"When we reviewed the evidence compiled by our team, along with other information available to the State Department, we concluded that genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the Government of Sudan and the jinjaweid bear responsibility -- and genocide may still be occurring" said Powell.

Up until that moment, Powell had been studiously avoiding a growing chorus of reporters' questions about whether Darfur was genocide. He had been awaiting the results of an investigation that his staff had hoped would provide "clear evidence" of whether or not the label was applicable. It had turned out to be a false hope.

Investigating Genocide

The State Department investigation, which involved the deployment of 24 independent experts to the Chadian border where refugees of the atrocities were fleeing, had primarily been the brainchild of assistant secretary Lorne Craner. And like so much of the State Department's thinking on Darfur over this period, it was influenced by the massacres in Rwanda a decade earlier.

Craner remembers Powell saying: "There is not going to be another Rwanda." (Powell has no recollection of this. "It wasn't that I wasn't mindful of Rwanda of course, I just don't recall making that statement" he says.)

Craner says he knew exactly what Powell meant, having finished the Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. The book, written by former journalist and now Obama adviser, Samantha Power, memorably recounted how the Clinton administration had tied itself in semantic knots to avoid using the word genocide while the 1994 massacres of over 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were underway in Rwanda.

The ban on saying "genocide" by the Clinton administration arose out of a briefing compiled by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Inside the May 1994 briefing (later declassified by the National Security Archives), State Department lawyers said they were worried that a finding of genocide might obligate the administration "to actually 'do something.'"

The concerns of the State Department lawyers stemmed from the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, which was drafted in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Article I of the convention places an obligation on those who have joined, like the U.S., to "undertake to prevent and to punish" genocide. The article does not elaborate on what the obligation means in practical terms, and certainly does not specify a requirement for the deployment of troops. But in the wake of the Clinton administration's Black Hawk Down disaster in Somalia, there was no desire to even open a discussion about the engagement of U.S. resources in another African country. So, despite clear evidence to the contrary, U.S. officials refused to label the Rwandan atrocities genocide.