The business of tyranny line DC pockets as they sweep up the dirt of Human Rigths Abuse

Who Does Bahrain Pay to Make It Look Good? – Human-rights abusing country employs D.C. lobbyists in surprising ways
united re:Public – 12 December, 2011

Bahrain has used DC lobby firms to improve its image during Arab Spring protests. Credit: Wikipedia

The Arab Spring has been good business for lobby shops in Washington. Despotic regimes have long sought to improve their reputations abroad, especially in the United States.

Bahrain, like many of its neighbors in the Middle East, has seen its share of demonstrations where security forces have been brutally violent toward protesters. But, as Ken Silverstein reports in Salon, that’s not always the story you’ll read when you Google “Bahrain.”

…to judge from Tom Squitieri — the self-described “stargazer, Award winning reporter, communications crafter” who has tweeted and blogged about events in Bahrain for Huffington Post and the Foreign Policy Association — demonstrators are largely to blame for the violence.

Squitieri states in his blog posts that he “works with the Bahrain government on media awareness and press freedom,” which is an odd way of describing work that amounts to propaganda…Nor does he mention anywhere that he is an employee of Qorvis Communications, a Washington firm that is registered to lobby for the government of Bahrain.

Silverstein notes that foreign governments, especially those with bad reputations, have started “meta-lobbying” using tactics that advance their interests through other means such as:

making contributions to think tanks and universities; arranging for allegedly independent pro-democracy groups to shill for their bogus elections, funding bilateral business associations that focus on trade issues while advocating, directly or indirectly, for enhanced political ties; and influencing the media and public opinion by hiring American opinion-makers to mouth their talking points.

It’s not just Bahrain. Former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, for example, paid the Monitor Group of Cambridge, Mass. $250,000 each month to burnish his image. They employed people like historian Francis Fukuyama, scholar Bernard Lewis, neoconservative Richard Perle, and Harvard professor Joseph Nye to advocate on the Libyan regime’s behalf. …more