As reported last week, President Obama has created a new government agency tasked with identifying and combatting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other such atrocities.
Appropriately, this new committee is called the White House Atrocities Prevention Board (APB) and it will be headed by President Obama’s National Security Advisor, Samantha Power (pictured).
Exercising the powers he created for himself in Executive Order 13606, President Barack Obama established the Atrocities Prevention Board, whose formation was announced by the President during his remarks at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum marking Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The goal of the APB is to first formally recognize that genocide and other mass atrocities committed by foreign powers are a “core national security interest and core moral responsibility.”
The APB, will be comprised of senior government officials across nearly a dozen government agencies, and will conduct regular meetings in the White House to identify and combat these atrocities occurring overseas that pose a significant threat to America’s national security.
According to a statement issued by the White House, the APB will also be charged with coordinating the actions of other agencies and departments with similar mandates so as to prevent ineffective and untimely responses to the various actions it highlights as threats. That is to say, President Obama has created a new government agency to make sure the work of existing government agencies is efficient and not duplicated.
Apart from the unconstitutionality of this use of the executive order, there is something sinister in the selection of Samantha Power to spearhead the search for atrocities.
One source claims that the very existence of the APB is due to Power’s own persistence in convincing the White House that discovering atrocities should be a “core national-security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.” The statement released concomitant with the issuing of the executive order evinces Power’s remarkable power of persuasion.
Samantha Power rose to prominence in government circles as part of her campaign to promote a doctrine known as the Responsibility to Protect. Notably, this philosophy was also espoused by Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian lawmaker who has publicly questioned the reality of the Holocaust and who was a dedicated lictor of the late leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization — Yasser Arafat.
Responsibility to Protect (also known as Responsibility to Act) is a doctrine advanced by the United Nations and is predicated on the proposition that sovereignty is a privilege not a right and that if any regime in any nation violates the prevailing precepts of acceptable governance, then the international community is morally obligated to revoke that nation’s sovereignty and assume command and control of the offending country.
There are three pillars of the United Nations’ backed Responsibility to Protect are:
- A state has a responsibility to protect its population from mass atrocities,
- The international community has a responsibility to assist the state if it is unable to protect its population on its own.
- If the state fails to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures have failed, the international community has the responsibility to intervene through coercive measures such as economic sanctions. Military intervention is considered the last resort.
Records indicate that the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, of which Samantha Power is a co-founder, participated in the advisory board of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty that was established by the Canadian government in September 2000 to address the growing problem of “mass atrocities.”
It was this “independent” commission that coined the term “responsibility to protect.”
Also of significance to the current examination of the newly-minted Atrocities Prevention Board and its chief, Samantha Power, is the fact that the latter is the founding executive director and the head of the Carr Center at the precise time it was helping to hammer out the details of the implementation of the Responsibility to Protect.
There are other more ominous threads in the tapestry depicting the relationship that exists among President Obama, Samantha Power, the Atrocities Prevention Board, the United Nations, and America’s official sponsorship of the Responsibility to Protect.
The worldwide leader in the promotion of this sovereignty stealing doctrine that Samantha Power worked to develop is the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P).
As published on its website, the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect’s mission is:
… to help transform the principle of the responsibility to protect into a practical guide for action in the face of mass atrocities. The GCR2P was founded by leading figures in government and academia, as well as by International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam International, Refugees International, and WFM-Institute for Global Policy. The GCR2P engages in advocacy around specific crises; conducts research designed to further understanding of R2P; recommends and supports strategies to consolidate the norm and help states build capacity; and works closely with NGOs, governments and regional bodies which are seeking to operationalize the responsibility to protect.
One of the biggest financial supporters of the GCR2P is the Open Society Institute which itself is a branch of the Open Society Foundation, an organization created by leftist financier and Rothschild benefactor, George Soros.
A quick perusal of the GCR2P website reveals that Soros’ group is one of a very small cadre of sponsors not affiliated with any government. The other two being the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (a substantial funder of National Public Radio) and Scott and Elena Lawlor.
Apart from providing financial backing to the Right to Protect, Soros personally believes in and promotes the philosophy. In an article published by Foreign Policy in 2004 entitled “The People’s Sovereignty: How a New Twist on an Old Idea Can Protect the World’s Most Vulnerable Populations,” Soros presented his take on the principles that undergird the Right to Protect.
“[T]rue sovereignty belongs to the people, who in turn delegate it to their governments,” Soros wrote.
And:
If governments abuse the authority entrusted to them and citizens have no opportunity to correct such abuses, outside interference is justified. By specifying that sovereignty is based on the people, the international community can penetrate nation-states’ borders to protect the rights of citizens.
In particular, the principle of the people’s sovereignty can help solve two modern challenges: the obstacles to delivering aid effectively to sovereign states, and the obstacles to global collective action dealing with states experiencing internal conflict.
So deep are Soros’ roots in the Right to Protect family tree that Ramesh Thakur, one of the men credited with first uttering the term “responsibility to protect,” sits with Soros on several boards and is in fact a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, which participates in international efforts with another institute founded by Soros.
The picture is darker still. Thakur, the co-author of the Right to Protect doctrine that is so dear to Atrocities Board leader Samantha Power, was quoted in a Canadian newspaper article published in March 2011 pushing for a “global rebalancing” and “international redistribution” of power that would usher in a “new world order.”
Seems that President Obama and those of his progressive ilk are not content with the forced redistribution of wealth, but insist on wresting control of all the governments of the world and assigning sovereignty to those who will commit to following the orders and heeding the policy directives of the United Nations, the Right to Protect crowd, and George Soros.
With the naming of Samantha Power to direct the Atrocities Prevention Board, President Barack Obama has now officially given Right to Protect the imprimatur of the United States of America. Let us hope that our own national government is not being purposefully mis-managed in such a way as to invite a revocation of our sovereignty by the United Nations under the authority of the Right to Protect nor a domestic demonstration of what Samantha Power describes as a “meaningful military presence” that she believes is appropriate when a nation’s sovereignty must be re-distributed to those who share her worldview.
