"Obama picks Susan Rice as national security adviser; Taps Samantha Power as UN ambassador" by Matt Viser | Globe Staff, June 05, 2013
WASHINGTON – President Obama on Wednesday announced a major shakeup of his foreign policy team by elevating two longtime advisers who have been the subject of Republican criticism, naming Susan Rice as his national security adviser and former Harvard professor Samantha Power as ambassador to the United Nations.
Obama reportedly had wanted to name Rice as his Secretary of State but shelved the plan after Republicans said they would try to stop her nomination.
Because Israel wanted John Kerry, and look at him working the region on their behalf.
By naming her as national security adviser, Obama bypasses the need for Senate confirmation.
Rice was rewarded for stepping aside. And is it just me, or does an NSA adviser named Rice bring up bad memories?
Power, meanwhile, will need Senate confirmation and, given her long record of outspokenness, could face questioning about her suggestion that the United State apologize for its “crimes.”
Nothing wrong with that.
But she could win Republican support from those who admire her calls for a more activist foreign policy....
After that the article is a total rewrite. WTF and why?
On a sunny afternoon in the Rose Garden, Rice and Power said they were honored to accept their new roles.
[Following the announcement Obama escorted them to the to the Oval Office and they walked away with arms wrapped around one another]
From the print I'm looking at in my printed paper.
“I’m deeply grateful for your enduring confidence in me,” Rice said, hinting at Obama’s strident defense of her during months of criticism.
“The question of what the United Nations can accomplish for the world and for the United States remains a pressing one,” Power said. “I have seen UN aid workers enduring shellfire to deliver food to the people of Sudan. Yet I’ve also seen UN peacekeepers fail to protect the people of Bosnia.”
The appointments mark an emboldened president, willing to shirk off the criticism of his opponents.
Related: Seeing Through the PRISM of Obama's Spying Program
Trying to take attention away from that.
It also instills two women into prominent administration roles several months after Obama was criticized for appointing men to some of the most influential positions. Rice and Power departed with arms around each other.
Oh, okay, they did work that back in.
Power, 42, has a lengthy record for Republicans to mine as they prepare for confirmation hearings. She has written numerous articles and several books on foreign policy, and is known for her bluntness.
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These next few paragraphs are verbatim print:
Power rose to prominence as a journalist, starting her career as a 22-year-old foreign correspondent. She covered the Balkans during the 1990s for a variety of outlets, including the Globe. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2002 book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide” which examined the US reluctance to condemn mass atrocities as genocide.
Depends on who does 'em, if they did 'em.
The book drew controversy in some circles for outlining a case that the United States foreign policy is rife with double standards.
Translation: the TRUTH is CONTROVERSIAL!
The United States takes action in certain cases of mass killings, she argues, but not in others.
Or just FLAT-OUT INITIATES IT itself!
In comments bound to incite those who subscribe to a more hawkish foreign policy, she said the United States needs to own up to its role in past genocides.
The neo-con, neo-liberal, globe-kicking war-planners!
“We need a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, permitted by the United States,” she wrote.
In so many ways and on so many issues.
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Back to the rewrite:
She noted that former German chancellor Willy Brandt once got down on one knee in the Warsaw ghetto.
“His gesture was gratifying to World War II survivors, but it was also cathartic for Germany,” she wrote. “Would such an approach be futile for the United States?”
She has also not been restrained on criticism of the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, or the United Nations itself.
“The U.N. Security Council is anachronistic, undemocratic, and consists of countries that lack the standing to be considered good faith arbiters of how to balance the stability against democracy, peace against justice, and security against human rights,” she wrote in the New Republic in 2003.
The five veto-wielding members of the security council -- you know, the ones charged with promoting and protecting peace? -- are responsible for most of the world's arms trading, with the U.S. having about 75% of the market.
Critics on Wednesday morning, even before Power was officially nominated, were already seizing on some of her past comments.
She isn't going to make it.
“I don’t know about you, but it might be helpful to have someone rep’ing America at UN who doesn’t think we are the source of world’s ills,” tweeted Keith Urbahn , a former chief of staff to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Oh, that's one hell of a source!
David Feith, whose father, Douglas, was in President George W. Bush’s administration and had an influential role in the leadup to the Iraq War, dubbed it in the Wall Street Journal “Power’s ‘Mea Culpa’ Doctrine.”
Feith the fabricator from the Office of Special Plans?
Power was born in Dublin and spent the first nine years of her life in Ireland before her family moved to Pittsburgh. She recounted on Wednesday arriving wearing a red, white, and blue shirt and quickly trying to stifle her Irish accent.
“For the next three months, I came home from school every day… and I sat in front of mirrors for hours straining to drop my brogue so that I, too, could quickly speak and be American,” Power said.
She later graduated from high school in Atlanta before going to Yale University. She once played basketball with George Clooney. The Daily Beast once called her “the femme fatale of the humanitarian assistance world.”
Esquire in 2009 dubbed Power and her husband – Harvard law school professor Cass Sunstein– a “Fun Couple of the 21st Century.” (They met on Obama’s 2008 campaign, and started dating during the Iowa caucuses; the article featured the couple, dressed in all white, holding rackets on a squash court).
Sunstein is the one who criticized conspiracy theorists and called them crazy, so only expect so much from Samantha.
Power also drew controversy during Obama’s 2008 campaign when she told a reporter from a Scottish newspaper that she thought then-senator Hillary Clinton was a “monster.” Power, who thought the comment was off the record, resigned from the Obama campaign as a result.
See? You can't tell the truth in AmeriKa.
But after the election, Power was appointed as senior director for multilateral affairs at the National Security Council. The White House announced in February that she would leave that post to “spend some well deserved time” with her husband and their two small children, a three-year-old son and an 8-month-old daughter.
“While she is likely to return to the administration,” spokesman Tommy Vietor said at the time, “no decisions have been made on her next steps.”
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Rice has been a lightning rod for Republican criticism for her role in explaining the attacks on a US outpost in Benghazi....
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Power was a leading voice in US military intervention in the Libyan conflict, which later led to the downfall of Moammar Gadhafi’s regime.
She was wrong there.
She has largely been supportive of Obama’s more cautious approach in Syria.
‘’When innocent life is being taken on such a scale and the United States has the power to stop the killing at reasonable risk,’’ Power wrote in her book, ‘’it has a duty to act.”
And in the process kill more people.
Republicans were more restrained in their immediate responses to Obama’s choices.
Senator John McCain, a chief critic of Obama’s foreign policy decisions tweeted, “Obviously I disagree w/ POTUS appointment of Susan Rice as Nat’l Security Adviser, but I’ll make every effort to work w/ her on imp’t issues.”
My printed paper on McCain and Power:
[In one early sign she could face a relatively smooth confirmation, Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican and frequent critic of Obama, said he supported her nomination. "I believe she is well-qualified for this important position and hope the Senate will move forward on her nomination as soon as possible," said McCain, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, in a statement.]
Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, said in an interview that he didn’t anticipate major shifts in policy. He said that while he doesn’t know much about Power, he doesn’t see major impediments.
“Susan Rice has been in her position for a long time. It’s a move where she’ll still have the president’s ear,” Flake said. “For the most part, people here believe the president deserves to have his people in positions that he finds important.”
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The printed Globe I read mentioned Obama's upcoming conference in California with the Chinese leader as well as a future trip to Germany. It mentions Kerry and the Israel-Palestinian conflict as well as Syria, and tells me Power is a Red Sox fan.
What is notoriously missing from the web version is this:
"The Israel-based newspaper Ha'aretz on Wednesday highlighted a video clip that showed Power in 2002 suggesting that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might require alienating the American Jewish community. She also said a solution may require investing "billions of dollars not in serving Israel's military but actually investing in the new state of Palestine. She later distanced herself from those comments."
Has the Senate seen it, or does Israel not want to fight about it now because the assault on Syria and invasion of Iran is days away?
As for her comments, they once again show who you can not criticize in AmeriKa. You can rip the government and Obama, but not Israel.
Related:
How the hell you going to make two states out of that when Israel says they are keeping all settlements?
Also see: Memory Hole: Future Vision of Israel
There is your answer, Sam.
"Samantha Power outspoken voice for human rights" by Bryan Bender | Globe Staff, June 06, 2013
WASHINGTON — Diplomatic is not a word commonly used to describe outspoken Harvard-trained scholar and activist Samantha Power.
In the early 1990s, as a recent college graduate wading into Bosnia’s civil war, she called the Clinton administration immoral for not using military strikes to halt ethnic cleansing. In 2003, she called for a “historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, permitted by the United States.”
In 2008, while advising then-candidate Barack Obama, she described as “extremely disappointing” the new head of the United Nations. Then she got in trouble for calling Obama’s primary rival, Hillary Clinton, “a monster.”
Now Obama has nominated the 42-year-old Irish-born mother of two to represent the United States in one of the most influential diplomatic posts: as ambassador to the United Nations, the very body she has criticized for failing to prevent the untimely deaths of millions of people around the globe....
Once you realize the U.N. is nothing but an USraeli tool you understand its actions better.
Power — who spent half a dozen formative years in the Boston area — and who until earlier this year served as a senior director on the National Security Council — has been one of the strongest advocates inside the White House for confronting humanitarian crises.
But do we HAVE TO DO IT with WAR?
She was a leading voice for military action in Libya in 2011.
That's disappointing.
One of the most pressing issues in her new job will be how to bring an end to the grinding civil war in Syria.
Tell your boss to pull the CIA-Duh mercenaries out and leave Assad alone.
Her rise to prominence in American foreign policy circles has been swift, beginning when she was a 22-year-old freelance journalist covering the civil war in Bosnia, where she witnessed first-hand the atrocities committed by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims.
There were atrocities all around, and Bill Clinton used Al-CIA-Duh against the recalcitrant Serbs, but whatever....
“She thought what was happening was horrible and nobody was paying attention to it,” said Gary J. Bass, a professor at Princeton University who has known her since 1992. “She wanted to go and bear witness. She was fresh out of Yale and decided this was something she had to do. That was an incredibly brave thing to do. Lots and lots of reporters were being killed.”
I know how she feels.
Her dispatches at the time, including for The Boston Globe and the Economist, led to a job as an analyst for the nonprofit International Crisis Group....
But it is not only the complexities of global affairs that captivate her. Sometimes it is baseball....
After working on the 2008 campaign — where she was remembered most for resigning after her impolitic comment about Hillary Clinton, for which she later made amends — Power joined the Obama administration as part of a power couple that included her new husband, Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor who served in the first term as Obama’s chief of regulatory affairs before returning to Harvard....
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UPDATE: Samantha Power is good choice for UN
