Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. during President Barack Obama (D)'s second term, claimed that her guiding philosophy was Responsibility to Protect (R2P).  However, in this absolutely heartbreaking letter in Tablet Magazine, "AMBASSADOR SAMANTHA POWER LIED TO MY FACE ABOUT SYRIA," by Kassem Eid, a Syrian who survived unspeakable torture and poison gas bombing attacks from Syrian president Assad's forces but managed to escape and then tried to warn her about the true situation, we learn that Power's real motto was Responsibility to Protect Our Rear Ends (R2PORE) by not getting involved.

In an introduction to the letter, Tony Badran sets the scene in present-day war-wracked Syria and what preceded (emphasis added):

In the week prior to the UNSC vote, the pro-regime camp's assault had killed hundreds of civilians, using both regular munitions and poison gas.  As they have done for years, Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers systematically targeted, in the words of a doctor in Ghouta, "everything: shops, markets, hospitals, schools, mosques, everything."  The images are unspeakably horrific, and the stories chilling.

Eastern Ghouta, readers will recall, was the site of what then-President Barack Obama called a proud moment, a moment when he mustered the "most political courage," and cut a deal with Vladimir Putin that got Bashar Assad off the hook after he gassed more than 1,300 men, women, and children with sarin in 2013.  For Obama, nothing could interfere with his policy of realignment with Iran.  Getting the Iran deal meant "respecting Iran's equities" in Syria. That meant turning a blind eye to the gassing of children and industrial-scale slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians. ...

In 2016, Obama's calculated appeasement policy led to the fall of Aleppo, whose handover Malley negotiated directly with Putin's envoy.  Meanwhile, Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, used her reputation as a humanitarian as a deflect from the White House's inaction in the face of mass slaughter on an industrial scale, including crematoria.

Eid continues with his story.

I first met then-ambassador Samantha Power in the U.S.-U.N. Mission on April 14, 2014.  That was two months after I fled Syria and less than a year after I survived Assad's sarin-gas attack.  When I met Ambassador Power, she told me that she was trying so hard to persuade President Obama to act decisively against the Assad regime and that she was ashamed of Obama's inaction.  She then told me about her personal experience as a journalist and activist while she was covering the Yugoslav wars and the genocide in Bosnia.

I was touched by what I perceived to be Ambassador Power's sincerity and personal experience that led her to write A Problem From Hell, which explained how politicians lie in order to avoid intervening to stop genocide.  I was so honored that she gave me an autographed copy of her famous book, and in return, I gave her a copy of A Book of Syria's Dead, which contains the names of the first 100,000 Syrians who had been killed up until that time.  In that moment, I never thought that a day would come when I would find out that she was just lying to my face.  Samantha Power is exactly like the genocide-enabling politicians that she wrote about herself in her book.  (Emphasis added.)

This was true not only of Syria, but also of other skirmishes and wars around the world.

In A Problem From Hell, Samantha Power explains how the U.S. administration tried to cover up the genocide in Bosnia by instead labeling it a "civil war."  Yet she and President Obama escaped responsibility for the documented and proven war crimes committed in Syria under the Assad regime's brutal campaign.  If Ambassador Power was telling the truth, she should have resigned just as she chided diplomats at the State Department for not resigning during the genocide in Bosnia. ...

It was the Trump administration that finally showed the world this reality last year and publicized the truth that Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and President Obama tried to hide.

Ms. Power and Mr. Rhodes have been going around the country as activists for the truth, decrying "fake news" and dishonesty, which they say is creating an alternative reality. At the same time, it was these two who during the Obama administration created an alternate universe to hide the genocide in Syria [emphasis added]. Rhodes is experienced in creative writing, and he used his skills after he was appointed to be deputy national security adviser by President Obama to write an alternative universe to hide the truth of the Syrian genocide and the Iran deal. It should boggle the mind how these two, who were so instrumental in pushing disinformation to mislead the American people, could in any way be activists for the truth.

Meanwhile, all the White House correspondents who so diligently questioned

the White House physician about President Donald J. Trump (R)'s health were totally unable to question or discover these in-your-face tragic lies in the oh, so not scandal free administration of Obama (D).

Thus, the Obama-besotted White House correspondents aided and abetted and enabled the lying as people were and are dying.  If they are called out on it, they'll blame their usual suspects for the mess of their predecessors:  President Trump and Syria's neighbor, Israel.

Image: Eric Bridiers via Wikimedia Commons.