberate blind spots about America’s active role in genocide is nitpicking should remember that every moral tradition the earth has known, from the Babylonian Talmud to St. Thomas Aquinas, sees sins of commission as far worse than sins of omission.)

Power’s willful historical ignorance is the inevitable product of her professional milieu: the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. One simply cannot hold down a job at the KSG by pointing out the active role of the U.S. government in various postwar genocides. That is the kind of impolitic whining best left to youthful anarchists like Andrew Bacevich or Noam Chomsky and, really, one wouldn’t want to offend the retired Guatemalan colonel down the hall. (The KSG has an abiding tradition of taking on war criminals as visiting fellows.)

On the other hand, to cast the U.S. as a passive, benign giant that must assume its rightful role on the world stage by vanquishing evil -- this is most flattering to American amour propre and consonant with attitudes in Washington, even if it doesn’t map onto reality. A country doesn’t acquire a vast network of military bases in dozens of sovereign nations across the world by standing on the sidelines, and for the past hundred years the U.S. has, by any standard, been a hyperactive world presence.

For Samantha Power, the United States can by its very nature only be a force for virtue abroad. In this sense, the outlook of Obama’s human-rights advocate is no different from Donald Rumsfeld’s.

Power’s faith in the therapeutic possibilities of military force was formed by her experience as a correspondent in the Balkans, whose wars throughout the ’90s she seems to view as the alpha and omega of ethnic conflict, indeed of all genocide. For her, NATO’s bombing of Belgrade in 1999 was a stunning success that “likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives” in Kosovo.

Yet this assertion seems to crumble a little more each year: estimates of the number of Kosovars slain by the province’s Serb minority have shrunk from 100,000 to at most 5,000. And it is far from clear whether NATO’s air strikes prevented more killing or intensified the bloodshed.

Even so, it is the NATO attack on Belgrade -- including civilian targets, which Amnesty International has recently, belatedly, deemed a war crime -- that informs Power’s belief that the U.S. military possesses nearly unlimited capability to save civilians by means of aerial bombardment, and all we need is the courage to launch the sorties.

Power has recently admitted, perhaps a little ruefully, that “the Kosovo war helped build support for the invasion of Iraq by contributing to the false impression that the US military was invincible.” But no intellectual has worked harder than Samantha Power to propagate this impression.

A Problem From Hell won a Pulitzer in early 2003. America’s book reviewers, eager to be team players, were relieved to be reminded of the upbeat side of military force during the build-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Surely Saddam Hussein, who had perpetrated acts of genocide against the Kurds, needed to be smashed by military force. Didn’t we owe it to the Iraqis to invade? Hasn’t America played spectator for too long? Power, to her credit, did not support the war, but she has been mighty careful not to raise her voice against it. After all, is speaking out at an antiwar demonstration or joining a peace group like Code Pink really “constructive”? It is certainly no way to get a seat on the National Security Council.

The failed marriage of warfare and humanitarian work is also the subject of Power’s most recent book, Chasing the Flame, a biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN humanitarian worker who was killed, with 21 others, by a suicide bomber in Baghdad just months after the U.S. invasion. Most of the book is a sensitive and rather gripping account of Vieira’s partial successes and heroic efforts in refugee resettlement in Thailand, Lebanon, and the Balkans. He eventually rose to become the UN’s high commissioner on human rights -- a position he left when asked by George W. Bush to lead a UN “presence” in Iraq.

That the UN’s top human-rights official would rush to help with the clean-up after an American invasion that contravened international law may strike some observers as strange. (One can imagine the puzzlement and outrage if the UN’s high commissioner on human rights had trailed the Soviets into Afghanistan in 1979 to help build civil society.) But for Vieira, and for Samantha Power, there is nothing unseemly about human-rights professionals serving as adjuncts to a conquering army, especially when the prestige of the UN -- scorned and flouted during the run-up to the war -- is on the line.

Besides, Vieira had the personal assurances of the U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer -- a simply charming American: he even speaks a foreign language -- that the UN taskforce would have a great deal of sway in how a new Iraq was built.

In June 2003, Vieira arrived in Baghdad and was surprised to find himself completely powerless. That Vieira and company believed the UN insignia would be more than a hood ornament on Blackwater’s Humvees bespeaks not tough-minded idealism but wishful thinking. Power herself claims that Kofi Annan’s main reason for sending Vieira off to Baghdad was to remind the world of the UN’s “relevance” by getting a piece of the action. But for him and his colleagues, this confusion of means and ends proved deadly, one of tens of thousands of blood-soaked tragedies that this war has wrought.

The clear lesson is that humanitarian work is always fatally compromised if it’s part of a militarized pacification campaign: NGO workers wield no real power and serve mostly as window dressing for the conquering army.

But this isn’t the moral that Power draws. She is still looking for Mr. Good War. Today, her preferred human-rights adventure is an escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

For the past seven years Afghanistan has been the “right” war for American liberals, but this carte blanche is fast expiring, as more civilians and soldiers die, as the Taliban resurges, and as the carnage whirlwinds into Pakistan.

The numerous humanitarian nonprofits in Afghanistan are no longer backed up by the military; it is they who are backing the armed forces, having morphed into helpmeets to a counterinsurgency campaign. This transformation has, according to one knowledgeable veteran of such work in Afghanistan, rendered humanitarian work unsustainable. But Power, like so many American liberals, remains committed to “success” in Afghanistan -- whatever that means.

As a human-rights entrepreneur who is also a tireless advocate of war, Samantha Power is not aberrant. Elite factions of the human-rights industry were long ago normalized within the tightly corseted spectrum of American foreign policy.

Sarah Sewell, the recent head of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, has written a slavering introduction to the new Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual: human-rights tools can help the U.S. armed forces run better pacification campaigns in conquered territory.

The Save Darfur campaign, more organized than any bloc of the peace movement in the U.S., continues to call for some inchoate military strike against Sudan (with Power’s vocal support) even though this disaster’s genocide status is doubtful and despite an expert consensus that bombing Khartoum would do less than nothing for the suffering refugees.

Meanwhile, the influential liberal think tank the Center for American Progress also appeals to human rights in its call for troop escalations in Afghanistan—the better to “engage” the enemy.

Nor is the imperialist current within the human-rights industry a purely American phenomenon: the conquest of Iraq found whooping proponents in Bernard Kouchner, founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, now Sarkozy’s foreign minister, and Michael Ignatieff, also a former head of the Harvard’s Carr Center and poised to become Canada’s next prime minister.

Gareth Evans, Australia’s former foreign minister and a grinning soft-peddler of Indonesia’s massacres in East Timor, is perhaps the leading intellectual proponent of the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P as it is cutely called, an attempt to embed humanitarian intervention into international law. Evans, who recently stepped down from leading the International Crisis Group, laments the Iraq War chiefly for the way it has soiled the credibility of his pet idea.

To be sure, the human-rights industry is not all armed missionaries and laptop bombardiers. Human Rights Watch, for example, is one of few prestigious institutions in the U.S. to have criticized Israel’s assault on Gaza, for which its Middle East and North Africa division has endured much bashing not just from right-wing media but from its own board of directors. That said, HRW’s rebuke was limited to Israel’s manner of making war, rather than Israel’s decision to launch the attack in the first place -- the jus in bello, not the jus ad bellum.

Human-rights organizations can do a splendid job of exposing and criticizing abuses, but they are constitutionally incapable of taking stands on larger political issues. No major human-rights NGO opposed the invasion of Iraq. With their legitimacy and funding dependent on a carefully cultivated perception of neutrality, human-rights nonprofits will never be any substitute for an explicitly anti-imperialist political force. In the meantime, America’s best and brightest will continue to explore innovative ways for human rights to serve a thoroughly militarized foreign policy.

"Hollowed out" Mexico and hollowed-out USA

The Republic of International Community as seen from satellite

CNN and FNC -- America's two national cable TV all-news channels -- have been too busy during the past week reporting on the murder trial of Casey Anthony and the antics of New York Rep. Anthony Weiner to squeeze in reporting on Mexico (actually they're always too busy to do more than glance at Mexico) so in the manner of a public service I present links to the following recent reports on Mexico. All the reports are important but I think the Reuters one is the 'must read' and biggest shocker.

June 1 - Reuters, Special Report: If Monterrey falls, Mexico falls.

June 2 - The Los Angeles Times, How many have died in Mexico's drug war?

June 5 - Christian Science Monitor, Mexico peace tour: How the drug war changed once-calm Cuernavaca

June 7 - Christian Science Monitor, Mexican drug traffickers' latest weapon: 'monster' narco-tanks

June 8 - Wall Street Journal, Mexico Tourism Feels Chill of Ongoing Drug Violence

A companion read is Zenpundit Mark Safranski's April 5 review of Narcos Over the Border: Gangs, Cartels and Mercenaries, a series of monographs edited by Dr. Robert J. Bunker. Before I quote Mark's summary of the book, in which he mentions the need for better U.S. policy on Mexico, an aside:

I hate to be the one to break this news to Mark but there can no longer be an American policy on Mexico because there is no longer a United States of America. He doesn't know this because he doesn't watch much television news, but a few weeks of watching CNN will clue him that the USA is no more. In its place is a country called The Whole World (aka RIC - Republic of International Community), which for reasons known only to the rascals who run CNN excludes every world region where CNN is not in hot competition with al Jazeera.

I myself speak of the "country" of the USA, which I think is what seems to be a box of cookies or a milk carton in the foreground of the above satellite photo of the RIC, only as a matter of convention.

As for FNC (Fox News Channel): currently too busy taking pot-shots at other TV news outlets for initially covering up the Weiner story and otherwise too busy trying to find a Republican who can win the White House to notice that a U.S. government is a memory.

(Memo to FNC: The other TV media were initially quiet about Weiner's texting problem not because he's a Leftist but because his wife is Hillary Clinton's closest aide and they didn't want to have to tell the American public that the person closest to the U.S. Secretary of State is an American Muslim of Indian-Pakistani heritage who was raised in Saudi Arabia, you nitwits.)

So before we try to upgrade U.S. policy on the hollowed-out state of Mexico, as the Narcos book terms it, I say let's examine how the U.S. got hollowed out.

One more point before I cede the floor to Mark: His summary doesn't indicate whether the book addresses racism and apartheid in Mexico. I know that Mark is aware of the subject so I think he would have mentioned it, if any of the monographs dealt specifically with racism; frankly I'd be surprised if any did because the topics of Mexican racism and apartheid are taboo in both the USA and Mexico.

Later this week or the next I'll try to rip myself away from the Afghan War long enough to return to those issues, which I touched on in an earlier post. For now, I'll just say that I think Mexico's type of racism is the true "virus" that Dr Bunker talks about.

Now to Mark's summary (see the article at Zenpundit for links to topics and sources):

[...] Narcos Over the Border. ... is one of the more disturbing academic works recently published in the national security field, not excluding even those monographs dealing with Islamist terrorism and Pakistan. If the authors of this granular examination of Mexico’s immense problems with warring narco-cartels, mercenary assassins, systemic corruption, 3rd generation gangs and emerging “Narcocultas”of Santa Muerte are correct - and I suspect they are - Mexico’s creeping path toward state failure reprsents a threat to American national security of the first order.
[...]
Some impressions I gained from reading Narcos Over the Border include:

> The Narco-Cartels and the Zetas, which fight each other as well as Mexico’s military (Mexican police generally are infiltrated, intimidated, outgunned and seriously outclassed by the Cartel gunmen, Zetas and Guatemalan Kaibiles) are better armed and better trained than are the Taliban. The deadly and efficient Zetas and Kaibiles are superior to regular Mexican military forces and have established safe haven training camps in Central America.

> Narco-cartels are properly speaking, no longer narco-cartels but transnational criminal syndicates involved in a wider array of revenue generating activities, but with professional intelligence and military capabilities, and increasingly, political, social and religious agendas that are functionally reminiscient of Hezbollah and HAMAS.

> The Mexican state is severely hampered in its response to the threat presented by the cartels by its own strategic use of corruption as a cost-saving measure and a tool for sustaining elite control of Mexican politics, as well as a method of personal enrichment by members of Mexico’s ruling class.

> The eschewing of the extreme violence by the cartels North of the border appears to be more of a sign of a strategic policy by cartel and Zeta bosses than a lack of capacity or evidence of a lack of infiltration into American society. To the contrary, Mexican cartel links to acutely dangerous American prison and street gangs such as the Mexican Mafia and MS-13 are significant and well documented.

> The cartels are global, not regional or local operators.

> The culture of the Narco-cartels, which draws on some romantic Mexican social and religious underground traditions, particularly the hybrid cartel La Familia, is morphing into a very dangerous “Narcocultas”, a neo-pagan, folk religion featuring ritualistic violence, beheadings and torture-murders carried out for reasons other than economic competition.

[See also Zenpundit's summary , Skulls and Human Sacrifice: Bunker and Sullivan on Societal Warfare at Small Wars Journal]

> Mexico has departed the realm of having a serious law enforcement problem and has graduated to a significant counterinsurgency war against the cartels in which the Mexican state is treading water or making progress against some cartels (possibly displacing their activities to weaker states in Central America).

The authors do not assume the worst-case scenario for Mexico; i.e., state collapse, but rather an insidious “hollowing out” of the state by the cartels and a mutation of Mexico’s native culture to host a 4GW nightmare. As Robert Bunker writes:

What is proposed here is that Mexico is not on its way to becoming a “rotting corpse” but potentially something far worse - akin to a body infected by a malicious virus.

Already, wide swaths of Mexico have been lost to the corrupting forces and violence generated by local gangs, cartels and mercenaries. Such narco-corruption faced few bariers given the fertile ground already existing in Mexico derived from endemic governmental corruption at all levels of society and in some ways, it even further aided the ‘virus’ spreading through Mexican society from this new infection. Among its other symptoms, it spreads values at variance with traditional society, including those:

... conceivably derived from norms based on slaveholding, illicit drug use, sexual activity with minors and their exploitation in prostitution, torture and beheadings, the farming of humans for body parts, the killing of innocents for political gain and personal gratification and the desecration of the dead.

While meticulous, Narcos Over the Border is not all-encompassing in scope. A fundamentally Mexico-centric collection of scholarly articles, it does not deal extensively with American policymakers involved in Mexico’s narco-insurgency, the intricacies of cartel financial operations or undertake case studies of narco activities in Mexican-American communities, though the authors do track narco-cartel and gang presence in cyberspace.

Narcos Over the Border represents a starting point for deeper investigation of narco-insurgency and for a national security community that has thus far treated Mexico as a third-tier problem, a policy call to arms. Strongly recommended.

Libya Stalemate

Here's the best overview of the military situation in Libya, as it stood yesterday. NATO is boxed in militarily as are the rebels and Gadhafi's forces:

CNN's THE SITUATION ROOM with Wolf Blitzer, anchor

Aired April 11, 2011 - 17:00 ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[...]

WOLF BLITZER: Let's go to the military operation underway in Libya right now. A new U.S. concerns, a stalemate could be emerging. Our Pentagon correspondent, Chris Lawrence is joining us with this part of the story. What's the latest, Chris?

CHRIS LAWRENCE, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, Wolf, one senior U.S. official tells us that there's almost no chance that Libya's rebels can move further along on the ground towards Tripoli, and yet, another official tells us that Moammar Gadhafi's forces cannot undertake a major ground offensive. So, where does that leave you?

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LAWRENCE (voice-over): Nobody wants to call it a stalemate, but U.S. officals privately say the rebels are holding Ajdabiya but don't have the organization, weapons, or manpower to move on. Gadhafi holds Brega, but air strikes have a destroyed a third of his ground armor and cut into his supply lines. U.S. and NATO officials now believed neither side can move. They also say it can't go on like this. If it does, al Qaeda is almost sure to take advantage.

ANDERS FOGH RASMUSSEN, NATO SECRETARY-GENERAL: If this ends up in a stalemate that eventually could also make Libya a failed state, that could become a breeding ground for terrorists and extremists.

LAWRENCE: In a political term, there's no such thing as a tie.

WILLIAM COHEN, FORMER DEFENSE SECRETARY: A stalemate would be a defeat. I think for the president and in terms of his stated goal of seeing Gadhafi leave.

LAWRENCE: Former Defense Secretary William Cohen says NATO must do more militarily.

COHEN: That would intensify the military operations.

LAWRENCE: U.S. and NATO officials have information notes civilians being killed, but Gadhafi's forces are enough now so mixed in so with civilians it's impossible to launch air strikes against them, unless, you use low flying aircraft that can fire extremely accurately, the kind that U.S.S. stop flying now that it is not leading the mission. In addition, Gadhafi may still have as many as 15,000 shoulder fired missiles. It's why NATO secretary-general now says there's no way to fight its way out of this.

RASMUSSEN: I want to be clear that there can be no solid military solution to the crisis in Libya.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LAWRENCE (voice-over): Especially when it's getting harder for NATO to even tell the two sides apart. For example, last Thursday, NATO warplanes accidently bombed the rebels because they didn't know that the rebels now had tanks -- Wolf.

BLITZER: Chris Lawrence at the Pentagon, thank you.

[...]

Libya: Regarding CNN's attempt to take over the job of the U.S. Dept. of State and Mike Huckabee's attempt to score against President Obama

CNN and Huckabee are not the only offenders but those two happened to catch me on a bad day last night.

The final straw was when I heard Huckabee say that Obama needed to take action to stop genocide in Libya. He covered his ass later in the same conversation by saying "what could be heading toward genocide." But Huckabee knows very well that genocide is grounds for U.N. forces and even individual nations to invade a country.

Right now the U.S. government and scores of other governments are desperately working to evacuate their nation's citizens from Libya, and scores of humanitarian agencies are desperately working to bring critical medical and food supplies into Libya. So this is not the time for CNN or any other U.S. news organization to attempt to manipulate the American public into pressuring President Obama to order U.S. military action against Libya's government.

Nor is it the time for Huckabee or any other American politician to use the crisis in Libya to score against Obama's administration -- or the previous administration, for that matter.

As for CNN's machinations -- I've been on the fence about whether to call them out for their coverage of the Egyptian protests. I got off the fence last night while I watched Anderson Cooper make another terrified Libyan citizen into a Queen for Day contestant, with the Grand Prize for the biggest sob story being U.S. Marines wading ashore.

More follows, if not this evening, I'll have the next post up by Saturday morning.

For now, CNN and the American political industry need to stand down and let the U.S. government do its job. Later there will be plenty of time to criticize how the job was done.