The Obama administration used the Ploughshares Fund to plow through Congress’s and the public’s perception of threats to our national security. It used this and other organizations to harrow its critics and to plant disinformation to undermine the security of the United States from within and without.
In 2015, it used the Ploughshares Fund that prides itself on supporting “ the smartest minds and most effective organizations to reduce nuclear stockpiles, prevent new nuclear states, and increase global security,” to pay off useful idiots in the press and NGOs to advocate the “White House Narratives on the Iran Nuclear Deal,” and to undermine Israel’s opposition. Its board chairperson Mary Lloyd Estrie boasted in its 2015 annual report that $7,322,110 in grants paid for “the absolutely critical role that civil society played in tipping the scales towards this extraordinary policy victory.”
Creating this “echo chamber,” as Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes boasted to the New York Times Magazine, helped the White House to achieve this national and international deception. In 2015, to silence Israeli opposition, Ploughshares Fund gave the pro-Palestinian J-Street, $576,500, and more than $281,000 to the National Iranian American Council to promote the deal.
Other recipients of grants to publish analysis and briefings supporting the Obama deal with Iran, include the Arms Control Association $282,500; the Brookings Institution, $225,000; and the Atlantic Council, $182,500. Princeton University got $70,000 to support former Iranian ambassador and nuclear spokesman Seyed Hossein Mousavian’s “analysis, publications and policymaker engagement on the range of elements involved with the negotiated settlement of Iran’s nuclear program. The ‘Gulf 2000 Project’, Columbia University received $75,000,” To support analysis, reporting and other efforts to inform the debate about Iran’s nuclear program and international diplomatic approaches to verifiably prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.” The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies ($50,000).