I SUPPORT SAMANTHA POWER AND BARACK OBAMA

It took me a night and some time to feel compelled to write about Samantha Power. Last night I emailed her.

It is obvious that I strongly support Barack Obama as the Presidential candidate. And it is transparent that I have been a grass roots volunteer for his campaign, but also for ending genocide, specifically in Darfur for four of the five years that it has been allowed to go on.

I own two copies of Samantha Power's book, A Problem from Hell ~ America and the Age of Genocide~ one for me and one for my 20 year old son, who used it in high school for a term paper on genocide. I have given speeches about the Darfur and the Rwandan genocide, always having this one of several books that I own about genocide on display at my speeches. The tenth chapter is about the genocide in Rwanda. And this is the genocide that President Bill Clinton made Prudence Bushnell avoid calling the genocide genocide. It it the genocide that President Clinton got calls for and chose not to answer many times. With Jared A. Cohen, Prudence Bushnell has authored a book One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide.

Samantha Power spoke at Salve Regina University, in Newport, Rhode Island, April 10, 2006, where she signed both of my copies of the Pulitzer prize-winning book. She has endlessly spoken up and out about the Darfur genocide as well as other genocides. Her record on human rights far exceeds Hillary Clinton's.

I have said things about Hillary Clinton that are what I feel and would be seen by supporters as wrong. No doubt. I have only heard the entire quote of Samantha Power once and when I heard the entire statements, they sounded correct to me. As someone who supports Barack Obama and who is one of his visible supporters, it was not the best choice of words to call Hillary a monster by Samantha Power, even if it is an appropriate adjective in the speaker's mind. Even though she is an unpaid supporter. It doesn't come across well for our wish to elect Barack Obama as the Presidential candidate. I am sure what I have written about Hillary and her very, very well paid consultants being SLEAZY would not be acceptable to Barack either. And I do feel badly about that. But for me, it is the truth of how I see her and her consultants. How do you say "sleazy" and use words like "untruthful" to have the same kind of ringing of the truth of how I see things?

The Battle of Attacks

Barack has a difficult time winning the "battle of attacks" because even if he ONLY answers Hillary's attacks he looks weak, the pundits tell us. The suggestion is that he needs to play offense and not defense. And Barack doesn't want to bring up the scandal-ridden Clinton lifetime of EXPERIENCE in order to get the public to remember the waste of time and focus the Clintons will bring back to the Administration should Hillary become the President. And it WILL be a major part of the Republicans' and the 527 groups who will have a heyday with the Clinton history. All the work has been done in the books and online with all of the rhetorical weapons to load up the ammunition against Hillary. What they have on Barack is the lie that he is Muslim, that he has a middle name that means beautiful or handsome and that some relish relying on the divisive ignorance, apathy and fears of those who want to claim he secretly is running President with a hidden agenda. All this is untrue. And most voting Americans know it. Some like Mrs. Clinton like to perpetuate the untruths to further their personal ambition. They simply aren't interested in the truth if the truth hurts their quest for political power.

Samantha Power has never run for political office. She is an activist. She cares about humanity. She so passionately cares about Barack Obama that she let her guard down and said something that would have been best to not say. It wasn't helpful. I am sure she knew that the second she said "that is off the record" to the Scottish reporter.

Samantha Power speaks out to Irish news RTE.
Question: "Do you regret (the words you said)?"
Samantha Power answers: "Of course I regret them, I can't even believe they came out of my mouth. The campaign was getting very tense, and I -- in every public appearance I've ever made talking about Senator Clinton, I have sung her praises as the leader she's been, the intellect. She's also incredibly warm, funny. I've spent time with her. I think that I just had a very weak moment in seeing some of the tactics, it seems, that were getting employed. I was just afraid really that the campaign would not stay at the level it had been on and I let out in a wave of frustration."

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Gerri Peev talks about her interview with Samantha Power with Tucker Carlson

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Prudence Bushnell is asked how many "acts of genocide" does it take to make a genocide.
Youtube uploaded by: AmatekaRwanda
In 1994, the President Clinton's spokeswoman, Prudence Bushnell, talked about "acts of genocide" referring to the genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda. (Page 359 of the Power book, A Problem from Hell). She was not allowed to say the word "Genocide". Notice this was posted not by an American, but it is an important expose of our not picking up the ringing phone, or even jamming the Rwandan radio waves (the main form of communication , not television) well within our capabilities. The radio was instrumental in rallying the people to murder and naming the lists of people to be murdered. If our government called it genocide, it would have meant that we were compelled to act. But President Clinton didn't have the political will to act. He was busy with a personal scandal at the time. The United States of America Clinton administration "blocked deployment on UN peacekeepers (to Rwanda. Page 373 of Samantha Power's Pulitzer prize-winning book.)

Furthermore, page 383 states about the Clinton administration, "It is striking that most officials involved in shaping U.S. policy were able to define the decision not to stop (the Rwandan) genocide as ethical and moral. The administration employed several devices to dampen enthusiasm for action and to preserve the public's sense ~ and more important, its own ~ that U.S. policy choices were not merely politically astute, but also morally acceptable."
Page 366: "...during the entire (1994) three months of the genocide, (Bill) Clinton never assembled his top policy advisers to discuss the killings...Rwanda generated no sense of urgency and could safely be avoided by Clinton at no political cost." And he knew. (Page 354 ~ 389)


Text of Prudence Bushnell's interview by Frontline after Bill Clinton was no longer President.

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From PBS' Frontline Ghosts of Rwanda Part 1 of 12 parts uploaded on Youtube by assaultivebear

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From PBS' Frontline Ghosts of Rwanda Part 2 of 12 parts uploaded on Youtube by assaultivebear

OBAMA FOR PRESIDENT