"I'm going to interrupt you..."
Via TheGrayZone: Damon Wilson, the head of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), was interrupted by a member of Congress during a House oversight hearing on Tuesday after revealing that his agency "began supporting the deployment [and] operation of about 200 Starlinks early on" amid the violence which swept through Iran last month.
Before
he could finish the sentence, he was cut off by the ranking member of
the House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related
Programs, Rep. Lois Frankel, who told Wilson: "You know what, I’m going to interrupt you – we’d better not talk about it."
Wilson’s
comments had been prompted by a question from Frankel, who requested
details of what appears to be a new and apparently secret initiative by
the State Department to provide Starlink terminals to Iranians.
Wilson appeared to take credit for both the recent unrest and Iran and subsequent media framing of the chaos. "What we're seeing today, the Endowment has been making investments over years
that have ensured that there have been secure communications, including
Starlinks… that allowed information to go both in and out of the
country," he stated.
According to the New York Times,
the Elon Musk-produced internet systems had been smuggled into the
country by a "ragtag network of activists, developers and engineers
[who] pierced Iran’s digital barricades." It is clear now that the NED was at least partly responsible for funding and coordinating that network.