"A Faraway Country . . . of Whom We Know Nothing"

Events moved too swiftly to reward Neville Chamberlain with a Nobel Peace Prize. But he's alive and well and working for the State Department:

For the past five years, researchers in a modest office overlooking the New Haven green have carefully documented cases of assassination and torture of democracy activists in Iran. With more than $3 million in grants from the US State Department, they have pored over thousands of documents and Persian-language press reports and interviewed scores of witnesses and survivors to build dossiers on those they say are Iran’s most infamous human-rights abusers.

But just as the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center was ramping up to investigate abuses of protesters after this summer’s disputed presidential election, the group received word that -- for the first time since it was formed -- its federal funding request had been denied.

As Ed Morrissey says:

This is truly a breathtaking step. Obama has signaled that he doesn’t care at all about human-rights abuses, and that he in fact cares more about making the ruling mullahs happy than in how they treat the subjects of their oppression. After all, the mere documentation of abuses doesn’t constrain Obama’s policymaking choices; it merely informs them. He can choose any direction he wants, but one would expect an American President to make those choices on the basis of intelligence and research.

(via Doug Ross, BizzyBlog)