The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #108887 Message #2270931
Posted By: GUEST,Guest
24-Feb-08 - 09:40 AM
Thread Name: BS: US in Kosovo
Subject: RE: BS: US in Kosovo
These days, I get most my news coverage from online sources, and the main one I use is Democracy Now.
If you go to their website & watch the streaming video on the Kosovo story, it is almost bizarre beyond belief, in that believers vs thinkers vein.
There is an interview with Samantha Powers, a brilliant woman who wrote a Pulitzer prize winning book about genocide, and Jeffrey Scahill, an indie reporter who works for Democracy Now, the Nation, the Progressive, etc etc, who is every bit as smart as Samantha Powers.
Now, at the time Samantha Powers book on genocide came out, I listened to her a lot, and read the book. I found her very well informed, if not a little too Harvard "we define what a genocide is, what an atrocity is". I didn't agree with everything she said, and I certainly am not comfortable letting Harvard scholars define genocide and atrocity for the rest of the world, so I didn't think she was perfect, or anything. But she was one of the few academics who got out of their cozy Cambridge offices and actually went into the field to do their research, and come to some very provocative conclusions. That was back in 2003.
Fast forward to 2008, and I can't for the life of me figure out where she is coming from anymore, and why Jeffrey Scahill is making mincemeat out of her in the interview. Suddenly she is defending the NATO war in Kosovo in ways she never did before, she is denying that what is occurring in Iraq at the hands of the US military occupation qualifies as genocide, and on and on. I was absolutely gobsmacked by what seemed to be a 180 by her, and I couldn't figure out why an academic and a writer would do that.
Spoiler note, in case any of you intend to go watch the interview. At the beginning of the interview, Amy Goodman did give a disclaimer that Powers was now working for the Obama campaign. However, I missed the very first part of the interview when she said that, so I was listening to Powers, just stunned. While I couldn't recall exactly what her positions were from the previous times I had heard her and what she had said in her book, it did seem to me she was practically denouncing much of what she herself had been saying just a few years ago. So, off googling I went, and that was when I discovered the roots to her turnaround: she has gone into presidential politics with Obama.
But man, I was really disappointed to see it. Not that she is on his team, but that the woman was so opportunistic on such a big issue as genocide. She was spinning so madly, it showed.
Rarely have I ever seen that kind of sell out before my very eyes. She is still as smart as ever, of course. But like I said, Jeffrey Scahill made mincemeat out of her.