Tom Malinowski, a former official of the Clinton Administration who has worked for years at Human Rights Watch, has been nominated by President Obama to the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.
He's a smart and affable man and experienced in both government and in the nonprofit sector and comes with bi-partisan endorsement via the Helsinki Commission, as Sen. Cardin and Sen. McCain have weighed in to support him. He has spent his career championing human rights in various hell-holes of the world, and is such a human rights nerd -- and so identified with the cause as the leading human rights organization's advocacy director -- that he could make a widely-read April Fool's article about why he was "leaving" HRW -- when the bad guys were what made life interesting.
Now he's really leaving HRW to take up a position in the government and the question for me is whether he will be in a better or worse position to fight the worst human rights violators, and whether the beliefs he represents are going to advance or set back human rights in the world.
Because the trouble with Tom Malinowski isn't in his person -- he is not associated with any scandal, although some might prod the issue of his status as a lobbyist and Obama's hypocrisy in that regard.
No, the issue is his ideas and positions as a thinker and as HRW's lead advocacy voice and the path of the last 35 years that brought this leading liberal crusader for rights to enable their leading advocate to go into government in a "progressive" administration completely undistinguished by human rights progress in the world -- indeed, dangerously enabling of tyrants through its weakness. (See my second post for an analysis of some of his writings).
The hearing for Malinowski's confirmation should present an opportunity to debate these positions which might be described as pre-emptive empathy with some regimes which aren't "going Gorbachev" as much as one thinks. There should be a closer look at the fanciful if nuanced insiderism that gives a credit of faith to would-be human rights reformers in authoritarian regimes abroad that is entirely unwarranted -- it could be called neo-progressivism in that it tolerates illiberalism in the name of human rights (Morsi in Egypt and other Islamists) and yet still looks for artful human rights solutions in situations like Syria or Pakistan where more classical "progressives" would keep the US far away.
DANGERS OF NEO-PROGRESSIVISM
My concerns are that appointment of Malinowski and the endorsement of Human Rights Watch for statehood bring about a number of developments that are troubling for human rights:
o the piping of never-debated or seldom scrutinized very politicized Human Rights Watch policies and perspectives into the government where they will have new resourcing and amplification; indeed, they are already symbiotic in many ways;
o the usual troubles of cronyism when any NGO activist comes to power, despite avowals of self-policed impartiality;
o softness or evasion on Russia, China, Iran, South Africa and other states where HRW prefers dialogue, lower-key advocacy, or inaction -- or tending to one-sided action opposing only states and giving non-state actors, thereby giving Mexican drug lords or Nigeria's Boko Harem a pass;
o troublesome positions on Israel/Palestine, i.e. obsession on Israeli settlements or allegations of excessive use of force; a tendency to minimize Palestinian rockets, violence, and the dire terrorist nature of Hamas or Hezbollah, and rare criticism of the nature of the new Palestinian self-declared state;
o inaction or punting on Obama's "no-action" topics like ICC, CEDAW, drones, Guantanamo, Bahrain, etc.;
o continued promotion of the notion that addressing terrorism should be a low-key police matter not ever to be handled by ideological opposition let alone "war";
o horrible coddling of the Islamists in Egypt and other Arab Spring countries; ignorance of the legitimate concerns for security and an end to Muslim Brotherhood tyranny expressed by the leading human rights groups, not to mention many ordinary people;
o continued bureaucratic muddle about how you really help human rights defenders abroad, morally and financially;
o an end to Hillary Clinton's Internet freedom program in the (mistaken) belief that the US no longer has credibility or effectiveness on this topic;
o less rather than more press coverage on all these problems and controversies due to liberal press insiderism with Obama and HRW;
o little sustained interest in women's rights -- just enough to get the job done; indeed, couldn't Obama have found a perfectly good woman in his binders for this position?
o zero interest in religious freedom and labor rights, except for the bare bureacratic minimum;
o an even later Country Reports (remember the good old days when it came out February 1) and even longer and more protracted and on-the-one-hand on-the-other-hand chapters than ever before in the (mistaken) belief that writing really long reports in a building is nearly as good as going out of the building and addressing critical human rights crises on the ground, in person with your presence;
o heavy travel, particularly to some places that aren't important or don't have really serious human rights problems due to saddle-bag-balancing and too-long trips to Arab Spring sites in last-ditch effort to pretend Islamists are going to be "inclusive" etc.;
o ineffective commissions, committees, and conventions with Russia, India and a few other high-need hand-holders.
THE GOOD LOBBYIST
Yet rather than talk about the big ideas of the failed human rights movement and the pitfalls of neo-progressivism, the discussion around Malinowski, such as it will be, is likely to be limited to rueful chuckling about how this lobbyist got a job in the Obama Administration, despite Obama's ban on lobbyists or indignant ranting that good people just can't get appointed by Obama because of the Religious Right and their War on Women. There are plenty of pieces that explain the nuances between "good" and "bad" lobbyists like this one and even advocated that Obama shouldn't be so strict and conscientious in his construction when it involved one of his own, like this one-- and there have been since 2009, when Malinowski was first nominated and the human rights community got all excited that one of their own would be chosen, and then their hopes were dashed when it turned out that as an advocate and campaigner for human rights, he was registered as a lobbyist and "this wasn't fair". (Human Rights Watch appears to have deliberately refrained from registering him as a lobbyist in order to help him get the nomination; it didn't help him for Obama I, but now it has for Obama II).The entire issue of how human rights groups have slid gradually into outright lobbying groups, many of them funded by George Soros' foundations, and evolved from groups that never commented on legislation or advocated for legislation because of fears of being branded as "lobbyists" and losing their 501-c-3 status, to groups that could get away with almost anything and not lose this status, or at worst, be pushed into also creating lobbying organs with 501-c-4 status (like moveon.org) -- that's a story that really has never been told. But that's a story for another day and the entire issue of lobbying and Tom Malinowski's lobbying including for legislation is really a red herring. That's not the trouble with Tom Malinowski or the human rights movement writ large.
The trouble is that one more figure -- and a powerful and resourced and networked figure from a powerful organization -- with neo-progressive perspective of Samantha Power or Susan Rice or Anne-Marie Slaughter or any number of selective "humanitarian interventionists" or "utopian insiders" will be coming to real power in the state and acquiring even more resources and influence.
NEO-CONS AND NEO-PROGS
"Progressives" endlessly knock the "neo-cons" like Paul Wolfowitz or Elliott Abrams who they believe recklessly pursued wars and liberation abroad with idealistic and imperialistic notions of regime change in American interests. They believe these idealists are responsible for the wrongfulness of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and have the deaths of hundreds of thousands on their conscience, instead of Al Qaeda or the Taliban being largely responsible. They believe they are lop-sided and overly protective or Israel or the West. When the neo-cons applauded Samantha Power's nomination to the position of US ambassador to the UN, some progs pointed their fingers to deride their former colleagues on the left whom they believed were now little distinguishable from the neo-cons in their zeal for geopolitical engineering.
But what is the term you should use for leftists, even radical leftists or at least "progressives" (a term I always use in scare quotes because I don't think they are progressive), when they adopt new views of aggressive if "nuanced" social engineering abroad that seem as if they belong to conservatives or neo-conservatives, yet are antagonistic to the West and Israel and antithetical to true liberalism? Well, would "neo-progressive" do? After all, you can't call them "neo-liberals" as that term has now been established as largely related to economic theories identified with opposing socialism, and the neo-progs don't have a problem with socialismexactly, as long as it doesn't affect their own affluent lifestyles. To be sure, Bernard Henri Levy has used the term "neo-progressive" and anything he does will be instantly derided. Okay, you come up with a better term, then.
In a nutshell, here's what the advent of Tom Malinowski both symbolizes and is symptomatic of: a network of powerful elites with a perspective that is arrogantly heedless and dangerously unrealistic regarding ruthless, oppressive regimes and their potential for change, and dangerously illiberal in giving them the benefit of the doubt and suppressing legitimate concerns about them. If neo-cons pursued regime change for democracy and freedom in American state interests, neo-progs pursue regime evolution -- which only they are positioned to understand and manage -- in the interests of a transnational elite who get to decide what democracy and freedom mean. It would be one thing if they pursued their ideas with mere sincere idealism -- but they pursue them with arrogant aggression and disdain for everyone else as discredited or "unscientific", out of touch with "the facts."
In a sense, these theories are a form of anarchism on a continuum that naturally ultimately includes Julian Assange or Edward Snowden -- Western states are bad and corrupt (as Assange would say) and have to be overthrown, yet the states formed by Islamists or Eurasianists shouldn't be challenged because they help maintain the multi-polar world. Universality of human rights is an abstraction that only gets to be applied selectively.
Of course, I get it that one NGO leader jumping to government doesn't mean the HRW perspective has now effortlessly moved into C Street (although there are actually quite a few more). Indeed, some inside and outside of HRW will claim that they will parodixically have even less access to Malinowski now because he will have to be on his Ps and Qs about seeming appearances of favouritism. Of course, those who count things like the number of trips to the White House or stays in the Lincoln bedroom imagine that Nate Silver numbers tell a story when it's really more about instinct and connectivity -- Tom doesn't have to receive a visitor in person to "just know" who has the "right" take on what's happening in Libya or Egypt or Russia, and weave it seamlessly into his positions. Maybe he will even rebel at the carefully-crafted cables he will now be privileged to read because they will seem so at odds with the virtuality he lives in with endless sober high-minded recommendations to the international community about what they should do.
But Tom is the heart of HRW's ideological, strategic, and lobbying arm and he wouldn't remain in this organization so long if he didn't share these views and live them. As a Clintonite in the wilderness biding his time in a nonprofit during the Bush years, he kept close ties with those few Clintonites still in power overtly or covertly. Then he was part of preparing the way for the Obama "Progressive" Revival and continued patiently doing penance in an NGO until the lobbying issue subsided (and the scandal really is that HRW had to hold back on their reports a few years and pretend he wasn't a lobbyist to get him to this position now.)George Packer at the New Yorker got it absolutely right about what was wrong with Obama and the human rights cause starting with the Cairo Speech and the "mea culpa" approach to the world's unfree situations; I would put it more forcefully -- the mea-culpa chest-beating putting America and Israel and other Western states in the dock, or with more zealous detail and energy than the gravest human rights violators of the world is what this position is all about. That Obama could pluck the top human rights watchdog from his labors for his top human rights job lets us know that HRW has been in the Cairo-speech tank with Obama for the duration.
DOES HRW EVER REALLY CRITICIZE OBAMA?
If you regularly read Human Rights Watch's website at hrw.org or the Watch's Twitter accounts, you'll notice that in recent months, this leading human rights watchdog of the entire world has been pretty quiet about the Obama Administration and its various sins and awfully soft on Islamist regimes in keeping with Obama's wishes. Make of that what you will. My teeth hurt thinking of how strenuously and effectively HRW media operatives will deny this with chapters and verse, even thought we can all say "We saw what you did there."
Perhaps it stands to reason why HRW wouldn't comment on the IRS scandal or the journalists' scandal -- they can always claim that they don't really do domestic civil rights work, not duplicating the ACLU's work, but only take up issues where they can "make a difference" like prison conditions. Perhaps HRW can get off the hook for writing little about some of the most oppressive Middle East regimes because they can't get their researchers into the countries.
HRW per se hasn't commented much let alone lobbied on PRISM or anything to do with the NSA scandal or Edward Snowden, although there is an extremely carefully-crafted thinky op-ed piece by Ken Roth about the issue of electronic surveillance in the New York Review of Books, which is where HRW puts their extremely carefully-crafted thinky op-ed pieces that are over the heads of the typical New York businessmen or brainy 12-year-olds who are sometimes said to be the level at which the Grey Lady has to ensure its 800-word pieces can be understood easily. You won't be surprised to find that Lawfare has already endorsed Malinowski of course. Didn't The Cable get to it yet?
BREAKING THE 11TH COMMANDMENT
Human rights groups in general tend not to be criticized, and if they are, it's by the loony left or the raging right and then gets discredited automatically by the cool customers at the helm of the PR offices in these groups. They enjoy what has been called "the halo effect" -- they do good work, the expose terrible injustices and awful wrongs, they champion the victims' causes -- how could you criticize them? After all, their job is to promote and protect universal human rights, so their agenda is "above reproach". Those who criticize them must be for protecting certain states from scrutiny! They must be for covering up human rights evils! They must be for giving Israel an unwarranted exception! They must be in the pay of the Koch Brothers or the Uzbek tyrant's daughter, Gulnara Karimova! Otherwise, you couldn't explain it, right?
It's very difficult to get a debate going on a powerful NGO like HRW or on the "neo-progressive" views because you are then instantly be delegitimized as a "neo-con" or "making common cause with the right" including by neo-realists (like Joshua Foust, even though he is among the most vicious savagers of the human rights movement). I'm not a neo-con, but it's no good protesting; nowadays, everything the left doesn't like these days is "neo-con".
Among themselves, human rights NGOs speak of the "11th commandment" -- Thou Shalt Not Ever Criticize Another NGO or Group in Society Especially if It is a Victim. This is sacred writ. To do so would not only break ranks and in some cases break non-governmental omerta; it would expose your comrades to persecution by evil states or evil groups in society like the hawks or the neo-cons, you see. Worse, you will be lining yourself up with those evil groupings like the conservatives, as Amnesty International's gender advisor discovered when she criticized misogynist Islamists -- and we wouldn't want that would we! Human rights groups' ideas almost never get debated. Concepts like the re-orientation of the human rights movement from the monitoring of human rights treaties to the monitoring of international humanitarian law or "humanitarian intervention" which got then adjusted into "the responsibility to protect" almost never get debated substantively in public; they merely get delivered as policy in this or that setting, to this or that degree of success.
I often marvel at the sixth sense that people in these networks have for determining "the line" among each other; it's not by debate, it's by osmosis. "What do we think about this?" is about as much of a question you will get from one executive to another, and then that might be merely determining what Mort Halperin has said, Soros' ideology czar, or one of the other key figures. Oh, it's never so crude as merely getting a temnik from OSI or marching orders from Mort or his lovely wife Diane Orentlicher in the State Department -- a truly dedicated and nice person who I saw work until late at night every day of the week at Human Rights First (formerly Lawyers Committee for Human Rights) when I was doing the same at Human Rights Watch for 10 years.
No, it doesn't work like that at all, please -- but to give you a tiny sense of the emotions, the passions -- when a certain international human rights lawyer found that Orentlicher wasn't doing enough to criticize -- or was even justifying! -- the US government's pursuit of Edward Snowden, he demanded that she be fired on the spot. The neo-progs go just a few degrees off from the radical progs, and they go wild.
But here's the thing: I don't care. I think these ideas need to be debated more openly, outside the sequestered emails of HRW itself and its satellite groups and funders (Soros).No one on the left will criticize Malinowski's ideas, and those on the right will either hold back or not care for various sometimes contradictory reasons. Obama will be allowed to have this one. It doesn't matter that much as a position. This is not like Chuck Hegel or Samantha Power. They are more well-known figures around which to generate debates on Israel or intervention in Syria.
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH IS LIKE A FOREIGN EMBASSY
They aren't going to take this opportunity to scrutinize the utterly failed and outright abysmal human rights policies of the Obama Administration all over the world, or the successes and failures of Malinowski's predecessor and the DRL, much less take a closer look at this incredibly powerful entity called Human Rights Watch which is really more like the embassy of a foreign country now or a mini-state all of its own.
Human Rights Watch is so large -- and especially since the $100 million gift from George Soros -- so powerful and influential with a presence all over the world, that it actually can afford to have its executives publicly bash countries or plant critical oped pieces haranguing this or that abusive government, but then have others, like the HRW UN representative, double back and hold private and ameliorative and "constructive" talks with that same government. A prime example is when the HRW staffer who represented the organization in Tashkent was getting the boot by the Karimov regime like all other foreign operations, but the leadership decided not to publicly condemn this but instead to do quiet diplomacy for months on end -- even bashing the EU for not speaking out about their harassment -- in the hopes of maybe coming to a deal with the Uzbek government. They failed. The Uzbek Foreign Ministry "perestroika liberals" were never able to convince their "hardliners" -- or it was likely a ruse the entire time.
GOOGLE JUICE
HRW has offices in every major capital of the world and the funds to fly to places where they don't have a presence. It has powerful boards or advisory councils in every major country. If you have ever worked as a journalist you will see what happens when HRW gives you an embargoed story -- your story on say, Reuters or the AP, will actually be pushed way down in the Google results for the keywords of the story because HRW's own offices, simultaneously releasing their press releases on all their own websites and the many websites of partners and supporters all over the world make Google fall over. It's rare that a lobbyist's own story trumps the mainstream news outlet's story about that lobbyist, especially stories by faithful stenographers. But in the case of HRW it does -- I have personally witnessed this a number of times.
Most people will find this point way too obscure to understand; indeed, I found even regional HRW staffers irritated when I pointed it out to them. That's because they don't understand that Google juice -- the power to move Google -- is the new wealth and new currency of our time. This is what HRW has. It is unbeatable. If you doubt me, type the terms "Jennifer Lopez" and "Turkmenistan" into Google. Or try another test: type the term "Human Rights Watch" into Google. Most subjects' own web pages don't come up first in Google searches -- news stories or Wikipedia entries come up first. I can only think of few other entities that has that level of clout -- the public relations firm Edelman. And the State Department.
But there is more than one journalist in the world who said they were going to do the big critical story on HRW and then just didn't, and certainly few people on the Hill have any stomach for taking on an examination of the group regardless of their politics. They should. It matters. But most people who care will be afraid of losing their access or even their funding from HRW's funders (it's been known to happen!) or will have been exhausted by their controversies around Susan Rice and Chuck Hegel and to a lesser extent Samantha Power, and they won't take on any debate of this neo-progressive triumphalist worldview; and sometimes they think it's prudent not to take it on at the confirmation stage anyway as with Hegel. I expect Malinowski's candidacy to sail through with little jostling, even from those "evil right-wing congressmen who wage a war on women" and such -- they have other fish to fry with Obama and won't fry it on this skillet. I get all that.
I also know from experience that HRW has the best lawyers, the best resources, the best strategists, and is paranoid from its battles in the past and will have thought of every conceivable way to seal this nomination airtight, to pre-anticipate and quash any resistance, and to snuff out doubts and qualms. They are hugely good at that -- they're all-powerful and they're everywhere. But that's what I mean -- too powerful, and they shouldn't be beyond criticism.
Those who care about human rights issues should understand what they're getting here:
GuantanamoDon't expect anything to move on this account. This is not the job of this office. It has been handed to someone else and in any event, and while wishing they could close Gitmo, State believes privately that America isn't the problem. The problem is Europeans, who look down at their shoes when asked to take Gitmo inmates. The Europeans won't take them, because too many of them have either gone out and committed terrorism again or at least spout incitement to terrorism that creates problems (Cage-prisoners). So, no. "The community" will feel that HRW has already "done so much" that it is unnecessary to prod their close colleague to do anything more. Obama has spoken many times. Lots of other officials have spoken many times. It's hard and that's it -- leave it alone, so the thinking will go.
Thus, incredibly, we will see this festering wound drag on for more years even when managed by the former advocacy director of the organization that arguably did the most to put it on the map in the first place.
International Criminal Court
HRW was at the birth of the ICC in Rome; it has championed the ICC vigorously; it has ascribed magical powers to the ICC beyond all belief. I'll never forget the time I heard Ken Roth claiming that the ICC would "save lives" in Sudan. It didn't. The ICC's indictment of Sudan's autocrat in fact led to a dozen humanitarian groups being expelled and lives being lost. Not only has the indicted Bashir never been arrested; his minister of humanitarian affairs (!) also indicted, hasn't been either -- and that was doable. HRW pushes the ICC always and everywhere and nudges the US at the UN always and everywhere. Do you think Tom Malinowski will ensure that the US finally ratifies the ICC statute on his watch?
Of course not. It's not time. Why, with this Congress? Why, it's not strategically prudent. Howard Koh may have trimphantly called each and every one of us in the Human Rights Leaders group back in the day when Clinton managed to sign it in the last days of his presidency, but that was just the signature; the ratification is out of reach. Besides, no need to pressure Obama on this because it could isolate him with allies and fragile coalitions, you see. I personally think Obama doesn't have a human rights bone in his body; I think he is all ideology, all the time, and stealth-socialist ideology, at that, which is actually quite antithetical to human rights, as they would be above the socialist state and require the socialist state to answer to the rule of law. No, I don't think that's what Obama is about. And therefore, I don't think Tom Malinowski will be about this, either, whatever his private reservations.
CEDAW (international women's rights treaty)
I once raised the idea of promoting with Obama before the election the idea of endorsing the ratification of CEDAW. I was tackled and wrestled to the ground not only by a key UN operative but an Obama campaign advisor on women's rights who beat into me that we must never, ever attempt to get CEDAW passed with this Congress because it would be death and undermine the momentum to get Obama elected. This is how identity politics work.
No one in DRL ever tries to get their own country to sign UN treaties; instead, they learn how to wince at international meetings where the US is derided for being alone with Somalia in not signing the children's rights treaty, for example, and mysticalloy hold up crooked fingers forming the letter "L" -- which means the legal department of the State Department often blamed for thrwarting human rights progress in the world. Oh, I get it about these treaties -- the US does more to abide by them then the thugs that sign them merely to get the UN off their backs. My point here is to stress the spinelessness and politicization on human rights topics.
Drones
I've been a moral critic on drones, but HRW has been fairly quiet on this topic. That is, sure, they have their whole "robots" thing and all, and very carefully crafted thinky pieces. They are no CODE PINK on this question; they are not in the headlines bashing Obama on every killing of civilian like Glenn Greenwald. Like war itself, HRW believes that drones are nuanced and can be made to follow "rules of war". Every time Ken Roth tweets about drones, he packages his comment in a frame about how rules can be made to work for this menacing new form of warfare. A prominent former HRW staff person, Ken Anderson, has produced a lengthy and lawerly justification for drones and has received no pushback from his former employer; other former employees work the circuit with the concept of "drones as nuanced instrument of actual human rights promotion" without any dismay from the mother ship.
But, ultimately the DRL job is not the place where you discuss drones. If you ask the people who have held this office or worked on human rights at IO, you'll find that they grow vague and distant and say that the CIA and the Pentagon deals with that topic. It's out of their hands. It's secret. They can't do anything with it.
DRL IS NOT THE CONSCIENCE OF AMERICA
The purpose of the DRL chief is not to serve as the moral human rights chief of the country, or the conscience of the nation, as even the Russians think that the job of Lukin, the human rights commissioner appointed by parliament, should be. The purpose of the DRL chief is to serve as America's moral voice on human rights problems to other countries, and have bilateral talks or take part in multilateral institutions where human rights are on the agenda. I don't have a problem with that kind of role as part of a state that has to make compromises and cannot function as a purely-principled entity; my problem is when human rights advocates take up this role in the belief they are doing good. Obviously, America's problems on these other topics make it increasingly vulnerable to charges of double standards, a point that HRW endlessly preaches on in its recommendations at the end of every report.
Indeed, one of the ways HRW constantly indulges in moral equivalency is to intone piously that if the US pursues some bad thing, like pressuring Amazon not to accept WikiLeaks files, it is making it hard to pressure China on its bad behaviour controlling the Internet. I'm not the one who subscribes to this skewed notion, but it's funny when those who do suddenly decide the "lessons" don't matter anymore.
We could have a long debate about moral equivalency and America's role in the world and I'm happy to, but let me summarize this issue for you about America: it's a seven-lane Texas highway coming in (immigrants from all over the world); it's a cow-path going out (Edward Snowden). Ok, then. Next.
NSA Surveillance
Tom will have to learn how to wince convincingly and look sympathetic and privately guide visiting critics to Ken Roth's thinky piece on the subject, because he will not be able to address this subject in any kind of significant way himself. This office does not exist for crafting America's overall position on a variety of human rights issues in the world, writ large. That is, sure, it has a role. But higher-ups at State will decide the real issues around the NSA and Snowden and Manning, and Syria and chemical warfare and aid to rebels or peace talks with Israel or what to say to Putin at the G20 -- the NSC and of course the White House have the real say. Maybe DRL will be on the morning phone calls. But maybe it won't...
That's why some people "in the building" were filled with chagrin at yet another NGO type coming in and having to represent their turf -- NGOs aren't skilled bureaucratic infighters, they only know how to be antagonistic.
Nothing is going to happen on Guantanamo, the ICC, drones, NSA surveillance except perhaps some clucking that good people can't get anything done due to the CIA or the DOD. "My hands are tied," one can hear Malinowski saying -- like his predecessor, Mike Posner, another veteran NGO human rights leader who served as Assistant Secretrary of State for DRL in Obama's first term.
That brings us to countries -- in my next post.
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