Cameroon

==<a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/12/01/us-asylum-seekers-cameroon/">https://theintercept.com/2019/12/01/us-asylum-seekers-cameroon/</a>1219 <a class="Homepage-HomepageSubjectSecondaryNode-container" relay="[object Object]" href="https://theintercept.com/2019/12/01/us-asylum-seekers-cameroon/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(74, 59, 181); outline-color: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; margin-bottom: 40px; padding-top: 20px; position: relative; border-top: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); font-family: SwiftNeueLTW01, Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; display: inline !important;" /><div class="Homepage-HomepageSubjectSecondaryNode-textBlock" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: 16px; width: 247.266px; flex: 1 1 100%; display: inline !important;"><h4 class="Heading-heading Heading-light Homepage-HomepageSubjectSecondaryNode-heading" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: TIActuBeta-ExBold_web, Tahoma, sans-serif; line-height: 22px; color: rgb(102, 83, 255); margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 0px; font-size: 20px; display: inline !important;"><span class="elements-Eyebrow-eyebrow elements-Eyebrow-light PromoHeadline-eyebrow" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(74, 59, 181); outline-color: inherit; margin: 0px; padding-top: 20px; position: relative; border-top: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); font-family: SwiftNeueLTW01, Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.1; display: inline !important;"><a class="Homepage-HomepageSubjectSecondaryNode-container" relay="[object Object]" href="https://theintercept.com/2019/12/01/us-asylum-seekers-cameroon/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(74, 59, 181); outline-color: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; margin-bottom: 40px; padding-top: 20px; position: relative; border-top: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); display: inline !important;">War on Immigrants</a></h4></div><div><a class="Homepage-HomepageSubjectSecondaryNode-container" relay="[object Object]" href="https://theintercept.com/2019/12/01/us-asylum-seekers-cameroon/" style="font-family: SwiftNeueLTW01, Georgia, serif; font-size: 16px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(74, 59, 181); outline-color: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; margin-bottom: 40px; padding-top: 20px; position: relative; border-top: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); display: inline !important;">Cameroonian Asylum-Seekers at the Border Are Fleeing a U.S.-Backed Military Force</a></div>==harper's:

Although there are distinct limits to what they can achieve, lobbyists are the crucial conduit through which pariah regimes advance their interests in Washington. “It’s like the secret handshake that gets you into the lodge,” as one former lobbyist told me. Occasionally, firms will achieve spectacular successes for a client: one particularly remarkable piece of lobbyist image management, for example, occurred in the mid-1980s, when the firm of Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly helped refashion Jonas Savimbi, a murderous, demented Angolan rebel leader backed by the apartheid regime in South Africa, as a valiant anti-communist “freedom fighter.” Savimbi visited Washington on numerous occasions, where the lobby shop had him ferried about by limousine to meetings with top political leaders, conservative groups, and TV networks. Black, Manafort checked repeated threats by members of Congress to cut off aid to Savimbi’s rebel group, which was burning and raping its way through Angola with the help of American taxpayers.

Generally, though, lobbyists’ victories are more discreet. In 2004 six former members of Congress served as “election observers” in Cameroon and offered an upbeat assessment of President Paul Biya’s overwhelming reelection victory, which a local Roman Catholic cardinal described as “surrounded by fraud.” It turned out that the firm of Patton Boggs, which worked for the Cameroonian government, had arranged the trip of allegedly independent observers, whose expenses were paid by the Biya regime. Between 1999 and 2000, the Carmen Group received more than $1 million from the government of Kazakhstan to help “establish President [Nursultan] Nazarbayev as one of the foremost emerging leaders of the New World.” The lobby shop sent four writers—syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, Providence Journal associate editor Philip Terzian, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. of The American Spectator, and Scott Hogenson of the Conservative News Service—on all-expenses-paid trips to Kazakhstan, and upon their return all wrote stories, ranging from critical but sympathetic to slavishly fawning, which the Carmen Group circulated on Capitol Hill.11. The most notable entry in the latter category came from Tyrrell. Despite traveling to Kazakhstan soon after a presidential balloting that was widely condemned as rigged, he wrote that the country “has at least four highly competitive political parties . . . the freedoms of our Bill of Rights, and commendable tolerance.”