THE WAY THE GAME IS PLAYED – AT 9:52 P.M. ET:  If this story revolts you, it should.  Apparently our good buddy Moammar Khadafy was writing some checks sometime back, and letting a U.S. firm handle the details on how the money was spent.  This is not a pretty picture.  From the Boston Globe.  The "Cambridge" referred to is Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

WASHINGTON - Monitor Group, a Cambridge-based consulting firm, released new details yesterday of its payments to a raft of intellectuals and public figures who visited Libya between 2006 and 2008 during a stealth public-relations campaign to bolster the image of Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy.

The documents, filed yesterday at the Foreign Agents Registration Unit, show that Harvard professor Joseph Nye, who took a four-day visit to Libya in 2007, was paid $27,500, while Francis Fukuyama, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, was paid $80,000 for two visits he took in 2006 and 2007.

A lot of cash just for saying hello.

Others were paid far more. British journalist David Frost, best known for his interviews of Richard Nixon, was paid $91,429 in connection with what appears to be a single visit to Libya. Benjamin Barber, who wrote a landmark book, “Strong Democracy,’’ and who served on the board of a nonprofit run by Khadafy’s son Saif, received just over $100,000 during those years. British sociologist Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, was paid more than $67,000.

Many of the payments appear to relate to a highly-publicized debate on democracy between Giddens, Barber, and Khadafy hosted by Frost in Libya in 2007.

The documents, which represent the culmination of a three-month internal investigation by Monitor into its own activities in Libya, were filed retroactively to comply with a federal law that requires firms that lobby or do public-relations work on behalf of a foreign government to submit public disclosures. The firm, which ended its work in Libya in 2008, had said it will no longer take on public-relations work, which is outside of its core area of expertise.

I'm sure they were shocked, shocked, at what they found.  I love these organizations that investigate themselves, then go into high self-righteous mode.

Of course, the excuses are now being peddled:

Yesterday, Nye said he had no problem with the public disclosure that Monitor paid him his usual business consulting fee of $25,000 - plus $2,500 for late payment - but that he felt misled by the firm about its secret public-relations agenda.

“I was told my visit was to help promote reform,’’ Nye wrote in an e-mail to the Globe yesterday. “The documents I was shown in preparation for my trip were plans to reform the Libyan economic and political system.’’

That may well be true.  But common sense should have told any knowledgeable person what kind of government was operating in Libya.  A lot of bigwigs visited Nazi Germany in the 1930s and assured us they were there just to marvel at the technological development.

Monitor’s work in Libya has sparked soul-searching at Harvard about what standards its professors should meet in their outside work. The firm was founded by a group of people linked to Harvard, including Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and Mark Fuller, who earned three degrees at Harvard and served as an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School and on Harvard’s major gifts steering committee.

There's a lot of soul-searching that should be going on in many universities about many things.  The list is too long for this entry.

July 6, 2011