from Mother Jones:
Elizabeth Cheney, daughter of Dick, draws plenty of attention these days as a feisty conservative advocate and pundit. A board member of the hawkish Keep America Safe, she often blasts President Barack Obama and his national security policies—and vigorously defends the record of the Bush-Cheney administration. (Last month, she was on television claiming it was absurd to blame her father for the regulatory failures that led to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.) But a few years ago, Cheney was more than a mere talking head. She was a senior State Department official, and documents recently obtained by a Washington-based watchdog group show how Cheney was intimately involved in the creation of a pro-democracy foundation that has turned out to be something of a dud.
In February 2005, Cheney was appointed principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs and coordinator for Broader Middle East and North Africa (BMENA) Initiatives. (Earlier in the Bush-Cheney administration, she had held a similar position.) With the administration bogged down in Iraq and pushing a so-called "freedom agenda," Cheney in May attended a meeting in Bahrain of representatives of G8, Middle Eastern, and North African governments, as well as civil-society groups and international organizations, who were planning a major gathering in the fall. She informed the assembled that the United States wanted that coming conference—known as the Forum for the Future—to launch a Foundation for the Future. The mission of this outfit would be to support civil society and democratic reforms throughout the Middle East.
According to a State Department cable obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Government Accountability Project, a public interest organization that supports whistleblowers, Cheney told the attendees at this planning meeting,
Our thought is to create an entity outside of official government donor channels which is multilateral, has a clear mandate, and whose members of its board of directors come from BMENA and donor countries. ...........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/07/liz-cheney-foundation-for-the-future