Sunday, February 12, 2017

UN Offers Position to Tzipi Livni, After Holdovers' Failure on Fayyad, Silent on DPRK


By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, February 11 – How pathetic or lost is the UN? After the nomination of Palestinian Authority official Salam Fayyad to be the UN's envoy to Libya was blocked by the US, it's reported the UN is offering an unidentified, perhaps non-existent Under Secretary General position to Israel's Tzipi Livni. 

  This comes while the UN Secretariat is silent on the North Korea missile launch Trump and Abe have already spoken on. Everything is for sale.

  Under Secretary General position can be made up out of whole cloth. When Inner City Press asked Secretary General Antonio Guterres about reports he'd name Louise Arbour USG for Migration, he correcting returned to the UNTV microphone and said he had to go to "ACABQ" - the UN's Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions - first. So why. despite misreported that all USGs require Security Council approval, would this be different?

  But Guterres is surrounded by holdover officials, from Jeffrey Feltman to spokesman Stephane Dujarric, who in full disclosure evicted Inner City Press from the UN Press Briefing Room (video here, memo to US Senate here at Paragraph 10) and then from the UN, as Guterres flies from Saudi Arabia to Qatar to the UAE. Talk about wrong place, wrong time. Watch this site.