The Foreign Service Journal, March 2011

10 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 1 1 good fortune to have played on the A Team with him as our captain. David Jones FSO, retired Arlington, Va. Don’t Praise the Human Rights Council Although it’s nice to know that entry-level FSO Sarah Ciaccia is en- joying her tour of duty at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, her piece in the December FSJ (“ADay at the UNHRC”) makes no mention of the fact that the council is widely re- garded as a toothless, mostly anti- American international bureaucracy. As veteran foreign correspondent Jackson Diehl noted recently in the Washington Post , “The council is dom- inated by human rights abusers who devote most of the agenda to condem- nations of Israel.” Guy W. Farmer FSO (USIA), retired Carson City, Nev. Pakistan’s Presidency One reads book reviews with the expectation that the reviewer knows at least the basic elements of the subject matter under review. Imagine my sur- prise, then, to read Patricia Lee Sharpe’s review of Philip Oldenburg’s India, Pakistan and Democracy: Solv- ing the Puzzle of Divergent Paths in the January FSJ , in which Ms. Sharpe makes the following statement: “By contrast, not only did Pakistan’s Muslim League lack the long history of the Congress, but its leader Mo- hammad Ali Jinnah opted to become president instead of assuming the chal- lenges of parliamentary leadership.” At Pakistan’s independence on Aug. 14, 1947, Mohammad Ali Jinnah was appointed the new nation’s governor general (not president), a position he held until his death in September 1948. Liaquat Ali Khan became prime minis- ter until his assassination in October 1951. Pakistan did not have a president until March 1956, with the adoption of the nation’s first constitution and the naming of Iskander Mirza as its first president. Prior to that time, the India Act of 1935 provided the legal basis for Pakistan’s parliamentary government. William H. Barkell FSO, retired Arlington, Va. The Hunger Site Thank you to Editor Steve Honley for recommending The Hunger Site (www.thehungersite.com) as the Site of the Month in January’s edition of Cy- bernotes. It is a great Web site that I would not have found on my own. Judy Jones FSO, retired Sanibel, Fla. CORRECTION Due to an editing error, the refer- ence on p. 40 of Ken Brown’s January Appreciation of the late Ambassador Stephen Low, “A Visionary and Activist for the Foreign Service,” should have stated that Amb. Low worked very closely with John Sprott, former deputy director of the Foreign Service Insti- tute (rather than Representative John Spratt, D-S.C.) to acquire the new campus as a permanent home for FSI. We regret the error. ■ L E T T E R S Send your Letter to the Editor to journal@afsa.org.