McCain’s Kyrgyz Connection: The “Freedom House” That Isn’t Free

[Joanne98]

McCain’s Kyrgyz Connection: The “Freedom House” That Isn’t Free
The US Presidential Candidate, His Lobbyist-Advisor, and the “Tulip Revolution” Gone Awry


By Bill Conroy
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
August 3, 2008

Despite all the experts who have pored over McCain’s financial disclosure statements, it seems far too little attention was paid to a very small detail: John McCain’s position as chairman of the “Supervisory Committee” of an organization called the Media Support Center Foundation (MSCF).

The MSCF operates a printing company in the Republic of Kyrgyz in Central Asia – a nation tucked between China, Tajikistan (which borders Afghanistan), Kazakstan and Uzbekistan.

The tiny “Stan” nation of Kyrgyz, located in the heart of a region rich in oil and natural gas deposits and under the shadow of giants Russia and China, has recently been in the news in relation to another matter connected to the McCain campaign.

The Associated Press and other mainstream news reports recently making their rounds in Blogistan reveal that one of McCain’s chief policy advisors on foreign affairs, Randy Scheunemann, has a past history of providing lobbying services (for compensation to the tune of at least some $50,000) for a Houston businessman (and big-time Republican rainmaker) named Stephen Payne. The targets of the lobbying efforts (which centered on, among other things, “energy issues”) were Congress, the National Security Council and the Department of State.

McCain’s camp has gone to great lengths to distance itself from Payne, a business friend of President George and VP Dick Cheney, and to downplay the role Scheunemann played in his lobbying efforts for Payne. (USA Today reports that Orion Strategies, a management consulting firm founded by Scheunemann, “earned $540,000 from its foreign clients” over the 12 months ended Dec. 1, 2007, and “received $56,250 last year from March to July from McCain.”)

Payne is now in the hot seat, facing the spotlight of a Congressional investigation, after being taped in an undercover sting set up by the Sunday Times of London offering to introduce the former president of Kyrgyzstan (Askar Akayev) to high-level Bush administration officials, including possibly the president himself, if Akayev agreed to make a hefty donation to the legacy of President George – his presidential library fund:

Continued>>>
http://www.narconews.com/Issue54/article3175.html

[pansypoo53219]

1. mcPOW

is a former POW. stop lucking under the rug! or combover.

[Tribunus Plebis]

2. Unreliable information in this story...

This story relies too much on speculation and even contains some misinformation. One of its sources for historical background, Justin Raimondo, is a libertarian blogger who for some time has been peddling conspiracy theories alleging CIA or capitalist plots behind various nonviolent revolutions, without much empirical evidence. Like a lot of conspiracy theorists, he's not above connecting people based on common board memberships -- as if plots against Central Asian potentates were being hatched in the men's room at Goldman Sachs.

Also, the article cites Noam Chomsky as its authority for claiming that Freedom House is a "virtual propaganda arm of...the international right wing." The latter would be news to its executive director, who served in the Clinton Administration, as well as Democratic members of the Freedom House board like Stuart Eizenstat (who served in the Carter Administration), Michael McFaul (an advisor to Barack Obama), and Sidney Harman, the husband of Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman. By the way, it was Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Wilkie -- both intensely disliked by the right-wingers of their era -- who founded Freedom House. It predates the neo-cons by a half-century and will be around when the neo-cons are long gone.

As for the Bush Administration, it may well have been ambivalent about the fall of Akayev, but the reliable international news outlets did substantial reporting about the "Tulip Revolution," and none found evidence that the kind of chaotic semi-insurrection that happened in Kyrgyzstan could have been neatly engineered by Western democracy promoters. Internal forces largely drive these convulsions, not well-barbered guys wearing ties from inside the Beltway.

This was way too messy a conflict to be likely to yield a scandal that's sufficiently straight-forward to be used in a presidential campaign. But the story would no doubt benefit from additional reporting that produces more reliable information than this article contains.