if you do the 5,000 troops that I guess General [Romeo] Dallaire was asking for, you can probably secure Kigali, but you can’t do the whole country. And we’re not even sure you could do Kigali because it would have been a hostile insertion

, tend to be applied with the assumption thatboth the degree and direction of bias afflicting analysts is known when in fact this is rarely known

ve lenses, policy makers did not takquate notice of the contrasting forms of state-driven, hierarchical, and copolitical genocide occurring alongside Rwanda's civi

Rather, these two experiences appear tobe complementary and mutually-reinforcing: U.S. policy-maker scepticism ofthe UN in general, combined with the traumatic memory of how the UN'sperceived organizational failures played out in the particular instance ofSomalia, may have predisposed U.S. policy makers to identify and similarlyinterpret observed surface similarities between Rwanda and Somalia. Perceivedsimilarities between Rwanda and Somalia were in turn given greater weight inU.S. policy-making decisions, reinforcing U.S. policy-maker resistance to intervene in the cris

The report called for a cease-fire between the warring ethnicparties, with no reference to the plight of and need to protect at-risk civilians.

the absence of another coherent narrative was the "African" sche

meagre intelligence resources in the regionhowever—one intelligence officer stationed at the time in Cameroon—were notsufficient to gather a great deal of in-depth information from the conflict z

ts including the TimGuardian, Le Monde, the Washington Post, the New York Times and allin the CLA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service for Africa and Westope, which includes radio and newspaper reports from Rwanda, Belgiumand Franc

, it was assumed that the natureor meaning of the violence was also the same as Som

schema, according to David Houghton, is "a general cognitive structure intowhich data or events can be entered, typically with more attention to broadbrush strokes than to specific details

, and the Somalia image of a 'failed state' with random violence masked the actual premeditation and directing role of the Hutu extremists in the interim government"(Klinghoffer 1998

MCs draft resolutions in support ofa specific policy direction, participate in committee hearings on foreign policyissues, seek out media attention, and give floor speeches urging the president topursue specific policy routes

Adding to the Record

SSCI Report —some-times referred to as the “torture re-port”—is a travesty, fatally flawed byerrors of fact, unsupportable findingsand conclusions, and serious flaws inanalytical tradecraft

There were serious problems in the intelligence, some of which were relegated to dissenting footnotes. But the Bush administration also chose to highlight aspects of the intelligence that helped make the administration’s case, while playing down others.

“They lied.

it isparticularly difficult for analysts to get it right when the truth is implausible.'''61Hindsight always reminds us not to assume that what appears irrational toobservers does not have a rationale. When estimating, however, what analystwill ever predict that the subject will act stupidly rather than sensibly? I

cognitive psychology thatpeople tend to look for information that confirms what they already believeand discount information that is inconsistent with those predisposition

policymakers' cognitive processes, and difficult choices between competingrisks got in the way of the right actions.

modern government creates confusion in communication and coordinationand tradeoffs among objectives that conflict with each other, leaving a largeroster of impersonal enemies of effective intelligence that are inherent in theprocess

it is a fight against cunning outside enemies looking forways to circumvent our efforts

The creation of the APB, which convenes on a monthly basis to assess emerging threats ofgenocide and mass atrocities around the world, has helped remedy some of the institutionaldeficits that hampered U.S. analysis of the Rwandan crisis on the eve of the genocide

As for the warnings of impending violence issued by Rwandan and international humanrights organizations, U.S. diplomats tended to discount these reports, at least partially, as lackingin objectivity and methodological rigor

did not consistently investigate incidents of violence or rumorsof treaty violations. Nor did they systematically track or report on “hate radio” broadcasts orspeeches

limited local contacts

were paying so much attention to thepeace process, and trying to keep it on the rails, trying to get that transitional government goingthat [the Embassy] didn’t really appreciate the possibility of things going completely south.

Rumors of imminent warfare are sweeping thecapital, international relief workers report both sides are fortifying defensive positions

In February1993, following the Gisenyi massacres and the subsequent resumption of the RPF offensive inNorthern Rwanda, the DIA Weekly Warning Forecast Summary declared: “Renewed warfarecould lead to the RPF and government forces participating in ‘ethnic cleansing’ of their opponentsfurther exacerbating the situation.

The peace process that culminated in theAugust 4 peace accord led to the virtual elimination of the human rights abuses that plagued thecountry during the first quarter of 1993.

links to government actions or agents are tenuous, unproven and, indeed, seem to beperpetrated by all sides and not necessarily orchestrated or organized?

pre-94 data they would not come up with genocide onthat scale.

the intelligence report thatallegedly predicted half a million deaths may well be apocryphal.

Defense Intelligence Agency, ‘So what’s going on?Who’s killing who? I haven’t seen much about this.’ Maybe I’d seen something, but hadn’t certainlyfocused on it. And they couldn’t tell me.

it was not high on the agenda.... It didn’tshow up very often in intelligence summaries. There were not very frequent reports about it.

We werepsychologically and imaginatively too limited

U.S. government diplomatic reporting and intelligence analysis on Rwanda lackedthis sense of urgency

International Commission of Inquiry that visitedRwanda in January 1993

fatal blow to the already shaky prospects for theimplementation of the Arusha Accords.

August 1993, theUN Special Rapporteur on Summary, Arbitrary, and Extrajudicial Executions had issued a reportthat largely confirmed this commission’s findings, concluding that the UN Genocide Convention“might ... be considered to apply to” the massacres committed over the past three years, which hadclaimed the lives of more than 2,000 Tutsi

who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you werebeing engulfed by this unimaginable terror.

UN was severely limited during this timeby its organizational structure and “possessed no powerakin to that of a sovereign state...it could act only with theconsent of the international community under the auspicesof the Security Council.

TURQUOISE

sovereignty policy and they were not about to get involved in some other country in Africa. If there were problems in the next door neighbor, well those were problems for the next door neighbor to deal with

I don’t have any present sense that it was brought to my attention and I didn’t act on it

he Hutu, Tutsi, Burundi, Rwanda nexus had nothing to do with the Cold War, and therefore it has been kind of off the scope

far reaches of central Africa, by almost nobody’s definition a vital interest except a humanitarian interest, it’s very hard to make the case for risking American lives and the case for overriding the Pentagon’s resistance to it

the most important achievement of the Clinton foreign policy, and that was to help put in place an architecture appropriate to the post-Cold War world. And the part of the world most deficient with regard to structures was Africa. So there was really very little to get your hands on

The clarity that now comes from people saying, If we’d sent in 5,000 troops we could have saved X hundred thousand people, was just a non-concept at that time as far as I was concerned

reliance was, as so often happened with our reliance on the Europeans, misplaced

We were deep in the Haiti crisis and we were being pressured constantly to take some action in Haiti, pressured by ourselves and by external events

link a conspiracy theory shared by a well-known hate account to an award-winning journalist and author, who then amplified the conspiracy theory on Twitterand TV

"royal experts."

we’re not used to thinking about dealing with Africa in the same way that we deal with Europe, not just on racial grounds but in general. But there are 2 million people who died and there is slavery and they are going on dying and I’m not saying that we should invade, but we should do more.

It just didn’t seem possible

The DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] folks there couldn’t tell me. That’s how well we were on top of what was going on in Rwanda

the sad fact is the possibility of an American intervention never came up. It was so far beyond anybody’s imagining

t least 55 genocides andpoliticides have taken place since the founding of the UnitedNations in 1945 in which about 75 million have died, most ofthem murdered by their own governments - m

he best way to stop genocide is notmilitary intervention after the fact butwise diplomacy that prevents genocidefrom starting in the first plac

e ci a study was a"desk-level" analysis that contained threepossible scenarios, only one of whichpredicted such mass killings.

utsi civilians were not a party to theconflict. They were a people targeted forextermination. Helping them wouldnot have escalated fighting but wouldhave saved their live

Jamming the genocidal radio broadcastswould have kept the organizers frompassing orders directly to the populatio

became convinced that the genocidalgovernment would succee

The world has mostly enjoyed peace since 1945, but that owes noth-ing to the UN and everything to American power, exercised mostly in theform of guarantees to Japan, NATO, and other allies, rather than in shoot-ing wa

rds, UN forces might play a post-conflictrole in restoring normalcy but are generally helpless where one party oranother wants to continue ki

States. Was Washing-ton now to be given a free hand in the name of humanitarianism? Mightnot America's war hawks exploit such a loophole for their own p

o order members of his administrationto avoid using the word "genocide" while the Rwanda killings were underway, lest this invoke America's obligation under the genocide conventionto attempt "to prevent" it.

UN officials encouraged them to flee

shame by their ineptitude and lack of urgency in the face of wholesaleatrocities, preparing the ground from which R

writing. "The need for humanitarian intervention to save a people from its own government has not coin-cided with the availability of a power or group of pow

olute. When agovernment's depredations against its own subjects far exceeded the levelof brutality that is all too common, then it in effect forfeited its sovereigntyand others might rightfully send combatants to protect the

Then we must react decisively, along withothers, to prevent further mass killingsand to punish the perpetr

No government would have ratified theconvention if its intent were to require,as a legal obligation, that all states partiesdeploy military forces to foreign territo-ry to prevent genocide whenever andwherever it occ

part could only mon-itor and analyze events from outsideRwanda's bor

y that PDD-25needed to be flexible in its interpreta-tio

ct, work on the guide-lines began in February 1993 an(l waslargely finished before the "Blackhawkdown" incident. That costly battle, how-ever, caused us to revisit the documentfor minor revisions and extensive con-sultations on Capito

t earlier communications may have leftthe impression that the Secretary- Gener-al supported withdra

that UNpeacekeeping operations worldwide werealready overloaded, and that UNAMIRcould not satisfy new U.S. governmentcriteria to guide UN peacekeepingdeploymen

e Respo

ion. Washington andNew York remained focused on thepeace acco

ore, expecting Habyari-mana to report accurately on the armscaches and training missions was a mis-tak

We would not rush into each and everyhumanitarian catastrophe, I confidentlyreport

? We responded conventionally toan extraordinarily unconventional cr

maintaining masculine identitythrough constant acts of assertion, confrrmation, and defense.

the assumption that products of a culture automatically reflectthat culture

Let’s say you’ve recently liked a number of photos from San Francisco’s dumpling chef Cathay Bi (@dumplingclubsf). We then look at who else likes Cathay’s photos, and then what other accounts those people are interested in. Maybe people who like Cathay are also into the SF dim sum spot @dragonbeaux. In that case, the next time you open Explore, we might show you a photo or video from @dragonbeaux

United States completely modernized the air defense systems inSpain. The Pentagon built the Turkish highway system. Between 1946 andthe 1970s, the Philippines received $704 million through base deals.33 Someof that showed up as M60 machine guns and M1 rifles; 35,000 pairs of bootsmade their way to Manila.

1940s the US Navy deter-mined that the Marshall Islands, far away and sparsely populated, wereideal for weapons testing.

catastrophic mistake forAmerican interests in Iran.” One from which the Americans did not recover.

new SOFA with Iran narrowlypassed parliament granting US forces extraterritoriality in exchange fora $200 million military aid package. The SOFA granted US service peopleand their dependents almost complete immunity from Iranian laws.

y1973 the US Navy and its British colleagues forcibly evicted the Chagossianpeople and turned it into a military reserve, named Camp Justice. Theislanders were sent 1,200 miles away without resettlement assistance.

In 1951, the UK granted the US Air Forceaccess to twenty-six new bases; the Saudis permitted the United States toexpand in Dhahran. Beginning in 1952, the US Navy spent $170 million tobuild the massive Subic Bay Naval Station in the Philippines. Iceland, too,a country that had long denied basing rights, finally relented.

other countries, long reluctant to cede military rights, changed theircalculus: perhaps a few US troops were a good insurance policy taken outagainst future Soviet aggression

“maintain the military bases necessary for the completeprotection of our interests and of world peace.”

See No Evilby former CIA agent Robert Baer

Just as George Lucas was chastising Ronald Reagan for appropriating StarWars to name his proposed missile defense system

Lucas set out to critique theManichean assumptions of the Cold War

persisting conviction that the American experience,despite its unprecedented nature, could serve as a template for the future of lessfortunate peoples and less developed cultures not only justified increasing inter-ventionism in the outside world, it often promoted a predisposition to denigrate theworth and viability of foreign, particularly non-Western, cultures.

Americans' self-images and the way theyrepresented other peoples and cultures would have increasingly significant reper-cussions for all of humanity

exceptionalism

"an intenseconsciousness of uniqueness" and "a hyperactive sense of mission" as two of anumber of critical themes in American history

rugged individualism exemplified by the frontiersman, the rags-to-richesascent of the hardworking entrepreneur, and the non-imperialist nature of Amer-ican expansion—subsequently reinforced exceptionalist formulations of the Amer-ican experience and national identity on the part of historians and politicians alike