[R-G] Agent Ménard resigns from RSF

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2008/octubre/vier17/41menard-ing.html

Agent Ménard resigns from RSF

Jean-Guy Allard

WHILE his organization Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) finds itself  
under the looking glass of the Government Accountability Office (GAO)  
in Washington for being one of the principal beneficiaries of the  
Center for a Free Cuba, currently implicated in a massive embezzlement  
case, Robert Ménard has announced in Paris that he is leaving his post  
as general secretary because he "wants to do something else."

"I’m going to find another way of continuing the fight I have been  
waging for human rights," states Ménard in an overindulgent cable from  
AFP. The devoted collaborator with U.S. intelligence added that he  
wanted to leave "once the campaign on China was over" – a reference to  
the attacks on the Beijing Olympics on the part of the Taiwanese  
government in the last few months.

Ménard is leaving his post just a few weeks after U.S. Congress  
ordered the Agency for International Development (USAID) "to freeze"  
the funds of the Center for a Free Cuba, a creation of Freedom House  
and managed by CIA Agent Frank Calzón. This situation will be  
maintained until an extensive audit has been made on the operations of  
its Cuba Program.

This year, USAID has a budget of $45 million for engaging in its  
propaganda and espionage work through a network of alleged NGOs, all  
linked in one way or another to the anti-Cuba mechanism of the U.S.  
special services.

Since the publication of the Bush Plan to Annex Cuba in 2004, RSF – 
identified in the document – has had no option than to acknowledge its  
collaboration with the State Department and its hefty remuneration not  
just through Calzón’s apparatus, but also through the National  
Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International Republican  
Institute (IRI).

It is worth noting that, during the last few years, Jean-François  
Julliard, the new RSF chief appointed by Ménard himself, has devoted  
himself to producing open letters and scandalous statements denying  
such links between the Parisian group and the U.S. governmental funds  
placed at the disposition of CIA operations.

THE FRENCH PRESS DOESN’T MENTION THIS

The USAID embezzlement scandal provoked the resignation of Mafioso  
Adolfo Franco, head of the organization for the Latin American region,  
and also Felipe Sixto, right-hand man to the chief of the Center for a  
Free Cuba, who confessed to having diverted half a million dollars.

As it happens, not long ago Ménard also lost his right-hand man of  
many years – Régis Bourgeat – who handled the RSF’s anti-Cuba  
operations in a very particular way, to the point of accompanying his  
master in Miami during the course of a visit to the ringleaders of the  
anti-Cuba mafia.

In the case of Calzón, the audit being carried undertaken by the GAO  
and also by the very same auditors legally assigned to USAID, could  
blow up into a major scandal, in which RSF would have to reveal its  
secret funding, for which Ménard used a number of accountants and a  
secret account in a bank in Virginia, coincidentally just a few  
minutes away from CIA headquarters.

If, in the end, Julliard and his boss should be forced to admit the  
illegal deposits they received in 2006 from the U.S. state through the  
Center for a Free Cuba and the IRI, they have not yet mentioned their  
connection with Freedom House, another secret mechanism for  
circulating economic aid to the empire’s collaborators.

Freedom House is technically a private organization, although it  
receives 75% of its budget from the State Department and just 25% from  
other contributions.

This organization announces in its reports that it distributes its  
funds to "journalists, human rights activists and other associations."  
RSF fits perfectly into that category.