By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, August 10 -- When new US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power gave a speech Saturday night in California at an event of the Invisible Children, launchers of #KONY2012, she spoke of human rights and of governments abusing the internet.
She did not, however, even mention her own government's surveillance through the National Security Agency, asexposed by contractor Edward Snowden. It would have been easy to mention it, to an enthusiastic audience of students predisposed to like Samantha Power. But no.
Power urged those in the audience to look into the world's problems, as she did with ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. She cited "Rwandan mothers" and later, villagers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
But setting aside the US' role in pulling the UN mission out of Rwanda in 1994 -- Power told the Senate the US has nothing to apologize for -- currently the UN Mission in the Congo MONUSCO, overseen by the UN Security Council, is supporting Congolese Army units which have been named as arming the genocidal FDLR militia, and the 391 Battalion, US trained, which raped 135 women in Minova.
Power could have said, the world in complicated, the US didn't do enough during the slaughter of 40,000 civilians in Sri Lanka in 2009. But she didn't. Nor did she mention that among the US drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, civilians and children get killed too.
Invisible Children, indeed. Watch this site.
