I have been typing for years that AID = CIA, and now it has been confirmed.
"US built ‘Cuban Twitter’ secretly to stir up dissent; Agency defends project amid legal questions" by Desmond Butler and Jack Gillum | Associated Press April 04, 2014
WASHINGTON — The US government masterminded the creation of a ‘‘Cuban Twitter’’ — a network designed to undermine the communist government in Cuba, built with secret shell companies, and financed through foreign banks, according to documents and interviews with participants.
This from the transparent government and all that openness shit.
The Obama administration project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba’s stranglehold on the Internet with a primitive social media platform. First, the network would build a Cuban audience, mostly young people. Then, the project sought to push them toward dissent.
So how many more places have they done this? Iran, Ukraine, Syria, everywhere?
Its users were not aware it was created by a US agency with ties to the State Department, nor that American contractors were gathering personal data about them, in the hope the information might be used someday for political purposes.
Oh, it ALSO ACTED as a SURVEILLANCE and COLLECTION CENTER, huh? No kidding?
It is unclear whether the scheme was legal under US law, which requires written authorization of covert action by the president and congressional notification.
If it's illegal, it's an out-of-control administration with a figurehead; if he signed an order, it may be legal but it is real bad publicity for the freedom president; and if Congress was notified they are guilty, too.
Officials at the US Agency for International Development would not say who had approved the program or whether the White House was aware of it.
Add AID to the LONG LIST of ALPHABET SCANDALS for Obummer!
The Cuban government declined to comment.
USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah said Thursday that it was not a covert program, though ‘‘parts of it were done discreetly’’ in order to protect the people involved.
Then it's a covert program! These guys and their doublespeak!
Shah said on MSNBC that a study by the Government Accountability Office found the project to be consistent with the law.
So? Just because government says it's law-breaking is legal doesn't mean it is, and even if it is legal it DOES NOT MAKE IT RIGHT!
‘‘This is simply not a covert effort in any regard,’’ he said.
Did he say it with a straight face?
White House spokesman Jay Carney echoed Shah’s statement and said he did not know whether individuals in the White House were aware of the program, dubbed ZunZuneo. Carney also said President Obama supports efforts to expand communications in Cuba.
This is CLASSIC COVER-UP MODE!
At minimum, details uncovered by the Associated Press appear to muddy the USAID’s longstanding claims that it does not conduct covert actions, and the details could undermine the agency’s mission to deliver aid to the world’s poor and vulnerable — an effort that requires the trust and cooperation of foreign governments.
That's why Russia and others are kicking US AID! They KNOW it is a SPYING OUTFIT!
Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Appropriations Committee’s State Department and Foreign Operations Subcommittee, called the program ‘‘dumb, dumb, dumb’’ on Thursday, adding that he had not been previously aware of the effort.
‘‘And if I had been, I would have said, ‘What in heaven’s name are you thinking?’” Leahy said on MSNBC. ‘‘If you’re going to do a covert operation like this for a regime change, assuming it ever makes any sense, it’s not something that should be done through USAID.’’
I find the whole idea of regime change repugnant, Pat, but you don't seem to agree. It's just who we use, huh?
And he's the Democratic dove of the Senate!
The Republican chairman of a House oversight panel said it would look into the project.
‘‘That is not what USAID should be doing,’’ said Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform National Security Subcommittee. ‘‘USAID is flying the American flag and should be recognized around the globe as an honest broker of doing good. If they start participating in covert, subversive activities, the credibility of the United States is diminished.’’
That would be if we had any left, which we do not.
As for AmeriKa "doing good" in this world....
But several other lawmakers voiced support for ZunZuneo, which is slang for a Cuban hummingbird’s tweet. Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said USAID should be applauded for giving people in Cuba a platform to talk.
Well, NSA has the records of Menendez's trips to the Dominican Republic for sex with underage girls, so....
USAID and its contractors went to extensive lengths to conceal Washington’s ties to the project, according to interviews and documents. They set up front companies in Spain and the Cayman Islands to hide the money trail.
But they weren't doing anything wrong or illegal!
‘‘There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement,’’ according to a 2010 memo from Mobile Accord Inc., one of the project’s creators.
ZunZuneo was publicly launched shortly after the 2009 arrest in Cuba of American contractor Alan Gross. He was imprisoned after traveling repeatedly to Cuba on a separate, clandestine USAID mission to expand Internet access.
Related: Capitalism Has Failed in Cuba
The coverage is Gross if you follow the links back.
USAID said it is ‘‘proud of its work in Cuba to provide basic humanitarian assistance, promote human rights and fundamental freedoms, and to help information flow more freely to the Cuban people,’’ whom it said ‘‘have lived under an authoritarian regime’’ for 50 years. The agency said its work was found to be ‘‘consistent with US law.’’
Time to end US AID!
--more--"
"Subtweeting the Castros | April 10, 2014
It may
have seemed like a harmlessly foolish scheme (“cockamamie,” in the
words of a US senator), a throwback to the era of exploding cigars and
spy-vs.-spy skulduggery. But the decision by the United States Agency
for International Development to launch a Twitter-like service in Cuba,
in an effort to surreptitiously undermine the Castro regime, can only
damage the agency’s credibility around the world.
That's assuming it had any, and look at the Globe minimize it. Imagine if someone did that to the United States (Zionists exempted, of course, since they are already doing it with their control of the ma$$ media).
USAID’s mission is to
provide humanitarian assistance from the people of the United States to
the hungry and needy of the world.
They serve AmeriKan cities, too?
It promotes US foreign policy goals
by showing off America’s willingness to put generosity before politics.
Pfffft!
Yeah, AmeriKan foreign policy is so generous if you overlook the bombed and flattened villages and destroyed infrastructure or the squeeze of sanctions. Now set up that private banking system that must go through the dollar or else!
This is Gross, folks!
But by setting up a secretive Cuban Twitter knockoff that the agency
then kept at arm’s length, USAID has brought suspicion upon its other
projects around the world.
That made me laugh! As if we thought they were pure, altruistic, and innocent.
Named ZunZuneo after Cuban slang for the sound a hummingbird makes,
the social media network attracted tens of thousands of users at its
peak. But those users never knew who was behind the company and that
information on them was being collected and categorized.
In other words, they were being SPIED ON!
According to an
Associated Press investigation, USAID wanted to identify “potential
participants in the democratic movement” and separate them from
“hardcore government supporters.” It was the intention of its creators
to use ZunZuneo as a platform to trigger a Cuban Spring.
And now those behind the Arab Spring and all those wonderfully colorful revolutions are allied called into question. Looks like the Arab Spring was more about creating a pretext for regime change while removing stale dictators sand replacing them with fresh-faced puppets.
The head of USAID, Rajiv Shah, defended the project at a
congressional hearing this week, explaining it was part of the
administration’s efforts to provide digital tools to increase the flow
of information in and out of Cuba, and that data gathered were used to
help USAID shape other programs.
Yup, the info went out of Cuba and into a database!
The agency also maintains now that it
never made any secret of the program — but documents gathered by the AP
suggest otherwise.
Then the agency LIED!
Regardless, the project
puts the lives of agency workers at risk, as Senator Patrick Leahy
rightly pointed out. “It taints USAID workers as spies,” said Leahy, who
is the chairman of the Senate subcommittee that oversees USAID. Leahy
said he had no knowledge of the program, which ran at a cost of $1.2
million for a couple of years before being shut down in 2012.
We are told it was shut down, but if Leahy doesn't know then we may have something illegal here.
Nice use of tax money in this age of imposed austerity, 'eh?
If the United States hopes to put more pressure on Cuba, it should do
so in a spirit of active engagement. In the meantime, it shouldn’t
jeopardize the mission of USAID, which oversees billions of dollars in
foreign aid a year. Some of its international missions include
reconstruction projects in Afghanistan and post-earthquake rebuilding
efforts in Haiti. Cubans need a platform to communicate amongst
themselves. But the ZunZuneo project as devised, executed, and financed
by USAID only heightens suspicions that American aid is only a front for
a political agenda.
It's not a suspicion any longer, it's a given!
--more--"
And now the Congress is getting involved -- after the pre$$ breaks the story!
Isn't oversight their job?
"Senate panel requests files on Twitter-like program for Cuba; US aid agency’s worldwide efforts under scrutiny" by Jack Gillum | Associated Press April 11, 2014
WASHINGTON — The Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked the US Agency for International Development on Thursday to turn over all records about the Obama administration’s secret Cuban Twitter-like program as part of a broader review of the agency’s civil-society efforts worldwide.
Yeah, Obama loves the secret warfare stuff! No Twitter transparency there!
The request included copies of messages the US government or its contractors transmitted to subscribers in Cuba, who were never told about Washington’s role in the primitive, text message-based cellphone service that was meant to undermine Cuba’s communist government and was the subject of an Associated Press investigation last week.
‘‘I’d like to get a full sense of all your democracy programs, beyond the Internet, as well, because we’re going to judge all of those in context,’’ committee chairman Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, told USAID administrator Rajiv Shah during a hearing. Menendez, who said he supported the Cuban network known as ZunZuneo, said he may ask for separate reviews by other auditing agencies, including inspectors general and the Government Accountability Office.
He said he will advocate that prodemocracy programs continue to be run by the agency.
Menendez made the surprise request after Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, separately asked for data about the program under the auspices of Congress’s oversight responsibilities. ‘‘Will we have access to all the tweets or the messages that were sent by USAID or its contractors in full so we can judge here?’’ Flake asked. ‘‘Because we have to provide oversight, whether we authorize programs or fund them.’’
So Menendez wasn't going to do a damn thing if not for Republican Flake, huh?
The USAID administrator told Flake that the agency doesn’t have most of them but promised to turn over any documents it can obtain from contractors. ‘‘You’ll have access to what we are able to gather,’’ Shah said.
Well, give the NSA a call because I'm sure they have them somewhere.
What a lame ass excuse for a cover up!
Menendez, who made the request without a committee vote, said the review will consider whether USAID’s prodemocracy programs in Cuba were consistent with those run in other foreign countries, and whether USAID should operate what it has since acknowledged was a ‘‘discreet’’ program. The agency’s full name is United States Agency for International Development.
The Associated Press investigation revealed that the US government took great care to keep its role hidden in the now-defunct ZunZuneo, which was publicly launched in 2010, using foreign bank transactions and computer networks. The Associated Press also revealed that draft messages produced were overtly political, despite earlier US government statements that the service had a more neutral purpose.
They not only hid their conduct, they lied about it!
How could ANYONE EVER TRUST THIS GOVERNMENT EVER AGAIN regarding ANYTHING?
In four congressional hearings over three consecutive days, lawmakers have debated whether USAID, best known for its humanitarian mission, should be running such a cloak-and-dagger mission instead of government spy agencies like the CIA.
It is a government spy agency! They all are!
Based on internal documents and interviews, the Associated Press reported that Cuban subscribers were neither aware it was created by the US government nor that American contractors were gathering personal data about them, in the hope that the information might be used someday for political purposes.
Same reason they are gathering data on all of us!
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, strongly defended ZunZuneo as a platform Cubans could use to communicate with each other amid government-imposed Internet restrictions. Rubio said he wants to restart the operation, which ended in 2012, although he acknowledged that USAID was perhaps not the appropriate federal agency to do so.
‘‘Maybe USAID is not the perfect agency for this,’’ Rubio said.
Rubio asked the USAID administrator, ‘‘This wasn’t an intelligence program. We weren’t spying on the Cuban government, were we?’’
Shah replied, ‘‘No.’’
And because he said it, it's true, even as it is contradicted by their own records and as the U.S. government spies on us all.
--more--"
Time to go home.
