.
Egypt travel ban for son of US transport secretary
(BBC News) – The son of a senior US cabinet minister is among several foreigners working for civil society groups who have been banned from leaving Egypt. Sam LaHood, the son of Transport Secretary Ray LaHood, was stopped as he tried to board a flight leaving the country.
His organisation, International Republican Institute (IRI), was one of 17 recently raided by authorities. IRI is a US-funded non-profit that encourages democratic governance.
Egypt’s military government has vowed to investigate how pro-democracy and human rights organisations are funded, and has said repeatedly it will not tolerate foreign interference in the country’s affairs. In a raid in late December, Egyptian officials confiscated documents and computers at the non-government organisations (NGOs).
The Egyptian raids were part of an investigation into allegations that the groups may have received illegal foreign funding and may have been operating without government licenses, a spokesman for Egypt’s general prosecutor’s office, Adel Saeed, said at the time.
Saeed told CNN that the investigating judge had banned six people from International Republican Institute from traveling until the investigation of “receiving foreign funding” is complete.
GOP organization linked to dirty politics, attempted coups, ‘building democracy’ for US
(RAW Story) June 2006 – The International Republican Institute, though billing itself as an independent nonprofit unaffiliated with the Republican Party, acts essentially as a wing of the GOP. Its is chaired by party presidential frontrunner Senator John McCain (R-AZ), and Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and Representatives David Dreier (R-CA) and Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) serve on its board of directors. Many of IRI’s high-ranking staff members have at some point worked directly for the Bush administration. IRI is also involved in Ukraine, Georgia and Syrian revolutions. McCain’s Ties with Lobbyist Scheunemann
Cont’d below the fold …
Crushing Kerry
In December 2004, IRI contracted with Tony Marsh and Lance Copsey of the media consulting firm Marsh, Copsey & Scott to set up a Baghdad Media Center on behalf of the U.S. State Department. Its stated purpose was to assist Iraqi political parties and candidates in the upcoming January elections.
Earlier that year, in January 2004, Marsh Copsey & Scott (now Marsh Copsey & Associates) had registered the domain name crushkerry.com, which was used throughout the 2004 election for an anti-Kerry blog run by their senior account executive, Patrick Hynes. The site was heavily involved in promoting both the SwiftBoat Veterans and CBS Memos stories. It also encouraged readers to suggest other ways of discrediting John Kerry, and claimed to have inside sources of information on the Kerry campaign.
Outsourcing regime change
IRI was founded in 1983 as the result of a Reagan administration initative to fight Communism by providing government funding to private groups — most notably the National Endowment for Democracy — that would promote U.S. policies in ways the government could not undertake directly. In 1991, one of the creators of the NED would be quoted as saying, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” This initiative led to the creation of two organizations, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, associated with the two political parties.
Karl Rove’s dirty tricks alma mater
Tony Marsh and Lance Copsey are not the only names associated with both IRI and Karl Rove-style campaign dirty tricks. Several of IRI’s volunteers have lectured or taught seminars at Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute, the venerable training-ground for dubious Republican campaign practices, which Salon has described as teaching “that with sufficient organization, the act of voting becomes less a basic right than a tactical maneuver.” Karl Rove himself is an alumnus of the Leadership Institute, as is Jeff Gannon. So is Patrick Hynes, the Marsh Copsey employee who ran crushkerry.com.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
