After Tanden’s thinktank got millions from UAE, it went easy on Yemen slaughter and MBS

Neera Tanden’s nomination for a post in Joe Biden’s Cabinet is in trouble — and part of her problem is the financial ties between the liberal think tank she ran and the United Arab Emirates, the undemocratic Gulf oil sheikdom. 

Tanden has headed the influential Center for American Progress for the past 9 years. The Washington Post, to its great credit, scoured the CAP’s donor list — and found worrying links to powerful U.S. financial firms, like Bain Capital, Blackstone and Evercore. CAP also got donations from Walmart, and the defense contractor Northrup Grumman. The Post didn’t even get to the UAE connection until Paragraph 23 of its exposé, explaining that the sheikhdom gave between $1.5 million and $3 million in recent years. So far, Tanden is hiding from the paper’s reporters who sought her response.

The UAE link looks very bad, because the Post article suggested that Tanden’s organization may have not criticized the UAE and the sheikhdom’s close ally, Saudi Arabia, because of the gift. The Intercept had already sharply raised doubts, in January 2019, charging that CAP had 

fired two staffers suspected of being involved in leaking an email exchange that staffers thought reflected improper influence by the United Arab Emirates within the think tank. . .

The Washington Post provided several pieces of evidence that the UAE financial link may have corrupted Tanden’s organization:

After Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi’s 2018 murder at the hands of Saudi officials, CAP put out a statement denouncing the “heinous and reprehensible act” but stopped short of demanding specific consequences to punish the kingdom. The think tank also declined to go to bat for a bipartisan resolution in the Senate aimed at ending U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen.

A Saudi/UAE aerial onslaught against Yemen’s de facto government has killed tens of thousands of civilians and triggered an awful cholera epidemic.

The Post also pointed to an unsigned June 2017 essay at the CAP’s website that praised the rise of Muhammed bin Salman as the Saudi crown prince, contending his promotion would lead to “a long era of stability at the top” and “economic and social reforms.”

The Post then quotes Ben Freeman, who monitors foreign influence at another think tank, the Center for International Policy:

That reads like something that would be distributed by a Saudi foreign agent. . . Thousands of civilians had already been killed in Yemen, and we knew that MBS [the Crown Prince] was the architect of that war. It’s hard for me to understand how CAP could support someone so repressive and a regime with absolutely egregious human rights issues.

Why would a liberal think tank take money from the United Arab Emirates? It’s true that Dubai, the UAE’s best known city, is regarded as a harmless pleasure dome, in the words of the Lonely Planet guide “a sci-fi-esque city of iconic skyscrapers, palm-shaped islands, city-sized malls, indoor ski slopes and palatial beach resorts.”

The latest Human Rights Watch Annual Report tells a different story: UAE’s rulers “showed no tolerance for any manner of peaceful dissent,” and the report cited “Ahmed Mansoor, an award-winning human rights activist sentenced to 10-years in prison solely for exercising his right to free expression. . . “

The HRW report also pointed out that 80 percent of the UAE’s population are foreign nationals, who do most of the work and are “acutely vulnerable to forced labor” and other abuses.

This site has already criticized Neera Tanden several times “because she has been such a good functionary for Israel inside the Democratic Party leadership.” Her pro-Israel views didn’t jeopardize her high-level appointment. These latest revelations will.

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