Samantha Power
Samantha Power | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1970 |
| Alma mater | Yale |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Public policy, human rights |
| Institutions | Kennedy School of Government, Harvard |
Samantha Power (born 1970 in Ireland) is an American journalist, writer, and professor. She is currently affiliated with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Power has been a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and was a senior adviser to U.S. Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama until resigning for remarks she made about Hillary Clinton that were disavowed by Obama.
Biography
Power was born and raised in Ireland before emigrating to the United States in 1979. She attended Lakeside High School in Atlanta, Georgia. She was a member of the cross country team and the basketball team. She is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School.
From 1993 to 1996, she worked as a journalist, covering the Yugoslav wars for U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, The Economist, and The New Republic. A scholar of foreign policy especially as it relates to human rights, genocide, and AIDS, she is currently the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
She was a foreign affairs advisor to Presidential candidate Barack Obama until making negative remarks about Hillary Clinton (including calling her a "monster") in an interview with The Scotsman. Power apologized for the remarks and resigned soon after.
Work
Her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2003.
As of 2006, she was writing about foreign policy and Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and United Nations Special Representative in Iraq who was killed in the Canal Hotel bombing in Baghdad along with Jean-Sélim Kanaan, Nadia Younes, Fiona Watson, and other members of his staff, on the afternoon of August 19, 2003. The book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World was released on February 14, 2008.
She spent 2005-06 working in the office of U.S. Senator Barack Obama as a foreign policy fellow, where she was credited with sparking off and directing Obama's interest in the Darfur conflict[1]. According to the November 4, 2007 edition of The New York Times, she served as a foreign policy adviser to Obama's 2008 presidential campaign until her resignation from the campaign.
Alongside her work with Obama, Power has been involved in several efforts to increase awareness with regard to genocide and human rights abuse, most particularly regarding the Darfur conflict. In 2006, she contributed to "Screamers", a movie telling about Darfur, Armenian and other genocides of 20-21st centuries. She endorses the Genocide Intervention Network.
In 2004, Power was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 top scientists and thinkers of that year.[2] She appears in Charles Ferguson's 2007 documentary No End in Sight which alleges numerous missteps by the Bush administration in the U.S. war in Iraq.
In fall 2007, Power began to write a column in Time Magazine.[3]
In a 2002 interview at Berkeley[4] , Power proposed that instead of encouraging negotiations between Israelis and Arabs, the United States should spend "billions of dollars" to send a "meaningful military" force to effect the "imposition of a solution" and create "the new state of Palestine" beside Israel. [5]
2008 Obama Democratic Party presidential campaign
When she joined the Obama campaign as a foreign policy advisor, Men's Vogue described her as a "Harvard brainiac who can boast both a Pulitzer Prize and a mean jump shot (ask George Clooney). Now the consummate outsider is working on her inside game: D.C. politics." [6]
In an interview with BBC's HARDtalk on March 6, 2008, Power stated that Barack Obama's pledge to "have all [US] combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months"[7] was a "best case scenario" that "he will revisit when he becomes president." She continued, saying that "what we can take seriously is that he will try to get US forces out of Iraq as quickly and responsibly as possible." Power concluded her statement, saying that Obama "will not rely upon some plan that he's crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. senator."[8]
In a March 6 interview with The Scotsman, she was quoted as saying: "We fucked up in Ohio. In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win".[9] [10] "She is a monster, too -- that is off the record -- she is stooping to anything...You just look at her and think, 'Ergh.' But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive." Power apologized for the remarks that night, saying that they "do not reflect my feelings about Sen. Clinton, whose leadership and public service I have long admired."[11] In the wake of reaction to the remarks, she resigned from the campaign the next day. [12]
Bibliography
- Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (2008) ISBN 1-59420-128-5
- "Rethinking Iran,"[13] Time Magazine, January 17, 2008.
- "Access Denied,"[14] Time Magazine, September 27, 2007.
- "The Void: Why the Movement Needs Help," [15], New Republic, May 15, 2006.
- "Punishing Evildoers," Washington Post, April 23, 2006.
- Abramowitz, Morton, and Power, Samantha. "Democrats: Get Loud, Get Angry!" Los Angeles Times, April 10 2006.
- "Missions," New Yorker, November 28, 2005.
- "Talk of the Town: Boltonism," New Yorker, March 21, 2005.
- A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2003) ISBN 0-06-054164-4
- Realizing Human Rights : Moving from Inspiration to Impact (coeditor, 2000) ISBN 0-312-23494-5
References
- ^ Campaign '08: The Radical Roots of Barack Obama : Rolling Stone
- ^ TIME Magazine: TIME 100: Samantha Power
- ^ Search Results Failed
- ^ Kreisler, Harry (2002-04-29). "Conversation with Samantha Power". Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley. pp. p. 5 of 5. Retrieved 2008-03-07.
...we need ... a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean ... investing ... billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel's military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force ... a meaningful military presence.
{{cite web}}:|pages=has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - ^ [1]
- ^ [2]
- ^ [3]
- ^ [4][5]
- ^ "Hillary Clinton's a monster': Obama aide blurts out attack in Scotsman interview" - The Scotsman 2008-03-06
- ^ [6]
- ^ Barack Obama forced to decry adviser's 'monster' remarks of Hillary Clinton - New York Daily News 2008-03-07
- ^ 'Obama aide forced out for calling Clinton "a monster"'
- ^ Rethinking Iran - TIME
- ^ Access Denied - TIME
- ^ Kennedy School Op-Ed: Samantha Power: The Void: Why the Movement Needs Help
External links
Profiles and Bios
- Personal Homepage
- Bio, from Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
- Power's profile at Harvard
- Samantha Power: Biography | PBS
- A League Of Her Own- Profile story from Men's Vogue
Speeches and Interviews
- Interview on Sudan for guernicamag.com
- Interview at Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley
- Interview at IdentityTheory.com
- Interview with Harry Kreisler on Conversations with History about "Genocide and U.S. Foreign Policy
- Speaking on human rights and U.S. foreign policy at the University of Chicago Feb 23, 2007.
- Interview in 02138 on Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, the purpose of the United Nations and Barack Obama.
- Interview with The Scotsman, that led to Ms. Power's resignation from the Obama campaign and apology.
Debates
- Power v. Jeremy Scahill: A Debate on U.S. Actions in the Balkans, the Independence of Kosovo, the Iraq Sanctions and Humanitarian Intervention
- Audio .mp3 Download - Debate near middle of program