More Evidence the Obama White House Deliberately Deceived on the Iran Deal Ben Rhodes formally joins the Ploughshares Fund.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/more-evidence-the-obama-white-house-deliberately-deceived-on-the-iran-deal/article/2011592
There was an interesting announcement on Wednesday for Ben Rhodes, formerly the Obama White House deputy national security adviser. Rhodes, you may recall, caught some flack at the end of Obama’s presidency for admitting to the New York Times that he was manipulating the media in his efforts to sell the Iran Deal: “We created an echo chamber,” [Rhodes] admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
On Wednesday it was announced that Rhodes is joining the board of directors of the Ploughshares Fund:
If you know anything about the Ploughshares Fund, and their role in selling the Iran Deal, having Rhodes on their board is a good fit:
In March 2015, Joe Cirincione, president of a foundation called the Ploughshares Fund, was interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered about the impending nuclear deal with Iran. “President Obama’s political opponents try to block everything he does,” he said. “But I think the center of the American security establishment is solidly behind the deal as it’s been outlined.” The interview was headlined on NPR’s website, “Nuclear Experts Remain Optimistic About Iranian Negotiations.”
Now that the Iranian deal has been finalized, so many discomfiting facts about the campaign to push it through a reluctant Congress have emerged that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. The latest revelations, however, are especially startling. On May 20, the Associated Press reported that Cirincione’s Ploughshares Fund apparently bought and paid for this favorable NPR coverage, giving the news outlet $100,000 last year and $700,000 in grants over a decade. Ploughshares also gave money to the Center for Public Integrity, which supports the influential nonprofit news outlet ProPublica, along with left-leaning publications such as Mother Jones and the Nation to beef-up their Iran coverage.
Ploughshares carefully tracked how much influence they were buying and produced a “Cultural Strategy Report.” They also paid for a Columbia professor to maintain a listserv to sustain and promote these “newly minted experts” on the Iran Deal. And Ploughshares efforts didn’t stop at generating positive press for the Iran Deal, they publicly attacked mainstream press outlets that did critical reporting on the deal, such as the AP and the New York Times.
There’s been one other revelation about Rhodes in recent weeks that’s worth noting:
Any consideration of Obama’s priorities in the Middle East has to address the most contested part of his legacy, the still unfolding crisis in Syria. Many critics, including former members of his administration, have charged that Obama’s reluctance to intervene to a greater extent in Syria was motivated in part by the desire to achieve the nuclear agreement with Bashar al-Assad’s patron, Iran. In the new documentary, The Final Year, which follows Obama’s foreign policy team throughout 2016, adviser Ben Rhodes essentially legitimizes this claim by defending Obama’s hands-off policy in part by saying that if the U.S. had intervened more forcefully in Syria, it would have dominated Obama’s second term and the JCPOA [Iran Deal] would have been impossible to achieve. Rhodes may be right, but it’s less and less clear as time goes on that this was the right trade-off.
Credible estimates put the death toll in the Syrian civil war at over 400,000. You would think that this might make Rhodes blanche. But then again, his entire career has been a series of trade-offs.
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