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Comment by biesnecker | Hacker News Reader

This is such a bizarre story. It doesn't even seem like it was "the US" as much as it was an overeager and undersupervised team within USAID. It's sad, too, because USAID does good work in a lot of places around the world, and that works is undermined if (rightly or wrongly; seemingly rightly in this case) host governments think that USAID is an arm of the US intelligence community.

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USAID is an arm of the US intelligence community. Every US embassy has a CIA Chief of Station. That most USAID employees and cobtractors are sincere and not officially or knowingly spies does not mean that they can really be trusted. They're agents of a foreign power and they're in your country to further its hegemony.

Remember how they found bin Laden? If they'll use a vaccination programme as a front to spy they're not going to take the "independence" or "mission" of USAID seriously.

I never heard of a work of USAID that does not involve US trying to enforce his vision of politics in the country. Could you please illuminate me?

Yeah, all that crazy freedom and democracy.

Can't work out whether you are being sarcastic or not, but the notion of a free country exporting freedom and democracy is a novel one. A quick survey of history will tell you that a country A being democratic does not necessarily mean it will support countries to follow suit. Think England back in the late 1800s: Very liberal by anyone's standards at that time, but follows horrendous policies overseas.

I agree it may be a modern idea, but I don't think you can really judge current policies on those of countries from 200 years ago.

Yeah, let's force freedom and democracy down people's throat. It didn't work so well in Irak but I'm sure the next one is going to be a success ! Everyone who doesn't think like us is wrong and needs to be set on the right path anyways.

Iraq and Afghanistan are better off than they were before.

Really? Iraq lost 4% (1.45M) of it's population due to the 2003 invasion. What did the Iraqi people get in return for these 500 9/11's?

For better or worse, U.S. foreign aid and assistance are instruments of U.S. foreign policy. Just look at the list of countries and how much they receive. It's not exactly correlated to the amount of poverty and hunger among recipient countries.

"instrument of US foreign policy" != "arm of the US intelligence services"

Here's how I see it. As the government of the US relies on information mostly from US intelligence services when figuring out foreign policy, US intelligence services have a large influence on US foreign policy, and by extension it also has a substantial influence on the instruments used to implement such a policy.

What in this article associates USAID with the intel community? The fact that they both use technology?

Nothing in the article, but they have had a close association in the past. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Public_Safety

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