HyeOctane

It is a little disturbing to see former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen teaming up to unveil a 109-page report offering U.S. policymakers advice on how to prevent future genocides. After all, just last October, this “dynamic duo” was busy encouraging Congress to perpetuate U.S. complicity in Armenian Genocide denial – cosigning letters to Speaker Nancy Pelosi arguing that it’s not the right time to honor the memory of 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children. And William Cohen’s “The Cohen Group” continues to have a strategic partnership with top lobby firm DLA/Piper – hired by Turkey to spread genocide denial in the Halls of Congress for a cool $1.8 million a year.

And yet, 14 months later, they claim to have written the blueprint to end genocide once and for all. I haven’t had a chance to read through the whole thing yet, but no doubt there are some sound ideas in the Genocide Prevention Task Force report. The question remains, however, how do you take a report seriously when the folks who wrote it pick and choose which genocides to speak truthfully about?

It’s a slippery slope, as The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart alluded to last year. Once you start misrepresenting one genocide, what’s to stop you from misrepresenting other genocides for political expediency? As Senior Armeniologist Aasif Mandvi told Stewart, given the right circumstances, the Holocaust could be downgraded to a “half-a-caust”.

Cohen and Albright’s genocide prevention schtick involves fuzzy logic – kind of like the weird scribble they have for a logo on the report presented today (my boss’ 3 year old daughter could have come up with something better). Frankly, the report would have more credibility if they scratched out Cohen and Albright as its authors.