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Tagged ‘NED | National Endowment for Democracy‘

Keith Harmon Snow Speaking on Propaganda and NGOs

Human rights investigator and award-winning journalist Keith Harmon Snow, describing the U.S. Center for American Progress and its use of propaganda in portraying Africa in order to protect and further U.S. interests/ foreign policy objectives. Snow must be considered one of our finest Western reporters for obtaining true independent, grassroots news from the continent of Africa.

Within the lecture, Snow discusses the psyops/propaganda strategically orchestrated behind the “Save Darfur” campaigns/movements which, in 2004, began to saturate the populace. At the helm of this “movement” was “The Center for American Progress”.

The Center for American Progress, is closely connected with the same players that founded and financed Avaaz. Today, with Avaaz at the forefront, the non-profit industrial complex has been appointed trusted messenger of a grotesque and disturbing ideology; nothing less than a complete reflection and validation of the U.S. administration’s rhetoric intended to justify the annihilation and occupation of sovereign states under the false pretense of “humanitarian intervention” and “responsibility to protect”.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.”
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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.

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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.
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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.

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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.

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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).

NGOs: The Missionaries of Empire

by Devon DB

Global Research | March 3, 2012

Non-governmental organizations are an increasingly important part of the 21st century international landscape performing a variety of humanitarian tasks pertaining inter alia to issues of poverty, the environment and civil liberties. However, there is a dark side to NGOs. They have been and are currently being used as tools of foreign policy, specifically with the United States. Instead of using purely military force, the US has now moved to using NGOs as tools in its foreign policy implementation, specifically the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, and Amnesty International.

National Endowment for Democracy

According to its website, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is “a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world,” [1] however this is sweet sounding description is actually quite far from the truth.

The history of the NED begins immediately after the Reagan administration. Due to the massive revelations concerning the CIA in the 1970s, specifically that they were involved in attempted assassinations of heads of state, the destabilization of foreign governments, and were illegally spying on the US citizens, this tarnished the image of the CIA and of the US government as a whole. While there were many committees that were created during this time to investigate the CIA, the Church Committee (led by Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho) was of critical importance as its findings “demonstrated the need for perpetual surveillance of the intelligence community and resulted in the creation of the permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.” [2] The Select Committee on Intelligence’s purpose was to oversee federal intelligence activities and while oversight and stability came in, it seemed to signal that the CIA’s ‘party’ of assassination plots and coups were over. Yet, this was to continue, but in a new way: under the guise of a harmful NGO whose purpose was to promote democracy around the world- the National Endowment for Democracy.

The NED was meant to be a tool of US foreign policy from its outset. It was the brainchild of Allen Weinstein who, before creating the Endowment, was a professor at Brown and Georgetown Universities, had served on the Washington Post’s editorial staff, and was the Executive Editor of The Washington Quarterly, Georgetown’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, a right-wing neoconservative think tank which would in the future have ties to imperial strategists such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. [3] He stated in a 1991 interview that “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” [4]

The Purpose of U.S. Soft Power Themed Revolutions: Disunity and Power Projection

14.02.2012
Wayne MADSEN
Strategic-Culture.org

A U.S. “alphabet soup” agency-sponsored themed revolution in the Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean comprising twenty-six atolls, stands to plunge the nation, heretofore considered a tropical paradise for tourists, into the same kind of chaos and civil unrest now seen on the streets of Libya, Egypt, and Syria. Maldives is smaller in comparison to the nations of the Middle East where the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), International Republican Institute (IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI), and George Soros’s Open Society Institute (OSI) have sponsored themed revolutions that have all resulted in civil unrest and a entrance of extremist Wahhabi Salafists into political power. However, the small size of Maldives provides a much clearer picture of how the aforementioned Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-sponsored “soft power” aggressors managed to turn paradise into another center of unrest in the Muslim world.

In the case of the Maldives, the road to civil strife began in 2005 when USAID- and OSI-sponsored democracy” manipulation groups took root in the country upon the legalization of opposition political parties by the government of President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Serving as president for thirty years, Gayoom was seen by the international human rights network of non-governmental organizations as a dictator ripe for removal. The Western-sponsored NGOs settled on Mohamed Nasheed, a Maldivian opposition leader who had lived in exile in Britain – with the support of the British government — and Sri Lanka and who returned to Maldives in 2005, as their favorite candidate for president.

In preparation for the first direct presidential election for president in 2008, outside “democracy manipulators” descended on Maldives, a country that had become popular with the Soros network because of global climate change. Maldives, which is threatened by rising sea levels, became a cause célèbre for the carbon tax and carbon cap-and-trade advocates.

Nasheed was the 2008 presidential candidate of the Maldivian Democratic Party against President Gayoom’s Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party. In the first round of voting, Gayoom received a little over 40 percent of the vote in the first round to the 24 percent of Nasheed’s and his vice presidential running mate, Mohammed Waheed Hassan. To defeat Gayoom in the second round, Nasheed, obviously with the encouragement of his foreign “democracy” advisers, sought and received the endorsement of four other opposition parties, including the Saudi- and United Arab Emirates-financed Salafist Adhaalath (Justice) Party. Adhaalath is an ideological partner of the Muslim Brotherhoods of Egypt and Syria. In the second round of the election, Nasheed, with the support of the other four opposition presidential candidates, defeated Gayoom 54 percent to 46 percent.

Nasheed was immediately embraced by the world’s glitterati community of NGOs and celebrities, including carbon tax-and-trade advocate Bill McKibben of 350.org and the crowd who gathered at the Sundance Film Festival to view a sycophantic film about Nasheed called The Island President. Nasheed was called the “Mandela of the Maldives” by those celebrities whose knowledge of Maldives did not extend beyond the nation’s Wikipedia entry. In October 2009, Nasheed and his Cabinet pulled off a pre-Copenhagen climate change conference publicity stunt by holding the world’s first underwater Cabinet meeting. Nasheed and eleven of his ministers, wearing scuba gear, convened the meeting twenty feet under the surface of the Indian Ocean. Nasheed was a huge hit among the celebrity contingent at the December 2009 Copenhagen summit.

Nasheed was selected by Time magazine at the top of their “Leaders & Visionaries” list of “Heroes of the Environment.” The United Nations awarded Nasheed its “Champions of the Earth” award. Foreign Policy magazine, co-founded by the late Samuel Huntington, a chief ideologist for the neo-conservative pabulum of a “Clash of Civilizations” between the West and Islam, named Nasheed as one of its top global thinkers.

Nasheed took on as his close adviser and communications assistant Paul Roberts, a British national. In what alienated his Salafist supporters, Nasheed also opened diplomatic relations with Israel, invited Israeli surgeons to Maldives amid fears they would begin harvesting human organs for Israeli clients, met with Israeli government officials, agreed to allow direct air links between Israel and Maldives, invited Israeli trainers into Maldives to advise Maldivian security forces, and failed to ensure that Maldives voted for Palestine’s full admission to the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) during the organization’s general assembly meeting in Paris on October 31, 2011. Maldives was absent from the vote.

Maldivian opposition parties, particularly the Salafist Adhaalath Party which left Nasheed’s coalition, did not buy Nasheed’s government’s weak explanation about the Palestine vote. By the end of 2010, the four other political parties in Nasheed’s Cabinet had left and Nasheed’s government was accused by the opposition of lacking transparency. The trademark yellow neckties and shirts worn by Nasheed and his supporters and the yellow Maldivian Democratic Party flags waved by Nasheed’s supporters were yet another indication that Nasheed’s “revolution” was another “themed revolution” concocted by the Soros/NED network of NGOs and think tanks in Washington, London, and New York.

Just as other Soros / NED-installed regimes began to violate the constitutions of their respective nations, including Georgia and Ukraine, Nasheed was no different. On December 10, 2010, the Maldivian Supreme Court ruled that Nasheed’s cabinet ministers could not serve without the approval of parliament. Nasheed responded by declaring the Maldivian courts were controlled by supporters of ex-president Gayoom and on January 16, 2012, Nasheed ordered the military to arrest Abdulla Mohammed, the Chief Justice of the Criminal Court.

Counter-protests were organized by Maldives opposition parties and were backed by the police. After the military clashed with the opposition protesters and police, several military members defected and joined the protesters.

Faced with the opposition and police/military uprising, Nasheed resigned the presidency on February 7. Later, Nasheed and his British adviser Roberts claimed that Nasheed was ousted in a coup d’etat. The U.S. State Department demanded that Vice President Mohammed Waheed Hassan, who assumed the presidency and opposed the arrest order of the Chief Justice, form a government of national unity with Nasheed’s supporters. Hassan refused and India, which, in the past, has intervened militarily in Maldives to put down attempted coups, remained silent. The Soros/NED global glitterati, including the Soros-funded “Democracy Now” program hosted by Amy Goodman and partly-funded by Soros, featured Roberts on an interview in which Gayoom was described as a thug and who was trying to re-assume power. Of course, the Soros propaganda program made no mention of Nasheed’s repeated violations of the Maldivian constitution.

As with the destabilization of Iraq, Egypt, and Libya, the first target for alleged Islamist radicals after the ouster of Nasheed was the destruction of priceless museum artifacts. Unknown men broke into the Chinese-built Maldives National Museum in Male, the capital, and smashed the delicate coral and limestone pre–Islamic Maldivian Buddhist statues on display.

The yellow flag of Nasheed’s political party.

The rise of Salafists and Muslim Brotherhood adherents in the new Maldivian government parallels what occurred in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia after their themed revolutions.

The Maldives were destabilized by the West at the same time that the Egyptian government charged 43 CIA-linked NGO personnel, including Americans, Britons, Serbs, and others working for IRI, NDI, and NED, with possessing a secret plan, including maps, to divide Egypt into an Israeli-dominated Sinai state, a Coptic state extending from Alexandria in the north to Asyut in the South, a Berber-dominated Islamic state based in Cairo, and a black African Nubian state in the south.

There now may be an attempt by the West to split up Maldives. In 1957, the British established the Gan airbase on the southernmost atoll of Addu and insisted on 100-year base rights on Seenu Atoll. After Maldives Prime Minister and President Ibrahim Nasir adopted a nationalist foreign policy, the British backed a secessionist movement in the southern atolls where the British bases were located that declared the short-lived United Suvadive Republic in 1959. After the collapse of the secessionist republic in 1965, the British bought the southernmost atoll in the Chagos-Laccadive chain of atolls from Mauritius and established the British Indian Ocean Territory. The inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago island of Diego Garcia were forcibly removed to Mauritius and other Chagos islands and the United States established its strategic military base on the island of Diego Garcia. Maldives never recognized Mauritian claims over the Chagos atolls or the British Indian Ocean Territory. With neo-con interference in Maldives now coming to fruition, secessionist movements in the southern atolls may, once again, gain ground to ensure unfettered U.S. and British control over Diego Garcia and expansion of U.S. and British military facilities to the Addu atoll and, perhaps, further north in the Maldives chain.

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation on-line journal www.strategic-culture.org.

The politics of charity

Aid is not designed to bring the wretched of the earth out of poverty but to pacify unrest in the donor country’s domestic sphere

Sreeram Chaulia | The Asian Age

Feb 22, 2012

Foreign aid is both a sop to the liberal conscience of the donor state’s domestic society as well as an instrument of indirect control over recipient states. The motivations and effects of aid are frequently ulterior and detrimental, notwithstanding the altruistic rhetoric. These ugly realities were reified recently by two prominent cases, one in post-revolutionary Egypt and the other in economically growing India.

Egypt’s military-dominated interim regime is prosecuting 19 American citizens working for “pro-democracy” NGOs linked to the two main US political parties. They are facing charges for taking unauthorised foreign aid and undermining Egyptian sovereignty by funding street protests, which have become ubiquitous since Hosni Mubarak’s downfall in February 2011.

The three American NGOs in the line of fire — the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and Freedom House — have a reputation of channelling partisan US government aid to alter internal political processes of countries that receive aid. Since they are organisations serving American strategic interests in the name of advancing human rights and civil liberties, the Egyptian authorities have a valid reason in investigating their activities.

But what’s interesting here are the shrill cries that emanated from the US Congress in response to Egypt’s filing of legal suits against the NGO employees. Last week, there was an uproar on Capitol Hill exhorting the Barack Obama administration to deny vital military and development aid to Egypt, which is the fifth-largest recipient of American largesse. At stake is $1.6 billion of aid that Washington annually gifts to Cairo and which is now the lifeline for the transitional Egyptian state.

Egyptian civilians, who are disillusioned with the revolution and fear falling under a fourth successive military dictator since the 1950s, know that the US has leverage over Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of Egypt’s ruling military council, and his officer ranks owing to their dependence on Washington’s aid. As the anti-military sentiment has risen into a mass fervour on the streets, the fact that the US was not using the aid card to force the Army to hand over power to civilians had, despite the charade, been frustrating activists. But sadly for their cause, not even the NGO arrests have pushed the US executive away from pampering the Egyptian military.

In the last few days, US Senators and representatives who had earlier demanded an end to the harassment of American NGO staffers have toned down their stridency on retaliation for the arrests. The key to this turnaround has to do with Israel’s fears that shutting off the aid tap will push the Egyptian military to abandon its three-decade-old peace treaty with Tel Aviv.

Foreign aid from Washington to successive Egyptian regimes since the days of Anwar Sadat is actually a bribe to perpetuate their entente cordiale with Israel — anger on the streets in Egypt against a sell-out on the Palestinian cause had to be salved through this form of payment from the US to the Egyptian military. Sensing Israel’s fear and the US’ vulnerability, the Muslim Brotherhood, which currently dominates the Egyptian Parliament, has threatened to “review” relations with Israel if the aid stops flowing from Washington. The Brotherhood and Tantawi’s officer corps know that in an election year, Mr Obama would not dare to weaken Israel geopolitically.

The outcome of this sordid game over aid is that the people of Egypt who are desperately striving for civilian supremacy and de-politicisation of the Army, are being cheated by the strategic aid policy of the US, which is nothing but a guarantee for Israel’s security. The NGOs who claim to be helping to democratise Egypt are playing their parts as cogs in this structural vicious circle.

The India-UK row over foreign aid is equally convoluted. Some British MPs, angered by New Delhi’s award of a major fighter jet contract to a French defence manufacturer, pressured the David Cameron government to cancel the £280 million worth of annual development assistance to India. If development aid does not buy lucrative contracts to Britain’s military industrial complex, they argued, Britain should stop its charity pretentions and suspend aid deliveries to India.

Following this muscle-flexing, it emerged from leaked memos that India was anyway not clamouring for British development aid. India’s then foreign secretary, Nirupama Rao, is said to have recommended that Delhi stop accepting British aid due to the “negative publicity of Indian poverty” promoted by UK’s DFID (Department for International Development). India’s finance minister Pranab Mukherjee bluntly remarked in 2011 that Britain’s aid was “peanuts” and was not welcome.

Yet, as in the case of the US and Egypt, the British government has not withdrawn its unsolicited aid to India owing to domestic compulsions. The justification for this puzzling act of unwarranted benevolence is that British ministers had painstakingly sold the policy of foreign aid to their electorates and that pulling the plug now on India would cause “grave political embarrassment”.

In other words, the myth that Britain is still a liberal saviour of suffering people of the world has to be kept up for a domestic audience that is suffering under the weight of a prolonged economic downturn. Aid is, thus, not designed to bring the wretched of the earth out of poverty but to pacify unrest in the donor country’s domestic sphere. This has echoes from colonial times, when workers at home were kept under leash by means of the civilising mission and the “white man’s burden” overseas — the propaganda in Victorian England about the supposed uplifting nature of British colonialism was couched in humanitarian aid terms and was a means to cover up the Dickensian gloom of factory labour exploitation.

Last year, China surpassed the World Bank as the world’s biggest development lender. Apart from the political leverage, market penetration and energy security that Beijing gets in return from Africa and Latin America, Chinese aid investments also serve domestic purposes. Beijing’s “chequebook diplomacy” keeps internal dissent under check by peddling the vision of a benevolent state whose foreign policy is empowering the world’s underdogs.

Charity indeed begins at home, but in a rather murky way. Aid has never pitchforked receiving societies out of poverty, although donor states and their allies routinely benefit from developmental loans and grants thrust upon the wary. Egypt and India would fare better if liberated from foreign aid and its entwining strings.

The writer is vice-dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs and the author of the recent book, International Organizations and Civilian Protection: Power, Ideas and Humanitarian Aid in Conflict Zones

http://www.asianage.com/columnists/politics-charity-832

 

 

US Trojan Horses in Venezuela

Nil NIKANDROV | 20.02.2012

Strategic Culture Foundation

Several days ago, representatives of 55 Venezuelan NGOs called the international community to rise to the defense of democracy in the country at a media event in Miami, charging Hugo Chavez with threatening democracy, neglecting human rights, and igniting a civilian conflict in Venezuela. The participants of the event pledged that the campaign built around the demand to put the Venezuelan leader on trial would continue in order to keep Chavez’s regime under permanent pressure, and its coordinator Carlos Fernandez announced that an appeal had been supplied to the Hague Tribunal to make Chavez face justice over nothing less than alleged crimes against humanity. At the moment, the key lines on the Venezuelan opposition’s grievances list are company nationalizations, the looming closure of the anti-Chavez Globovision TV channel, attempts to introduce Marxist instruction in Venezuelan schools, and crackdowns on the opponents of the current Venezuelan regime. Fernandez, who had been on the radical fringe during the 2002 outbreak of anti-government protests in Venezuela, urged the international community to act immediately and warned that failure to do so would result in the entrenchment of a militarist, Castro-communist regime in Venezuela for years. He also confided to the audience that an investigator was dispatched by the Hague Tribunal to Columbia to examine the files on the notebooks which belonged to slain FARC secretariat member and spokesman Raúl Reyes. Chavez would eventually face justice for his FARC connections, claimed Fernandez.

NGOs mushroomed in Venezuela after Chavez’s 1998 electoral triumph, and at the moment their number estimatedly reaches several hundreds. Back in 1998, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) enjoyed unlimited freedom of maneuver in the country and made full use of it to expand the influence of the US intelligence community over the Venezuelan society. The correspondence of the US embassy in Caracas, unveiled by WikiLeaks, left no doubts that the US Department of State, the CIA, the US Defense Intelligence Agency, and DEA had been taking advantage of the situation to make inroads into Venezuela.

Washington had to learn as the 2002 anti-Chavez coup collapsed that the Venezuelan leader was a serious opponent who would not crack under pressure and at all times remained a clever strategist. Chavez managed to handle successfully the recurrent conflicts with the Empire, while staunchly upholding his socialist project domestically and building ever stronger positions internationally. Given Chavez’s record which includes oil sector nationalization and the expulsion of the fifth column from the petroleum industry, the removal of conspiracy-prone officers from the army top command, and nationally oriented socioeconomic reforms, plans for his ouster in a violent putsch obviously stand no chance, and Washington therefore has to place its bet on a color revolution in Venezuela. This type of revolt in the country does not seem altogether impossible as the support for the opposition in Venezuela typically measures around 35% and the Venezuelan middle class, students, and intellectual circles for the most part do not favor Chavez. These are the communities currently comprising the audience of the Venezuelan NGOs and receiving from them perks in the forms of grants, travel support, and costly gadgets.  Color revolution champions are trained in Venezuela based on movies featuring the corresponding episodes from the recent East European history. As in Cuba, the white color is chosen as the hallmark of the Venezuelan protesters. What Venezuela’s NGOs must pretend to be oblivious to are Chavez’s achievements in fighting poverty, strengthening the national economy, and boosting the amounts of welfare for the population.

Naturally, Venezuela’s young are the NGOs’ main target audience. Student attack groups played the central role in the clashes between protesters and police in Venezuela in May, 2007 when the government revoked the license of the RCTV channel (the step was taken in connection with the fact that the RCTV broadcasting contract expired by the time). Chavez described the unrest as an attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government and called the residents of low-income urban quarters and villages to resist what he termed a fascist offensive. In response, Andrés Bello Catholic University student leader John Goicoechea said that Chavez’ drumming up support among the more radical part of his constituency who were supposed to confront the violence-prone students was an irresponsible policy. Shortly thereafter, Venezuela’s state-run 8th TV channel demonstrated Goicoechea’s phone book with the US embassy phone and that of the US diplomat who worked with students. Goicoechea later stepped out of the spotlight, but there is surely still a place for him as a skilled color revolution activist in the CIA plans and we will see him stage a comeback. The US program of entraining students from affluent Venezuelan families stays on-line, though the tricks with white shorts, white paint on palms, etc. reflect a rather unimaginative attempt to replay past success stories.

NGOs like Provea, Cofavic, Centro de Derechos Humanos (in the Catholic University) Una Ventana a la Libertad, and Sinergia occupy the human rights advocacy niche. According to Chavez and his supporters, the groups, along with the opposition media, deliberately draw a distorted picture of what is happening in Venezuela, hammering just about every aspect of the country’s life, be it the situation within the army, the struggle against crime, the detention conditions, the workers’ employment terms, the environment, the Indian problems, etc. Activists from the above NGOs were spotted a number of times during transactions with CIA operatives who supply to them instructions and funds. The NGOs submit to the CIA lists of candidates for admission to courses teaching “self-defense” under the conditions of “instability”, which evidently means a provoked crisis.

The legitimacy of Venezuela’s electoral procedure is being permanently challenged. US puppeteers who used to say that Chavez had employed the national electoral council for ballot-rigging were instrumental in forming the NGO known as Sumate. María Corina Machado, a defeated candidate in the 2002 presidential race, headed Sumate in 2002. Predictably, she called into question the outcomes of essentially all elections and referendums in Venezuela, for example, that of the 2004 referendum in which Chavez smashingly won 60% of the vote. The image of Sumate suffered a heavy blow when it transpired that money – occasionally, tens of millions of US dollars – was fed to the group on a regular basis by NED. Chavez accused Sumate of conspiracy in the wake of the revelations. Machado personally met with US President G. Bush at the peak of her career, but her prestige was irreversibly eroded. In 2005, the Venezuelan office of the general prosecutor charged Sumate with exerting pressure on the authority and receiving funds from an organization controlled by the US Congress, but the case, after a series of re-openings, finally stalled in court.

The activity of NGOs in Venezuela continued completely unchecked over the first decade of Chavez’s rule, while the police and counter-espionage agency were constantly discovering that the confidants of the US and other Western countries in Venezuelan NGOs collected information of military importance across the country or surveyed its regions bordering Columbia, Brazil, and Guyana. It should also be noted that foreign intelligence services are keenly interested in Venezuela’s Amazonia, and environment-protection NGO activists are spying in the parts of the country formerly frequented by US preachers from the New Tribes Mission. Some 30 secret aerodromes in the zone of their activity were used to illegally carry out Venezuelan gold, diamonds, precious metals, and, according to several accounts, uranium. The latter circumstance may be paradoxically related to the concerns voiced by Bush’s and Obama’s Administrations over Venezuela’s allegedly existing secret uranium mines with Iranian workers on staff.

An end was put to the untamed activity of NGOs – the US Trojan Horses in Venezuela – in December, 2010 when the parliament of the country passed a law on the protection of political sovereignty and national self-determination. The legislation was backed by the ruling United Socialist Party (PSUV) and predictably met with resistance mounted by the opposition which actually thrives on foreign donations. By the law, groups are subject to sanctions for drawing money from abroad with the aims of destabilizing Venezuela or undermining the present authority. If caught red-handed, NGO activists would have to pay in fines twice the amount received from other countries or even face the loss of political rights for 5-8 years. Moreover, fines and deportation now await foreign nationals involved in funding subversive NGO activities in Venezuela.

With the financial transparency regulations for NGOs now in place, there is hope that the level of corruption in Venezuela’s politics will visibly go down, but it should be realized that the channels via which NED, USAID and their like pour millions of dollars into the country have not been fully severed. As noted by Eva Golinger, a person extremely knowledgeable about CIA operations against Venezuela, the easiest way to smuggle currency into the country is to have it delivered by diplomatic mail.

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2012/02/20/us-trojan-horses-in-venezuela.html

 

 

Egypt Leads Fight Against NGO Agitators | A real revolution may be about to follow

Feb 20, 2012

by Tony Cartalucci | Land Destroyer Report

Neo-Conservative Max Boot is a certified warmonger, an elitist policy wonk sitting on the Fortune 500-funded Council on Foreign Relations, has signed his name to letters that called for sidestepping both national and international law to militarily intervene further in Libya, as well as call for troops on the ground even after Tripoli fell last year. He is a man you would least expect to champion NGOs and their liberal-progressive agendas.

However NGOs are not “liberal-progressive.” They are the system administrators of modern empire, an empire being forged by the wars and covert operations Boot is a chief proponent of. The absence of NGOs in any given nation, means a nation free from the influence of Wall Street & London’s networks and meddling. That is why Boot feverishly penned, “Obama’s Egyptian Hostage Crisis,” in an attempt to spur a more vigorous response to what would seem like a very minor event in the context of greater global conflicts. Egypt’s arrest and trying of 19 Americans, all of whom are directly involved in Wall Street’s network of National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded NGOs, including the head of the International Republican Institute (IRI) office in Egypt, signifies a potential turning point not just in Egypt, but around the world.

Empire’s Double-Edged Sword: Global Military + NGOs

Feb 19, 2012

Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer Activist Post 

Tearing down sovereign nations and replacing them with global system administrators

Colonial Southeast Asia circa 1850s. Thailand/Siam
was never colonized but made many concessions.

Part 1: Imperialism is Alive and Well

The British Empire didn’t just have a fleet that projected its hegemonic will across the planet; it possessed financial networks to consolidate global economic power, and system administrators to ensure the endless efficient flow of resources from distant lands back to London and into the pockets of England’s monied elite. It was a well-oiled machine, refined by centuries of experience.While every schoolchild learns about the British Empire, it seems a common modern-day political malady for adults to believe that reality is organized as their history books were in school — in neat, well-defined chapters. This leads to the common misconception that the age of imperialism is somehow a closed chapter in human history. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. Imperialism did not go extinct. It simply evolved.

The International Campaign Against Evo Morales

Published Feb 15, 2012 by Cambio, the official newspaper of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.

An extended version was originally published in English on Jan 23, 2012 by Political Context and Canadians for Action on Climate Change.

http://www.cambio.bo/opinion/20120215/la_campana_internacional_contra_evo_morales_64561.htm