Frank Wisner in Cairo -- The Empire's Bagman

[Octafish]

Factual reporting, coupled with excellent analysis about the current situation:

Frank Wisner in Cairo

The Empire's Bagman

By VIJAY PRASHAD
CounterPunch
February 2, 2011

From inside the bowels of Washington's power elite, Frank Wisner emerges, briefcase in hand. He has met the President, but he is not his envoy. He represents the United States, but is not the Ambassador. What is in his briefcase is his experience: it includes his long career as bagman of Empire, and as bucket-boy for Capital. Pulling himself away from the Georgetown cocktail parties and the Langley Power-point briefings, Wisner finds his way to the Heliopolis cocktail parties and to the hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya. Mubarak (age 82) greets Wisner (age 72), as these elders confer on the way forward for a country whose majority is under thirty.

SNIP...

Wisner has a long lineage in the CIA family. His father, Frank Sr., helped overthrow Arbenz of Guatemala (1954) and Mossadeq of Iran (1953), before he was undone in mysterious circumstances in 1965. Frank Jr. is well known around Langley, with a career in the Defense and State Departments along with ambassadorial service in Egypt, the Philippines, and then India. In each of these places Wisner insinuated himself into the social and military branches of the power elite. He became their spokesperson. Wisner and Mubarak became close friends when he was in country (1986-1991), and many credit this friendship (and military aid) with Egypt's support of the US in the 1991 Gulf War. Not once did the US provide a criticism of Egypt's human rights record. As Human Rights Watch put it, the George H. W. Bush regime "refrained from any public expression of concern about human rights violations in Egypt." Instead, military aid increased, and the torture system continued. The moral turpitude (bad guys, aka the Muslim Brotherhood and democracy advocates need to be tortured) and the torture apparatus set up the system for the regime followed by Bush's son, George W. after 911, with the extraordinary rendition programs to these very Egyptian prisons. Wisner might be considered the architect of the framework for this policy.

Wisner remained loyal to Mubarak. In 2005, he celebrated the Egyptian (s)election (Mubarak "won" with 88.6% of the vote). It was a "historic day" he said, and went further, "There were no instances of repression; there wasn't heavy police presence on the streets. The atmosphere was not one of police intimidation." This is quite the opposite of what came out from election observers, human rights organizations and bloggers such as Karee Suleiman and Hossam el-Hamalawy. The Democratic and Republican ghouls came together in the James Baker Institute's working group on the Middle East. Wisner joined the Baker Institute's head Edward Djerejian and others to produce a report in 2003 that offers us a tasty statement, "Achieving security and stability in the Middle East will be made more difficult by the fact that short-term necessities will seem to contradict long-term goals." If the long-term goal is Democracy, then that is all very well because it has to be sacrificed to the short-term, namely support for the kind of Pharonic State embodied by Mubarak. Nothing more is on offer. No wonder that a "Washington Middle East hand" told The Cable, " the exact wrong person to send. He is an apologist for Mubarak." But this is a wrong view. Wisner is just the exact person to send to protect the short-term, and so only-term, interests of Washington. The long-term has been set aside.

I first wrote about Wisner in 1997 when he joined the board of directors of Enron Corporation. Where Wisner had been, to Manila and New Delhi, Enron followed. As one of his staffers said, "if anybody asked the CIA to help promote US business in India, it was probably Frank." Without the CIA and the muscle of the US government, it is unlikely that the Subic Bay power station deal or the Dabhol deal would have gone to Enron. Here Wisner followed James Baker, who was hired by Enron to help it gain access to the Shuaiba power plant in Kuwait. Nor is he different from Holbrooke, who was in the upper circle of Credit Suisse First Boston, Lehman Brothers, Perseus and the American International Group. They used the full power of the US state to push the private interests of their firms, and then made money for themselves. This is the close nexus of Capital and Empire, and Wisner is the hinge between them.

CONTINUED...

http://counterpunch.org/prashad02022011.html

Who really laughs?

[Octafish]

1. Kick for ENRON and Capitalism's Invisible Army

...On 28 October 1997, Enron Corporation announced the entry of Frank G. Wisner Jr. onto its board of directors. Most of the business press did not find this untoward and it certainly did not emerge as part of the US discussions on corruption at the highest level. Frank Wisner, as we know in India, was the US Ambassador from 1994 until this year and his entry into Enron must be seen in light of the scandal of Dabhol. Enron, like most US corporations, uses its close association with the state (both its elected and bureaucratic arms) for its own ends. US campaigns are financed by corporations whose money not only enables politicians to win elections, but it also buys businesses the state's power both for domestic subsidies and for the use of US power in the international arena...

SOURCE: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Frank_Wisner

These fellahs save time, mixing personal and national business.

[robertpaulsen]

2. K & R!

:kick:

[leftstreet]

3. K&R

Good read, thanks for posting this

[lonestarnot]

8. I love that poster!

[bobbolink]

12. Me, too. I want one!

[seafan]

4. The tentacles of Empire stretch far and wide.

From Pepe Escobar at the Asia Times in this entry.

Obama's "messenger" in the latest Mubarak pantomime was Frank Wisner, a former diplomat and former AIG executive very close to the Mubarak system oligarchy, and whose brother Graham has represented their extensive business interests. Wisner has lately been a de facto lobbyist for the Mubarak regime among Middle East experts in Washington - unlike, for instance, the bipartisan Egypt Working Group led by former National Security Council member Elliott Abrams and Michele Dunne from the Carnegie Endowment. Without a mere hint of irony, the US State Department had announced that Wisner would press the Mubarak system to "embrace broad economic and political changes" - the same ones never embraced over the past three decades.

Thanks for your fine work, Octafish:

Frank Wisner in Cairo -- The Empire's Bagman

[starroute]

6. I wonder if Graham Wisner was named after Phil Graham?

It looks like Graham Wisner was born about 1950, so it seems possible. Funny how these things work.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm

In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."

Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic American media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis (Katharine the Great): "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."

In 1951 Allen W. Dulles persuaded Cord Meyer to join the CIA. However, there is evidence that he was recruited several years earlier and had been spying on the liberal organizations he had been a member of in the later 1940s. According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became Mockingbird's "principal operative".

One of the most important journalists under the control of Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), C. D. Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (Miami News), Herb Gold (Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman) these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by Frank Wisner. The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.

[seafan]

7. VERY interesting information.

Frank Wisner's brother Graham Wisner being named after Philip Graham, who ran Operation Mockingbird?

You could be on to something, starroute.


Funny, how the same names do crop up in the offspring of this cabal.


Reminds me of another one...

Prescott convinced his partners at the banking house of Brown Brothers Harriman –among them Averell Harriman, a fellow Skull and Bones member-- to wave the firm’s nepotism rule so George could work there. Uncle George Herbert Walker, Jr. offered him a job at G.H. Walker and Co., the private Wall Street banking firm founded by his father, Bush’s maternal grandfather.

Instead of taking those two prospects, George opted for a third family tie. He met with Henry Neil Mallon, the president of Dresser Industries. Mallon offered George his first job at Dresser subsidiary International Derrick and Equipment Company (Ideco), in Odessa, Texas. Brown Brothers Harriman had underwritten Dresser’s transition from a private company to a publicly traded one. Years later, George named a son after Mallon.

That would be one Neil Mallon Bush.


More and more, the importance of de-infesting our media is taking center stage.

[hootinholler]

5. Re the Cow:

Haven't you heard? Belguim doesn't exist.
:rofl:

The Christians are doing damage control? Evacuating Prisoners? Burning files? The other activities of a compromised operation I imagine are in full swing. Or perhaps since the bagboy was sent then operation posterior obscura must be complete or nearly so.

-Hoot

[snagglepuss]

9. Wisner was on Enron's B of Ds. Talk about being embedded in the power structure.

"This is the close nexus of Capital and Empire, and Wisner is the hinge between them."

Kicking . Thanks for posting.

[defendandprotect]

10. K/R - thank you!

[mmonk]

11. Thanks Octafish.

[EFerrari]

13. Kefaya!

Enough already.

[defendandprotect]

14. k/r

[chimpymustgo]

15. Too late to rec, but will kick for MUST READ exposure.

[Kurovski]

16. Kick. Thanks, Mr. O. (nt)