Obama aide uses war to achieve 'radical values'?

Samantha Power

White House official Samantha Power sees war as an "instrument for achieving her liberal, even radical, values," charged Tom Hayden, himself a notorious left-wing radical.

Power is the National Security Council special adviser to Obama on human rights. She reportedly heavily influenced Obama in consultations leading to the decision to bomb Libya.

WND exposed that a research center founded and headed by Power had a seat on the committee that invented the military doctrine used by Obama as the main justification for U.S. and international airstrikes against Libya.

Hayden made his remarks in a recent posting at the Rag Blog, a far-left website that is home to radical 1960s anti-war leaders, some with previous close ties to Obama.

Hayden was the principal organizer for the 1960s anti-war movement group Students for a Democratic Society, from which the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group splintered.

In an article about Power's role in the international coalition currently bombing Libya, Hayden writes that he had "a long conversation with Power in December 2003."

"I was struck by the generational factor in her thinking," relates Hayden. "If she had experienced Vietnam in her early 20s, I felt, she would have joined the radical left, suspicious always of American power."

Continued Hayden: "But as an Irish internationalist witnessing death and destruction in the former Yugoslavia, she wondered how the United States could be neutral. She strongly favored the American intervention and air war that followed."

Hayden contended that Power's Balkans experience led her to become an advocate of American and NATO military intervention in humanitarian crises.

"She began to see war as an instrument for achieving her liberal, even radical, values," he stated.

Many Rag Blog personalities were the founders of a coalition, Progressives for Obama, that campaigned for the president during the 2008 campaign.

One Rag Blog contributor is Mark Rudd, a founder of the Weather Underground terror group alongside Obama associate William Ayers. The Weathermen, co-founded by Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, sought the overthrow of the U.S. government.

Also writing at Rag Blog is Marxist activist Carl Davidson, a founder of the socialist New Party. WND previously reported evidence Obama was a New Party member.

Davidson, along with Obama associate Marilyn Katz, a Chicago extremist activist, organized a 2002 anti-war rally at Chicago's Federal Plaza that was widely credited with propelling Obama to the national stage.

Rag Blog's founder and co-editor is confessed Vietnam War draft dodger Richard Jehn.

Soros-funded doctrine

The Libya bombings have been widely regarded as a test of a military doctrine called Responsibility to Protect.

In his address to the nation earlier this month, Obama cited the doctrine as the main justification for U.S. and international airstrikes against Libya.

Responsibility to Protect, or Responsibility to Act, as cited by Obama, is a set of principles, now backed by the United Nations, based on the idea that sovereignty is not a privilege but a responsibility that can be revoked if a country is accused of "war crimes," "genocide," "crimes against humanity" or "ethnic cleansing."

The term "war crimes" has at times been indiscriminately used by various U.N.-backed international bodies, including the International Criminal Court, or ICC, which applied it to Israeli anti-terror operations in the Gaza Strip. There has been fear the ICC could be used to prosecute U.S. troops.

The Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect is the world's leading champion of the military doctrine.

As WND reported, Soros is a primary funder and key proponent of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect.

Several of the doctrine's main founders sit on boards with Soros.

WND reported the committee that devised the Responsibility to Protect doctrine included Arab League Secretary General Amre Moussa as well as Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi, a staunch denier of the Holocaust who long served as the deputy of late PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

Also the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy has a seat on the advisory board of the 2001 commission that original founded Responsibility to Protect.

The commission is called the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. It invented the term "responsibility to protect" while defining its guidelines.

The Carr Center is a research center concerned with human rights located at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Power was Carr's founding executive director and headed the institute at the time it advised in the founding of Responsibility to Protect.

With Power's center on the advisory board, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty first defined the Responsibility to Protect doctrine.

Two of the global group's advisory board members, Ramesh Thakur and Gareth Evans, are the original founders of the doctrine, with the duo even coining the term "responsibility to protect."

As WND reported, Soros' Open Society Institute is a primary funder and key proponent of the Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect. Also, Thakur and Evans sit on multiple boards with Soros.

Soros' Open Society is one of only three nongovernmental funders of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Government sponsors include Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Rwanda and the U.K.

Board members of the group include former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former Ireland President Mary Robinson and South African activist Desmond Tutu. Robinson and Tutu have recently made solidarity visits to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip as members of a group called The Elders, which includes former President Jimmy Carter.

Annan once famously stated, "State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined – not least by the forces of globalization and international co-operation. States are ... instruments at the service of their peoples and not vice versa."

Soros: Right to 'penetrate nation-states' borders'

Soros himself outlined the fundamentals of Responsibility to Protect in a 2004 Foreign Policy magazine article entitled "The People's Sovereignty: How a New Twist on an Old Idea Can Protect the World's Most Vulnerable Populations."

In the article, Soros said "true sovereignty belongs to the people, who in turn delegate it to their governments."

"If governments abuse the authority entrusted to them and citizens have no opportunity to correct such abuses, outside interference is justified," Soros wrote. "By specifying that sovereignty is based on the people, the international community can penetrate nation-states' borders to protect the rights of citizens.

"In particular, the principle of the people's sovereignty can help solve two modern challenges: the obstacles to delivering aid effectively to sovereign states, and the obstacles to global collective action dealing with states experiencing internal conflict."

More Soros ties

"Responsibility" founders Evans and Thakur served as co-chair, with Gregorian on the advisory board of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which invented the term "responsibility to protect."

In his capacity as co-chair, Evans also played a pivotal role in initiating the fundamental shift from sovereignty as a right to "sovereignty as responsibility."

Evans presented Responsibility to Protect at the July 23, 2009, United Nations General Assembly, which was convened to consider the principle.

Thakur, is a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, which is in partnership with an economic institute founded by Soros.

Soros is on the executive board of the International Crisis Group, a "crisis management organization" for which Evans serves as president-emeritus.

WND previously reported how the group has been petitioning for the U.S. to normalize ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, the main opposition in Egypt, where longtime U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak was recently toppled.

Aside from Evans and Soros, the group includes on its board Egyptian opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei, as well as other personalities who champion dialogue with Hamas, a violent offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

WND also reported the crisis group has petitioned for the Algerian government to cease "excessive" military activities against al-Qaida-linked groups and to allow organizations seeking to create an Islamic state to participate in the Algerian government.

Soros' own Open Society Institute has funded opposition groups across the Middle East and North Africa, including organizations involved in the current chaos.

'One World Order'

WND reported that doctrine founder Thakur recently advocated for a "global rebalancing" and "international redistribution" to create a "New World Order."

In a piece last March in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, "Toward a new world order," Thakur wrote, "Westerners must change lifestyles and support international redistribution."

He was referring to a United Nations-brokered international climate treaty in which he argued, "Developing countries must reorient growth in cleaner and greener directions."

In the opinion piece, Thakur then discussed recent military engagements and how the financial crisis has impacted the U.S.

"The West's bullying approach to developing nations won't work anymore – global power is shifting to Asia," he wrote.

"A much-needed global moral rebalancing is in train," he added.

Thakur continued: "Westerners have lost their previous capacity to set standards and rules of behaviour for the world. Unless they recognize this reality, there is little prospect of making significant progress in deadlocked international negotiations."

Thakur contended "the demonstration of the limits to U.S. and NATO power in Iraq and Afghanistan has left many less fearful of 'superior' western power."

With research by Brenda Elliott