The Wash­ing­ton D.C.–based Satel­lite Sen­tinel Project (SSP) has for two years been method­i­cally expos­ing mil­i­tary build-ups and aggres­sion, as well as war crimes and shock­ing crimes against human­ity in a remote part of Africa — and demon­strat­ing the worth of one of the most promis­ing advances in human rights work in the his­tory of the world.

SSP is the brain­child of actor George Clooney and human rights activist John Pren­der­gast, who sought to use high res­o­lu­tion satel­lite imagery to doc­u­ment mil­i­tary aggres­sion and atten­dant atroc­i­ties and to bring them to world atten­tion. Access to such tools has his­tor­i­cally been lim­ited to governments, militaries and large cor­po­ra­tions. SSP is the first sus­tained pri­vate appli­ca­tion of satel­lites for peace advo­cacy and human rights. The orga­ni­za­tion has focused on volatile areas in Sudan and the new nation of South Sudan in its first two years, from 300 miles over the earth, peer­ing into places where the inter­na­tional media and even human­i­tar­ian aid groups can­not go — places that the geno­ci­dal Khar­toum regime would rather the world not see.

Clooney said jok­ingly that the SSP would be “the anti-genocide paparazzi” — but their reports have repeat­edly com­manded the atten­tion of the world media from NBC News to the BBC and Al Jazeera.

SSP has exposed, among other things, the work of death squads in the town of Kadugli. Com­bin­ing satel­lite images with eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mony, SSP pub­lished satel­lite images of piles of white body bags; the trucks and clean-up crews; the dis­posal of the bod­ies in mass graves; and bull­doz­ing over the corpse-filled pits. SSP has also shown mil­i­tary build-up, such as the mass­ing of troops and and the deploy­ment of attack heli­copters and Antonov bombers. In Decem­ber of 2012, SSP pub­lished graphic images of vast tracts of land that were once home to thou­sands of peo­ple span­ning 26 vil­lages as well as crops and cat­tle — now burned black. The UN reports that more than 200,000 Nuba peo­ple have been dis­placed — dri­ven out of their homes and home­land by the Khar­toum regime — and are now liv­ing in refugee camps.

SSP is cur­rently a joint effort of the anti-genocide group Enough (a project of The Cen­ter for Amer­i­can Progress); the Dig­i­tal­Globe satel­lite com­pany; and Not On Our Watch, an orga­ni­za­tion of such lead­ing Hol­ly­wood fig­ures as Clooney, Don Chea­dle, and Matt Damon. The pilot phase of SSP also included the UN satel­lite agency, UNOSAT; Har­vard Human­i­tar­ian Ini­tia­tive; and the inter­net com­pa­nies Google and Trellon. Dynamic game-changing inno­va­tion inevitably dis­com­fits some estab­lished inter­ests, and the Satel­lite Sen­tinel Project has been no excep­tion. Some ele­ments in the U.S. gov­ern­ment have tried to dis­credit their work, notably the doc­u­men­ta­tion of mass graves. The leader of that effort was then-U.S. Spe­cial Envoy for Sudan and South Sudan, Prince­ton Lyman. He could pro­vide no facts to dis­prove the mass mur­ders, body bag­ging, and mass graves and had no alter­na­tive expla­na­tion for what the satel­lite imagery showed — and the issue was not revis­ited. Some of the satel­lite recon­nais­sance com­mu­nity have, how­ever, wel­comed and been fas­ci­nated by this pri­vate effort.

But the project faces a greater con­cern than turf-conscious agen­cies inside and out­side gov­ern­ment. Regard­less of the qual­ity and time­li­ness of the work and its medi­a­genic nature, no one with the capac­ity to make a deci­sive dif­fer­ence has been will­ing to do much to pre­vent or respond to the mil­i­tary aggres­sion of the Khar­toum regime and the now well-documented pat­tern of atroc­i­ties that lead from Dar­fur to South Kord­o­fan. The U.S. State Depart­ment has sent an occa­sional sternly worded let­ter to Khar­toum, but has oth­er­wise taken no con­certed pub­lic action to stop the atroc­i­ties. Sim­i­larly, the UN Secu­rity Coun­cil has been briefed by its own staff about the atroc­i­ties, and is well aware of the SSP imagery, but will not take action for a vari­ety of rea­sons. One rea­son is that Secu­rity Coun­cil mem­ber China gets six per­vent of its oil from the Sudans. Mean­while, Pres­i­dent Bashir and other top Sudanese lead­ers are accom­plished war crim­i­nals, unable to leave the coun­try with­out risk­ing arrest and trial before the Inter­na­tional Crim­i­nal Court for their activ­i­ties in Dar­fur. They have lit­tle to lose.

Unde­terred, SSP has con­tin­ued its focus on Sudan. But SSP would also like to see their now-proven meth­ods more widely used — in other coun­tries and focus­ing on other con­cerns. “We envi­sion that our model can also be applied to other emerg­ing crises,” Jonathan Hut­son of the Enough project told Unbound, “such as expos­ing ter­ror­ist net­works in Africa who are poach­ing endan­gered species such as ele­phants and rhi­nos to fund their activities.”

Mean­while, a war has erupted in Sudan, as Khar­toum has launched what some long time observers describe as a “final solu­tion” against the Nuba peo­ple. The Nuba are black Africans who have been tar­geted by the Arab Islamists who dom­i­nate the Khar­toum regime. Angli­can Bishop Andudu Adam Elnail told me in a 2011 inter­view that his name was on the death squad’s hit list, and if he had not been out of the coun­try, he would prob­a­bly be in a mass grave in Kadugli.

“We all belong to one human fam­ily, what­ever our national, eth­nic or polit­i­cal dif­fer­ences,” Andudu (who is liv­ing in exile in the U.S.) told a House For­eign Affairs Com­mit­tee hear­ing in 2012. “The state-sponsored eth­nic cleans­ing cam­paign is tar­get­ing Nuba peo­ple, includ­ing not only Christians such as the Angli­can Church, the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, and the Sudanese Church of Christ in Kadugli, but also Mus­lims, includ­ing those who wor­ship at the mosque in Kauda, which a SAF [Sudan Armed Forces] fighter plane recently tar­geted with ten rockets.

“We are our broth­ers’ and sis­ters’ keep­ers, wher­ever they may be,” Andudu said. “Lov­ing our neigh­bor requires pro­mot­ing peace and jus­tice in a world marred by geno­ci­dal violence.”

His­tory is full of such sto­ries: the aggres­sors and the hor­rors that they bring, and those who stood in sol­i­dar­ity with the vic­tims and sur­vivors. And our time is no dif­fer­ent. But in our time, for the first time, unprece­dent­edly pow­er­ful tools have fallen into the hands of peo­ple wag­ing peace.

Conceptually, humanitarian intervention is a rather beautiful thing. State sovereignty had been seen as absolute for 350 years, but then the universal human rights  regime emerged and the idea took hold that a state’s responsibility to defend its people trumped its right to territorial sovereignty. When a state massacres its people rather than protecting them, the human family, working through broadly legitimate international institutions, would intervene, militarily if need be, to spare the vulnerable. This has become known as the “responsibility to protect,” and you can read all about it here (PDF).

As one who believes in this principle, I can’t say that I “oppose” the no-fly zone established over Libya. The country offers a rather clear-cut example of a despotic government poised to massacre thousands of its own, and here is the international community responding forcefully to spare their lives. Perhaps it will be a text-book example of the “responsibility to protect” in action.

I imagine that most of those who “oppose” the action would like nothing more than to have their skepticism be proven to be unfounded.

At the same time, there is every reason to be deeply cynical about the prospects of success. Because while the principlesunderlying humanitarian intervention are well developed, the institutions charged with implementing them are certainly not.

For those of us who have long argued to develop those institutions more fully, this no-fly zone creates distinctly mixed feelings. Under the circumstances, doing nothing would not only be profoundly irresponsible, it would also violate our core belief in the imperative of respecting essential human rights. Yet, having studied our history, we also know that the potential for unintended consequences — for a bad situation to be turned into something worse — are real, and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, or due to wishful thinking.

Books have been written about the challenges of humanitarian intervention, but here’s a very quick-and-dirty summary of three of the most daunting.

1) Mission creep

I wrote yesterday that limited interventions — with promises that the goals will be limited and, in the case of no-fly zones and naval embargoes, that no ground troops will be deployed — are like a “gateway drug” leading all-too-easily to expanded conflict. This is an institutional reality — the Security Council states are now invested in this conflict, but there is no reason to be confident Gaddhafi’s regime will fall quickly. As the saying goes: “in for a penny, in for a pound” — having entered the conflict, the temptation to escalate our involvement — to add “regime change” and “state-building” to the agenda — is going to be difficult for the Security Council to resist.

You can go through the history of multilateral interventions — from Korea through Somalia (but not really in Rwanda!) — and what you’ll find in virtually every case is not a single Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force, but a series of them authorizing ever-greater military involvement in the conflict. This reality cannot be ignored.

2) Insufficient resources

If the mission creeps — or, if it drags on — then history also suggests that we’re likely to end up with the worst of both worlds: a broad mandate coupled with insufficient resources to do the job right.

This is almost always the case in the UN system, which has no independent source of funding and must rely on the dues and pledges of its member states to undertake any action. It’s the same whether you want to talk about humanitarian intervention or relief from famine, drought or natural disaster. At the beginning, with shocking footage of rebel forces being massacred, children starving or tsunamis hitting the beach flashing across the world’s TV screens, it’s easy to commit all kinds of resources to help. But these actions are costly, and those resources have to be authorized by domestic legislatures. And it’s not just the money at stake — national governments also have to deal with all manner of domestic and international political calculations.

In the case of military interventions, under-funding can lead to disastrous results, with the most obvious example being the horrific failure of UNAMIR leading up to and during the Rwanda Genocide.

3) Politicization

Finally, the nature of the UN decision-making process itself is a huge challenge to these kinds of interventions being viewed as legitimate. Central to the “responsibility to protect” concept is that it is based on an imperative to uphold certain basic human rights, and not on international political (or economic) considerations. So the entire venture rests on the decision of when and where to intervene being made in some relatively apolitical fashion. In the real world, of course, given that the power of the Security Council, and thus the entire United Nations system, rests in the hands of the 5 permanent, veto-wielding members — the most powerful states, each with its own internal and external politics to manage — this is impossible to achieve.

That an intervention be widely perceived as legitimate is not just some abstract academic issue. Combatants are far less likely to engage in the political process that must always accompany such actions if they view them as prettied-up acts of neo-colonialism or cover for other, more powerful states’ agendas.

So, again, many who oppose — or are at least skeptical of humanitarian intervention — support it in theory, and have long argued for reforms that might address these issues.

Security Council reform — gradually phasing out the veto power enjoyed by “permanent 5,” or providing a mechanism to override a veto — has been a long-time goal of human rights activists. But, as you might imagine, the P-5 have fought it tooth-and-nail.

There have also long been calls for a dedicated and independent UN intervention force, which wouldn’t rest on the ad-hoc pledges of UN member states. Similarly, reformers have long argued that an independent funding mechanism for UN actions — both military and humanitarian — must be created through some variation of the “Lula Fund” or “Tobin tax.”

A final but important note: anyone who holds an idealized view of “clean” and “precise” modern warfare is simply deluded. As of this writing, there are reports of US cruise missiles being fired at targets in densely packed Tripoli, and French fighters engaging “regime tanks” on the ground. Despite being widely portrayed by the media as a UN air patrol designed to deny the regime’s forces the capacity to wipe out their enemies from above, Western powers are dropping munitions on Libya. Make no mistake: innocents will die. There will be “collateral damage” — it’s the nature of the game, and that can’t be ignored.

Rather than “opposing the no-fly zone,” I find myself deeply conflicted. Hopefully, it will work exactly as promised — lives will be spared, opposition forces will be emboldened and the Libyan regime will crumble under the pressure of international isolation. Hopefully, the skeptics among us will be proven wrong.

But it’s important to understand that the history of these adventures, no matter how well intentioned, doesn’t provide much cause for optimism. And one doesn’t have to be an “isolationist” to see that.

All of which is to say, there has been far more and far deeper continuity between Bush and Obama than there has been any sort of fundamental change. As is to be expected on the national security/state secrets front, Glenn Greenwald has already penned two excellent posts on this matter, “WH forces P.J. Crowley to resign for condemning abuse of Manning” on Sunday and “The clarifying Manning/Crowley controversy” today.

Rather than rehash any of the considerable territory that he has already covered, I want to hone in on an underlying question that I feel he somewhat glosses over due to his own ideological orientation. (Glenn often gives the impression it’s apparently unsurprising hypocrisy ala “both sides do it”.) That is the question of why and how Obama continues to get by with so little criticism and opposition from his activist and voter base. It’s not that people are entirely silent, but that critical voices who do exist have not made a meaningful impact on the broader mass of activists and/or voters. Obama continues to be perceived more as a liberal than a centrist, and liberals continue to support him disproportionately, despite his clearly center-right policies, not just on national security, but across a broad range of policy areas, including such central ones as economic and foreign policy, on both of which he is well to the right of Bush Sr. and relatively close to Bush Jr.

As Greenwald himself reminds us in several instances, there is a particularly striking disonnect between Obama’s campaign rhetoric and his actual governing practice:

It’s long been obvious that the Obama administration’s unprecedented war on whistleblowers “comes from the President himself,” notwithstanding his campaign decree — under the inspiring title “Protect Whistleblowers” — that “such acts of courage and patriotism should be encouraged rather than stifled.” …. Other than Obama’s tolerance for the same detainee abuse against which he campaigned and his ongoing subservience to the military that he supposedly “commands,” it is the way in which this Manning/Crowley behavior bolsters the regime of secrecy and the President’s obsessive attempts to destroy whistleblowing that makes this episode so important and so telling.

And:

Elsewhere, The Philadelphia Daily News‘ progressive columnist Will Bunch accuses Obama of “lying” during the campaign by firing Crowley and endorsing “the bizarre and immoral treatment of the alleged Wikileaks leaker.” In The Guardian, Obama voter Daniel Ellsberg condemns “this shameful abuse of Bradley Manning,” arguing that it “amounts to torture” and “makes me feel ashamed for the [Marine] Corps,” in which Ellsberg served three years, including nine months at Quantico.

This immediately struck a chord with me, since one of the more noteworthy findings of Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics by Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler was that Obama voters during the primary were considerable more non-authoritarian than Clinton voters. (Greenwald himself called this “a certain-to-be-controversial chapter” in the book.)

To understand what’s going on here, I think one other factor that Hetherington and Weiler draw attention to needs to be considered, concerning what is most salient about authoritarianism. Quoting from a passage in the book that I quoted in my own comments as part of the TPMCafe discussion of the book:

Our treatment places a need for order at the center. Much emerging work in cognitive science depicts a struggle in all humans to achieve clarity in the face of confusion. To use terms more often used by social scientists, people hope to impose order on ambiguous situations….

Thinking about authoritarianism in terms of order rather than authority itself also helps explain why those scoring high are more inclined to simplify the world into black and white categories while those scoring lower in authoritarianism feel more comfortable with shades of gray. Black and white categories provide order. So, too, does a propensity to submit to authorities, but only to those who promise a black and white understanding of the world. Authoritarians do not view Barack Obama as the same type of authority as, say, George W. Bush. Hence it is not so much the submission that is important but rather a preference for concreteness that is important.

Bush’s language was the very essence of concreteness, as well as dividing the world strakly into black and white. Obama’s language was quite the opposite. And yet, as soon as Obama took power, his actions began paralleling Bush’s actions, rather than his own rhetoric. The reason for this can be seen as quite pedestrian, tracing back to an underlying consistency: Even from the beginnings of Obama’s campaign, he was very concerned about controlling the message and maintianing the discipline of his campaign–arguably even obsessively so. He even managed to convince major donors and outside organizations to silence themselves and allow his campaign virtually exclusive message control over everything coming from the Democratic side.

Thus, even as the campaign encouraged vigorous discussion and “bottom-up input” in its online fora, this had virtually no role in the broader campaign. It could even be seen as a way of allowing supports to ‘let off steam’ so as not to get in the way of the “grownups”. Indeed, within weeks of taking power, Obama completely dispensed with taking any notice of such input, first rejecting calls for holding Bush/Cheney war criminals accountable, then mocking his own supporters for calling for the decriminalization of marijuana.

It’s often been noted that Obama seems to care more about process than end results, and so it’s completely consistent for his own authoritarian bent to emerge almost effortlessly out of his organizational penchant for a smoothly-running machine. For him, much more than Bush or Cheney, it’s the order side of things that drives his authoritarianism, even though the black-and-white categories he ends up embracing are not rooted in anything deeper than the backroom political battles inside his own administration.

Most of his liberal supporters still have yet to catch on precisely because Obama’s authoritarianism comes out of left field for them–not just from a purported “liberal” who even now uses more sophisticated language most of the time, but from someone motivated more by a bureaucrtic need for control in line with battles waged behind closed doors along lines that are often being fluidly redrawn according to criteria that are difficult for non-partipant to follow. Of course, participants and active critics see things quite differently. The numerous parallels between Bush and Obama that Greenwald draws attention to are anything but obscure to active, engaged critics. But decades of research tell us quite clearly that the mass public doesn’t read politics based on this sort of information. Obama’s manner–as well as his most prominent critics–continus to reinforce his appearance as a non-authoritarian, carefully considering and balancing a wide range of factors.

The big picture take-away here is that authoritarianism has gained such a pervasive foothold among the American ruling class that it is no longer even possible for a substantively non-authoritarian political position, actor, organization or movement to be recognized as such. Non- (or even anti-)authoritarian spoofs, set-pieces and fantasies by authoritarian actors of one stripe or another have completely taken over the roles of their authentically anti-authoritarian counterparts, and this is every bit as true of Obama as it is of the Tea Party, however much they may differ from one another in any number of other ways.

When a genuinely non-authoritarian movement arises–such as the mass opposition to Walkers’ Wisconsin coup–the political elites are completely flummoxed by it, and aside from falling back on hackneyed authoritarian-projection stereotypes of “union thugs” and “union bosses” they have literally nothing to say, and consequently simply decide not to cover what they cannot understand.

This, then, is the deeper sense in which the Manning/Crowly Affair reveals the fact that truth is not an option in American political life today.

Blink and you might have missed it. Or, more to the point, fallen asleep before you got to item number 42 under “Other Matters” of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s latest report on Iran’s nuclear program. (Link courtesy of Arms Control Wonk.) It reads:

On 15–16 February 2011, the Agency conducted an inspection at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant . . . and has verified the nuclear material  present in the facility. On 23 February 2011, Iran informed the Agency that it would have to unload fuel assemblies from the core.

In the New York Times William Broad and David Sanger explain the significance of that item.

Iran told atomic inspectors this week that it had run into a serious problem at a newly completed nuclear reactor that was supposed to start feeding electricity into the national grid this month, raising questions about whether the trouble was sabotage, a startup problem, or possibly the beginning of the project’s end.

It doesn’t appear to be connected with the Stuxnet computer virus that ravaged Bushehr’s reactors, though. Instead, Reuters reports:

Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Bushehr may have a problem with equipment in its primary cooling circuit.

“At Bushehr there is a critical interface in this area between equipment supplied by German industry and equipment supplied by the Russians,” Hibbs said.

“If there is a problem in that equipment . . . that could delay the start-up of the unit for a few months.”

Reuters also quotes Olli Heinonen, former head of IAEA inspections, who said that “the issue could be embarrassing for the Russian operator of Bushehr, Rosatom. Full responsibility for the plant is only ‘supposed to be turned over to the Iranians after the first refuelling which is estimated to take place perhaps two years from now,’ he said.” In other words, it’s happening under Rosatom’s more than Iran’s watch.

Thanks, Reuters, for that measured account. If only Broad and Sanger could have refrained from once again soliciting comments from one of the mainstream media’s go-to guys on nuclear issues, David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security. Never one to let an opportunity to ratchet up pressure on Iran pass him by, Albright said:

It raises questions of whether Iran can operate a modern nuclear reactor safely. . . . The stakes are very high. You can have a Chernobyl-style accident with this kind of reactor, and there’s lots of questions about that possibility in the region.

Note that Albright has doubled his Iran alarmism fun. First, invoking Chernobyl may be a sly attempt to leverage an intelligence report about which George Jahn wrote for the Associated Press last month. It was, “drawn up by a nation closely monitoring Iran’s nuclear program” on the effects of Stuxnet.

“The minimum possible damage would be a meltdown of the reactor,” it says. “However, external damage and massive environmental destruction could also occur . . . similar to the Chernobyl disaster.”

Number two: by applying the Chernobyl comparison to the fuel unloading as well, Albright, aided and abetted by Broad and Sanger, is making it look like another setback to Iran’s program that originated from outside the country has joined Stuxnet in making a second Chernobyl even more likely.