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Capital-driven Civil Society

Capital-driven Civil Society

john-d-rockefeller

Originally published on State of Nature, May 19, 2008.

Republished by Michael Barker with additional links.

by Michael Barker

“It is the more subtle support that democracy manipulators provide to progressive activist organizations that are the most important yet least understood part of their activities.”

According to, the once progressive, now neo-conservative commentator, David Horowitz, Professor Stephen Zunes is a member of a select group of leftist activists that he refers to as The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006). Horowitz is infamous for co-founding the Center for the Study of Popular Culture – which has been ominously renamed as the David Horowitz Freedom Center. More recently though, in 2005, this Center launched DiscoverTheNetworks, an online project that has been accurately referred to as “Horowitz’s Smear Portal”. The relevance of this background is found in the fact that I have also assessed Zunes’ connections to the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (where he chairs the board of academic advisors). While both I and Horowitz have criticised Zunes’ background and affiliations, needless to say Horowitz’s “Smear Portal” attacks Zunes for very different reasons than my own. [1] Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that DiscoverTheNetworks approach to investigating Zunes is very similar to my own, as it identifies the “individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it”. The crucial difference, between these two parallel analyses, however, is that I criticise the Left in an attempt to strengthen it by causing it to reflect on the elite manipulation and co-option of civil society, while DiscoverTheNetworks simply aims to undermine the Left. [2]

FLASHBACK | The Velvet Slipper And The Military-Peace Nonprofit Complex

The following excerpts are from the article The Velvet Slipper And The Military-Peace Nonprofit Complex written by Michael Barker. The article in its entirety can be read at Swans Commentary where it was published February 18, 2011.

The political clout of the military-peace nonprofit complex is growing apace, and too many people at home and abroad are in danger of being lulled and then crushed by an oligarchy capable of wearing both the velvet slipper and the iron heel. Such anti-democratic developments hold no surprises to opponents of the oligarchy, but apologists for the velvet slipper who seek to teach anti-democratic intelligence agencies about the power of nonviolent activism must be identified and excluded from further involvement with progressive social movements. A good example that springs to mind is Lester Kurtz, who — in addition to residing on the advisory board of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict — recently responded to an article that challenged the fact that he had given a lecture to the CIA, by “arguing”: “I spoke as an independent academic and in no way as a representative of the ICNC when my government asked me to dialogue with members of its intelligence community. I feel that it is my duty as a citizen to educate others…” and “was glad to give my modest input…” (17)

In his timeless novel The Iron Heel (1907), Jack London was all too aware of John D. Rockefeller and his plutocratic ilk’s desire to crush humanity “under the iron heel of a despotism as relentless and terrible as any despotism that has blackened the pages of the history of man.” Yet London recognized the other dangers that capital posed to an increasingly powerful revolutionary movement, as he warned how the oligarchy complemented their violence against organized labor by providing selective subsidies to conservative unions much as the Rockefeller Foundation went on to do in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. (1) But in 1907, when London first published his book, the art of capitalist philanthropy was not fine-tuned, and so if he were writing today, London might well have authored a second book titled The Velvet Slipper.

FLASHBACK: DEEPER DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE OF U.S. BACKED COLOR REVOLUTIONS

US Department of Imperial Expansion

March 6, 2011

Tony Cartalucci

Believe it or not, the US State Department’s mission statement actually says the following:

“Advance freedom for the benefit of the American people and the international community by helping to build and sustain a more democratic, secure, and prosperous world composed of well-governed states that respond to the needs of their people, reduce widespread poverty, and act responsibly within the international system.”

A far and treasonous cry from the original purpose of the State Department – which was to maintain communications and formal relations with foreign countries – and a radical departure from historical norms that have defined foreign ministries throughout the world, it could just as well now be called the “Department of Imperial Expansion.” Because indeed, that is its primary purpose now, the expansion of Anglo-American corporate hegemony worldwide under the guise of “democracy” and “human rights.” That a US government department should state its goal as to build a world of “well-governed states” within the “international system” betrays not only America’s sovereignty but the sovereignty of all nations entangled by this offensive mission statement and its execution.

The illegitimacy of the current US State Department fits in well with the overall Constitution-circumventing empire that the American Republic has degenerated into. The current Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, gives a daily affirmation of this illegitimacy every time she bellies up to the podium and further makes a mockery of America, its people and its destiny.

Recently she issued a dangerously irresponsible “warning” to Venezuela and Bolivia regarding their stately relations with Iran. While America has to right to mediate its own associations with foreign nations, one is confounded trying to understand what gives America the right to dictate such associations to other sovereign nations. Of course, the self-declared imperial mandate the US State Department bestowed upon itself brings such “warnings” into perspective with the realization that the globalists view no nation as sovereign and all nations beholden to their unipolar “international system.”

It’s hard to deny the US State Department is not behind the
“color revolutions” sweeping the world when the Secretary of
State herself phones in during the youth movement confabs
her department sponsors on a yearly basis.

If only the US State Department’s meddling was confined to feckless secretaries squawking behind podiums attempting to fulfill ridiculous mission statements, we could all rest easier. However, the US State Department actively bolsters its meddling rhetoric with very real measures. The centerpiece of this meddling is the vast and ever-expanding network being built to recruit, train, and support various “color revolutions” worldwide. While the corporate owned media attempts to portray the various revolutions consuming Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and now Northern Africa and the Middle East as indigenous, spontaneous, and organic, the reality is that these protesters represent what may be considered a “fifth-branch” of US power projection.

CANVAS: Freedom House, IRI, Soros funded Serbian color revolution
college behind the Orange, Rose, Tunisian, Burmese, and Egyptian protests
and has trained protesters from 50 other countries.

As with the army and CIA that fulfilled this role before, the US State Department’s “fifth-branch” runs a recruiting and coordinating center known as the Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM). Hardly a secretive operation, its website, Movements.org proudly lists the details of its annual summits which began in 2008 and featured astro-turf cannon fodder from Venezuela to Iran, and even the April 6 Youth Movement from Egypt. The summits, activities, and coordination AYM provides is but a nexus. Other training arms include the US created and funded CANVAS of Serbia, which in turn trained color-coup leaders from the Ukraine and Georgia, to Tunisia and Egypt, including the previously mentioned April 6 Movement. There is also the Albert Einstein Institute which produced the very curriculum and techniques employed by CANVAS.

2008 New York City Summit (included Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement)
2009 Mexico City Summit
2010 London Summit

As previously noted, these organizations are now retroactively trying to obfuscate their connections to the State Department and the Fortune 500 corporations that use them to achieve their goals of expansion overseas. CANVAS has renamed and moved their list of supporters and partners while AYM has oafishly changed their “partnerships” to “past partnerships.”

Before & After: Oafish attempts to downplay US State Department’s extra-legal
meddling and subterfuge in foreign affairs. Other attempts are covered here.

Funding all of this is the tax payers’ money funneled through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and Freedom House. George Soros’ Open Society foundation also promotes various NGOs which in turn support the revolutionary rabble on the ground. In Egypt, after the State Department’s youth brigades played their role, Soros and NED funded NGOs began work on drafting Egypt’s new constitution.

It should be noted that while George Soros is portrayed as being “left,” and the overall function of these pro-democracy, pro-human rights organizations appears to be “left-leaning,” a vast number of notorious “Neo-Cons” also constitute the commanding ranks and determine the overall agenda of this color revolution army.

Then there are legislative acts of Congress that overtly fund the subversive objectives of the US State Department. In support of regime change in Iran, the Iran Freedom and Support Act was passed in 2006. More recently in 2011, to see the US-staged color revolution in Egypt through to the end, money was appropriated to “support” favored Egyptian opposition groups ahead of national elections.

Then of course there is the State Department’s propaganda machines. While organizations like NED and Freedom House produce volumes of talking points in support for their various on-going operations, the specific outlets currently used by the State Department fall under the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). They include Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Alhurra, and Radio Sawa. Interestingly enough, the current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sits on the board of governors herself, along side a shameful collection of representatives from the Fortune 500, the corporate owned media, and various agencies within the US government.

Hillary Clinton: color revolutionary field marshal & propagandist,
two current roles that defy her duties as Secretary of State in any
rational sense or interpretation.

Judging from Radio Free Europe’s latest headlines, such as “Lieberman: The West’s Policy Toward Belarus Has ‘Failed Miserably’ ” and “Azerbaijani Youth Activist ‘Jailed For One Month,’” it appears that hope is still pinned on inciting color revolutions in Belarus and Azerbaijan to continue on with NATO’s creep and the encirclement of Russia. Belarus in particular was recently one of the subjects covered at the Globsec 2011 conference, where it was considered a threat to both the EU and NATO, having turned down NATO in favor of closer ties with Moscow.

Getting back to Hillary Clinton’s illegitimate threat regarding Venezuela’s associations with Iran, no one should be surprised to find out an extensive effort to foment a color revolution to oust Hugo Chavez has been long underway by AYM, Freedom House, NED, and the rest of this “fifth-branch” of globalist power projection. In fact, Hugo Chavez had already weathered an attempted military coup overtly orchestrated by the United States under Bush in 2002.

Upon digging into the characters behind Chavez’ ousting in 2002, it
appears that this documentary sorely understates US involvement.

The same forces of corporatism, privatization, and free-trade that led the 2002 coup against Chavez are trying to gain ground once again. Under the leadership of Harvard trained globalist minion Leopoldo Lopez, witless youth are taking the place of 2002?s generals and tank columns in an attempt to match globalist minion Mohamed ElBaradei’s success in Egypt.

Unsurprisingly, the US State Department’s AYM is pro-Venezuelan opposition, and describes in great detail their campaign to “educate” the youth and get them politically active. Dismayed by Chavez’ moves to consolidate his power and strangely repulsed by his “rule by decree,” -something that Washington itself has set the standard for- AYM laments over the difficulties their meddling “civil society” faces.

Chavez’ government recognized the US State Department’s meddling recently in regards to a student hunger strike and the US’s insistence that the Inter-American Human Rights Commission be allowed to “inspect” alleged violations under the Chavez government. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro even went as far as saying, “It looks like they (U.S.) want to start a virtual Egypt.”


The “Fifth-Branch” Invasion: Click for larger image.

Understanding this “fifth-branch” invasion of astro-turf cannon fodder and the role it is playing in overturning foreign governments and despoiling nation sovereignty on a global scale is an essential step in ceasing the Anglo-American imperial machine. And of course, as always, boycotting and replacing the corporations behind the creation and expansion of these color-revolutions hinders not only the spread of their empire overseas, but releases the stranglehold of dominion they possess at home in the United States. Perhaps then the US State Department can once again go back to representing the American Republic and its people to the rest of the world as a responsible nation that respects real human rights and sovereignty both at home and abroad.

Tony Cartalucci can be contacted via email at cartalucci@gmail.com

Freedom House: The Language of Hubris [Freedom House in Venezuela]

September 20, 2012
by Jeremy Bigwood

 NACLA

[The following article is from the Summer 2012 issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas, “Latin America and the Global Economy.” It was published alongside Jeremy Bigwood’s expose of Freedom House’s role in clandestinely nurturing and organizing the opposition to Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez over the last eight years.]

1255 Freedom House offices in Washington (credit: Jeremy Bigwood)

Freedom House is the oldest Washington-based NGO working in the international arena. It was founded just before the beginning of the U.S. entry into World War II and blossomed during the Cold War. Freedom House today positions itself as a nuanced, liberal, or even left-of-center organization, obscuring its real agenda: to destabilize foreign governments whose policies challenge U.S. global hegemony. Since the 1980s Reagan revolution, its Board of Trustees has been largely composed of neoconservatives, including R. J. Woolsey, the former director of the CIA; Donald Rumsfeld; Paul Wolfowitz; Jeane Kirkpatrick; and Samuel P. Huntington.1 Although it likes to call itself “independent,” it receives about 80% of its funding from the U.S. government, either through the State Department, USAID, or the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).2 As such, it is clearly an instrument of the U.S. government.3 The rest of its funding is underwritten by foundations that pay for its annual Freedom in the World report, which ranks countries according to how free they are—as perceived through the eyes of Freedom House’s main office in Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C. This report is widely cited as gospel in the news media but has been heavily criticized by academics for its biased methodology.4

During the Cold War, Freedom House acted as the principal U.S.-based intellectual organ for attacking the ideologies and policies of Soviet and Chinese communism. But it almost always artfully avoided any discussion of the embarrassing inconsistencies between U.S. ideals and practices, such as the U.S. government’s Cold War activities in Latin America, Africa, and South East Asia, and its domestic racial policies. Even so, few NACLA readers would find fault with all of Freedom House’s work during the Cold War or after. As such, the organization belongs to a gray area of U.S. foreign policy.

Freedom House underwent a significant shift toward promoting neoliberal economic and political policies after the 1973 coup in Chile against the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende.5 Since the end of the Cold War, Freedom House has adjusted to the new geopolitical environment by shifting its attention from attacking Communism to undermining what Washington considers to be “authoritarian” and “populist” countries. Freedom House now quietly funds projects in those countries that the United States considers to be economic or ideological threats, or more openly in allies that the United States wants to keep in line. Freedom House tends to stay away from U.S.-friendly totalitarian regimes and monarchies.

Freedom House arrogantly holds that it has the right to operate anywhere in the world with or without the permission of the local government. In response to queries about its activities in other countries, an online Freedom House fact sheet explains: “Language in the annual State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill states that U.S. democracy and human rights programming shall not be subject to the prior approval by the government of any foreign country.”6 In other words, Freedom House believes that, with the permission of the U.S. Congress, it has the right to decide when and where it can meddle in any other government on the planet.

To rationalize this imperious position, the fact sheet continues: “In order for a foreign group to legally operate within the United States, it must simply fill out the proper tax forms. Civil society organizations within the United States do not have to report their activities to or receive approval from the United States government.” While this may be true for U.S. private- or government-funded and operated civil society programs, it would not apply to U.S.-based organizations funded by foreign governments—especially hostile ones. Fortunately for U.S. national sovereignty, the law clearly states that any individuals or entities working “as agents of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity” in order to influence the U.S. political system must register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).7 FARA would clearly be applicable to any organization receiving foreign funding and working to influence the outcome of elections, international court cases, and the like. In the United States, there are serious penalties for unregistered paid agents of a foreign country who actively meddle in U.S. domestic politics, which is precisely what Freedom House does in other countries.

 


 

Jeremy Bigwood is an investigative reporter whose work has appeared in American Journalism ReviewThe Village Voice, and several other publications. He covered Latin American conflicts from 1984 to 1994 as a photojournalist. See his article in this Report, “Freedom House in Venezuela.”

 


 

1. Diego Giannone, “Political and Ideological Aspects in the Measurement of Democracy: the Freedom House Case,” Democratization 17, no. 1 (January–February 2010): 68–97, available at tandfonline.com.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., 75.

4. Gerardo l. Munck and Jay Verkuilen, “Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: Evaluating Alternative Indices,” University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Comparative Political Studies 35, no. 1 (February 2002): 5–34; Scott Mainwaring, with Daniel Brinks and Anibal Perez Liñán, “Political Regimes in Latin America, 1900–2007,” available at kellogg.nd.edu.

5. David Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610 (March 2007): 26, as quoted in Giannone, “Political and Ideological Aspects in the Measurement of Democracy.”

6. Sarah Trister, “Fact Sheet: Freedom House in Egypt,” January 2012, available at freedomhouse.org.

7. U.S. Department of Justice, “Foreign Agents Registration Act,” available at fara.gov

 

NGO’S AND INREVENTIONISM AS A GEOPOLITICAL INSTRUMENT

by Hannes HOFBAUER

October 01, 2012

Strategic Culture Foundation

The mother of all coloured revolutions was black and white. Its name: «Otpor», «Resistance». Its symbol: a white feast in front of a black ground, red colour was hated. «Otpor» was founded in the beginning of the 1990s in Belgrade. The group understood itself in sharp opposition to the rise of Slobodan Milosevic and his «Socialist Party of Serbia» (SPS). «Otpor’s» battle-cry: «gotov je!», «he is finished». «He» was the big enemy: Milosevic. The first manifestations against his government began in 1988. Their social character was evident. People protested against rising prices for living. These «bread-riots» pointed at the government, but meant the IMF that dictated what they called «reform», the abolishment of state subsidies for housing and goods of daily use. Out of parts of these protesters «Otpor» formed a political group with one single goal: to get rid of whom they called «the autocrat», Slobodan Milosevic.

After the end of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia the legitimacy of rule and governance was debated widely in a political and philosophical sense. Where rulers of the old type or their supposed revenants did not give way voluntarily, oppositional groups felt legitimated to overthrow the system. This also happened in Serbia. Slobodan Milosevic and his SPS undermined the shock therapy of the IMF in Winter 1990/91 by setting in motion the money-printing machine. The fresh banknotes allowed paying state employers like teachers, doctors and military. Hence he obstructed the restrictive monetary policy, prescribed by the IMF. What was appreciated by vast parts of the people, provoked Western organisations, and he became an enemy of them. «Otpor» repeated its standpoint: «Milosevic has to leave». It took some time until the potential of this oppositional group was discovered by Western financiers.

Civil society intervention

Since the middle of the 1990s masses of so-called Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have been operating in the countries of ex-Comecon and Yugoslavia. Their «mission» followed slogans of «democracy», «nation-building» or «new governance». They aimed at interfering in politics by supporting local oppositional groups of civil society.

One of the most prominent and strongest «Mission»-organisation to bring Western democracy to Eastern and Southern countries is the American foundation named «National Endowment for Democracy» (NED). Founded by the US-Congress in 1983 and financed by state-money since then, NED has the function to distribute an annual amount of a three-figure million Dollar number to four so-called NGOs: The «National Democratic Institute for International Affairs» (NDI), which stands under the influence of the Democratic Party, its Republican vis-à-vis, the «International Republican Institute» (IRI), the «Center for International Private Enterprise» (CIPE) and the «American Center for International Labor Solidarity» (ACILS), one representing the Chamber of commerce, the other the AFL/CIO-union. These four NGOs, all of them fully backed by state-money and therefore cheating with the «N» in their self-representation as «NGO», work in their respected fields on the ground in Eastern Europe, the Islamic world and elsewhere.

The ideological background of foundations like NED, the United States Agency for International Development USAID, «Freedom-House» or its British variant «Westminster Foundation for Democracy» is rooted in a specific understanding of what they call «universal democracy», which they claim to be spread all over the world. The concept is based on the declared necessity of economic competition and its political administration through democratic institutions. Democratic institutions have to follow the principles of market economy and not vice versa. The ideal, universalistic form of this model of democracy can be described as «constitutive liberalism» in a parliamentary two-party-system under a strong presidency. The electoral freedom excludes the social and economic system and reduces socio-economic debates, if admitted at all, to measures of tax policy.

This understanding of democracy is not compatible with revolutionary processes having taken place in Eastern Europe and North Africa. There the vision of democracy reaches beyond the system of «constitutive liberalism» and its defence of property. On the contrary: revolutions overwhelm such things like property laws and open new radical perspectives. Political and media observers are well aware of this fact and its potential danger. Therefore all missions of civil society-interventions by Western foundations are united by one goal: to direct revolutionary processes in East and South towards the Western understanding of liberal democracy; to pave the way for «constitutional liberalism».

Many democratic elections, for example in Eastern Europe, but also in the Arab world after 1989/91, did not reflect the Western idea of liberal democracy. The outcome were «false results» in the cases of Yugoslavia, Romania, and Slovakia, when leaders like Milosevic, Iliescu, Meciar or Fico received majorities at the ballot-box. The American political scientist and redactor in chief of the influential magazine «Foreign Affairs», Fareed Zakaria, named these democratic elections, when Milosevic or Meciar took legal power, «illiberal democracies». (1) In his view it is not the democracy as such that are in ill health condition, but the constitutional liberalism. He even makes his view more concrete: «Democracy without constitutional liberalism is not simply inadequate, but dangerous». Meciar, Iliescu, Milosevic, Yanukovych… they all won elections and got majorities, some of them more than one time. Nevertheless Western media and politicians call them despots, autocrats, nationalists, communists or national communists. Western foundations like NED, USAID, Westminster or Freedom House see their task in spreading their universalistic claim of a bourgeois, liberally constituted democracy throughout the world. In the societies of transformation they intervene into civil society by moulding local protests into coloured revolution.

How do these interventions function? At the beginning local or national discontent, which almost always is rooted in social problems, has to be «politicised». That means that social revolutionary elements have to be excluded. They could be dangerous for the establishment of a liberal democracy. In a second step cadres are formed. They run through different seminars in «regime change», «liberal democracy», «institution building», «nation building» etc. Allen Weinstein, one of the founders of NED, once stated openly, what the function of organisations like NED was like at the beginning of the 1990s: «A lot of what we [NED] do was done 25 years ago covertly by the CIA». (2) In some cases like in the case of James Woosley this statement can be proved even biographically. Woosley was head of the CIA between 1993 and 1995, before he led the board of «Freedom House».

If the civil society interventions do not fulfil the aim of «regime change», a military intervention can take place, like it did in Yugoslavia in March 1999. Since the rule of Bill Clinton civil mission and military threat go hand in hand. Barack Obama brings this system to perfection.

With the help of Western foundations, the Serbian «Otpor» positioned itself as a more or less successful export model. From Georgia to Ukraine, Belarus and Egypt former activists of «Otpor» hold trainings and seminars in civil resistance to form NGO-units of oppositional groups to overthrow the respective political leaders and governments like Shevardandze, Kuchma/Yanukovych or Lukashenko. Not everywhere the plan is functioning, like the case of Belarus shows. There the local coloured revolutionaries were persecuted and moved to Lithuania or Poland, where they now maintain their infrastructure like radio stations, offices and «universities».

Moscow is warned

In July 2012 the Russian Duma passed a law which obliges civil society organisations to financing transparency. This includes the declaration and control of foreign money. The Western resentment at this law is dishonest in some regards. On the one hand, the civil society interventions of Western foundations for Eastern and Southern coloured revolutions get more and more visible. Their function is evident. Even more: For example NED is publishing openly which NGO is getting how much grants. In its annual statement of accounting (2011) NED notes that it concentrated on subsidising NGOs in Belarus, where organisations like «Freedom of information» (1,23 Mio Dollars) or «Civil Society» (300.000 Dollars) all together received 3,5 Mio. Dollars in 2011.

On the other hand, Russia is not the first country to hinder civil society interventions from outside. So Venezuela closed down the NED-bureau in Caracas in December 2010. And Egypt checked the bureaus of five foreign foundations and brought more than 40 responsible employees (Americans, Germans, Serbians and Egyptians) to the court. They are accused of «illegal activities with illegal money transfers».

After all the experiences with intervening in civil societies in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Belarus, nobody can be astonished that Moscow is trying to protect its civil society from foreign attempts to implement coloured opposition. Let’s be frank: what would happen if Russian foundations would intervene in Western European civil societies? How would the European Union, for example, react, if Russian of Chinese financial support would be given to – let’s say – groups for national self-determination. They could even use the same political argument Berlin did in the 1990s by supporting Croatian and Bosnian nationalists and their fight against Belgrade. National discontent is widespread in Europe. And easily young people from Greece to the Netherlands could be found to fight EU-establishment with social or national arguments. Russian money could help them to organise. It is for sure that in the case of logistical and financial intervention into EU-inner politics, Brussels would immediately stop the flow of money from outside, for example from Moscow. This restriction would be labelled as a necessary «capital control» to protect EU-European interests, as it is done in other fields of the economy. Moscow is doing exactly the same, but Western media and politicians are defaming the restriction for being «undemocratic» representing «Soviet-type politics». With the new Russian law controlling foreign money flow into civil society organisations, the Western «NGOs are forced to react. USAID is the first to close down its office end of September 2012…

____________________________________

(1) Fareed Zakaria, The Rise of Illiberal Democracy. In: Foreign Affairs 76/6 (1997), 42

(2) Washington Post, 21th of September 1991

Using NGOs to Coerce Nations

by Sandhya Jain

Source: The Pioneer

May 8, 2012

Western nations fund NGOs operating in developing countries to influence policy and subvert institutions. India does not need foreign-funded NGOs.

Non-Western nations have long known that non-Government organisations, ostensibly set up to provide humanitarian services to citizens in their respective countries, such as against the police or other public authorities, fighting poverty or environmental degradation, are funded by foreign regimes to serve their agendas. They are, in that sense, a tool of coercive diplomacy, or war by other means.Some weeks ago, Egypt, front-runner of the aborted Arab Spring, clamped down on foreign NGOs and refused to licence eight US civil groups, including the election-monitoring Carter Centre, prior to the presidential poll. Under Egyptian law, NGOs cannot operate without licence.American NGOs, called ‘quangos’, tend to focus on promoting democracy abroad, an euphemism for electing Governments that serve American interests. Last month, the UAE decided to shut down the offices of an American ‘quango’ run by the Democratic Party but mainly funded by the US Government. Observers said the move was engineered by Riyadh and other capitals that felt the ‘quango’ was interfering in their internal affairs, and hence urged the UAE to close it.

Many capitals view ‘quangos’ as intrusive of national sovereignty. By grooming ‘democracy activists’ — recall the Coloured Revolutions in former Soviet republics — they create the environment for US-desired changes to occur. The decision by the UAE and other Gulf countries to curtail the functioning of German and US foundations is likely to usher in a new system whereby entities directly or indirectly funded by foreign Governments will be allowed to function only under negotiated agreements and can no longer operate as they please.

The National Endowment for Democracy, closely associated with the Reagan Administration, was conceived as a tool of US foreign policy by its founder Mr Allen Weinstein, a former professor, Washington Post writer, and member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a neo-conservative think-tank whose members included Mr Henry Kissinger and Mr Zbigniew Brzezinski. The NED’s first director, Mr Carl Gershman, was candid that it was a front for the CIA. From its inception in 1983, the NED’s annual funds are approved by the US Congress as part of the United States Information Agency budget. Its activities include funding anti-Left and anti-labour movements; meddling in elections in Venezuela and Haiti; and, creating instability in countries resisting imperial America.

Freedom House, set up in 1941 as a pro-democracy and pro-human rights organisation, is engaged with the Project for the New American Century, and much of the war-mongering in Washington, DC. The Bush Administration used it to support its ‘War on Terror’. The US Government provides 66 per cent of its funding via USAID, the State Department, and the NED. Freedom House leapt into the Arab Spring, training and financing civil society groups and individuals, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, and grassroots activists in Yemen.

The Bush Administration also compelled NGOs to serve its imperial agenda. In 2003, USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios said the NGO-USAID link helped the Karzai Government to survive, but Afghans did not appreciate this. In Iraq, he wanted NGO work there to show a connection with US policy. It is difficult to be more explicit.

U.S. Covertly Funds North Korea Destabilization While Training With South Korea to “Re-stabilize” It Using an Army of 100,000 [Canvas/Otpor, NYC OWS, 350.org]

April 12, 2012

S.Korea, U.S. Practice Stabilizing N.Korea in Civil War

The annual joint South Korean and U.S. exercises dubbed “Key Resolve” last month for the first time practiced deploying more than 100,000 South Korean troops in North Korea to stabilize the country in case of regime collapse.

The two countries “practiced deploying a large contingent of troops to bring stability in the North in case of civil war in the wake of sudden change there,” a government source said on Thursday. “Seoul and Washington practiced preparing for sudden change in the North for the first time during last year’s Key Resolve drill, but this was the first time we went on the assumption that South Korean troops would be deployed in the North.”

This year’s exercise supposed that civil war breaks out due to conflict between hawks and doves in the North Korean military. It envisioned deploying several South Korean Army corps south of Pyongyang to bring hardliners under control and stabilize the North.

A few years back, the two countries’ militaries formulated a contingency plan for six scenarios of sudden change in the North — a coup, civil war, a mass exodus of North Koreans, a massive natural disaster, and kidnapping of South Korean citizens by the North. But they did not stage a drill on the specific assumption of civil war for fear of upsetting the North.

“We conducted the drill this time because top military leaders in South Korea and the U.S. concluded that nobody knows what scenario will materialize because the regime of new leader Kim Jong-un is still unstable,” the source added.

Seoul is reportedly worried that North Korean military hardliners have strengthened their position since former leader Kim Jong-il’s sudden death late last year.

FLASHBACK: REVOLUTION U – FOREIGN POLICY FEATURE, FEB 16, 2011, BY TINA ROSENBERG

U.S. funds North Korea destabilization efforts via CANVAS

Revolution U Excerpts:

“Belarus,” said Djinovic, shaking his head. “They were extremely tough to motivate — extremely passive. I couldn’t find the spark in their eyes.” And then there were the North Koreans: “They were great young students in a big hotel in Seoul,” Popovic told me. “We worked for two days and had no idea how the hell we were doing. People didn’t change the expression on their faces. They sat like monuments. It was awful.”

Background information on both Djinovic and Popovic from the same feature:

“On a trip to South Africa to train Zimbabweans in 2003, Djinovic and Popovic decided to establish CANVAS.  … Djinovic had founded Serbia’s first wireless Internet service provider in 2000 and was well on his way to becoming a mogul. Today he is head of Serbia’s largest private internet and phone company and funds about half of CANVAS’s operating expenses and the costs for half the training workshops out of his own pocket. (CANVAS has four and a half staff employees. The trainers are veterans of successful democracy movements in five countries and are paid as contractors. CANVAS participates in some workshops financed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the United Nations Development Program, an international NGO called Humanity in Action, and Freedom House, an American group which gets its money from the U.S. government. But CANVAS prefers to give Washington a wide berth, in part due to Otpor’s experience. Like the entire opposition to Milosevic, Otpor took money from the U.S. government, and lied about it. When the real story came out after Milosevic fell, many Otpor members quit, feeling betrayed.”

Who is Canvas? | Egypt Leads Fight Against NGO Agitators, A real revolution may be about to follow

Image on far left: In 1998 the Otpor logo appears in Belgrade. Image on left: Otpor logo as found on the New York Occupy Wall Street Official website (2012),  featured above an Avaaz destabilization campaign against Syria. (screenshot below). Read more about Avaaz here.

February 19, 2012, by Tony Cartalucci. The following is an excerpt. The full article can be read here.

Shortly afterward, April 6 would travel to Serbia to train under US-funded CANVAS, formally the US-funded NGO “Otpor” who helped overthrow the government of Serbia in 2000. Otpor, the New York Times would report, was a “well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States.” After its success it would change its name to CANVAS and begin training activists to be used in other US-backed regime change operations.

 

The April 6 Movement, after training with CANVAS, would return to Egypt in 2010, a full year before the “Arab Spring,” along with UN IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei. April 6 members would even be arrested while waiting for ElBaradei’s arrival at Cairo’s airport in mid-February. Already, ElBaradei, as early as 2010, announced his intentions of running for president in the 2011 elections. Together with April 6, Wael Ghonim of Google, and a coalition of other opposition parties, ElBaradei assembled his “National Front for Change” and began preparing for the coming “Arab Spring.”

350.org | Sept 22 and 29 2011, Creative Activism Thursdays Srdja Popovic and Slobo Djinovic Lecture

 Due to the widespread interest in the Creative Activism Lecture Series this fall, and in order to better accommodate all guests, RSVP is required; please show up early. If you don’t RSVP, you can still show up and we’ll let you in 5 minutes before the lecture starts if there’s room. Note: immediately after the lecture, the audience will head down to #occupywallstreet!

“NGO”: The Guise of Innocence | The Illusion of Innocent Philanthropic Activity

The term “NGO” is used deliberately to create an illusion of innocent philanthropic activity. In this case the Egyptian government is investigating the operations of organisations in receipt of US state funding which have a proven history of covertly funding political parties, influencing elections and aiding coups against both autocratic and democratic non-compliant and left-leaning governments around the world. Yet one mention of the Egyptian government’s raid on the offices of so-called “pro-democracy NGOs” in Cairo was enough to spark an international outcry. The result has been an almost complete failure by the Western press to investigate at all the history of the organisations involved or the validity of the charges being brought against them.

by Jenny O’Connor

Global Research, April 8, 2012 | Irish Foreign Affairs (Vol 5, No. 1, March 2012) and Dissident Voice

 

 

In December Egyptian prosecutors and police raided 17 offices of 10 groups identifying themselves as “pro-democracy” NGOs, including four US-based agencies. Forty-three people, including 16 US citizens, have been accused of failing to register with the government and financing the April 6th protest movement with illicit funds in a manner that detracts from the sovereignty of the Egyptian state.

The US has applied massive pressure on Egypt to drop the case, sending high-level officials to Cairo for intense discussions and threatening to cut off up to $1.3bn in military aid and $250m in economic assistance if the US citizens were tried. A travel ban was imposed on seven of them by Egypt’s Attorney General, including Sam LaHood, son of Obama’s Transportation Secretary. By the first day of the case all but the seven with travel restrictions had left the country and those who remained did not even attend court. A day after the ban was lifted a military plane removed the remaining seven US citizens from Egypt after the US government provided nearly $5m in bail.

The Egyptian authorities stated that the matter was firmly in the hands of the judiciary and out of control of government and accused the US of unacceptable meddling. The international community has expressed outrage at the affair and accused the Egyptian military of inciting paranoia of foreign interference so as to deflect attention from the slow pace of political and democratic reform a year after the revolution. Amid the high-profile diplomatic strife there has been an almost total global journalistic silence on the nature and funding of these “NGOs”.

State Sponsored Organisations, Not NGOs

The people standing trial are repeatedly referred to by governments and the media as “NGO workers”. The 43 defendants worked for five specific organisations; Freedom House; the National Democratic Institute (NDI); the International Republican Institute (IRI); the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. Only one of these organisations, the ICFJ, can be considered as non-governmental in that it does not receive the majority of its funding either directly or indirectly from a government.

The NDI, chaired by Madeline Albright, and the IRI, chaired by Senator John McCain, represent the US Democratic and Republican political parties. The NDI and IRI, together with the Center for International Private Enterprise, which represents the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Solidarity Centre, which represents the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), make up the four “core institutions” of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). NED is a non-profit, grant-making institution that receives more than 90% of its annual budget from the US government. While Freedom House claims to be independent it regularly receives the majority of its funding from the NED. The Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, sometimes referred to as the German NED, is a non-profit foundation associated with the Christian Democratic Union. It receives over 90% of its funding from the German government. This means that the IRI, the NDI, Freedom House and the Konrad Adenauer Stifung – four of the five accused organisation – are state sponsored institutions and can not be defined as NGOs.

Freedom House has long been criticised for its right wing bias, favouring free markets and US foreign policy interests when assessing civil liberty and political freedom “scores” in countries around the world. Freedom House statistics for 2011 claim that Venezuelans had the same level of political rights as Iraqis. Bolivia’s overall score was reduced from “Free” to “Partially Free” after mass protests removed American-educated millionaire Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada from power after he initiated a sweeping privatization program. Now, under the first government in her history to really recognise the rights of the indigenous majority, Bolivia is still rated by Freedom House as only partially free and received a lower overall score than Botswana where one party (the BDP) has been in power since the first elections were held there in 1965. Freedom House has also been accused of running programmes of regime destabilisation in US “enemy states” and a 1996 Financial Times article revealed that Freedom House was one of several organisations selected by the State Department to receive funding for “clandestine activities” inside Iran including training and funding groups seeking regime change, an act that received criticism from Iranian grass roots pro-democracy groups.1

The most nefarious of these organisations by far, however, are the IRI and the NDI. They receive NED grants “for work abroad to foster the growth of political parties, electoral processes and institutions, free trade unions, and free markets and business organizations.” 2  On March 6th, a protest march was organised by American civil society organisations at the offices of the NED in Washington, demanding; “NO ATTACKS ON DEMOCRACY ANYWHERE! CLOSE THE NED”. Union members and labor activists have protested and campaigned for years demanding that the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center break all ties to the NED.

Board of Directors

Chaired by Richard Gephardt – former Democratic Representative, now CEO of his own corporate consultancy and lobbying firm – the NED’s board of directors consists of a collection of corporate lobbyists, advisors and consultants, former U.S congressmen, senators, ambassadors and military and senior fellows of think tanks. For example, John A. Bohn, a former high level international banker and former President and Chief Executive Officer of Moody’s Investors Service, is now Commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission, a principal in a global corporate advisory and consulting firm and Executive Chairman of an internet based trading exchange for petrochemicals. Kenneth Duberstein, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff under Reagan, is now Chairman and CEO of his own corporate lobbying firm. He also sits on the Board of Governors of the American Stock Exchange and NASD and serves on the Boards of Directors of numerous conglomerates including The Boeing Company, ConocoPhilips and Fannie Mae. Martin Frost is a former congressman who was involved in writing the 1999 “Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act” also known as the “Citigroup Relief Act”, and William Galston, former student of Leo Strauss, is a US Marine Corp veteran.

The Board also contains four of the founding members of ultra-conservative think tank Project for a New American Century; Francis Fukyama (author of ‘The End of History’), Will Marshall (founder of the ‘New Democrats’, an organisation that aimed to move Democratic Party policies to the right) former congressman Vin Weber (who retired from Congress in 1992 as a result of the House Banking Scandal and is now managing partner of a corporate lobbying firm) and Zalmay Khalilzad. Under George Bush Jr., Khalilzad served as US Ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan and the UN.  He is now President and CEO of his own international corporate advisory firm which advises clients – mainly in the energy, construction, education, and infrastructure sectors – wishing to do business in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also briefly consulted for Cambridge Energy Research Associates while they were conducting a risk analysis for the proposed Trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline.

History

The NED was founded in 1983 when Washington was embroiled in numerous controversies relating to covert military operations and the training and funding of paramilitaries and death squads in Central and South America. The NED was formed to create an open and legal avenue for the US Government to channel funds to opposition groups against unfavourable regimes around the world, thus removing the political stigma associated with covert CIA funding. In a 1991 Washington Post article, “Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups”, Allen Weinstein (who helped draft the legislation that established the NED) declared; “A lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”. 3

In 1996 the Heritage Foundation published an article in defence of continued NED congressional funding which accurately summed up the NED as a US foreign policy tool; “The NED is a valuable weapon in the international war of ideas. It advances American national interests by promoting the development of stable democracies friendly to the U.S. in strategically important parts of the world. The U.S. cannot afford to discard such an effective instrument of foreign policy…Although the Cold War has ended, the global war of ideas continues to rage”. 4

As well as ongoing campaigns of regime destabilisation in undemocratic US enemy states such as Cuba and China, and its well known funding of “colour” revolutionaries in the former soviet space, the NED has been repeatedly involved in influencing elections and overthrowing governments in left-leaning and anti-US democratic regimes around the world. This is achieved by providing funding and/or training and strategic advice to opposition groups, political parties, journalists and media outlets. As Barbara Conry of the Cato Institute wrote: “Through the Endowment, the American taxpayer has paid for special-interest groups to harass the duly elected governments of friendly countries, interfere in foreign elections, and foster the corruption of democratic movements.”5

From 1986 to 1988 the NED funded the right-wing political opposition to Nobel Peace Price winner, President Oscar Arias, in democratic Costa Rica because he was outspokenly critical of Reagan’s violent policies in Central America. During the 1980s the NED was even active in “defending democracy” in France due to the dangerous rise in communist influence perceived as occurring under the elected socialist government of Francois Mitterrand. Money was channelled into opposition groups including extreme right-wing organisations such as the National Inter-University Union. In 1990 the NED provided funding and support to right wing groups in Nicaragua, and Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas were removed from power in an election described by Professor William I. Robinson as an event in which “massive foreign interference completely distorted an endogenous political process and undermined the ability of the elections to be a free choice”.6

In the late 1990s the NED provided funding and support to the US backed right-wing opposition against the election campaign of progressive former president, and first democratically elected leader of Haiti, Jean-Betrand Aristide. When a coup removed Aristide from power for the second time in 2004 it was revealed that the NED had provided funding and strategic advice to the principal organizations involved in his ousting. The involvement of the NED in the 2002 attempted coup against President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela has been well researched and documented. Immediately after the coup, however, the then president of the IRI, George Folsom, revealed the institute’s role in the endeavour when he sent out a press release celebrating Chavez’s ousting: “The Institute has served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…”.

The IRI was also implicated in the 2009 Honduran coup amid claims that the organisation had supported the ousting of democratically elected leader Manuel Zelaya because of his support of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (an anti-free trade pact including Honduras, Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba) and his refusal to privatise telecommunications. According to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs AT&T – an American telecommunications giant – has provided significant funding to both the IRI and Senator John McCain (its chairman) in order to target Latin American states that refuse to privatize their telecommunications industry.7

Influence in Egypt and the Arab Spring

The NED works in democratic Turkey but does not provide “democratisation grants” to civil society organisations in Western allied absolute monarchies such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia or Oman. A number of NED backed activists have taken centre stage in the Arab Spring struggles and U.S. supported candidates have risen to occupy leading positions in newly established transitional governments. The most glaring example of this is Libya’s transitional Prime Minister, Dr. Abdurrahim El-Keib, who holds dual U.S./Libyan citizenship and is former Chairman of the Petroleum Institute sponsored by British Petroleum, Shell, Total and the Japan Oil Development Company. He handed the job of running Libya’s oil and gas supply to a technocrat and, according to the Guardian, has passed over Islamists expected to make the cabinet in order “to please Western backers”.8 Tawakkul Karman too, of Yemen, who became the youngest ever recipient of a Nobel Peace Price in 2011, was leader of a NED grantee organisation, “Women Journalists without Chains”.

In 2009 sixteen young Egyptian activists completed a two-month Freedom House ‘New Generation Fellowship’ in Washington. The activists received training in advocacy and met with U.S. government officials, members of Congress, media outlets and think tanks. As far back as 2008, members of the April 6th Movement attended the inaugural summit of the Association of Youth Movements (AYM) in New York, where they networked with other movements, attended workshops on the use of new and social media and learned about technical upgrades, such as consistently alternating computer simcards, which help to evade state internet surveillance. AYM is sponsored by Pepsi, YouTube and MTV and amongst the luminaries who participated in the 2008 Summit, which focused on training activists in the use of Facebook and Twitter, were James Glassman of the State Department, Sherif Mansour of Freedom House, National Security Advisor Shaarik Zafar and Larry Diamond of the NED.

This is rather ironic considering that in September 2009 the US authorities arrested Elliot Madison (a US citizen and full-time social worker) for using Twitter to disseminate information about police movements to G20 Summit street protesters in Pittsburgh. Madison, apparently in violation of a loosely defined federal anti-rioting law, was accused of “criminal use of a communication facility,” “possessing instruments of crime,” and “hindering apprehension”. Given that heavily armed police officers were using tear gas, sonic weapons and rubber bullets on protesters Madison’s actions were hardly unjustified. Further demonstrating the hypocrisy of Madison’s arrest is the fact that in June 2009 the State Department had requested Twitter delay a planned upgrade so that Iranian protesters’ tweets would not be interrupted. Twitter Inc subsequently stated in a blog post that it had delayed the upgrade because of its role as an “important communication tool in Iran.”9

A leaked 2008 cable from the Cairo US Embassy, entitled “April 6 activist on his US visit and regime change in Egypt”, showed that the US was in dialogue with an April 6th youth activist about his attendance at the AYM Summit.10  The cable revealed that the activist tried to convince his Washington interlocutors that the US Government and the International Community should pressure the Egyptian government into implementing reforms by freezing the off-shore bank accounts of Egyptian Government officials. He also detailed the youth movement’s plans to remove Mubarak from power and hold representative elections before the September 2011 presidential election.

While the cable revealed that the US deemed this plan “highly unrealistic”, the dialogue proves that the funding of any youth organisation associated with the April 6th movement by a US organisation since December 2008 had been done with Washington and the US embassy in Cairo being fully aware that the movement’s aim was regime change in Egypt. Yet in April 2011 the New York Times published an article entitled ‘U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings’ in which it openly stated that; “A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6th Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the IRI, the NDI and Freedom House”.

According to the NED’s 2009 Annual Report, $1,419,426 worth of grants was doled out to civil society organisations in Egypt that year. In 2010, the year preceding the January – February 2011 revolution, this funding massively increased to $2,497,457.11 Nearly half of this sum, $1,146,903, was allocated to the Center for International Private Enterprise for activates such as conducting workshops at governate level “to promote corporate citizenship” and engaging civil society organizations “to participate in the democratic process by strengthening their capacity to advo­cate for free market legislative reform on behalf of their members”. Freedom House also received $89,000 to “strengthen cooperation among a network of local activists and bloggers”.

According to the same 2010 report, various youth organisations and youth orientated projects received a total of $370,954 for activities such as expanding the use of new media and social advertising campaigns among young activists, training and providing ongoing support in “the production and targeted dissemination of social advertisement campaigns”, building the leadership skills of political party youth, strengthening and supporting “a cadre of young civic and political activists . . . well positioned to mobilize and engage their communities”, and providing youth  training workshops in “professional media skills as well as online and social networking media tools”.

But this is just the funding that is transparently made known to us on the NED’s official website. After the revolution, the NDI and IRI massively expanded their operations in Egypt, opening five new offices between them and hiring large numbers of new staff. The Egyptian authorities claim that they have found these organisations’ finances very difficult to trace. According to Dawlat Eissa – a 27-year-old Egyptian-American and former IRI employee – the IRI used employees’ private bank accounts to channel money covertly from Washington, and an IRI accountant stated that directors used their personal credit cards for expenses. Eissa and a number of her colleagues resigned from their posts with the IRI in October, and Eissa filed a complaint with the government after director Sam LaHood reportedly told employees to collect all of the organisation’s work related paperwork for scanning and shipping to the US.12

It is clear that NDI, IRI and Freedom House were training and funding the youth movement in Egypt while the US Government and its Cairo Embassy were fully aware that the youth movement aimed to remove Mubarak from power. Critics claim that the defendants are being charged with a law that is a “relic of the Mubarak era”. But, it may be replied, in what country does the law allow foreign governments to fund and train opposition groups with a stated goal of regime change? It is common sense to assume that if China or Cuba were funding similar oppositionist groups in the US, those involved would be facing far harsher sentences than the 43 now standing trial in Egypt. Yet they continue to hide behind the tattered guise of being “NGO” employees, claiming independence because their US government funding is channelled through the National Endowment for Democracy.

The term “NGO” is used deliberately to create an illusion of innocent philanthropic activity. In this case the Egyptian government is investigating the operations of organisations in receipt of US state funding which have a proven history of covertly funding political parties, influencing elections and aiding coups against both autocratic and democratic non-compliant and left-leaning governments around the world. Yet one mention of the Egyptian government’s raid on the offices of so-called “pro-democracy NGOs” in Cairo was enough to spark an international outcry. The result has been an almost complete failure by the Western press to investigate at all the history of the organisations involved or the validity of the charges being brought against them.

•  This article was first published in Irish Foreign Affairs (Vol 5, No. 1, March 2012)

  1. Guy Dinmore, “Bush enters Iran ‘freedom’ debate’”, Financial Times, March 31, 2006 [?]
  2. National Endowment for Democracy official website [?]
  3. Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups by David Ignatius. Washington Post, September 22, 1991 [?]
  4. The National Endowment for Democracy: A Prudent Investment in the Future by James Phillips (Senior Research Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs) and Kim R. Holmes (Vice President of Foreign and Defence Policy Studies), Heritage Foundation, 1996 [?]
  5. Conry, B. (1993) Cato Foreign Policy Briefing No. 27, November 8 [?]
  6. Robinson, William I. (1992), A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era,  Boulder: Westview Press, p. 150 [?]
  7. D’Ambrosio, Michaela,  ‘The Honduran Coup: Was it a matter of behind the scenes finagling by state department stonewallers?” Council on Hemispheric Affairs, September 16, 2009 [?]
  8. “Libyan PM snubs Islamists with cabinet to please western backers”, The Guardian, Tuesday  November 22, 2011 [?]
  9. Pleming, Sue. “US State Department speaks to Twitter over Iran”,  Reuters, Jun 16, 2009 [?]
  10. “Egypt protests: secret US document discloses support for protesters”,  The Telegraph, January 28, 2011 [?]
  11. All figures taken from 2009 and 2010 NED annual report’s for Egypt available on NED’s official website [?]
  12. Hill, Evan,  “Egypt dossier outlines NGO prosecution”, Al Jazeera English, February 26, 2012 [?]

Jenny O’Connor is a graduate of International Relations from Dublin City University and Communications Volunteer with the European Anti-Poverty Network Ireland. Read other articles by Jenny, or visit Jenny’s website.

What the “Professional Left” Refuses to Share With Their “Followers”: 2011-The Year of the Dupe

WKOG editor: This article contains a mountain of factual information/evidence. Acknowledging such evidence is critical if we are to see the light through veils and illusions. As only then does the possibility for a real influence and positive outcome arise from orchestrated events which are being engineered with a false exterior to serve corporate and Imperialist interests. The very forces we claim to oppose continue to successfully reabsorb us into the very system destroying us – the very system we must starve, struggle against and ultimately dismantle. This is where we fail. If we continue to deny these truths, rather than confront them, our collective denial will serve as the instrument to our own annihilation. [About WKOG]

A timeline & history: One year into the engineered “Arab Spring,” one step closer to global hegemony

by Tony Cartalucci

Editor’s Note: The title, “Year of the Dupe,” was inspired, and indeed coined by Dr. Webster Tarpley of Tarpley.net, who is noted below as giving the initial tip-off regarding Egypt’s unrest back in January 2011.

dupe (dp, dyp)

n.

1. An easily deceived person.
2. A person who functions as the tool of another person or power.

tr.v. duped, dup·ing, dupes To deceive (an unwary person).

December 24, 2011 – In January of 2011, we were told that “spontaneous,” “indigenous” uprising had begun sweeping North Africa and the Middle East in what was hailed as the “Arab Spring.” It would be almost four months before the corporate-media would admit that the US had been behind the uprisings and that they were anything but “spontaneous,” or “indigenous.” In an April 2011 article published by the New York Times titled, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” it was stated:

“A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.”

The article would also add, regarding the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED):

“The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department. “

It is hardly a speculative theory then, that the uprisings were part of an immense geopolitical campaign conceived in the West and carried out through its proxies with the assistance of disingenuous foundations, organizations, and the stable of NGOs they maintain throughout the world. As we will see, preparations for the “Arab Spring” and the global campaign that is now encroaching on both Russia and China, as predicted in February 2011’s “The Middle East & then the World,” began not as unrest had already begun, but years before the first “fist” was raised, and within seminar rooms in D.C. and New York, US-funded training facilities in Serbia, and camps held in neighboring countries, not within the Arab World itself.

The Timeline – 2008-2010 Preparing the Battlefield

December 3-5, 2008: Egyptian activists from the now infamous April 6 movement were in New York City for the inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) summit, also known as Movements.org. There, they received training, networking opportunities, and support from AYM’s various corporate and US governmental sponsors, including the US State Department itself. The AYM 2008 summit report (page 3 of .pdf) states that the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, James Glassman attended, as did Jared C0hen who sits on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of State. Six other State Department staff members and advisers would also attend the summit along with an immense list of corporate, media, and institutional representatives.

Shortly afterward, April 6 would travel to Serbia to train under US-funded CANVAS, formally the US-funded NGO “Otpor” who helped overthrow the government of Serbia in 2000. Otpor, the New York Times would report, was a “well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States.” After its success it would change its name to CANVAS and begin training activists to be used in other US-backed regime change operations.


Photo: Serbia’s “Otpor,” a model for future US-backed color revolutions.

….

Foreign Policy Magazine would report in their article, “Revoluton U,” that CANVAS assisted protesters in the “Rose Revolution” of Georgia, the “Orange Revolution” of the Ukraine, and is currently working with networks from Belarus, Myanmar (Burma), all across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as with activists in North Korea, and 50 other countries.

2009: In a US State Department funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Libery (RFE/RL) article titled, “Exporting Nonviolent Revolution, From Eastern Europe to The Middle East,” it was stated, “Popovic then exported his nonviolent methods, helping train the activists who spearheaded Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003 and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004. And now, Popovic is deploying his new organization, called Canvas, even farther afield — assisting the pro-democracy activists who recently brought down despotic regimes in Egypt and Tunisia.”

Activists from Iran, Belarus, and North Korea were also confirmed by RFE/RL as having received training from CANVAS. The RFE/RL article places the activists’ meeting with CANVAS sometime during 2009.

February 2010: The April 6 Movement, after training with CANVAS, would return to Egypt in 2010, along with UN IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei. April 6 members would even be arrested while awaiting for ElBaradei’s arrival at Cairo’s airport in mid-February. Already, ElBaradei, as early as 2010, announced his intentions of running for president in the 2011 elections. Together with April 6, Wael Ghonim of Google, and a coalition of other opposition parties, ElBaradei assembled his “National Front for Change” and began preparing for the coming “Arab Spring.”

Clearly then, unrest was long planned, with activists from Tunisia and Egypt on record receiving training and support from abroad, so that they could return to their home nations and sow unrest in a region-wide coordinated campaign.

An April 2011 AFP report would confirm this, when US State Department’s Michael Posner stated that the “US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments.” The report went on to explain that the US “organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there.” Posner would add, “They went back and there’s a ripple effect.” That ripple effect of course, is the “Arab Spring.”

The Timeline – 2011 Year of the Dupe

January 16, 2011: Al Arabiya News reported in their article, “Tunisian exiled reformist to head back home,” that Moncef Marzouki was returning to Tunisia (from Paris) amidst the chaos sown by US State Department trained, supported, and equipped mobs who were “triggered” by the convenient release of US State Department cables via Wikileaks. Quite clearly, considering the training Tunisian opposition groups received long before the cables were released, the Wikileaks cables were merely used as a planned rhetorical justification for long ago premeditated foreign-funded sedition. Since then, Wikileaks has been employed in an identical manner everywhere from Egypt to Libya, and even as far flung as Thailand.

Moncef Marzouki, it would turn out, was founder and head of the Arab Commission for Human Rights, a collaborating institution with the US NED World Movement for Democracy (WMD) including for a “Conference on Human Rights Activists in Exile” and a participant in the WMD “third assembly” alongside Marzouki’s Tunisian League for Human Rights, sponsored by NED, Soros’ Open Society, and USAID.

A “call for solidarity” by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) mentions by name each and every group constituting the Tunisian opposition during the “uprising” in January 2011 as “FIDH member organisations.” These include Marzouki’s “Tunisian League for Human Rights,” the “Tunisian Association of Democratic Women,” and the “National Council for Liberties in Tunisia,” or CNLT. FIDH, acting as an international nexus for various foreign-funded organizations carrying out sedition worldwide under the guise of “human rights,” is itself fully funded by the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy, Soros’ Open Society, and many others with clearly compromised affiliations.

January 28, 2011: After a warning by journalist/activist Dr. Webster Tarpley of World Crisis Radio, the alternative media began looking closer at the unrest in Egypt which began shortly after Tunisia’s growing crisis. In “All is not what it seems in Egyptian Clashes,” it was noted that protest leader Mohammed ElBaradei was in fact a devoted agent of the West, with a long standing membership within the Wall Street/London funded International Crisis Group (ICG) along side “senior Israeli officials” including the current Israeli President Shimon Peres, the current Governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, and former Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami. The ICG also includes senior American bankers and geopolitical manipulators including George Soros, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Armitage, Samuel Berger, and Wesley Clark.

https://i0.wp.com/www.mideastnewswire.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/elbaradei.jpg

Photo: ElBaradei’s ties to the West go much deeper than merely play-acting within the ineffectual, genocide-enabling UN. He is also a memberof the corporate-financier funded International Crisis Group.

….

Ironically, Western media outlets insisted ElBaradei was both anti-American and strongly anti-Israeli in a rouse best described a year earlier in March 2010 in the Council On Foreign Relations’ paper, Foreign Affairs’ article “Is ElBaradei Egypt’s Hero?”:

“Further, Egypt’s close relationship with the United States has become a critical and negative factor in Egyptian politics. The opposition has used these ties to delegitimize the regime, while the government has engaged in its own displays of anti-Americanism to insulate itself from such charges. If ElBaradei actually has a reasonable chance of fostering political reform in Egypt, then U.S. policymakers would best serve his cause by not acting strongly. Somewhat paradoxically, ElBaradei’s chilly relationship with the United States as IAEA chief only advances U.S. interests now. “

The most recent manifestation of this came when Israel farcically called ElBaradei an “Iranian agent.” This latest performance further illustrates the immense level of duplicity with which world events are being manipulated.

February 17, 2011: The London-based National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) calls for a Libyan “Day of Rage” to match the US-destabilization rhetoric used in Tunisia and Egypt. The NFSL has been backed by the CIA-MI6 since the 80’s and had made multiple attempts to overthrow Qaddafi’s government with both terrorist attacks and armed insurrection.


Photo: Please note the “EnoughGaddafi.com” signs. EnoughGaddafi.com’s webmaster is listed on the US State Department’s Movements.org as the “Twitter” to follow.

….

February 18, 2011: In the wake of Honsi Mubarak’s ousting, billionaire bankster George Soros’ Open Society Institute was found to be behind NGOs drafting Egypt’s new constitution. These “civil society” groups include the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information openly funded by George Soros’ Open Society Institute and the Neo-Con lined NED funded Egyptian Organization for Human Rights. It appears that while the International Crisis Group was turning out the strategy, and their trustee ElBaradei leading the mobs into the streets, it is the vast array of NGOs their membership, including Soros, fund that were working out and implementing the details on the ground.

February 21, 2011: An interview with Ibrahim Sahad of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) on ABC Australia, featured every talking point covered by the mainstream corporate media from previous weeks regarding Libya, all with the White House and Washington Monument looming over him in the background. He made calls for a no-fly zone in reaction to unsubstantiated accusations Qaddafi was strafing “unarmed protesters” with warplanes.

March 2011’s “US Libyan Policy: Zero Legitimacy,” noted the clearly heavily armed, western-backed insurgency that was still being disingenuously portrayed by Western media as “peaceful protests.”

February 28, 2011: “Destroying Libya” stated:

While Libyan opposition leader Ibrahim Sahad leads the rhetorical charge from Washington D.C., his National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) on the ground is armed to the teeth, as it has been throughout its 20 year history of attempted CIA backed rebellions against Qaddafi. In 1984, the NFSL tried to overthrow Qaddafi in a failed armed coup. The Daily Globe and Mail also recently confirmed that the NFSL along with the Libyan National Army, both under Sahad’s new National Conference of Libyan Opposition (NCLO), had both “attempted coups and assassinations against Col. Gadhafi in the 1980s.”

Already at this point, both British and US representatives were admitting Libyan rebels were indeed heavily armed, and instead of condemning the violence, openly called for additional weapons and military support to be provided.

March 17, 2011: The UN decided to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya to save the globalist-backed rebellion sputtering in failure and bordering on a “Bay of Pigs” disaster. Canadian, US, French, Arab, and UK jets were already reported to be preparing for the operation.

March 24, 2011: Unrest had already begun in Syria, as NATO began bombing Libya while Egypt and Tunisia had already fallen into political and economic chaos. In “Globalists Hit in Syria,” the opposition is closely examined and documented to be once again a creation of Western-backed opposition groups.

Much of the “evidence” of Syria’s unrest was being filtered through organizations such as the London-based Syrian Human-Rights Committee whose hearsay statements posted on its website were cited by corporate news media in outlandish reports of violence that also include “activists say” after each allegation. The “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,” also London-based, is now the exclusive source cited by corporate-media reports regarding Syria.

March 26, 2011: In Egypt, signs of a counterrevolution and the first signs of weakness in ElBaradei’s chances to be installed as president began to show. Mobs pelted ElBaradei with rocks calling him “an American agent.” Wikileaks would again come to the aid of US interests and try to reintroduce the “anti-Western” image ElBaradei had been hamfisted in portraying.


Photo: The “barrier of legitimacy” is broken: a mob shouts “American agent” as they hurl rocks at ElBaradei who most certainly is an American agent – a trustee of the US International Crisis Group alongside George Soros.

….

March 28, 2011: Fortune-500 funded Brookings Institution’s “Libya’s Test of the New International Order” is reported on – exposing the war as not one of a “humanitarian” nature, but one aimed explicitly at establishing an international order and the primacy of international law.


Image: Red = US-backed destabilization, Blue = US occupying/stationed. China’s oil and sea access to the Middle East and Africa are being or have already been cut. A similar strategy of isolation was used on Japan just before the onset of World War II.

….

April 17, 2011: Syria’s unrest yields widespread arson as well as reports of gunmen targeting both protesters and state security forces in a bid to escalate violence. In, “Globalist War Machine Fixates on Syria,” the “Libyan Precedent” is already being cited by US and French politicians as justification to use force against Syria. A later article, “Color Revolution’s Mystery Gunmen,” establishes a historical context within which to view the current violence in Syria and the fact that it is provocateurs sowing much of the violence.

April 21, 2011: Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko announces that his nation is now also under covert attack by Western forces to foster an “Arab Spring-style” insurrection. In, “Besieging Belarus,” documented ties between Belarus opposition members and the same Western organizations and institutions fueling the Arab Spring are illustrated.

April 22, 2011: John McCain touches down in Benghazi, Libya and consorts with verified terrorists who were fresh back from Iraq and Afghanistan, killing US troops. A West Point report would later confirm (.pdf from West Point’s CTC can be found here) with absolute certainty that the region from which the Libyan rebellion began was also the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group’s (LIFG) center of operations. It would also expose the fact that LIFG were in fact long-time affiliates of Al Qaeda with LIFG members occupying the highest levels of leadership within the terrorist organization.


Photo: Ultimate act of treason: McCain calls for recognition and extra-legal support for the very men who had killed US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. By denying “Al-Qaeda” a base in Iraq, but handing them the entire nation of Libya, he has brought American foreign policy
to a new level of surrealism.

….

May, 2011: In “Libya at Any Cost,” the conflict in Libya was reported to be escalating, including NATO attempts to assassinate Qaddafi and the targeted killings of several of his family members including several of his grandchildren.

America’s Arab Deception” attempted to review the past several months of engineered chaos blowing through Northern Africa and the Middle East, while it was noted in, “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up,” that the National Endowment for Democracy already began its first round of self-aggrandizing, and passing out awards to several of the dupes and collaborators that made its campaign of carnage throughout the Arab World a reality.

June, 2011: In “Arab Spring brings Corporate Locust,” the true agenda behind Egypt’s, and indeed the entire “Arab Spring’s” unrest became apparent as US representatives gave Fortune 500 executives a tour of destabilized Egypt and Tunisia in an effort to promote economic liberaliztion and privatization. John McCain and John Kerry led the tour and had co-sponsored bills to promote what would essentially be the meshing of Egypt and Tunisia’s economy into the Wall Street/London international order.


Photo: McCain (left) and Kerry (right) gesticulate as they explain their paymaster’s agenda within the confines of an Egyptian Coca-Cola factory. This is part of their latest trip surveying the effects of their US-funded opposition overthrowing Hosni Mubarak’s government.

….

In late June, France would admit to violating the terms of UN resolution 1973, and arming Libyan rebels.

July, 2011: The African Union would wholly reject the International Criminal Court’s mandate against Libya, exposing the severe illegitimacy with which it operates. Ties to corporate-financier funded organizations are revealed in “It’s Official: International Criminal Court has ZERO Mandate,” as well as the tenuous nature of the ICC’s claims against Libya’s Qaddafi. It would later be confirmed by members of Libya’s “human rights” community that indeed they, in collaboration with the rebel leaders, fabricated the numbers supplied to both the UN and the ICC, and that no verified or documented evidence of Qaddafi’s “atrocities” were produced.

In Thailand, another long-running US-backed color revolution finally yielded results and saw the return of Wall Street proxy, Thaksin Shinawatra’s political party to power. Various mouthpieces of the global elite, including the Council on Foreign Relations itself, gave stern warnings to Thailand’s establishment to accept the tenuous results of the July election or face isolation and other consequences. Another Southeast Asian country, Malaysia would also see color revolution take to their streets – this time in Malaysia by the yellow-clad, NED-funded Bersih movement.

Photo: Thaksin Shinawatra, a long time servant of the global elite, since before even becoming Thailand’s prime minister in 2001, reports to the CFR in New York City on the eve of the 2006 military coup that ousted him from power. He has now returned to power in Thailand via a proxy political party led by his own sister, Yingluck Shinawatra. Securing the votes of only 35% of eligible voters puts on full display how tenuous his support really is within a nation he claims stands entirely behind him.

….

August, 2011: By August, even the corporate-media began admitting that Syria’s opposition was “mostly unarmed,” or in other words, armed. The opposition was starting to be more clearly defined as armed ethnic groups and armed militants of the Muslim Brotherhood.

By late August, NATO began a coordinated attack on Tripoli, Libya, involving an elaborate psychological-operation that claimed to have eliminated or captured the entire Qaddafi family in a single day. The following day, Saif Al-Qaddafi would turn up alive and well, and free, while leading fierce fighting that would carry on until October and result in NATO leveling the cities of Bani Walid and Sirte in particular, into piles of rubble. It had become entirely clear that NATO was providing air support not for democracy-loving freedom fighters, but for hardcore terrorists who were carrying out a systematic campaign of genocide and reprisals throughout the country.

Photo: Libya’s rebels are far from motivated by democratic aspirations. Their grievances lie along ethnic, not political divides. “Gaddafi supporters” is the euphemism being used by the global corporate-media in describing the generally darker skinned and African tribes that form the majority of Western Libya’s demographics and who are bearing the brunt of NATO-backed rebel atrocities.

….

September, 2011: Sensing victory in Libya, corporate-financier funded think-tanks began preparing for the rebuilding and despoiling of the Libyan economy. In “Globalists to Rebuild Libya,” NATO’s Atlantic Council wrote a report detailing just how they would go about doing this.

Also as Libya’s violence spiraled out of control and atrocities carried out by the rebels and their NATO backers became more obscene, it became clear how fraudulent the “War on Terror” was. In “Libyan Rebels Listed by US State Department as Terrorists,” it is illustrated how NATO members were guilty of anti-terrorist laws for providing material support for listed terrorist organizations.

Image: A screenshot taken directly from the US State Department website showing the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) clearly listed as a foreign terrorist organization. This is important, as US Code prohibits providing material support to listed terrorist organizations. With revelations of Al Qaeda and LIFG fighters leading the Libyan rebellion with NATO-members’ full military, financial, and diplomatic support, attempts are being made to plea ignorance as to the true nature of the rebels. Listed below LIFG, is MEK, an Iraqi/Iranian group also being armed and supported by the US. (click on image to enlarge)

….

September also saw real humanitarian catastrophe unfold in Uganda, where a British corporation sanctioned genocide to clear land they had “leased” from the Ugandan government. Thus illustrates how the cause of “humanitarian concerns” is called on only when it serves Wall Street and London’s interests, and otherwise ignored when it involves verifiable genocide carried out in the pursuit of furthering their wealth and power.


Photo: Robert Devereux, a long time investor, a long time con-artist spinning his company’s despoiling of Africa as some sort of cutting-edge investment strategy that makes money and “helps” people. Even as Devereux made his disingenuous statements in 2010 regarding New Forests, the villagers in Uganda he was “helping” had already filed a court case a year earlier protesting the British company’s encroachment on their land. These villagers would be forcibly displaced, many of them killed by Ugandan troops acting on behalf of Devereux.
….

John McCain would land once again in Libya, this time in Tripoli to celebrate the destruction of the country and shake hands once again with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group that delivered Qaddafi’s Libya into the hands of the Wall Street/London elite.


Photo: It’s all smiles and laughs in Tripoli as McCain, a chief proponent and driving force behind the US intervention in Libya, literally glorifies Al Qaeda’s exploits in the now ruined nation. Miles away, the very rebels he was praising are purposefully starving the civilian population of Sirte in an effort to break their will, while they and NATO indiscriminately use heavy weapons aimed at crowded city centers.

….

October 2011: While Tunisia and Egypt had fallen, and Libya too being seized by proxy forces fueled by the West, the Obama administration began withdrawing troops from Iraq. This suspicious withdrawal when otherwise the rest of the Middle East was under US proxy assault raised serious suspicions that an escalation, not retreat was to follow.

Rhetoric for war with Iran had been steadily increasing and the beginning of what looked like a covert war was being fought inside and along Iran’s borders. A disastrous ploy of framing Iran for the alleged planned assassination of a Saudi ambassador in Washington D.C. fell apart when Iranians linked the plot to US-backed terrorist organization Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

Image: MEK. Admittedly a terrorist organization, listed by the US State Department as being such, it is fully funded, armed, and backed by the United States, based in France and US-occupied Iraq, and allowed to conduct terrorist operations against the Iranian people. The “War on Terror” is a fraud.

….

It is more than likely that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq would simply provide the US “plausible deniability” for an Israeli airstrike on Iran.

November 2011: Syria’s “peaceful protesters” who had been all along fully armed and attempting to stoke a Libyan-style civil war, were finally acknowledge as such by the corporate-media and more importantly by the corporate-funded think-tanks that supply them with their talking points. In “IISS: Syria’s Opposition is Armed,” it is states that a report out of the International Institute for Strategic Studies by Senior Fellow for Regional Security at IISS-Middle East, Emile Hokayem openly admitted that Syria’s opposition was armed and prepared to drag Syria’s violence into even bloodier depths.

Also in November, Wall Street and London’s assault on Libya came full circle with the installation of Abdurrahim el-Keib as prime minister. El-Keib who spent decades in exile in the US, was formally employed by the Petroleum Institute, based in Abu Dhabi, UAE and sponsored by British Petroleum (BP), Shell, France’s Total, the Japan Oil Development Company, and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

Photo: And so begins the farce that is Western “democracy.” One corporate-fascist puppet Mahmoud Jibril , steps down, another, Abdurrahim el-Keib, takes his place. In reality, it is NATO-states and their corporate sponsors that now determine Libya’s fate. Pictured above, el-Keib poses with Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, chairman of the unelected, NATO-backed “National Transitional Council.”
….

Joining el-Keib would be US-funded activist, Moncef Marzouki, named Tunisia’s president. Marzouki’s organization, the Tunisian League for Human Rights, was a US National Endowment for Democracy and George Soros Open Society-funded International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) member organization. Marzouki, who spent two decades in exile in Paris, France, was also founder and head of the Arab Commission for Human Rights, a collaborating institution with the US NED World Movement for Democracy (WMD) including for a “Conference on Human Rights Activists in Exile” and a participant in the WMD “third assembly” alongside Marzouki’s Tunisian League for Human Rights, sponsored byNED, Soros’ Open Society, and USAID.

https://i0.wp.com/images.alarabiya.net/9b/b1/640x392_70612_182256.jpg

Photo: US NED-funded activist leader Moncef Marzouki after spending two decades in Paris, helps foist the facade of “democracy” onto the Tunisian people. Of course, he, or someone of equal servitude to the West was going to become “President.” In 1993 Noam Chomsky would concisely describe the work of NED as “an attempt to impose what is called democracy, meaning rule by the rich and the powerful, without interference by the mob but within the framework of formal electoral procedures.” In other words, those fighting in the “Arab Spring” did so for gilded tyranny.
….

In Egypt, in late November, a second “revolution” began unfolding on the streets. In reality it was the same Western-backed forces led by ElBaradei and the emerging Mamdouh Hamza, against Egyptian military forces that seemed to have gone back on whatever arrangements they made with the West after the fall of Mubarak.

The UN, in another attempt to escalate foreign intervention in Syria, would release a UN Human Rights Council report regarding Syrian “crimes against humanity” which was actually co-authored by Karen Koning AbuZayd, a director of the US Washington-based corporate think-tank, Middle East Policy Council, that includes Exxon men, CIA agents, US military and government representatives, and even the president of the US-Qatar Business Council, which includes amongst its membership, AlJazeera, Chevron, Exxon, munitions manufacturer Raytheon (who supplied the opening salvos during NATO’s operations against Libya), and Boeing.

The report itself contained no verifiable evidence, but rather hearsay accounts recorded in Geneva by alleged “victims” “witnesses,” and “defectors,” put forth by “all interested persons and organizations.” In other words, it was an open invitation for Syria’s enemies to paint whatever image of the ruling government they pleased.

December 2011: With Tunisia and Libya fully run by Western proxies, Egypt and Syria still mired in chaos, and with globalists calling for war on Iran, the “Arab Spring” was nearly complete. However, the “Arab Spring” was only the first leg of a grander strategy to encircle Russia and China. In December, the campaigns to move in on Russia and China would begin in earnest.


Image: The “String of Pearls:” China’s oil lifeline is to be cut by the destabilization and regimes changes being made throughout Africa and the Middle East. Along the “String” the US has been destabilizing nations from Pakistan to Myanmar, from Malaysia to Thailand, to disrupt and contain China’s emergence as a regional power.

….

Hillary Clinton, in Foreign Policy Magazine would pen, “America’s Pacific Century,” a Hitlerian declaration of imperial intent for American “leadership” in Asia for the next 100 years. From “Hillary Clinton and the New American (Pacific) Century:

“Upon reading Clinton’s declaration of intent for American leadership into the next century, readers may recall the similarly named, ranting “Project for a New American Century” signed off on by some of America’s most notorious Neo-Conservatives, which almost verbatim made the same case now made by Clinton. In fact, America’s evolving confrontation with China, marked acutely by Obama’s announcement of a permanent US military presence in Australia just this week, is torn directly from the pages of decades old blueprints drawn up by corporate-financier funded think-tanks that truly rule America and its destiny.

 

As reported in June, 2011’s “Collapsing China,” as far back as 1997 there was talk about developing an effective containment strategy coupled with the baited hook of luring China into its place amongst the “international order.” Just as in these 1997 talking-points where author and notorious Neo-Con policy maker Robert Kagan described the necessity of using America’s Asian “allies” as part of this containment strategy, Clinton goes through a list of regional relationships the US is trying to cultivate to maintain “American leadership” in Asia.

 

For example, the recently reinstalled Wall Street proxy regime in Thailand led by Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck, has received reassurances by Clinton herself just this week stating that, “it is in the national security and political interest of the United States to have this government succeed.” As reported in-depth in “CONFIRMED: Thailand’s “Pro-Democracy” Movement Working for US,” Thaksin Shinawatra and his political regime have had long standing, well documented ties to Wall Street and London. The US backing of puppet-regimes like Thaksin, installing them into power, and keeping them there is central to projecting power throughout Asia and keeping China subordinate, or as Kagan put it in his 1997 report, these proxy regimes will have China “play Gulliver to Southeast Asia’s Lilliputians, with the United States supplying the rope and stakes.””

In Myanmar (Burma) “democracy icon” Aung San Suu Kyi, whose entire movement is a creation of Wall Street and London, received Hillary Clinton as well as Thailand’s proxy-PM Yingluck Shinawatra in a globalist show of support designating her as the defacto leader and point of contact within the Southeast Asian country. Clinton’s visit coincided with a successful campaign led by US NGOs to oust Chinese interests in the nation that resulted in the halting of a dam that was to provide electricity, revenue, flood control and irrigation for the people of Myanmar.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1c/Rendition_of_Myitsone_Dam.jpg

Image: The Myitsone Dam, on its way to being the 15th largest in the world until construction was halted in September by a campaign led by Wall Street-puppet Aung San Suu Kyi, a stable of US-funded NGOs, and a terrorist campaign executed by armed groups operating in Kachin State, Myanmar.

….

Meanwhile in Russia, Wall Street and London attacked more directly, attempting to interfere with Russian elections in December and resulting in several street protests led by overtly linked NED, Soros, and Rothschild operatives. NED-funded NGO “Golos” played a key role in portraying the elections as “rigged” and constituted America’s extraterritorial meddling in Russia’s sovereign affairs.


Image: NATO’s creeping encirclement of Russia has now been combined with another round of “color revolution” destabilizations in Belarus and now in Russia itself.

….

A concerted effort by the corporate-media to misrepresent the unrest in Russia was pointed out in, “Russian Protests: Western Media Lies ,” illustrating just how coordinated the overarching global destabilization being carried out actually is. In “Wall Street Vs. Russia,” it was concluded:

“It is quite clear that the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and even the US State Department whose new foreign affairs advisory board is full of think-tanks representing overt corporate-financier interests, are not interested in “democracy,” “human rights,” or “freedom” in Russia, but rather removing the Kremlin out of the way, and reestablishing the parasitic feeding on the Russian people and its economy they enjoyed after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

In late December it would be confirmed that the same Al Qaeda militants that ravaged Libya with NATO’s aid, were on their way to Syria to help overthrow the Assad government. LIFG leader Abdel Hakim Belhaj was confirmed to be on the Syrian border preparing troops of the so-called “Free Syrian Army.”

This wasn’t the only recent example of the West operating in tandem with listed terrorist groups. It was also reported in, “EXPOSED: US Troops Guarded Terrorist Camp in Iraq,” that the US has been guarding a terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq training camp inside Iraq with US troops and is planning to relocated them, possibly in a freshly abandoned US military base in Iraq while D.C. lobbyists work feverishly to have them de-listed, armed, and sent to conduct terrorist operations in Iran. Shocking comments are made in the Brookings Institution’s report, “Which Path to Persia?” where US policy experts conspire to use the terrorist organization against the government of Iran. In essence, corporate-funded policy makers have transformed the US into a state-sponsor of terror.

Conclusion

The year 2011 was surely the year of the dupe. Youth enamored with lofty, naive notions of “freedom” sold to them by corporate-fascist funded NGOs were brought into the streets to create chaos and division which was then capitalized on by covert political and even military maneuvering by the West and its proxy forces. In Egypt the nation is teetering on the edge of being fully integrated into the Wall Street/London international order, while a big-oil representative is enjoying his new position as prime minister of Libya. In Tunisia a life-long stooge of Western machinations is now president, and an alarming campaign of NATO-backed violence and terrorism is gripping Syria.

With the encirclement of Russia and China, these dupes have witlessly brought the world to the edge of World War III, and clearly done nothing at all to improve their own state of being. As their nations fall under the control of increasing Western influence, the resources once used to placate them and defend their nationalism will now be diverted into the bottomless maw of the parasitic banking combines that are currently destroying both North America and Europe.

February’s “The Middle East & then the World” is well worth reading again – to see how far we’ve come over the last year since it was written, and what is left for the globalists to do. As the globalists come ever closer to China and Russia’s doorsteps the stakes will continue to rise and the placid spectating Americans and Europeans have enjoyed this year will forever be lost.

Finally, consider what was written in one of the last articles of this year, “The End Game Approaches:”

“Complacency will kill, apathy is complicity: as the elitist-engineered “Arab Spring” reaches its conclusion, we stand on the precipice of being meshed into an inescapable, corporate-fascist, scientific planetary regime…. the End Game approaches.

 

Now more than ever, “we the people” must steel ourselves against this immense corporate-fascist empire as it sprawls death, destruction, and domination, militarily and economically, across the planet. We must, our very survival depends on it, boycott and replace entirely the corporate-financier interests that drive this dark, expansive agenda. It has been literally spawned of our apathy, complicity, and ignorance, fueled by us – the very source of corporate fascism’s power – and it must be our activism, resistance, and intellect that brings it to an end.

 

As far fetched as it may sound, every Pepsi we swig, every day we decide to drink beer and tune into our corporate-sponsored bread and circus, be it the modern day chariot races of NASCAR or the gladiatorial contests of the NFL, we bring inescapable eternal servitude to a corporate-fascist scientific dictatorship one step closer.

 

It is now “do or die” – unlike in the past, mankind now possesses the technology to render the vast majority of the population intellectually inferior through mass medication, food poisoning, GMO crops that rot our bodies and minds from the inside-out, and the martial means of eliminating vast swaths of the population permanently. Not only is this a possibility, it is a reality the global elite have conspired over at great length through texts like Ecoscience penned by current White House science adviser John Holdren and former White House science adviser Paul Ehrlich who openly talk about mass, involuntary medication to forcibly sterilize the population, reduce our numbers and confine us within what they literally call a “planetary regime.” The End Game approaches.”

Let us not “hope” next year fairs better for free humanity. Let us with our two hands, our will, and our capable intellects ensure that it is better. The decision is not that of our “leaders” or “representatives,” it is the decision of each and every one of us and what it is we do with our time, our money, our resources, our energy, and to where we pay our attention – each and every day. Let us define where it is we want our destiny to take us, and start taking one step at a time to get there.

Let us wait no longer for “saviors,” but rather look in the mirror and realize, God, the Universe, or whatever higher power you believe in, has already endowed you with everything you need, in your heart, your mind, and within your hands to prevail in whatever noble pursuit you, or “we the people” choose.

Source: Land Destroyer

Published December 24, 2011

 

The shadowy world of Egypt’s NGOs

by Jenny O’Connor

17 March 2012

NewStatesman

Funded by their governments, are these organisations funnelling money to protest movements?

Tahrir Square NGO EgyptTahrir Square: One year on. Photo: Getty Images

Ever since the Egyptian authorities raided the offices of a number of Western “non-profit organisations” in December, there has been consternation in the Western press. The 43 people accused of failing to register with the government and of financing the 6 April protest movement with illicit funds have been referred to repeatedly in the Western press as ‘NGO’ workers. This has served successfully to deflect the media from examining whether in fact there was some basis to Egypt’s claims that these people had been acting illegally.

As regards the accused organisations in Egypt, “NGO” might seem a strange term given that four of the five accused organisations receive the majority of their funding directly or indirectly from “their” governments. The Konrad Adenauer Stiftung is a German non-profit that receives 90 per cent of its funding from the German government. The International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) are two of the four core institutions of the grant-making institution the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).