Friday, March 04, 2011

Harvard Professors Raked in Millions from Khadafy

It was all about bringing change to Libya or something like that.

According to an excellent story by Farah Stockman in today's Globe, Monitor Group, a Cambridge-based consulting formed founded by Harvard professors, "received $250,000 a month from the Libyan government from 2006 to 2008 for a wide range of services, including writing the book proposal, bringing prominent academics to Libya to meet Khadafy 'to enhance international appreciation of Libya' and trying to generate positive news coverage of the country."

Obviously, given what is happening in Libya now and the increasingly deranged Khadafy's willingness to brutalize his own people to stay in power, people aren't looking too kindly on Monitor Group's Libya connection. It's worth remembering, however, that Monitor Group wasn't alone, and that it wasn't the only institution to have cashed in on the perception that Khadafy was softening in recent years.

So hey, they weren't the only ones. Swell.
Monitor Group, for its part, issued a statement arguing that, in Stockman's words, "the firm’s main effort was designed to help Khadafy’s dictatorship bring about change." If so, then the relationship between the firm and Khadafy would have amounted to a historic moment, the first time in history a despot paid huge sums to an outside group to help him reduce his grip on power.

5 comments:

Jim said...

If so, then the relationship between the firm and Khadafy would have amounted to a historic moment, the first time in history a despot paid huge sums to an outside group to help him reduce his grip on power.

Ha! How about the first time in history that a despot actually had to pay some money to bamboozle a bunch of naive American leftists.

cbinflux said...

And NBC honored Gadhafi's BFF, Lionel Richie tonight. Terrorist sympathizers all!

Nooyawka said...

Question for you lawyer types: In what kinds of cases will this connection require Justice Kagan to recuse herself from? She was, after all, an administrator of that institution.

Mandingo said...

Whores.

jgreene said...

These Harvard scuts did it for the money.  This very amusing.  Why would anyone believe their bullshit?