Beware of aid agencies bearing gifts

[Judi Lynn]

Beware of aid agencies bearing gifts
By Linda S. Heard
Source: Gulf News
May 11, 2014

There is no such thing as a free lunch as states that are recipients of western aid understand only too well. The naive may believe that foreign aid is a tool to help developing countries; sceptics are convinced it’s a quid pro quo enabling wealthy powers to exercise geopolitical policy objectives. In a documentary, filmmaker John Pilger made the case that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are “The New Rulers of the World” on behalf of their largest donor countries — the US, the UK, Germany, France and Japan. But some less powerful nations are alleging that one agency — the US Agency for International Development (USAID) — is acting as a front for the CIA.

When the Bolivian President Evo Morales expelled and shutdown USAID in his country last year for alleged attempts to undermine his leftist government, he wasn’t being paranoid after all. As a recent expose by the Associated Press shows USAID’s so-called “democracy promotion programmes” are designed to foment dissent against governments unfriendly to Washington.

“In a number of countries, including Venezuela and Bolivia, USAID is acting more as an agency involved in covert action, like the CIA, than as an aid or development agency,” asserted Mark Weisbrot, an economist with a Washington-based think tank, the Centre for Economic and Policy Research.

In the late 70s, under the headline “Police programme is called CIA cover” the New York Times revealed that the USAID police training initiative facilitated the CIA to “plant men with local police in sensitive places around the world” as well as recruit “prime candidates for enrolment as CIA employees.”

Dirty tricks outfit

USAID has coated its core mission, which is actually to further US foreign policy strategies, with such altruistic aims as alleviating extreme poverty; but that benign exterior crumbled last week when some damning facts were revealed casting the agency as a political dirty tricks outfit in Cuba where it created a social media “Twitter-type” site dubbed Zun-Zuneo used to collect personal data as a preliminary to whipping users’ emotions against the Castro regime.

More:
http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/beware-of-aid-agencies-bearing-gifts/

[Louisiana1976]

1. Good thing Bolivia expelled USAID.

The US was acting like the Ugly American under the cover of USAID.

[DCBob]

2. USAID does tremendous good in some of the poorest nations on the planet.

without USAID many would die needlessly. If these stories are true its most likely CIA dirty tricks wthout USAID knowledge... IMO.

[ColesCountyDem]

3. +1 n/t

[Judi Lynn]

4. A recent article posted at D.U.:

Published on Sunday, April 6, 2014 by CEPR's The Americas Blog

USAID Subversion in Latin America Not Limited to Cuba

by Dan Beeton

A new investigation by the Associated Press into a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) project to create a Twitter-style social media network in Cuba has received a lot of attention this week, with the news trending on the actual Twitter for much of the day yesterday when the story broke, and eliciting comment from various members of Congress and other policy makers. The “ZunZuneo” project, which AP reports was “aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government,” was overseen by USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI). AP describes OTI as “a division that was created after the fall of the Soviet Union to promote U.S. interests in quickly changing political environments — without the usual red tape.” Its efforts to undermine the Cuban government are not unusual, however, considering the organization’s track record in other countries in the region.

As CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot described in an interview with radio station KPFA’s “Letters and Politics” yesterday, USAID and OTI in particular have engaged in various efforts to undermine the democratically-elected governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Haiti, among others, and such “open societies” could be more likely to be impacted by such activities than Cuba. Declassified U.S. government documents show that USAID’s OTI in Venezuela played a central role in funding and working with groups and individuals following the short-lived 2002 coup d’etat against Hugo Chávez. A key contractor for USAID/OTI in that effort has been Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI).

More recent State Department cables made public by Wikileaks reveal that USAID/OTI subversion in Venezuela extended into the Obama administration era (until 2010, when funded for OTI in Venezuela appears to have ended), and DAI continued to play an important role. A State Department cable from November 2006 explains the U.S. embassy’s strategy in Venezuela and how USAID/OTI “activities support strategy”:

(S) In August of 2004, Ambassador outlined the country team's 5 point strategy to guide embassy activities in Venezuela for the period 2004 ) 2006 (specifically, from the referendum to the 2006 presidential elections). The strategy's focus is: 1) Strengthening Democratic Institutions, 2) Penetrating Chavez' Political Base, 3) Dividing Chavismo, 4) Protecting Vital US business, and 5) Isolating Chavez internationally.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/04/06

[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
This was followed by an excellent post written by an intelligent D.U. poster:

cascadiance (14,837 posts)

7. My family has been personally had to be close to some of this corruption...

I don't know how much it had been, as my dad had alzheimers and now is passed when I learned about the "Vietnam Project" that might have still had some damaging effects at the university he worked when on a USAID project in Thailand for them after "Citizen Stan" resigned as the head of the project that my dad worked for over there when it was more involved in Vietnam.

In the "Vietnam Project", the CIA had infiltrated this project under USAID and had helped the South Vietnamese government learn to use torture against the Viet Cong in the beginning of the Vietnam war back in the late 50's early 60's. Watch the movie "Citizen Stan" to about Stan Sheinbaum that is talked about here...

http://www.citizenstan.com/

Original web site I'd found a famous old ramparts article that talked about this issue has been taken down but is still available here...

https://webspace.utexas.edu/hcleaver/www/357L/357LMSUinVietnam.htm

Here's a PDF made of the old "CIA on campus" web site...

http://humanbeingsfirst.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/cacheof-cia-on-campus.pdf

Note that former MSU president John Hannah was made the head of USAID after these projects back in the 60's that was perhaps "payback" for this kind of involvement MSU had with USAID's more unsavory activities.

I know at least one name mentioned here was one that my Dad worked for back then in Thailand.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/110828827#post7

[Judi Lynn]

5. Information has been public knowledge for a very long time regarding USAID & Venezuela's opposition.

~snip~

Henrique Capriles Radonski is the leader of

[center]THE PARTY PRIMERO JUSTICIA, A CREATURE OF USAID, NED & IRI[/center]

and was born on 11 July 1972, in Caracas to one of the most privileged families in Venezuela. His mother, Monica Cristina Radonski Bochenek, of Jewish (Russian-Polish) origin, is the owner of a well-known cinema chain. His father, Henrique Capriles Garcia is from a Jewish-Dutch family from Curacao.

Both families have interests in the media, own various industries, services and real estate. Capriles Radonsky graduated from the conservative Catholic University Andres Bello (UCAB) in Caracas, and also studied at Columbia University, New York.

Capriles tries to focus on his "humble" roots, like many politicians making promises about reducing poverty and "social inclusion"

.....kinda just like Mitt Rmoney..

In 2000, Capriles formed the political party Primero Justicia, along with Leopoldo Lopez.
The policies of the Primero Justicia, were developed with financing and assessment of USAID through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), that have provided experts of the Republican Party of the USA who design its political platform and communication strategy.

More:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/WHO-IS-Henrique-Capriles-R-by-katherine-magdanga-121008-638.html

[Judi Lynn]

6. More USAID information for you:

Secret Programs Hurt Aid Efforts

Peter Kornbluh

Peter Kornbluh is the director the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. He is the co-author of the forthcoming, "Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana."

April 15, 2014

There is a world of difference between American foreign assistance programs that openly support democratic development, human rights and socioeconomic progress, and the type of clandestine operations aimed at regime change that United States Agency for International Development has been running under the guise of a “democracy” promotion program in Cuba. Those programs are not only counterproductive, they are an abject violation of Cuba’s sovereignty, undermine American interests in Cuba’s slow but steady political and economic transition, and endanger the legitimate missions of U.S.A.I.D. around the world.

U.S.A.I.D. was created in 1961 to help the United States win the “hearts and minds” of citizens in poor countries through civic action, economic aid and humanitarian assistance. As a cold war policy tool, the agency was, at times, used as a front for C.I.A. operations and operatives. Among the most infamous examples was the Office of Public Safety, a U.S.A.I.D. police training program in the Southern Cone that also trained torturers.

In the 21st century, U.S.A.I.D. has overcome its tainted legacy and undertaken humanitarian, political and economic work around the globe. It runs democracy promotion efforts from Afghanistan to Kenya — building political leadership capacity, electoral education and registration programs, and judicial reform projects — with little controversy. It is when U.S.A.I.D. undertakes “discreet” regime change operations that it runs into trouble. Indeed, its Office of Transition Initiatives now seems to be competing with, or at least complementing, the C.I.A. on hi-tech propaganda and destabilization programs in Cuba, if not elsewhere as well.

Regime-change programs have a negative impact on larger U.S. foreign policy interests as well as on the legitimacy of U.S.A.I.D.’s own core missions to advance global health and economic welfare. At a Senate hearing on U.S.A.I.D.’s budget last week, Senator Patrick Leahy told the agency's administrator, Rajiv Shah, that his oversight committee was receiving “lots of emails” from aid workers around the world asking this question: “How could they do this and put us in such danger?” The solution is simple: ban U.S.A.I.D. from conducting such covert operations in the name of advancing democracy.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/04/15/when-is-foreign-aid-meddling/secret-programs-hurt-foreign-aid-efforts