US Hypocrisy's Face at the UN – Samantha Power
by William Boardman atReader Supported News
Samantha Power, the Grand HIgh Witch US ambassador to the UN
What is so remarkable and troubling about the presentation we’ve heard today is that what Russia really wants from the U.N. is credit. Congratulations, Russia, you’ve stopped, for a couple days, from using incendiary weapons. Thank you for not using cluster bombs in civilian areas. Thank you for staying the hand of brutality with regard to bunker buster weapons. You don’t get congratulations and get credit for not committing war crimes for a day or a week. Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN, October 26, 2016
Samantha Power is the face of American diplomacy at the UN, where she gives ardent voice to American hypocrisy, deceit, intellectual dishonesty, and mockery of the rest of the world. Appalling as her performance has been, her portrayal is accurate, right down to her denial-laden confidence in American exceptionalism.
Power’s comment above came in the midst of a discussion of the carnage in Syria, a discussion without substance or pity, without a care for ending the killing. Her tone and content were in sharp, ugly contrast to the report of UN aid chief Stephen O’Brien addressing the Security Council about the layered wars in Syria that began with peaceful protests early in 2011:
Each month, I have come before you and presented an ever-worsening record of destruction and atrocity, grimly cataloguing the systematic destruction of a country and its people. While my job is to relay to you the facts, I cannot help but be incandescent with rage. Month after month, worse and worse, and nothing is actually happening to stop the war, stop the suffering.
Stephen O’Brien is “incandescent with rage” at the outrage that is Syria, and the perhaps greater outrage of inaction by the Security Council as a body as well as its individual states. O’Brien bears witness to destruction and atrocity that the council cannot stop and to which its member states contribute. They do not express rage, incandescent or otherwise; they express the snide posturing of politics and tactical advantage.
Vitaly Churkin, the Russian Federation’s ambassador to the UN, said O’Brien had delivered a sermon, not an objective report. Churkin said that the Russian Federation continued to negotiate with armed groups, continued to deliver humanitarian aid by the ton, and continued the eight-day-old bombing pause. Churkin said Aleppo was worse because the Al Nusra Front had not yet fulfilled its promise to separate from more moderate opposition forces. Churkin said that negotiation demands were constantly changing, that fighters used civilians as human shields, that a political solution should remain the first priority, and that New Zealand should be thanked for working to build a consensus among the members to end the fighting.
The American response is as heartbreaking as ever:
Samantha Power responded to the Russian assertion of facts not with rebuttal, but with sarcasm, mockery, and pettiness. Hers is an essentially ad hominem response that allows no credit for a bombing halt of any duration. And no wonder. Power speaks for a country that bombs others more or less at will for as long as it likes. The US has bombed Afghanistan without serious surcease since 2001, and Iraq almost as long. The US continues to participate in the Saudi Arabian coalition’s relentless bombing of Yemen’s hospitals, schools, and funerals, taking part in war crimes as part of a criminal war.
Mockingly, the ambassador from the country of military shock and awe acts as if her hands are clean from decades of devastation visited upon the region. Power acts as if the US aerial destruction brought to bear on defenseless tribes in Afghanistan and Pakistan or defenseless urban civilians in Syria, Iraq and Yemen had never happened. Power has nothing to say about American use of depleted uranium weapons that leave their targets – both people and the land – as radioactive threats to human health for generations.
The US/Saudi assault on Yemen uses cluster bombs in civilian areas, but Samantha Power has no sarcastic objection to that. The US manufactures cluster bombs – banned by most of the rest of the world – to sell to the Saudis to use in civilian areas in Yemen. The US had no hesitation using bunker-busting bombs in laying waste to Iraq.
Beyond her heavy-handed mockery, Power offered nothing useful. She might have admitted the constant pattern of American war crimes, especially since 2001, whether torture, kidnapping, imprisonment at dark sites, drone strikes, or any of the other horrific acts of American policy throughout the Middle East since World War II. Being the United States means never having to say you’re sorry, no matter how sorry your human rights record, no matter how sorry your fidelity to international law, and worst of all in the world of power politics, no matter how sorry your actual accomplishments are. No matter how monstrous American behavior becomes, Samantha Power is paid to praise it as the necessary actions of the world’s indispensible nation.
In 2008, when Samantha Power was part of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, she famously called Hillary Clinton a “monster.” So does it take one to know one?
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN
If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.
For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.
There it is again. A self-modified human being, now become a monster, gazing in love at her reflection in the mirror while perfectly conscious of millions gazing at her in awe as she gazes at herself. This, not democracy and freedom for all, is her idea of thrilling. I look forward to the dissolution of your old, evil world, Samantha. It looks like you’ve invested your soul – which means ‘everything’ – in it. That’s too bad.
I can understand the absurd Neo Con war talk, revisionism and outright lies coming from this “diplomat”, like John Bolton before her, but I can really not understand how British and European politicians can follow and announce the same crude propaganda to a more educated public with any attempt at dignity
or self-respect.
Have they all been thoroughly compromised? Have they all been partying with Ghislaine Maxwell and flying with the charming Jeffrey Epstein? What other reason could explain such debasement?
Like you, I find myself wondering sometimes how some of these people manage to keep straight faces.
Davide Cameron was never too good at it. He always looked on the verge of bursting out laughing.
However, having recently carried out substantial background research into the Balfour Declaration, and seen how this wove together a complex web of powerful individuals across Britain, the US, former Czarist Russia, France and Germany, it eventually became obvious that this particular class of individuals – then as now – do not care what “ordinary” people think.
This class of people control the mass media and the international financial and energy networks.
They are a literal international ruling class and they can easily afford to hire individuals like Bolton and Powers on to their payroll. These “mouths-for-hire” are always happy to take on leading public roles, thus obscuring the real puppet masters who pull their strings, along with the strings of the wider global populaces.
For now, this international ruling class has a problem, which is the internet, which they find extremely hard to control. The legislators have tried to do their bidding and bring the internet back under their control but global opinion – for now – has seen that off.
Without alternative sources of information, how can any of us know the real truth as to what is going on in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Israel-Palestine and other third world areas?
For now, we have some degree of available understanding – but just how long will it be before this ends?
I seriously wonder if she wasn’t drunk when she gave that speech to the UN. From memory, she had been hauled out of some do or other to address an “Emergency meeting” tabled by Russia, so it is at least possible.
Powers should seek professional help in dealing with her inability to acknowledge truth. But that’s not what she’s paid for, she’s following in Goebbels footstep, using the Big Lie technique over and over until people start believing her toxic emissions.
What is hard to understand is why the Russian UN representatives do not call out Powers and the US?
Why are they not making exactly the same points William Boardman is making above?
Are they just slow on the uptake or is it preferable for them to allow the US to get away with these statements?
Pointing to US hypocrisy and double-standards is unlikely to start World War Three – is it?
The only other factor may be that they do not want to get dragged into the US presidential campaign.
Does that explain their reluctance to respond properly to Powers?
Ms Power looks like the immoral, unethical and brutal zombie she is. This is definitely a case where form follows function!
Anglo-Saxon dogs can bark as much as they want – the rest of the world is laughing louder and louder.
Indeed, Sir Michael ‘bumped on the head as a child’ Fallon, the UK political genius, has given Russia two years notice of war. Presumably he hopes the UK aircraft carrier and its F-35s will both be available and fully functional (subject to the war being fought when the temperature is right) in that time.
https://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2016/11/03/uk-britain-would-be-ready-for-war-against-russia-in-two-years/
Meanwhile 8000 out 70000 British troops are physically unfit, failing to meet minimal fitness requirements.
https://z5h64q92x9.net/proxy_u/ru-en.en/https/russian.rt.com/world/article/330057-britanya-armya-fizpodgotovka