"Firm details payments on Libya visits; Stealth campaign sought to bolster Khadafy's image" July 02, 2011|By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff
WASHINGTON - Monitor Group, a Cambridge-based consulting firm, released new details yesterday of its payments to a raft of intellectuals and public figures who visited Libya between 2006 and 2008 during a stealth public-relations campaign to bolster the image of Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy.
The documents, filed yesterday at the Foreign Agents Registration Unit, show that Harvard professor Joseph Nye, who took a four-day visit to Libya in 2007, was paid $27,500, while Francis Fukuyama, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, was paid $80,000 for two visits he took in 2006 and 2007.
Others were paid far more. British journalist David Frost, best known for his interviews of Richard Nixon, was paid $91,429 in connection with what appears to be a single visit to Libya. Benjamin Barber, who wrote a landmark book, "Strong Democracy," and who served on the board of a nonprofit run by Khadafy's son Saif, received just over $100,000 during those years. British sociologist Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, was paid more than $67,000.
Many of the payments appear to relate to a highly-publicized debate on democracy between Giddens, Barber, and Khadafy hosted by Frost in Libya in 2007.
The documents, which represent the culmination of a three-month internal investigation by Monitor into its own activities in Libya, were filed retroactively to comply with a federal law that requires firms that lobby or do public-relations work on behalf of a foreign government to submit public disclosures. The firm, which ended its work in Libya in 2008, had said it will no longer take on public-relations work, which is outside of its core area of expertise....
Related (see last article): Stalemate in Libya
Not much has changed in two months, huh?
Nye said he had no problem with the public disclosure that Monitor paid him his usual business consulting fee of $25,000 - plus $2,500 for late payment - but that he felt misled by the firm about its secret public-relations agenda....
Documents filed yesterday give even more evidence of Monitor's public-relations intent: The firm spent more than $165,000 on Racepoint, a public-relations firm, and nearly $300,000 on Twofour Communications, a communications firm, to help with the Libya work. The firm took in $3 million in fees from Libya for its visitors program and over $3.7 million in expense reimbursements between October 2006 and January 2009, according to the filing. About $300,000 of the expenses were for private jets, while about $100,000 went to Grail Research, a Monitor-affiliated company. Monitor also paid $75,000 to Cas, which Monitor officials described as another consulting firm.
Monitor's work in Libya has sparked soul-searching at Harvard about what standards its professors should meet in their outside work. The firm was founded by a group of people linked to Harvard....
And GET A LOAD of this ASSOCIATE!
Richard Perle, a former member of the Defense Policy Board under President George W. Bush, visited Libya twice in trips that discussed "possible areas of collaboration between the United States and Libya," among other subjects. Perle took in about $90,000.
Yup, a REAL LIVE NEO-CON, PNAC, Clean Break criminal was sent to Libya by Harvard.
Monitor also brought Shayk Khabbani, chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, to Libya and paid him $20,000 for his visit.
But some intellectuals who traveled to Libya with Monitor's assistance received no payment, including Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter. Slaughter told the Globe in an e-mail yesterday that she was offered a fee but turned it down because of Libya's role in bombing a plane over Lockerbie Scotland in 1988.
Related: Lieberman Gets Last Word on Lockerbie
Well, almost.
Slaughter, who later served as Director of Policy Planning for the State Department under Obama, said she asked the State Department's advice. "They encouraged me to go because we were trying to encourage the opening up of Libyan society," she said. "But I did not want to take a fee because of Lockerbie, so [Monitor] paid my travel expenses only."
Now we are blasting it wide open, 'eh?
Fukuyama, Barber, and Perle did not respond to requests for comment yesterday.
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Now over to Syria:
"Monitor Group rebuked on Syria; Cambridge firm defends its project to train youth" July 03, 2011|By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff
WASHINGTON - Two years ago, the first lady of Syria, Asma Assad, hired a Cambridge-based consulting firm to take on a sensitive job: help train Syrian youth to become community activists.
But the project, which was aimed at reaching out to a generation that has become disillusioned with the regime, collapsed in March amid an antigovernment uprising and vicious government crackdown that human rights activists say has killed more than 1,400 people, including many teenagers, according to human rights groups.
Now Monitor Group is facing criticism from those who say the firm was naive about the Syrian government's desire for reform and that its assistance indirectly improved the image of a brutal regime.
Yeah, too bad the Syrians don't have AmeriKan newspapers working overtime for them like the USraeli empire does.
"How could any Western consulting firm take a look at the track record of this regime and believe that it was on the reform trajectory?" asked Andrew Tabler, a media adviser for Assad in 2004 who wrote a book about the experience.
But those involved in the project say it was a noble attempt to build civil society in an authoritarian state that badly needs it.
"There is no question it was worth trying," said Marshall Ganz, a Harvard lecturer and famed community organizer who Monitor brought in to help design the training for Syrian youth. "If it produced some real benefit in terms of increasing the capacity of young people to organize and make their claims on the future, it would have been a good thing."
The project, known as the Syrian Youth Agenda, was in some ways an unlikely assignment for a global consulting company better known for selling business advice.
Hey, this was bu$ine$$, if you know what I mean.
But the Syrian work was part of Monitor's burgeoning portfolio in a niche industry: delivering customized solutions to foreign governments for a wide range of problems, some of which are far afield from traditional consulting.
Monitor counted among its clients some of the most repressive governments in the world, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Libya....
I'll be looking for the Globe article on the Saudi connection.
Asma Assad, a London-born investment banker from a prominent Syrian family who wears Chanel sunglasses and no head scarf, [and her] work earned her positive news coverage in America and a profile in Vogue magazine. The Harvard Arab Alumni Association, which held a conference with her in Damascus in March, praised her for spearheading a new era of reform.
That's his wife?
But Nadim Houry, a Human Rights Watch researcher, said her work, while positive, gave the false impression of progress....
The same thing Americans get from their generals, government, and their media mouthpieces.
Nadim Shehadi, a Syria specialist at the British think tank Chatham House, said the first lady's nonprofits co-opted civil society, "soaking up all the donor funding and distributing it to those loyal to the regime."
Ever notice the range of "expert" opinion in the agenda-pushing paper is from neo-con to neo-lib?
Efforts to reach Assad and her organization, Syria Trust for Development, were unsuccessful.
I can understand why they don't want to talk to you.
In 2008, Assad hired Monitor to help her reorganize her nonprofits. She trusted Monitor's Syrian-American vice president, Emad Tinawi, so much that she invited him to serve on her nonprofit board. She also put him in charge of a massive effort to revamp Syria's 34 museums and 5,000 heritage sites with funding from the European Union, aimed at generating tourism, national pride, and overseas donations.
Then she asked for his help with another problem: A quarter of Syria's population is under 25, with few job prospects and little affection for the regime. Assad decided to start a nationwide program to train them to be "active citizens" able to help build Syria's future.
Tinawi's team researched youth empowerment programs and settled on the teachings of Ganz, a community organizer who dropped out of Harvard in 1964 to join the civil rights movement. Ganz, who devised training that galvanized youth during Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School. A former student who became a Monitor consultant invited him to Syria....
Ganz recalled: "It's a national security state in which there were sources of serious resistance to change."
Ah, living in AmeriKa!
Working with Arab colleagues, Ganz developed training to teach Syrians how to hold community meetings to work toward a collective goal.
Did the Syrians bring the protests on themselves by letting these bastards in the country?
The training programs, beset with false starts and delays, were slated to begin in Sweida in March. But they were canceled when protests erupted in nearby Daraa, sparked by the arrest and torture of 15 youths accused of writing antigovernment graffiti on a wall.
Is that what they were training them to do?
And the programs to teach protest were canceled when the kids went out to protest?
Since then, the protests - anchored by a youth movement that organized without Assad's help - have swelled to some 100,000 people.
That's actually not very many at all, and it sure looks like Assad was duped.
Now Syrian security forces are accused of killing at least 30 youths, including a 13-year-old boy whose castrated corpse was shown in a video that went viral on the Internet.
Psyop prop?
Assad has been so silent that she is rumored to have fled Syria with her three children....
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Globe is far from silent when it comes to Syria:
"Syria rebuked over embassy attacks" by Elizabeth A. Kennedy, Associated Press / July 13, 2011
CAIRO - Syria came under withering international criticism yesterday as the White House said President Bashar Assad has “lost legitimacy’’ and the UN Security Council unanimously condemned attacks on the US and French embassies in Damascus.
It was a sharp escalation in pressure on Assad and a sign that the Obama administration could be moving closer to calling for regime change in Syria....
It is what this WHOLE THING has been ABOUT!
“President Assad is not indispensable,’’ White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters in Washington yesterday. “We had called on him to lead this transition. He clearly has not, and he has lost legitimacy by refusing to lead the transition.’’
The Syrian Foreign Ministry condemned the comments as “provocative.’’
“Syria stresses that the legitimacy of its political leadership is based neither on the United States nor on others, it is exclusively from the will of the Syrian people,’’ the statement said.
Assad has tried to crush largely peaceful protests against the government using a mixture of deadly force and promises of reform. But the revolt has only grown more defiant. Enraged by a crackdown that activists say has killed some 1,600 people, the protest movement is calling for the downfall of the regime.
US tools.
Tensions between the United States and Syria have risen sharply over the past few days.
On Monday, hundreds of regime supporters attacked the American and French embassies in Damascus, smashing windows and spray-painting obscenities on the walls.
Related: The Hama Hammer
The attacks prompted unanimous action at the UN Security Council, where all 15 members condemned “in the strongest terms’’ the attacks against the embassies. The message was significant in part because it was endorsed by Russia and China....
That is because no government wants its embassies trashed, or have to deal with embassy destruction in their country.
The regime blames foreign conspirators and thugs for the unrest, not true reform-seekers.
Turns out they are right.
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said the embassy attacks show Assad’s hold on power is slipping, telling Europe-1 radio that “each passing day makes it more and more difficult’’ for the authoritarian leader to remain in power.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the US embassy in Syria was operational yesterday.
She said six people were arrested in connection with the attack and that they should now be subject to a free, fair, and transparent judicial process.
Something we do not have in AmeriKa.
Nuland said Ambassador Robert Ford met yesterday with Syria’s foreign minister to follow up on US concerns. She said a “much more collaborative tone’’ emerged from the meeting.
Assad’s adviser, Buthaina Shaaban, took a somewhat conciliatory tone last evening.
“They should acknowledge that what they did angered people in the street and made Syrians feel that they were insulted,’’ Shaaban said, referring to the ambassadors’ trips to Hama.
The newspaper does that to me every day.
But she added: “We, as state and people, don’t want to cut relations with the United States.’’
Meaning they don't want to be invaded.
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