Alhurra – public diplomacy as black comedy

by | Jun 23, 2008 | Global system, Middle East and North Africa, North America

Alhurra – the Arab language TV station and America’s most costly public diplomacy boondongle – has been regularly slagged off, but this superb report from Pro Publica patches all the criticism together into a damning indictment.

Here was the promise – in George Bush’s 2004 State of the Union:

As long as the Middle East remains a place of tyranny and despair and anger, it will continue to produce men and movements that threaten the safety of America and our friends. So America is pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the greater Middle East. We will challenge the enemies of reform, confront the allies of terror, and expect a higher standard from our friend. To cut through the barriers of hateful propaganda, the Voice of America and other broadcast services are expanding their programming in Arabic and Persian — and soon, a new television service will begin providing reliable news and information across the region.

And here’s the reality:

  • Half a billion dollars spent for an audience share of around 2% (about the same as Hezbollah’s TV station – which is run on a shoestring).
  • Can’t document its expenditure to the satisfaction of its auditors.
  • Run by a President who doesn’t speak Arabic, who is “is unable to understand anything broadcast on the radio and television networks he is paid to manage,” and who sits through editorial meetings without being provided with translation.
  • Based in Springfield, Virginia, where it employs “an untrained, largely foreign staff with little knowledge of the country whose values and policies they were hired to promote.” (Yes, the Simpsons is set in Springfield. No, it’s not the same one. Yes, it might as well be.)
  • Regularly slags off the US and supports the policies of its enemies. Describes Israel as waging a holocaust against the Palestinians.
  • Promised to fire a reporter who “told viewers that Jews had provided no scientific evidence of the Holocaust” but didn’t.
  • Believed by the US’s (former) top public diplomacy official in the Middle East to be stocked “with radical Shi’a Islamists who favored their political brethren and discriminated against and intimidated members of other parties … especially during the Iraqi electoral season.”
  • Found by the State Department’s Inspector General to have had a hiring process that “may have been marred by favoritism toward Lebanese candidates or candidates of Lebanese ancestry.” Put a Lebanese hairdresser on a $100k salary to do the news anchors’ hair.
  • Paid guests $150-1500 dollars for a single appearance – even if they were from Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
  • Doesn’t even cover the United States as well or in as much depth as Al Jazeera.

Read the whole thing and weep.

How the Puerto Ricans stumped Saddam

by | Jun 23, 2008 | Middle East and North Africa

You have to hand it to three US intelligence amigos: Donald Kerr , Tom Fingar and Mike McConnell. They don’t just subscribe to the concepts of need to share and the responsibility to provide intelligence. They are systematically trying to embed new processes across the intelligence architecture.

One of the key areas they are currently eyeing up is diversity – for pretty obvious reasons. The agencies need to better understand countries like Indonesia and China, find and develop new technologies and listen to and share from different experiences (think more outreach to think tanks and academic institute). In a speech to The 2nd Annual Intelligence Community/Heritage Community Summit Donald Kerr gives an example of diversity in action:

In this work there are countless stories about the importance of diversity. There’s one I recently learned from an FBI intelligence analyst who had worked on Saddam Hussein’s debriefing team in Iraq. While Saddam was being interviewed, a key component of the strategy was to keep him isolated from people outside of the FBI agencies who were questioning him, but he was fluent in several languages. Not deeply so, but sufficiently, and the interviewers needed to find guards who could speak a language that he wouldn’t understand.

It turned out to be really difficult. He knew bits of Spanish, but not the rapid fire Spanish of Puerto Rico. So Puerto Rican speakers would really flummox him, they certainly do me. And that’s what the FBI settled on for his guards. US military members who were native Puerto Ricans in terms of the Spanish that they spoke.