On July 17, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gave a “mostly cordial reception” to Samantha Power, President Obama’s nominee to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Reporting on the hearing, the New York Times writes that Power “appeared to face no serious obstacles to confirmation.” Although not unexpected, it is unnerving given Power’s record on human rights, the locus of sovereignty, and the purpose of UN-sponsored war.
Parroting the party line and demonstrating her fondness for undeclared wars featuring U.S. troops fighting under that infamous blue flag, Power told senators, “We see the failure of the U.N. Security Council to respond to the slaughter in Syria a disgrace that history will judge harshly.”
Unfortunately, Power herself is not being judged at all, it appears.
Even ranking Republicans were ready at Wednesday’s hearing with a compliment or a vote of confidence. Again, as reported by the New York Times:
Several key Republican senators, including Bob Corker of Tennessee, the ranking member of the committee, and John McCain of Arizona, offered their support.
“I know you’re going to be received very well,” Mr. Corker said at the outset of the hearing.
For his part, in an earlier statement, McCain praised Power, saying, “I support President Obama’s nomination of Samantha Power to become the next U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. I believe she is well-qualified for this important position and hope the Senate will move forward on her nomination as soon as possible.”
The only wet blanket seemed to be Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Rubio fired a couple of good questions at Power, but failed to follow up when the would-be ambassador offered oblique answers. Committee member Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) did refer to Power’s answers as “non-responsive response[s].”
Rubio asked Power about “Force Full,” an article she wrote for The New Republic in 2003 criticizing President George W. Bush’s use of “illiberal power.” In the article, Power wrote:
U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought. It needs not tweaking but overhauling. We need: a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States. This would entail restoring FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] to its pre-Bush stature, opening the files, and acknowledging the force of a mantra we have spent the last decade promoting in Guatemala, South Africa, and Yugoslavia: A country has to look back before it can move forward. Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors.
When asked by Rubio to enumerate the sins for which America should ask the world’s forgiveness, Power dodged.
“I, as an immigrant to this country, think this country is the greatest country on earth,” Power said. “I would never apologize for America — America is the light to the world.” According to Wikipedia, Power’s Irish parents emigrated from Dublin to Pittsburgh in 1979, when Power was nine years old.
In trying not to answer, Power said more than she knew. America was once “the light of the world.” There was a time when the fundamental liberties upon which this country was founded drew immigrants to her shores, seeking freedom from oppression.
Now, however, rather than welcome the down-trodden and the refugees from despotism, our government sends billions of American dollars to prop up those same dictators and then sends thousands of American soldiers to topple them when our interests realign.
Rather than creating a haven for those desperate to breath free, one presidential administration after another exports death and destruction to the far-flung reaches of the world, creating enemies who know nothing of America’s greatness other than her military might and indiscriminate killing.
What of Power, though? What will she do to bring the candle of American greatness out from under the bushel of drones, death, and imperialism? A brief rehearsal of some of her principles might help illuminate the answer to that critical question — the one fawning federal representatives refuse to ask.
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.
The 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 Samantha Power is the fact that she 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 that she currently heads, 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 sponsors are 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 Responsibility 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 Responsibility to Protect.
“True 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 Responsibility 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 a former distinguished 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 Responsibility 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.”
Samantha Power, 42, is repeating that same old mantra: new world order. The drive to achieve the generations-old goal of replacing the Constitution with the UN Charter and replacing the Declaration of Independence with the UN Declaration of Human Rights is still very much in effect. President Obama’s nominee to represent the United States at the UN would oversee the sacrifice of American sovereignty on the altar of the globalists’ “new world order.”
Should the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approve Power’s nomination, the matter will go to the full body for consideration. Members of the Foreign Relations Committee are listed on its webpage.
Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels frequently nationwide speaking on topics of nullification, the NDAA, and the surveillance state. He can be reached at [email protected]
