07/23/10 – Shelley Walden – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, thanks for tuning in today.
So tonight I will be helping Alan Minsky, the program director, fill in for Susie Weissman on KPFK, that's 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, 98.7 FM in Santa Barbara, streaming at kpfk.org, that'll be 5 o'clock Pacific time, and I did a show last week with Gareth Porter and Michael Hastings, and then tonight I think I'll be talking with Jeremy Scahill about the Dana Priest, I always say Dana, but I think it's Dana, Dana's the other one, Dana Priest and William Arkin series in the Washington Post this week.
They can't do the show?
Fine, I'll interview a critic about it, see how they like that.
Alright, so our first guest on the show today is Shelley Walden, she is from the Government Accountability Project.
Hi Shelley, welcome to the show.
Hi, thank you for having me.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great, thanks.
That's good.
So first of all, tell us really quickly about the, well not really quickly, take your time, I don't care, the Government Accountability Project, what's going on there?
Sure, well we're a non-partisan, non-profit organization, we're based out of DC, and we represent whistleblowers, so employees who see wrongdoing on the job, and that may be in a government job, in corporations, or in an intergovernmental organization, such as the World Bank, and they speak out about what they see, and we help them do so in a way that they're protected, and are able to do so without risking their careers, or we try and help protect their careers to the extent possible.
Right on, the website there is whistleblower.org, and you know, I'm trying to, you know, I mean I think everybody really knows this in their heart, but I'm trying to reinforce the idea in people's minds as often as I can, that this is the only kind of good rat in our society, is a government employee who snitches on their boss, because, you know, supposedly the whole, you know, the power resides in the people, and we allow them to be our public servants to protect our rights, and whatever, sort of requires that we know what they're doing, and since so much of what they do is secret, we need for people who work for the government to violate their lower commitment to keep the secrets, in order to fulfill their higher commitment, which is to serve the public and protect the Constitution that they're sworn to uphold, am I right or what?
Exactly, I mean, we wouldn't use the term rat or snitch, we think these people are heroes, they're truth tellers, and they're really saving the public interest, I mean, a whistleblower is an employee who's looking out for the public interest, they're looking out for your tax dollars, they're looking out for your public health and safety, and they absolutely need to be protected.
Right, and you know, I only call them that because that's the, you know, people don't like tattletales at all, and I'm trying to carve out this exception, you know, these are good tattletales, these are the people that we need, you know, you can see in the Bradley Manning case, one's a hero, and then the guy that ratted on him was just a plain old rat, the kind we don't like.
Exactly.
All right, now, so let's talk about this incredibly important, although I don't know how much coverage you're getting for it, probably the better the article, the more important the story, the less coverage it gets, but we'll do our part here, Report Exposes Irregularities of Obscure State Department Funded Organization.
You've piqued my interest already, and then I read just a couple of words further and I hit the name Liz Cheney.
Oh, boy, this is going to be fun.
I'll be quiet now, and you tell me all about it.
Sure, well, you'll also hit a couple of other names in there, like Paul Wolfowitz, who was really the architect behind the Iraq War, he was the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2005, as I'm sure you know, and he became the World Bank President in 2005.
And Gap first became involved in 2007 when we received the payroll records of Shaha Reza, the girlfriend of Paul Wolfowitz at the time, and we made those records public, and that eventually led to Paul Wolfowitz's resignation as President of the World Bank.
But maybe I should go into just a little bit of the background about the relationship between Reza and Wolfowitz, which we don't talk about in the paper much, but it is sort of interesting for those who are interested in Iraq oversight issues.
So allegations of irregularities surfaced concerning Wolfowitz's work with Reza at the Department of Defense.
In 2003, the Department of Defense awarded Science Applications International Corporation, I don't know if you've ever heard of them, but they're a consulting firm focused on defense capabilities and intelligence, eight contracts.
And as Deputy Secretary of Defense, Wolfowitz personally recommended Shaha Reza for one of these sole source contracts to SAIC.
And Reza was then retained for post-invasion mission to Iraq while she worked for the World Bank as a staff member, and she was there for an international civil servant, and she's also a British national, she's not a U.S. national.
So under the terms of reference for this contract, she was to advise the Coalition of the Willing on establishing a new government in Iraq.
And it appears that Reza, if she was the consultant who earned the least on this project, earned $17,000 for one month's work in Iraq.
So that's just a little bit about what had happened prior to Wolfowitz becoming World Bank president.
And I should say, there was an investigation by the DOD Directorate for Investigations, a senior official's office, and they found that Reza had played a political role in post-invasion Iraq, and also that as early as 2003, she was cooperating with Wolfowitz at the Defense Department and also with Liz Cheney and Scott Carpenter at the State Department, Liz Cheney obviously being Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter.
And I can get, Liz Cheney's fingerprints are really all over this Foundation for the Future paper that we authored, but I will talk a little bit more about her in a second.
So flash forward to 2005, Wolfowitz has become president of the World Bank, Shahar Reza is there, so he has to do something to address this conflict of interest.
So she's seconded to, as a British national, she's seconded to the Foundation, to the State Department to establish the Foundation for the Future.
And the Foundation for the Future was this obscure non-profit organization funded by the State Department that was tasked with promoting democracy and reform in the broader Middle East and North Africa region.
And while seconded to the State Department, Reza received salary raises in excess of what bank rules allowed, and she earned more than her boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Okay.
Wow.
So we put those payroll records online on our website, www.whistleblower.org in 2007.
Eventually that led to Wolfowitz's resignation as president of the World Bank.
Oh, I didn't realize that.
Good for you.
But yes, that was our organization.
So in 2007, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request because we really wanted to know what is this Foundation for the Future that Reza was supposedly working on in the State Department.
So it took us three years to get documents through that FOIA request.
It should only take a few months if the process works correctly, but it is a broken process that is improving under the Obama administration, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.
We received 267 State Department documents, 53 were never released to us.
So the State Department has a lot more information about this that they're not giving to us.
And then 85 documents were redacted that we got, which means that they take out certain parts of the document.
They usually say it's for national security reasons, but if you look at the documents, it's clearly because they wanted to avoid embarrassment related to this process.
So our paper, which is about 40 pages long, is on www.whistleblower.org, and we also have an executive summary up there.
In addition, I would recommend reading David Korn's article, which appears on the Mother Jones website, because he did a really good summary of the paper.
But if you would like, I can go into a summary of what exactly it was we found in those 267 State Department documents.
Well that sounds great.
We'll do that right after we come back from this break.
And I'll Google up that David Korn article and everything.
By the way, you mentioned SIAC.
There's a great piece, everybody, called Washington's $9 Billion Shadow by Bartlett and Steele in Vanity Fair that's worth looking at about them, and of course they're in the Post series this week.
We'll be back with Shelley Walden right after this.
Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Shelley Walden.
She's from the Government Accountability Project, and I know it sounds like the GAO, but it's not.
It's the GAB.
It's different.
And she's, well they've got these reports at whistleblower.org about Paul Wolfowitz's girlfriend, and Dick Cheney's daughter, and a bunch of your tax money, and an obscure State Department funded organization.
Again, that's whistleblower.org.
Now Shelley, where were we?
Sure.
I was just starting to talk about some of the findings of our paper.
And what we found was that the Foundation for the Future was a pet project of Liz Cheney, the daughter of VP Dick Cheney, and she was the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs when the Foundation for the Future was established.
We also found that the Foundation for the Future was a haven for people with political connections.
It was where Shahariza, the girlfriend of the President of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, was working.
It also was where a good friend of Wolfowitz, Anwar Ibrahim, was working as the Chair of the Board.
Now the documents really show that Liz Cheney was most likely the person behind the secondment of Riza.
It was her idea to have Riza promote an overtly political U.S. agenda in the Middle East in violation of conflicts of interest regulations at the bank, as well as the national security tax and visa regulations of the U.S. government.
And it also seems that Liz Cheney was the sort of, maybe not the brains behind this operation, but really the person who was promoting the idea of the Foundation for the Future as this way to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East while we have the Iraq War going on.
Well, you know, if I remember right from the PR at the time, this was sort of along the lines of the Karen Hughes PR push.
Yeah, and Karen Hughes actually did do a PR push for this.
She said that the Foundation for the Future should be promoted as a way that the Bush administration was promoting democracy and human rights in the Middle East.
So they really sort of held this project up as, look at these great things that we're doing in the Middle East.
And really it's, I mean, the project was doomed from the start.
I mean, State Department officials in the region warned them not to establish it because restrictive laws in the Persian Gulf states would really make the Foundation ineffective.
And the governments in the region didn't support the Foundation because they knew it would give their opposition a platform from which to oppose them.
And potential donors had misgivings about the project's lack of indigenous imprint.
But despite these warning signs, Cheney and the Bush administration moved full steam ahead and established the Foundation anyway.
So there's a couple little nuances that I can get into about what's in the paper.
But I think maybe the most interesting thing just to mention is that Liz Cheney originally envisioned that this Foundation was going to be multilateral, that all these countries in Europe and in the region would give money to it, that it would have $60 million, $35 million of which would come from the U.S. taxpayer dollars.
Now, there was one problem with this, and that's that U.S. law required that all U.S. contributions to the Foundation for the future be matched by contributions from other governments.
But when Liz Cheney approached other governments, they were very reluctant to give money to this project.
I mean, they have the daughter of the vice president asking them to promote democracy in the Middle East when she's really only in her position because of nepotism.
So they were not able to raise as much money as they had hoped for the Foundation.
So what they did is the State Department told Congress that $22.26 million had been pledged to the Foundation, and they used that amount to get matching funds.
It was actually $21 million distributed by the U.S. government to the Foundation for the future.
So that's your tax money at work.
$21 million of U.S. funding went to this Foundation.
Now, in reality, there was not matching funds for this Foundation from other countries because a lot of countries didn't support it.
They had said that $22.26 million had been pledged by other governments.
Only a little over $6 million ended up coming in in the end.
So it does look like U.S. law was violated.
Now, they did change the law a couple months later after the funds had been distributed.
So that's sort of your tax dollars at work.
The U.S. government really portrayed this as a multilateral effort that was supported by countries all over the world, and it really wasn't.
I mean, the whole operation was really financed and monitored very closely by the State Department.
A State Department person was in the office helping to establish the Foundation for the future, in addition to Shahariza, who was also seconded to the State Department, and helping to establish it.
So the report's pretty long.
It's hard to get into everything that's in there, but I really do recommend reading it on our website, www.whistleblower.org, because it really gives an overview of what was happening in the Bush administration, well, post the invasion of Iraq, and how they were really trying to, after the fact, justify the invasion of Iraq by creating a democracy project in the Middle East that they knew was going to be doomed.
So I should mention the Foundation for the Future is still operational today.
They are running out of money, so it's a possibility that they may approach the government again to ask for additional taxpayer support.
And they have made some donations in the region, but clearly this project was not the impartial, multilateral initiative it was supposed to be.
So that's a little bit of an overview of the paper.
Is there anything specifically that you would like me to discuss of what I just talked about?
Yeah, well, I guess I wonder which countries they were operating in and what kind of dissent they were supporting here, because I know, well, you might remember when Richard Perle brought Laurent Mirowick to talk about how we need regime change in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, too.
The neocons sure had a much broader program for remaking the Middle East than the loyal guys did.
Well, I should say it was intended to loan to the broader Middle East and Northern Africa region.
Egypt was one of the countries that expressed strong concerns about this foundation.
We didn't look too much into the grants that the Foundation for the Future has made since it was established, because that information is all public.
It's on their website.
We wanted to concentrate more on what was in the State Department document.
But I do know that they've made numerous grants to Iraq, and they have a full-time person who just works on Iraq grants.
But I don't know specifically what countries they're working in, because we didn't look at that, because it's outside the time period.
It's outside the time period.
I mean, was this thing just a front so that these corrupt people could make some money and put a little PR window dressing on the Iraq war?
Or was it more like, you know, in Ukraine and in Kyrgyzstan and Georgia, where they're really working the color-coded revolution and trying to support dissenters to really get a regime change?
Sure.
I think it really started out as a PR campaign, or not even necessarily that, but an idea, sort of a pipe dream that they really just didn't have the expertise to implement.
And then it sort of became a haven for these people with political connections.
And then I think eventually the foundation sort of collapsed in on itself.
And, you know, the president resigned, the chair of the board resigned.
And it has since that time rebuilt itself.
So it has changed somewhat.
It has evolved.
And I really can't speak to what it's doing presently in the region.
But definitely when it was first established, it was not, you know, it was a haven for people with political connections.
How much money did Liz Cheney make?
I don't actually know how much she was paid while she was at the State Department.
How come?
That's not part of this?
Or that's part that's blacked out with a magic marker?
Yeah, no, no, no.
Well, no, it wasn't in there.
We asked for things related to the foundation for the future specifically.
So we should have, I guess, asked for the payroll records of Liz Cheney, because that would have been interesting.
But unfortunately, we didn't.
But someone else should go out and do that FOIA request for sure.
Yeah, that sounds like a good idea.
All right, everybody.
Well, the report is at whistleblower.org.
And I'm sorry, I didn't get a chance to read the whole report.
I just read the abstract and things before this interview.
I really wish I'd had time to read the whole thing.
But the whole report is called The Foundation for the Future, What FOIA Documents Reveal.
And you can also find the executive summary there at whistleblower.org.
And that has been Shelley Walden.
Thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
The Government Accountability Project.
Again, everybody, that's whistleblower.org.
And we'll be back after this.