AP TELEVISION
Washington - 10 April, 2014
1. Wide of hearing hall from far end
POOL
Washington - 10 April, 2014
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Chairman Robert Menendez, D-New Jersey:
"I think it is dumb, dumb, and even dumber to go ahead and suggest that there can be freedom and we should seek freedom of international access and freedom of expression globally but that somehow the people of Cuba don't deserve the same freedom."
3. Wide of people talking in the hall
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Senator Marco Rubio, R-Florida:
"The other argument I've heard is that this is a covert program but in fact this program was reviewed by the general accounting office right."
VOICE UP Rajiv Shah, USAID administrator; "Correct"
"And they made no suggestions for changes. They had no criticisms of how the money was being administered.
SOUNBITE (English) Rajiv Shah, USAID administrator:
"They actually complimented USAID on improvement management oversight of the program.
SOUNDBITE (English) Senator Marco Rubio, R-Florida:
"There was no intelligence program, there was no spying on the Cuban government used in this program"
VOICE UP Rajiv Shah, USAID administrator; "no"
AP TELEVISION
Washington - 10 April, 2014
5. Close of Shah listening
POOL
Washington - 10 April, 2014
6. SOUNBITE (English) Rajiv Shah, USAID president:
"USAID programs are as of notified designed to promote open accessed information, facilitate communication. Any programs that have further purposes are not implemented by USAID but rather by other parts of the state department or the national endowment for democracy."
AP TELEVISION
Washington - 10 April, 2014
7. Close of Senator Jeff Flake
POOL
Washington - 10 April, 2014
8. SOUNBITE (English) Senator Jeff Flake, R-Arizona:
"specifically with this one I do have issues. Not with the fact that we have programs like this going but the fact that they're conducted by USAID."
9. Wide of of people leaving hearing
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked the U.S. Agency for International Development on Thursday to turn over all its records about the Obama administration's Twitter-like social media program it secretly built in Cuba.
The request included all copies of any messages that the U.S. government or its contractors transmitted to subscribers in Cuba, who never were told about Washington's role in the primitive, text message-based network that was meant to undermine Cuba's communist government.
Congressional hearings this week scrutinized the Obama administration's social media program, known as ZunZuneo when it publicly launched in 2010, and whether USAID should be running such an intelligence-like operation instead of spy outfits like the CIA.
"USAID programs are as of notified designed to promote open accessed information, facilitate communication," said Rajiv Shah, USAID administrator. "Any programs that have further purposes are not implemented by USAID but rather by other parts of the state department or the national endowment for democracy."
Menendez, who made the request without a committee vote, said the review will consider whether USAID's pro-democracy programs in Cuba were consistent with those run in other foreign countries, and whether USAID should operate what it has since acknowledged was a "discreet" program.
Menendez said earlier Thursday that USAID's Cuban program was not "in any way a cockamamie idea." His comments took direct aim at Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who earlier this week criticized the USAID program in similar terms _ marking a rare departure from the Senate's staid tradition of decorum among lawmakers.
"It is dumb, dumb and even dumber to go ahead and suggest that there can be freedom, and we should seek Internet freedom globally, but somehow the people of Cuba don't deserve the same freedom," Menendez said. Leahy last week called the secret program "dumb, dumb, dumb."
