Authorities targeted the Educated Media Foundation after its head was found with slightly more than $12,500 in undeclared currency at a Moscow airport, an offense that routinely would be settled with a fine, lawyers said.But to me, the reported protests by Western diplomats appear as feeble as Vice President Cheney's claims that his office is not part of the Executive Branch. The Post admits, later in the same story, that there was indeed a great deal of funny-money, provided by US taxpayers, flowing through Internews:
Instead, Manana Aslamazyan, 55, is facing up to five years in prison on smuggling charges. Her organization, previously called Internews Russia, is accused of money laundering -- an allegation that Russian journalists and civic activists, as well as Western diplomats, dismissed as absurd.
According to Interior Ministry documents provided to The Washington Post, the investigation expanded to include suspected money laundering by the foundation.I visited the Internews office in Tashkent, Uzbekistan while a Fulbright scholar in 2002-2003. That same year, there was a scandal when the new director of the office published her online diary--and insulted the Uzbek employees of her own organization, while airing dirty linen about sexual hijinks among American expatriates. Her website was eventually shut down and she left the country, but the snapshot of Internews lifestyles was not flattering to say the least. I was particularly struck by an anti-American tone among some of the Internews employees. One Internews executive later told me at a Harvard University conference that he did not consider Internews to be an American NGO--or required to promote American interests--because its office in Paris was funded by European and some non-govenmental sources. I asked him, then why should the US government pay for Internews at all? Eventually the debate became moot--after the Uzbek government shut down Internews.
"In order to reveal facts of legalizing (laundering) of money or other property obtained in a criminal way, financial and other accounting documents were taken from the offices," stated one report. "During the investigation it was revealed that the following money transfers by foreign organizations were made to the bank account of 'Educated Media' during the period of December 2006 to March 2007: 70,000 euros from Internews Europe Association (France) and $300,000 from Financial Service Center (USA). However, there is no data on spending those amounts."
Internews Europe is an organization affiliated with the Educated Media Foundation. The Financial Services Center is the U.S. State Department disbursing office that makes overseas payments for U.S. agencies with foreign operations, according to a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman.
The $300,000 was a scheduled disbursement from the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to U.S. officials and Aslamazyan.
Since 2004, USAID has given approximately $8 million to the Educated Media Foundation and its predecessor organization, Internews Russia. From 1998 to 2004, the United States provided almost $30 million to Internews U.S., some of which was sent to the organization's Russian arm.
Considering how Americans would react if an international journalism program paying cash to American reporters were discovered to employ staffers smuggling cash into the country, funded by the Russian government, one cannot be surprised at the hostility this Internews scandal has provoked from the Russians. Here's an interesting excerpt from a profile of Internews founder David Hoffman in the Johns Hopkins alumni magazine:
As he contemplates Internews' future, Hoffman confronts paradox. He believes that media need to be independent of government control. Yet 80 percent of his organization's money comes from the U.S. government. Hoffman insists that Internews turns down money from any source if it carries a requirement to promote an American geo-political agenda, but he knows perception can hurt Internews. "In the Middle East," he says, "training sessions often begin with discussion of whether Internews is really U.S. propaganda, or the CIA." As he looks at the increasing consolidation of media ownership in the U.S., and the Bush administration's efforts to influence and even package the news reported to the American public, he calls Internews' support for independent media in this country "the great undone." Yet while support for Internews has been bipartisan, Hoffman believes political conservatives have been stronger supporters than liberals. "Free media tends to be a libertarian concept," he says. "Liberals are more accommodating to state-run media and state institutions generally."So, according to Hoffman's own testimony, the US taxpayer is getting the worst deal imaginable from Internews, the worst of both worlds--money spent without any support for the American geo-political agenda, yet generating a public perception of a CIA operation. Which is the situation I saw in Uzbekistan, and matches what the Central Asia executive for Internews told me at Harvard. In other words, it is the official party line at Internews.
In the end, Vladimir Putin may have done a big favor to the Bush administration by shutting down Internews in Russia.
Instead of wasting money on NGOs like Internews, that have harmed America's interests and contributed to the loss of Russia and the post-Soviet space, the US government will be forced to return to more traditional forms of government-to-government public diplomacy that have a better chance of genuinely improving America's standing among today's Russian general public and opinion leaders.
In fact, President Bush might consider using this scandal as a reason for closing down Internews entirely, including the lavish Paris headquarters...as a gift to the American taxpayer.
