Last week the White House celebrated the first anniversary of its Atrocities Prevention Board. At the time, Elie Wiesel asked at the inaugural ceremony whether or not we’d learned anything from the fact that “the greatest tragedy in history,” the Holocaust, “could have been prevented had the civilized world spoken up, taken measures in 1939, ‘40, ‘41, ‘42.” If we had learned the lesson, Wiesel asked an audience that included President Obama, how is that the greatest mass murderer at present still walks freely? “How is it,” Wiesel wanted to know, “that Assad is still in power?”

A year later and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has only added to the death toll, which is now by conservative estimates at 70,000 and climbing, with two more massacres over the weekend in Baniyas and Bayda. And yet the White House congratulates itself for the formation of an utterly useless bureaucracy. “In order to make the U.S. Government more effective at preventing and responding to mass atrocities,” reads the press release, “the military has developed new doctrine, multiple agencies have made new training commitments, the U.S. Agency for International Development has launched a new “Tech Challenge,” and the intelligence community is working on a new National Intelligence Estimate.”