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usaid [2022/12/06 03:52]
pamela 		usaid [2022/12/06 05:05] (current)
pamela [Agency History & Mission]
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 Even as the Agency continues to respond to a record number of humanitarian disasters and ongoing crises, the work to solidify - and build - on progress continues. ((https://web.archive.org/web/20190410143118/https://2012-2017.usaid.gov/who-we-are/usaid-history)) Even as the Agency continues to respond to a record number of humanitarian disasters and ongoing crises, the work to solidify - and build - on progress continues. ((https://web.archive.org/web/20190410143118/https://2012-2017.usaid.gov/who-we-are/usaid-history))
 +
 +==== USAID Pandemic PREDICT Program ====
 +
 +[[:PREDICT]] was an epidemiological research program funded by a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) grant. Launched in 2009, the program was described as an **early warning pandemic** in response to the [[:influenza A virus]] subtype [[:H5N1]] “bird flu” outbreak in 2005. Extensive program details at [[:PREDICT]] wiki page.
 +
 +
 +==== USAID CIA Alliance ====
 +
 +The murderous history of USAID, the US Government agency behind Cuba's fake [[:Twitter]] clone
 +
 +PANDO By [[:Mark Ames]] - **April 8, 2014** 
 +
 +“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.” —Mark Weisbrot, Center for Economic and Policy Research
 +
 +Presumably the US government had been studying [[:Twitter]]’s ability to supercharge its users with outrage vapors here in the Free World, where legions of credulous idiots spend their waking hours chasing the outrage dragon. It was only a matter of time before some DC spooks and Northern Virginia contractors would see the angles.
 +
 +Of course, the ZunZuneo plan failed. ZunZuneo collapsed, a bunch of money went missing (likely into the coffers of the Castro regime’s state-controlled telecoms firm, or so they say), and the Communist Cuban menace still threatens the Free World’s slick underbelly.
 +
 +What really seems to be weirding people out here is the shock realization that USAID — the nice, humanitarian, democracy-promoting arm of American idealism — also engages in sleazy regime-change and subversion. The sorts of nefarious covert activities folks normally associate with the [[:CIA]].
 +
 +Not that this is news to [[:PandoDaily]] readers, of course: Earlier this year, we broke the story about USAID co-investing with Omidyar Network in Ukraine NGOs that organized and led the Maidan revolution in Kiev, resulting in the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych. That revolution hasn’t turned out so well — thanks to the “success” of the USAID-Omidyar-funded revolution, there’s talk of the West going to war with nuclear-armed Russia, Ukraine is losing entire chunks of territory like the proverbial leper on a waterslide, Kiev is run by a coalition of costume-party fascists and a handful of billionaire Mafia dons—and Vladimir Putin has never been more popular, or more tyrannical.
 +
 +Given USAID’s “success” in Ukraine, perhaps we should be thankful that ZunZuneo failed as miserably and comically as it did.
 +
 +For me, there wasn’t anything all that surprising about the recent USAID revelations. I spent over a decade in Russia and the former Soviet Union, and witnessed for myself the good, bad and ugly that USAID funded—mostly the bad and the ugly. I assumed that most reporters already understood what USAID gets up to overseas,  often alongside private nonprofits like those run by Soros, Gates, Rockefeller, Ford and more recently, Omidyar.
 +
 +The truth is, USAID’s role in a covert ops and subversion should be common knowledge—it’s not like the record is that hard to find. Either USAID has developed those Men In Black memory-zappers, or else—maybe we don’t want to remember.
 +
 +This selective amnesia doesn’t do anyone else any good however, so I figured it might be useful to offer a brief look back at some of USAID’s darkest, ugliest moments. It's important to note that not everything USAID does is patently evil — in fact, there are many programs that could even be described as good. But USAID, as with any agency of American power, is fully capable of and will continue to be an instrument of geopolitical and corporate force.
 +
 +As **Big Tech becomes increasingly intertwined with USAID’s missions around the world — particularly as USAID’s programs** and language merge with the lexicon and interests of [[:Silicon Valley]] (such as "[[:Global Development Lab]]," USAID's new "[[:DARPA]]-like" research arm) — now’s a good time to refresh our memories about USAID’s dark past.
 +
 +I should warn you: some of what follows is horrifying. 
 +
 +(list of titles full ghastly details see Mark)
 +
 +**1. Dan Mitrione and The Office of Public Safety (OPS)**
 +
 +“The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount to achieve the desired effect.” —Dan Mitrione, USAID official 
 +
 +Of the many dark-red blotches in USAID’s record, none compares to the agency’s Office of Public Safety (OPS) program — and its most notorious official, [[:Dan Mitrione]].
 +
 +
 +**2. Other Offices of Public Safety (OPS’s)**
 +
 +“At one time, many AID field offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind.” —John Gilligan, director of USAID under Jimmy Carter [quoted in [[:William Blum]]’s book “Killing Hope”]
 +
 +Multiply Dan Mitrione’s story by all the other Dan Mitrione’s working in all the other USAID Offices of Public Safety that we rarely hear about, and you start to get a sense of how small USAID’s failed Twitter revolution in Cuba is by the agency's standards.
 +
 +**A few more examples of other USAID police training ventures through the Office of Public Safety
 +**
 +- The Vietnam War: USAID trained police and ran civilian jails. USAID also participated in the “soft” side of the Phoenix Program 
 +
 +- Laos: In 1967, USAID Co-funded with the CIA a suspected private opium airliner, Xieng Khouang Air Transport. 
 +
 +- Guatemala: By 1970, USAID trained over 30,000 Guatemalan police to suppress local leftists, according to William Blum’s book “Killing Hope.” Just over a decade later, Guatemalan death squads under US-backed dictator Rios Montt unleashed a genocide on the Mayan peasants.
 +
 +According to Victoria Sanford's "Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala," USAID programs supported the death squads as they carried out the genocide.
 +
 +**3. Haiti**
 +
 +After populist left-wing candidate Jean-Bertrand Aristide won the first democratic elections in Haiti in 1990, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy began pouring funds into opposition groups opposed to Aristide. 
 +
 +**4. Peru mass-sterilization**
 +
 +In the early 1990s, Alberto Fujimori won Peru’s presidency, and quickly imposed harsh shock therapy measures that impoverished millions. Peru’s impoverished masses weren’t responding to shock therapy the way Fujimori and the neoliberal consensus thought they should.
 +
 +**5. Russia**
 +
 +There were many ways to transform Russia in the 1990s, but t**hanks to funding from USAID, the path chosen was the most brutal and disastrous of all: Shock therapy, mass privatization, and the mass impoverishment of 150 million people.** 
 +
 +As Janine Wedel and my former eXile partner [[:Matt Taibbi]] documented, USAID funding and support empowered a single “clan” from St. Petersburg led by [[:Anatoly Chubais]], who oversaw the complete destruction of Russia’s social welfare system, and the handing over of lucrative assets to a tiny handful of oligarchs.
 +
 +Under Chubais’ stewardship, Russia’s economic output declined some 60% in the 1990s, while the average Russian male life expectancy plummeted from 68 years to 56 years. Russia’s population went into a freefall, Russia’s worst death-to-birth ratio at any time in the 20th Century — which is amazing when you think that USAID’s privatization program had to compete with the ravages Hitler, Dzerzhinsky and Stalin wreaked on Russia.
 +
 +**USAID funded Chubais through public-private organizations** and a [[:Harvard]] program that was so patently corrupt, Harvard and its program directors including economist Andrei Shleifer were sued by the US Department of Justice for "conspiring to defraud" the US government (not to mention Russians). 
 +
 +USAID also paid public relations giant [[:Burson-Marsteller]] to sell the disastrous voucher program to the Russian public, in a mass media advertising blitz that promoted Chubais’ political party on the eve of parliamentary elections. It was this USAID funded privatization, and the USAID-backed Russia “democrats,” which soured Russians on market capitalism and democracy (renamed “dermokratsia” or “shitocracy” in Russian).
 +
 +**6. Palestine**
 +
 +In 2006, the [[:Washington Post]] revealed a **covert $2 million USAID [[:propaganda]] effort** to help the “moderate” Palestinian Authority’s election bid against Hamas:
 +
 +The approximately $2 million program is being led by a division of the U.S. Agency for International Development. But no U.S. government logos appear with the projects or events being undertaken as part of the campaign, which bears no evidence of U.S. involvement and does not fall within the definitions of traditional development work.
 +
 +U.S. officials say their low profile is meant to ensure that the Palestinian Authority receives public credit for a collection of small, popular projects and events to be unveiled before Palestinians select their first parliament in a decade. Internal documents outlining the program describe the effort as "a temporary paradigm shift" in the way the aid agency operates. The plan was designed with the help of a former U.S. [[:Army Special Forces]] officer who worked in postwar Afghanistan on democracy-building projects.
 +((https://web.archive.org/web/20211004154549/https://pando.com/2014/04/08/the-murderous-history-of-usaid-the-us-government-agency-behind-cubas-fake-twitter-clone/))
 +
 +==== Enemies of Empire Archive & Trivia ====
 +{{ ::wapo_smear_mark_ames_-_matt_taibbi.png?600|}}
 +Mark Ames - Pando Archive ((https://web.archive.org/web/20211016110308/https://pando.com/author/markamespando/))
 +
 +Smear by Washington Post's Kathy Lally against [[:Mark Ames]] and [[:Matt Taibbi]] hits w her best shot.. body shaming!!  
 +
 +by Kathy Lally
 +**Twenty years ago,** when I was a Moscow correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, two Americans named Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames ran an English-language tabloid in the Russian capital called the eXile. 
 +
 +They portrayed themselves as swashbuckling parodists, unbound by the conventions of mainstream journalism, exposing Westerners who were cynically profiting from the chaos of post-Soviet Russia. 
 +
 +A better description is this: The eXile was juvenile, stunt-obsessed and pornographic, titillating for high school boys.((https://web.archive.org/web/20171215232732/https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-who-terrorized-women-correspondents-in-moscow/2017/12/15/91ff338c-ca3c-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html?utm_term=.39902eac3f74))
  
  
  
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