US Taxpayer Funded "Radio Free Europe"

[Moses]

Who is running them in the Bush Admin, and what are they broadcasting/publishing? They describe themselves as private corporation completely funded by the US government, and are promoting a "market economy" in countries of "vital interest" to the US. So, we have a fake private corporation that is completely government funded that is propagandizing for complete market economies. Why don't we start by pulling the plug of government funding for them?

www.rferl.org/about/organization/brief.asp

RFE/RL in Brief
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a private, international communications service to Eastern and Southeastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, Central and Southwestern Asia, funded by the U.S. government. In countries stretching from Belarus to Bosnia and from the Arctic Sea to the Persian Gulf, listeners rely on RFE/RL's daily news, analysis and current affairs programming to provide a coherent, objective account of events in their region and the world.

Strategy / Operations
Concentrating on events within this complex region, RFE/RL provides balanced, reliable information to bolster democratic development and market economies in countries where peaceful evolution to civil societies is of vital national interest to the United States.

RFE/RL operates one of the most comprehensive news operations in the region, with 23 bureaus throughout Europe and the former Soviet Union and over 1,400 freelancers reporting local news and current affairs.

Programs are broadcast in the following 27 languages:
Albanian (to Kosovo)
Arabic (Radio Free Iraq)
Armenian
Avar
Azerbaijani
Bashkir
Belarusian Bosnian
Chechen
Circassian
Crimean Tatar
Croatian (w/i S.Slavic regional program)
Dari Georgian
Kazakh
Kyrgyz
Macedonian
Pashto
Persian (Radio Farda)
Romanian Russian
Serbian
Tajik
Tatar
Turkmen
Ukrainian
Uzbek

RFE/RL broadcasts nearly 1,000 hours of programming a week from its broadcast center, located in the former Czechoslovak federal parliament building on Wenceslas Square in Prague, the Czech Republic. RFE/RL's corporate headquarters are located in Washington, DC.

RFE/RL programs can be heard on shortwave frequencies by listeners across the entire broadcast region. Since 1996, RFE/RL has also built a network of more than 210 affiliate partner organizations and 590 transmitter sites that relay programs on the AM and FM bands in 12 time zones. Political circumstances do not currently permit local re-broadcasting in Belarus, Iran, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Nearly six in 10 listeners to international radio in RFE/RL's 18-country broadcast region are regular listeners to RFE/RL.

RFE/RL is also gaining a large new audience through the Internet. Its multilingual website www.rferl.org features both live and on-demand audio and text. In October 2004, the RFE/RL website registered nearly 9 million page views and 2.1 million visits, while more than 800,000 visitors listened to nearly 600,000 hours of live and on-demand RFE/RL Internet audio broadcasts.

The daily report, "RFE/RL Newsline(c)," provides expert analysis on major political events and trends in Central Europe, the former USSR, the Middle East, and Southwestern Asia. Thirteen weekly reports on the region plus Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the daily review "RFE/RL Headlines" are available free-of-cost to subscribers via fax or e-mail as well as on the RFE/RL website. Additional country-specific reports and English-language content are available only at www.rferl.org and www.regionalanalysis.org

Management / Oversight

The president of RFE/RL, Inc. is Thomas A. Dine. Prior to joining RFE/RL in August, 1997, he served as Assistant Administrator for Europe and the New Independent States at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

RFE/RL is a private, nonprofit corporation chartered in Delaware, which receives federal funding as a private, nonprofit grantee. RFE/RL's corporate board of directors is composed of the nine Presidential appointees to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which has oversight responsibility for all nonmilitary U.S. government-funded international broadcasting activities. The chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors is Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, former editor in chief of Readers' Digest (1989-1996), member of the Board for International Broadcasting (1987-1995), and Director of the Voice of America (1982-1984).

[Moses]

Here's some of that "expert analysis" they published today:

Iran: Ambiguous Response To London Bombings

By Bill Samii

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Bill Samii is a regional analysis coordinator with RFE/RL Online and editor of the "RFE/RL Iran Report." He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge.[our taxpayer $$ going to Brits!] His research articles have appeared in the "Middle East Journal," "Middle East Policy," and the "Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal." He has contributed to several books about the Middle East.

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(RFE/RL)Tehran's reaction to the 7 July terrorist attacks in London is following a pattern seen before, and what this pattern shows is that the government projects an earnest and civilized facade to the outside world. At the same time, Tehran is highly critical of the outside world in messages to its domestic audience, and it tends to pin the blame on the victims. A precedent for this reaction, albeit on a different scale, was Tehran's response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.

Tehran's immediate response to the 7 July terrorist attacks in London was a statement from Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Assefi in which he condemned the bombings and expressed sympathy for the victims' families, according to state television.
A state television commentary later in the day struck a different note. It suggested that the bombings represent a "complete failure for [British Prime Minister Tony] Blair," and it added that "Blair's government has always been criticized for blindly following the American policies in Iraq and Afghanistan." The commentary said the British public will want to know why "Blair and his friends are searching for terrorists thousands of kilometers away, while the terrorist are targeting the British people in the heart of London."

An Iranian state radio commentary on 8 July blamed the Israeli intelligence organization, Mossad. The commentary cited the BBC as saying there were no witnesses to identify the perpetrators of the bombings. This claim, according to the Iranian commentary, "strengthens suspicion that the Zionist circles, in particular the Mossad espionage organization, were behind London's bloody events." The commentary connected the attacks with the G-8 summit in Edinburgh, saying, "often simultaneously with every G-8 summit, the Mossad organization tries to do something in order to direct the attention of the G-8 leaders towards the opponents of the Zionist regime." It concluded, "Of course, this espionage organization is the only body capable of carrying out such operations in London."

Friday Prayer leader Ayatollah Mohammad Emami-Kashani condemned the bombings in his 8 July sermon, according to state radio, and he extended his sympathies. Kashani noted that Prime Minister Blair said although the terrorists act in the name of Islam the majority of Muslims are decent and law-abiding.

Kashani then asked hypothetically, "have you forgotten who the parents of Al-Qaeda are?" "America is the father and Israel the mother," he answered. He went on to suggest that the British got what was coming to them.

"You brought this [illegitimate son] in the name of Islam. It is therefore obvious what will be the fate of a son whose father was the White House's [global] arrogance and whose mother was the hangman of Israel. And you named him Islam. The destiny of such a boy is obvious, and your motive is clear. You brought to exploit him as a pest against our life. But praise be to Allah, he became a pest of your life."

After 9/11
Three-and-a-half years ago, after 9/11, President Hojatoleslam Mohammad Khatami condemned the attacks and expressed condolences on Iran's behalf. "I condemn the terrorist operations of hijacking and attacking public places in American cities, which have resulted in the death of a large number of defenseless American people," he said. The Iranian people, furthermore, responded with a genuine and spontaneous outpouring of sympathy. This ranged from signing a condolence book at the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, which represents U.S. interests, to a moment of silence at a soccer match.

But just as it did in 2005, the regime blamed the victims. "The planning of operations, the selection of targets and the savage way in which the operations were carried out in America show that non-American groups are incapable of carrying out such attacks," Tehran Radio asserted on 12 September.

Ayatollah Emami-Kashani said in his Friday Prayers sermon three days after the 2001 attacks, "Israel and the usurper Zionist regime are the number one state terrorists. They are causing havoc like this.... America itself, the White House and the prevalent policy in the United States, most of which is in the hands of the Zionists -- they condone these crimes which are perpetrated here and there."

"America's expansionist policies were the cause of recent developments," Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said six days after the 2001 attacks. "Most of the evidence points the finger of suspicion towards the Zionists for masterminding the recent incidents in America," according to Khamenei, and he went on to say that Israel is exploiting the situation to oppress the Muslim Palestinians.

The two incidents -- the London bombings of 7 July 2005 and the 9/11 attacks -- are not isolated cases. For example, Tehran blamed the United States for the March 2004 bombings in Uzbekistan, and violence in Iraq is routinely blamed on occupation forces.

More sophisticated observers in Iran are unlikely to believe such accounts by state media or officials. Those who have less access to information about the outside world and who are dependent on Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting for news, however, may become convinced by what they hear.