One consultant to Sudan advocacy groups, Chuck Thies, emails that the move is the product of restlessness among advocates at the administration’s “seeming inaction” and concern at Special Envoy Scott Gration’s statement that genocide in Sudan had stopped.

Writes Thies:

Something to chew on that has not yet entered the public debate: Though the rate of death from violence in Darfur has been greatly reduced in the past year, millions of people still live in unsafe refugee and IDP camps, slowly starving to death. No one suggested the Holocaust genocide ended until the death camps were liberated; the same should be true for Darfur.