Dr Kamal Wickremasinghe  Courtesy The Daily News

The US embassy in Colombo has been uncharacteristically quiet the last week, especially for a foreign mission preoccupied with issuing media statements, press releases and tweets on intensely domestic Sri Lankan issues – who can forget outright falsehoods like the tweet of January 9, 2014 that declared St Anthony’s Ground at Puthukudurippu as the site of a January 2009 killing of hundreds of families” by army shelling?

Such usual social media hyperactivity by the US embassy has been uncharacteristically less lately, the last tweet being on July 9, tellingly publicising another press statement from the state department on Concerns Regarding Sri Lankan NGO Freedom of Expression”.

Incredibly, the US embassy seems to have decided it unimportant to inform the general public of Sri Lanka – whom the US claims to love so much – of President Barack Obama’s announcement of intent to despatch his Ambassador here, Michele Sisson to the United Nations as the Deputy Representative of the US, made ‘as far back’ as a week ago – an eon in the context of their social media hyperactivity!

It is not hard to read that the move by the powers-that-be in Washington to abruptly end Sisson’s stint in Colombo had been shrouded in secrecy – to begin with, White House ‘buried’ Obama’s announcement of the recall of Sisson from Colombo underneath a host of new appointments of US ambassadors to the Republics of Macedonia, Fiji, Azerbaijan, Costa Rica, Senegal and Guinea Bissau, and Montenegro.

Michele Sisson

The obvious coyness of the White House, the US state department and the embassy in Colombo about keeping Sisson’s urgent despatch quiet, however, is ‘usual procedure’ under the circumstances that required her recall – the disclosure in this newspaper of the evidence of Ms. Sisson’s moves, together with Norwegian operatives, to destabilise Sri Lanka.

It is usual practice by the Establishment at the state department to remove diplomats ‘when cover is blown’.

This was what happened with Michelle Sisson and two of her information officers” Christopher Teale and Juliana Spaven, also recalled ‘quick smart’ by Washington following the disclosures. Sisson’s role in Colombo was made untenable by the revelations of the role of the US embassy (CIA, USAID) in exacerbating situations with social media training” of minority youth, hence the quiet recall.

Considering the name Sisson earned during her stint in Colombo, which turned out to be rather short, it is opportune to record the ‘Monody on Sisson’ without awaiting the formal announcement by the US embassy in Colombo.

Her problem was that she tried to emulate, and sometimes out-perform the arrogant and overbearing precedent of ‘style’ set by the notorious meddlers Robert O. Blake and Patricia Butenis as US ambassadors in Colombo.

Sisson’s approach to diplomacy seemed to have been governed by the very phenomenon that has irreparably destroyed America’s diplomatic relations with countries around the globe – the overzealous pursuit by ambitious careerists at the state department of an unhealthy diplomatic agenda (built around human rights defence charade) devised by the neocons. Sisson epitomised the careerist rising up the intensely competitive greasy-pole at the state department.

Being a Filipino-American, born in Virginia, Sisson can be considered to have ‘done well’ by conventional standards to have joined the US foreign service in 1982, rising to her current Class of Career Minister. Her career history however, shows that she has ‘got there’ by loyally serving the neocons in their major projects such as Iraq, and Lebanon.

Sisson demonstrated she was overzealous to serve the neocons when she submitted during the confirmation testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 6, 2012 that serious allegations of violations of human rights law and international humanitarian law (by Sri Lanka) at the end of the war remain to be investigated”.

With such an inauspicious beginning, Sisson was never going to get her bearings right in Colombo! Naturally, Sisson started her stint in Colombo on the wrong foot by seeming to be hell-bent on making Sri Lanka ‘accountable’ to the alleged mass killings by the Sri Lankan army during the final stages of the war in 2009. The rest has become history.

Of course, she relied on narratives of alleged mass atrocities by the Sri Lankan Army founded on disgraceful ‘guestimates’ originally concocted by people like Catherine Philps of The Times newspaper in Britain and neocons who had infested the UN in the form short term contractors such as Gordon Weiss – Sisson did not give herself a chance to develop a fresh, healthy foundation for a sound relationship with Sri Lanka.

Since starting in Colombo, Sisson made no secret of her aggressive approach to relations with Sri Lanka; She seemed to rely on a mixture of hectoring and patronising, with a good deal of undermining thrown in.

As an example, the significance of Sisson’s meeting with the Muslim leaders of Jaffna during her first trip to the North as ambassador dawns only on looking back from among the ruins of Aluthgama and Beruwala.

Then there were Sisson’s announcement of programs like the Youth Empowerment” Grants to fund projects for Sri Lankan youth. Under the guise of supporting small-scale, cutting-edge projects developed and implemented for young people between the ages of 15-25, she paid NGOs to train” youth on such obvious neocon contraptions like community development, civil society building”, human rights, and youth enrichment” activities.

The work Sisson carried out concentrated mainly on Muslim, and where possible Tamil, youth. But learning from the failed experiments of Colour Revolutions and Arab Springs, they did not overlook the importance of educating” the new generations on the wondrous possibilities offered by the new Social Media.

So they offered, free, a program named Social Media Lab as a new program to foster greater understanding of social media” at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels, advertised on anti-government websites with instructions to bring a laptop for use.

Following an introductory course, the ‘fun’ began with the intermediate level course on how to use social media more effectively”, including lessons on digital storytelling and photography basics! The advanced level course supplied social media mobile applications (apps) and provided training on social media storytelling and visual storytelling.

There are many Sri Lankans who are not necessarily Fulbright scholars who see through the neocon modus operandi based on such work! The revelations of such activity, and Sisson’s refusal for the Secretary of the Defence Ministry to meet with the USAID operative in Colombo alone made an already bad relationship Sisson had with Colombo totally untenable; She had to be placed elsewhere.

Obama is advised to save Michele Sisson

It is against this background that Barack Obama was advised to announce his intent to nominate Michele Sisson as deputy representative of the US to the United Nations with her substantive rank of ambassador.

Sisson will be replacing the current occupant of the position Rosemary A. DiCarlo whose term came to an end on July 8, on the day Obama made the announcement.

The placement of Michele Sisson at the UN to assist the Permanent Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations”- Samantha Power – purportedly working to promote and defend universal values, and address pressing global challenges to global peace, security, and prosperity is an attempt to salvage what they can from a hopeless situation.

By placing Sisson to assist the neocon operative Samantha Power at the UN Security Council (UNSC), the neocons have demonstrated their thinking a year in advance – they are preparing themselves to take the Pillay Inquiry report to the UNSC as has been already indicated by that other neocon operative at the OHCHR, Pillay’s spokesperson” Rupert Colville. The neocons are keen to get Power to put on a show” like in the case of her performance of lies and deception on Libya in 2011. Sisson is going to be the ‘accomplice’ in the Act.

The neocons, however, are mistaken in the belief that Russia and China can be fooled again, like in the cases of Iraq and Libya.

US diplomacy is terminally ill and will never recover

Michele Sisson’s work in Colombo, as well as her next placement at the UNSC by the neocon establishment, reveals the terminal nature of the illness that inflicts the US body politic and its diplomatic apparatus – designed to operate on nothing but deception and efforts to undermine countries they purport to have ‘diplomatic’ relations with.

The neocon establishment is increasingly forced to hang out, like dirty underwear, examples of such deceptive, dishonest behaviour almost on a daily basis – On July 8, while Sisson was being recalled, Germany was ‘spitting fire’ upon discovering a US spy in the defence ministry, just days after a German foreign intelligence worker was arrested for being a CIA informant and admitted passing documents to a US contact. They promptly expelled the CIA chief at the embassy.

While their diplomatic infrastructure is crumbling around them, just this week, while hiding the recall of Sisson from the public, the US state department issued a statement noting” that the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defence circular to registered NGOs to cease their irregular activities undermined” Sri Lanka’s long-standing and proud democratic traditions. Of course, they strongly urged” the Government of Sri Lanka to allow NGOs to operate freely.

Do they expect all Sri Lankans to be Fulbright scholars without any thinking capacity?

The problem within the US diplomatic infrastructure runs deep – it is staffed exclusively by neocon operatives, many married to each other, and some who feign commitment to the unethical, at the end of the day irrational, neocon agenda for personal gain.

Examples of the incestuous, clannish structure of the US Foreign Service abound in Sisson’s next work place, the US mission to the UN – Samantha Power, her new boss, is a woman who rose to Obama’s Cabinet by serving the George Soros’ project in Kosovar as a journalist, made her way to the White House via Howard, through neocon networking. She is married to Cass Sunstein, a noted neocon playing for both sides of US politics.

The woman Michele Sisson is replacing, Rosemary A DiCarlo is similar in career history as well as personal background – she has previously operated from the US Embassies in Moscow and Oslo and as Coordinator for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the US Information Agency. DiCarlo is married to Thomas Graham, an experienced Russia hand”, currently a managing director at Kissinger Associates, Inc. Having moved through the state department from the NGOs Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and RAND in Moscow, Graham has been working on projects aimed at undermining Russia for decades.

While the future of US diplomacy looks as bleak as it has ever been, the curious persona of the Sri Lankan sculptor Upali Dias who since 1978 has apparently sculpted busts of US diplomats Ashley Wills, Robert Blake and Patricia Butenis – together with those of such other American ‘heroes’ of the calibre of Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama – may now get busy creating the bust of Michele Sisson.

Cases like Upali Dias show that we, as Sri Lankans have a way to go yet!