We recently traded in our standard cable box for a DVR box, one which allows the recording of programs and movies even while watching something else. (Cannot be done on a digital cable system with a VCR). Beats VCR tapes and hassles everyday of the week.

I can record programs I've not always been able to watch, especially programs considered too nerdy by my wife, like a recent NOVA program on tornadoes that centered on the University of Oklahoma and the National Storm Prediction Center, both of which are here in Norman. She actually wound up watching that one with me - tornadoes terrify her as much as they fascinate me, and I equate her sitting transfixed by the images of natural destruction with the look in the eyes of a mouse just before the snake strikes.

So I recorded Frontline last night without really reading the description of the show. Frontline is one of those programs worth watching, regardless of topic. "Ghosts Of Rwanda" is a two hour retrospective on the genocide of 1994 that annihilated at least 800,000 people in a premeditated mass slaughter. Western nations and the UN stood by as day after day, week after week, people were murdered, shot down, beaten, and hacked apart by machete. The interviews are gut wrenching, the pictures horrifying and sickening, and the response of the US nearly incomprehensible. I say "nearly," for in the news footage included on the program are clips of the State Department spokesperson giving the US government's take on the mounds of bodies piling higher by the minute. She contorts herself around the term "genocide," avoiding its use as long as possible, and finally caving as far as the phrase "acts of genocide."

"Acts of genocide."

As opposed to just plain "genocide."

I was reminded of Secretary Of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's difficulty with the term "Guerrilla Warfare" in relation to the violent resistance to the US occupation of Iraq.

The term genocide carries specific legal definitions in the context of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, of which the US is a prominent signatory. Under the Convention, combined with the UN Charter, member nations are required to act to end genocide wherever and whenever it occurs in the world. By avoiding the word, the US and European nations could abdicate their responsibility to act to intervene in a situation that fulfilled all of the definitions of the term genocide.

I quote:

Article 2

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The events that began on April 6, 1994, and continued until July of the same year could only be defined as genocide right from the start. In less than 100 days, greater than 800,000 people are destroyed, more than 8,000 every single day.

The Frontline program ends with clips of a series of visits by UN officials and US officials after the genocide was ended. It is nauseating in the extreme to watch as they expiate their own guilt by traveling to Rwanda to gaze upon the piles of bodies and scattered remains. President Clinton chose not to act, stating that the United States has no friends, only interests, and participating in international interventions will only occur in light of the extent of US interests. In 1998 Clinton traveled to Rwanda in a trip billed as an "apology" for choosing not to act. Not once in the brief speech he gave in Kigali did he use the word "apology" or the word "sorry."

I remember feeling sick at the time. Watching it all over again last night, I was very, very angry.

"Never again?"