This is very odd. The Wall Street Journal reports today: The Obama administration has been demanding that Congress spend trillions of dollars on the so-called stimulus, so-called health-care reform, and so-called global warming. But the Boston Globe reports on one expenditure it's willing to cut: For the past five years, researchers in a modest office overlooking the New Haven green have carefully documented cases of assassination and torture of democracy activists in Iran. With more than $3 million in grants from the US State Department, they have pored over thousands of documents and Persian-language press reports and interviewed scores of witnesses and survivors to build dossiers on those they say are Iran's most infamous human-rights abusers. But just as the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center was ramping up to investigate abuses of protesters after this summer's disputed presidential election, the group received word that--for the first time since it was formed--its federal funding request had been denied.... Foggy Bottom's rationale for the cut is foggy. "The State Department said it is keenly focused on human rights in Iran," the Globe reports: The job of doling out money to groups seeking to influence Iran has been shifted from the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs Bureau to a lower-profile division, its US Agency for International Development. USAID spokesman Harry Edwards did not provide an explanation of why funding was denied for the Human Rights Documentation Center, widely seen as the most comprehensive clearing house of documents related to human rights abuses in Iran. He said the government's funding priorities have not changed. USAID may be a "lower profile division" of the State Department, but it is a critically important one. It is very much on the forefront of what we used to call the "War on Terror," and especially efforts "seeking to influence" the populations of nations where terrorists recruit. It does this by addressing education, development and poverty worldwide. This both helps create a better-informed population in the far reaches of the world, who are harder for propagandists to sway; and it provides people with a tangible reason to remember the United States kindly, for help given to their children (or themselves). It's one of State's most effective units, deployable to the worst parts of some of the poorest nations on earth. It's regularly part of their ePRTs in Iraq and Afghanistan, is out there providing schoolbooks and aid in the southern Philippines, and so on and so forth. They do great work -- especially given that they are forever underfunded and under-resourced. Given the bang-for-buck aspect of USAID compared to many State programs, they certainly deserve more resources and more responsibility. However, one place they don't do much is Iran. We have no diplomatic presence in Iran, and if you check their website for their Middle East functions, you can see that Iran is a "non-presence" country for which there is very little by way of information. The main thing they seem ever to have done with Iran is their response to the 2003 earthquake in Bam, which was a program that featured airlifted relief supplies; the total cost of the program was under six million dollars. I would like a much fuller explanation of why this program would be turned over to an under-resourced, "lower profile" division of State -- one that has little experience with Iran. This is not a concern about USAID -- as you can tell, I'm a fan -- but it is an oddity. They normally work directly in the nation they are helping, often by hiring local nationals to 'go and do' in the few areas they can't go to themselves. That methodology isn't open to them in Iran, which makes it strange that they've been tasked with this function. It may be a good decision or a bad one, but I'd like to know why it was made.
Read the complete post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Blackfive/~3/U3WNJNtLesM/usaid-takes-over-iran.html
Posted
Oct 06 2009, 09:04 AM
by
BLACKFIVE