By Sarah Hamburger, Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Posted June 26, 2008.
Presidential hopeful John McCain is hiding a skeleton in his closet. Not your typical political scandal, Senator McCain's dirty little secret is his longtime involvement with the International Republican Institute (IRI), an organization that operates in 60 countries and is budgeted by millions of US taxpayer dollars each year. The IRI is "officially" a politically independent entity, though in reality it is aligned in most respects with the Republican Party and its ideals. Senator McCain has been chairman of the IRI since 1993 and Lorne Craner, president of the organization, is one of the presumptive Republican candidate's informal foreign policy advisors. If McCain's involvement with the IRI does not worry Latin America yet, it certainly will if the policies that have had such a destructive influence in the past are backed by the power of the presidency. His connection to the IRI could endanger already stressed US-Latin American relations in the event of a McCain victory ...
The International Republican Institute claims to be a nonpartisan organization whose mission is to "advance freedom worldwide by developing political parties, civic institutions, open elections, good governance and the rule of law." Unfortunately, the magnanimous goals of the IRI have been distorted by a quest to advance rightist US initiatives. Ghassan Atiyyah, Director of the Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy (a beneficiary of a $116,448 donation from the IRI) commented on the inconsistency of the organization's policy: "Instead of promoting impartial, better understanding of certain ideas and concepts, they are actually trying to further the cause of the Republican administration." Though Atiyyah here refers to the current Bush Administration, the McCain administration promises to be equally compatible with the strong armed methods advocated by the IRI and practiced in Latin America in the past.
Furthermore, during the years that the presumptive candidate chaired the IRI, the organization has chosen ironic means to "advance freedom:" training corrupt opposition leaders and providing funds to groups that effectively undermine often democratically-elected officials that the US government views unfavorably. In addition to running training camps, the IRI also conducts polls in high-stakes elections; the organization has been known to conduct "secret polls" with the intention of skewing public opinion in order to yield a desired outcome. The problem with such secret polls is that they cannot be verified and often contradict the findings of other, similar studies.
The IRI currently operates with a robust budget of $79 million. Though one of John McCain's goals as chairman of the organization has been to increase private funding for the IRI, the overwhelming majority of funds for the organization comes from two public sources, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) ...
http://www.alternet.org/audits/89431/?ses=2b135aa81b1a7d6b5e1b3017875dec7fIncludes discussion of IRI in Haiti and Venezuela
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