Obama Administration: Linking Mass Atrocities and National Security

PHOTO: US Intelligence Director Dennis Blair prepares to testify before the Senate (Select) Intelligence Community on Capitol Hill. (Army Base)

A few days ago we posted an article concerning US Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair testifying before the Senate (Select) Intelligence Community on Capitol Hill concerning national security threats against the United States. Surprisingly, Director Blair included current and potential mass atrocities in Africa in his “Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”

The Enough Project recently took an in depth look at what this means as the political scenes in both the US and the rest of the world continue to slowly shift towards integrating combatting mass atrocities into the national security agenda. Here’s a snippet from “Obama Team Connects The Dots Between Mass Killings and National Security:”

“By linking U.S. security concerns and mass killings, the administration has also changed the policy outlook toward genocide and civilian atrocities—as national security threats rather than just humanitarian concerns. Going beyond the moral and legal arguments found in the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, which argues that the international community has the responsibility to protect populations suffering from genocide, mass killings, or human rights violations, the administration has provided a self-interested rationale for engaging in, or even just caring about, the plight of civilians on the other side of the world.

The inclusion of mass atrocities in the threat assessment is also encouraging for many who felt that the blueprint produced by theGenocide Prevention Task Force, convened by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, American Academy of Diplomacy, and the U.S. Institute of Peace, held great promise to set the United States on a path to help avert crises and human suffering. As the museum noted in a recent blog post, Blair’s statement fulfills a recommendation made by the task force in 2008: “The director of national intelligence should initiate the preparation of a National Intelligence Estimate on worldwide risk of genocide and mass atrocities.”

For the full article, please click here.