Gathering Information about McCain's foreign advisor Randy Scheunemann
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Education and early career Scheunemann attended public school in
Burnsville,
Minnesota: Sioux Trail Elementary (1966-1972), John Metcalf Junior High School (1972-1975) and finally
Burnsville High School (1975-1978) from which he graduated in 1978.
Scheunemann has a degree from the
University of Minnesota, and did graduate work at
Tufts University. He moved to Capitol Hill in 1986, working in the office of Republican Senator
Dave Durenberger. In 1993, he moved onto the staff of Republican Senator
Bob Dole, as a foreign policy advisor. He left Dole's staff to work for Republican Senate Majority Leader
Trent Lott.
[1]
LobbyistWhile the foreign affairs advisor to Republican presidential candidate
John McCain, Scheunemann was also a registered foreign agent (lobbyist) for the
Republic of Georgia[5] [6]
On April 17, 2008, McCain spoke on the phone with Georgia President
Mikheil Saakashvili about the situation in
South Ossetia and
Abkhazia, two troubled provices that are considered part of Georgia but have been de facto independent since 1990. That same day, McCain issued a public statement condemning Russia and expressing strong support for the Georgian position. Also on that same day, Georgia signed a new, $200,000 lobbying contract with Scheunemann's firm, Orion Strategies. Scheunemann remained with Orion Strategies until May 15, when the McCain campaign imposed an anti-lobbyist policy and he was required to separate himself from the company.
[7]
In mid-July 2008,
The Sunday Times linked Scheunemann to
Stephen Payne, a lobbyist covertly filmed as he discussed a lobbying contract and offered to arrange meetings with Vice President
Dick Cheney, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, and others, and recomended donations to the
George W. Bush Presidential Library. Payne said Scheunemann had been "working with me on my payroll for five of the last eight years."
[8]
And consider this excerpt from a piece just published in the Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080929/ames
"The issue of "conflict of interest" takes on a new and apocalyptic meaning when you consider the role of energy giant BP in all of this. Palin's husband has spent most of his adult life, eighteen years, working for BP. The company is even more important to his wife, as BP owns Alaska's (and America's) largest gas and oil fields. BP hates Russia at least as much as their tools Palin and McCain: the company has been locked in a nasty battle over its 50 percent stake in Russian energy giant TNK--BP's stake in that company is key to BP's stock price. If BP loses TNK to Putin's goons, then billions could be wiped off the stock price. That's something to go to war for.
Meantime, BP all but controls Georgia thanks to the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, in which BP is the largest stakeholder. As Manana Kochladze explained, the pipeline was supposed to bring in huge benefits to average Georgians, raising the country out of its dire economic straits. Instead, "very little if any of those revenues have gone to social programs or environmental protection. Instead, the military budget has massively increased to 25 percent of the state budget. The BP pipeline has militarized the country."
One provision of Georgia's agreement to allow the BTC pipeline to pass through its territory was that Georgia is obligated to protect and secure the pipeline--which, Georgians allege, was bombed by Russian pilots during the August conflict.
"From the beginning, we said that Georgia would pay more defending this pipeline than we've received, and now look at our situation," Kochladze lamented.
Another figure tied to BP is, surprise surprise, Randy Scheunemann. He earned handsome fees lobbying for BP in 1999-2000, during McCain's first run for President. More recently, Scheunemann lobbied for the Caspian Alliance, which represents one of the oil majors that pumps oil into BP's pipeline.
From BP's perspective, things look very grim. It's in danger of losing its largest source of booked reserves via its stake in Russia's TNK. And now with the war, investors are worried about the BTC pipeline.....No wonder Big Oil is
throwing its weight behind the McCain-Palin ticket."
Georgia is described as being a democracy we need to protect and defend.
Here is an excerpt from this same article that paints a slightly different version of this supposed great democracy:
The false spin on Saakashvili (President of Georgia) as the Jefferson of the Caucasus has driven the hysterical talk of going to war with Russia. Maintaining this false image of Saakashvili has also been key to McCain's candidacy, given McCain's tight relationship with the controversial Georgian strongman.
Jefferson he is not. A former senior US diplomat who served in the former Soviet Union and the Balkans told me, "What Saakashvili has done since coming to power--controlling the television media, rigging elections, attacking opposition protesters and driving his opponents out of the country and now launching a war against an ethnic minority--I've seen this before. Saakashvili is just another Milosevic. He's the kind of guy who will do anything to stay in power for life." It's not like Saakashvili's authoritarian credentials are the world's biggest secret. Freedom House this year downgraded Georgia's freedom rating to the lower end of the "partly free" category, placing it on par with such beacons of democracy as Venezuela--yes, that's right, Hugo Chávez's Venezuela--and Guinea Bissau.
Georgia's
freedom index dropped below even such basketcases as Sierra Leone and Papau New Guinea, where nearly a third of the registered voters for last year's heavily-criticized elections were found to have been long deceased. What's more, Georgia's slide towards authoritarianism has only gotten worse, as Freedom House reports:
- Georgia's political rights rating declined from 3 to 4 due to the restrictions placed on political opposition following the November 2007 emergency declaration, and the civil liberties rating declined from 3 to 4 due to the circumscription of media and expression in the aftermath of the November protests.
- Georgians took to the streets to oppose President Mikheil Saakashvili in October and November 2007, turning out in the largest numbers since the 2003 "Rose Revolution," which swept Saakashvili to power. The authorities violently dispersed the demonstrators, causing hundreds of injuries, and imposed a state of emergency on November 7. The next day, Saakashvili called a snap presidential election for January 5, 2008. The state of emergency, which remained in place until November 16, banned all news broadcasts except state-controlled television and restricted public assembly. Also in 2007, former defense minister Irakli Okruashvili, a onetime Saakashvili ally who subsequently emerged as a principal political rival, was charged with corruption, jailed, and then quickly released.
That report came out a few months ago. Since then, things have deteriorated even further. The OSCE's election monitoring arm just released a damning report about May's parliamentary elections. As Reuters
reported last week:
- Ballot-box stuffing, beatings of opposition activists, biased news coverage and government officials campaigning for President Mikheil Saakashvili's party tainted Georgia's parliamentary elections this year, Europe's main election watchdog said on Tuesday.
And yet McCain, whose top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, was paid nearly one million dollars by Saakashvili to lobby his interests, described Georgia last month as a "
tiny little democracy." Saakashvili, meanwhile, bragged that he speaks to McCain "several times a day." One wonders, what do they speak about? Do they avoid touchy issues like the recent Reporters Without Borders
report denouncing Saakashvili for stomping on the media and restricting access to the internet?
Almost all of the Georgian TV stations support President Mikhail Saakashvili and the only opposition station, Kavkasia, is having difficulty broadcasting. "
Do Your Job: Stop Ignoring Scheunemann's Past
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/203960.php
07.14.08 -- 1:03PM
By
Josh Marshall
As you can see, the McCain campaign is moving ahead with a new stab-in-the-back style attack on Obama over Iraq. But as Team McCain is raising the volume on these slash-and-burn style attacks, it's time for some coverage of the guy who's McCain's brain on Iraq. Remember, McCain's pitch on Iraq is that he was a critic of Bush, not a supporter, on the poor decisions and lies that got us into the current mess. In the McCain paradigm, he starts fresh with the 'surge'. That's where he takes ownership, as it were, of Iraq.
But look who's advising him on Iraq, who's crafting Iraq policy. That would be Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top foreign policy advisor. And he's the guy who today
accused Barack Obama of wanting to lead America to defeat in Iraq for political gain.
Scheunemann was a core participant in the lobbying, plotting and organized campaigns of deception that led America to war in Iraq. He was a close collaborator with Ahmad Chalabi through the 1990s. He helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act, which created the new funding stream for Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. At the start of the Bush administration he signed on as Don Rumsfeld's 'consultant' on Iraq at the Pentagon. And then when the administration started cranking up the machinery for the propaganda campaign in favor of war he went back on the outside to form and lead the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, to lead the press and lobbying campaign to make sure the war got started on schedule.
Remember, US intelligence later found evidence that Chalabi, in addition to foisting a bunch of bogus intelligence and lying informers on the US and pocketing a lot of US taxpayer dollars, had provided highly classified US intelligence to Iran. Scheunemann worked closely with Chalabi for years in his efforts to get the US into war with Iraq. He was also a go-between between Chalabi and McCain. Now that he's taking such a high-profile role on the Iraq issue in the 2008, Scheunemann's history with Chalabi and the use of bogus intelligence to get the nation into war is unquestionably highly newsworthy.
