Of that money, $36.1 million supplemented Iran programs at the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the agency which handles Radio Farda and Voice of America Persian, and some was earmarked for "educational and cultural exchanges as well as for "internet and other interactive programming."
One of the program's staunchest advocates was and still is Joe Lieberman.
Jason Leopold wrote in an article last year that Lieberman stepped up to restore funding to the full amount requested, $75 million dollars, when it looked like the funds for the program were going to be much less than that. Lieberman said of the democracy promotion program:
This amendment would provide $75 million in funds, the amount requested by the administration; in fact, announced by Secretary of State [Condoleezza] Rice," Lieberman said in a floor statement last September. "That announcement, I know from sources I have, was broadly heard and appreciated within the Iranian civil society dissident movement. The committee has recommended one-third of that amount of money. This $75 million would go to labor activists, women's groups, journalists, human rights advocates, and other members of Iranian civil society. It provides Congress an opportunity to demonstrate that even as we condemn the behavior of the Iranian regime, we stand with the Iranian people, a people with a proud history who truly are, in my opinion, yearning to be free. That freedom is suppressed by the fanatical regime that dominates their lives today."
Joe Lieberman is a "distinguished advisor" for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).
Established two days after 9/11, the FDD, according to SourceWatch, is "a neoconservative thinktank that claims to conduct "research and education on international terrorism-the most serious security threat to the United States and other free, democratic nations."
The FDD runs several democracy promotion programs, for example, "an education program that has the "goal of advancing democratic values of liberty, tolerance, pluralism, and individual rights in the Greater Middle East"; a program that promotes "democracy activists" in the Middle East; and one that focuses on South Asia."
Wade through the names of people associated with FDD and you will find a cast of characters that used to be closely associated with the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC): James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney, William Kristol, Steve Forbes, Richard Perle, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, and Charles Krauthammer.
Newt Gingrich, Rep. Eric Cantor, and Clifford D. May are also affiliated and lest you think this is an organization dominated by Republicans, in the past a fair amount of Democrats including Donna Brazile, Rep. Eliot Engel, Rep. Jim Marshall, and Rep. Chuck E. Schumer have been affiliated with the organization.
Another "democracy promotion" organization, the Committee on the Present Danger, is closely interlinked with FDD. Clifford D. May, Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, James Woolsey, Newt Gingrich, and Joe Lieberman all have played some role in the actions of this group which has experienced a recent third incarnation.
Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service observed and reported that this new incarnation has "a number of members of the new CPD, including Kampelman, Kemp, Kirkpatrick, Muravchik , Gaffney, and Woolsey himself, overlap with the membership of the advisory boards of the Likud-oriented Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Middle East Forum, or the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon."
Other organizations like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Hudson Institute and Freedom House have a rich history of opposition to Iran and are committed to cloaking their neoconservative objectives with claims of "democracy promotion" as well.
Michael Ledeen, Reuel Marc Gerecht (who took posts at FDD after leaving AEI) and Michael Rubin, who worked for the Pentagon as a consultant when Donald Rumsfeld was in charge, have publicly expressed support for U.S. interventions in the Middle East and military action against Iran.
Gareth Porter, a Middle East analyst, has claimed that Gerecht has been in favor of an aggressive U.S. foreign policy. He once argued "that Iraq's Shiites, liberated by U.S. military power, would help subvert the Iranian regime."
In testimony given to the U.S. House Armed Services Committee in 2005:
"...Gerecht argued that diplomacy with Tehran was a dead end. Pointing to the Clinton administration's efforts to "give peace a chance," which Gerecht said had included apologizing for "the supposedly bad behavior of the entire Western world toward Iran for the last 150 years," Gerecht argued, "American apologies in revolutionary clerical eyes mean only one thing-weakness. And showing weakness to power-politic-loving Iranian clerics is not astute. This is 101 in Iranian political culture. Yet I'm willing to bet that most analysts dealing with Iran at the State Department and the CIA probably thought American soul-searching was a good thing, that the political elite in Tehran would respect us more."
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