The ‘Cuban Twitter’ Covert Program: Misleading Denials by the Obama Administration

[Judi Lynn]

Published on Monday, April 7, 2014 by Common Dreams

The ‘Cuban Twitter’ Covert Program: Misleading Denials by the Obama Administration

by Howard Friel

A simple reading of the report last week by the Associated Press that a U.S. State Department agency was engaged in a destabilization program in Cuba suggests that administration officials who responded to the report coordinated their comments to present a smoothly articulated but misleading case that the program was legal under U.S. law.

In its April 4 story, “White House Defends ‘Cuban Twitter’ to Stir Unrest,” the AP reported the details of a USAID-sponsored covert program in Cuba as follows:

• “The U.S. government masterminded the creation of a ‘Cuban Twitter’—a communications network designed to undermine the communist government in Cuba, built with secret shell companies and financed through foreign banks, the Associated Press has learned.”

•“USAID and its contractors went to extensive lengths to conceal Washington’s ties to the project, according to interviews and documents obtained by the AP. They set up front companies in Spain and the Cayman Islands to hide the money trail.”

•“‘There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement,’ according to a 2010 memo from Mobile Accord Inc., one of the project’s creators.”

•“The social media project began in 2009 after Washington-based Creative Associates International obtained a half-million Cuban cellphone numbers. It was unclear to the AP how the numbers were obtained, although documents indicate they were done so illicitly from a key source inside the country’s state-run provider.”

• “The estimated $1.6 million spent on ZunZuneo [the code name for the USAID project] was publicly earmarked for an unspecified project in Pakistan, public government data show, but those documents don’t reveal where the funds were actually spent.”

•“Executives set up a corporation in Spain and an operating company in the Cayman Islands—a well-known British offshore tax haven—to pay the company’s bills so the ‘money trail will not trace back to America,’ a strategy memo said.”

More:
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/04/07-1