By Dr. Mahmud Madi
Translated By Nicolas Dagher from Arabic
February 14, 2012
Egypt - Amal Al Ommah - Original Article (Arabic)
The shouts of the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square - and all of Egypt is for all intents and purposes Tahrir Square - were heard around the world, north, south, east and west, and everyone knew that an earthquake had happened in Egypt.
As Ahmed Shawqi once said: “We were separated from the world by mail, but joined at the horizons by broadcasting." [Writing at the beginning of the last century], the poet was referring to radio - which transformed the world into a small village.
But somehow, news of the revolution failed to reach the administrations in America and Germany, which insisted on taking the same approach they followed with the previous regime, when submission and unquestioned approval was the norm. As Georgetown University Professor John Esposito has said: “The administration only sees what it wants to see, and only hears what it wants to hear.”
With many others, I watched the press conference of the Egyptian investigative judges on the involvement of some American non-governmental organizations in political activity. Under the guise of charity work and spreading democracy, they and their money entered the country illegally - the cash going to Egyptian organizations in an effort to create strife and chaos in an attempt to influence the outcome of the revolution.
The American reaction was tense and angry. In the face of the Egyptian people, Washington then drew its sharpest weapon: it threatened to cut U.S. aid to Egypt.
Some American papers described the Egyptian position as reflecting a “lack of moral principle.” So is reclaiming our dignity, which was lost during the previous regime, considered a lack of moral principle? Then what should we call your arrogance toward us? Shall we call it a “lack of civility”?
Few of us have forgotten your $1.3 billion. But while Egyptians have not forgotten that, they have also not forgotten the story of the Aswan Dam and how you refused to finance it unless certain humiliating conditions were met. So the Egyptian people built it themselves with their daily bread. The people are more than willing to do without your aid.
The people will never forget your biased siding with Israel in 1967, and will not forget your threats to our military in 1973 and your airlift to Israel to save it from certain defeat at the hands of the heroic Egyptian Army. We will not forget the way you suborned President Sadat at Camp David until you stripped our victory of all substance. This is why large sectors of Egypt's population doesn't trust you. You kept the oppressive “Mubarak” regime safe and warm and you aspired to allow the regime to survive without Mubarak, so you could continue to guarantee Israel's security with the help of Egyptians.
We ask: Would the United States of America accept what these NGOs were doing here - undermining the nation's sovereignty - on U.S. soil? It would absolutely refuse. So why should we have to accept it? Why does the U.S. want revolutionary Egypt to become a breeding ground for conspiracies against Egypt's national and societal security, its territorial integrity and the unity of its people? Should Egypt accept such a situation in return for aid which is given in return for favors the previous regime performed for the U.S. in Iraq, the Gulf and Afghanistan, all at the expense of our Arab nation?
If the Americans were sincere about their calls to spread democracy, they would have waited a bit until the end of the investigation into their agents and their leader, International Republican Institute chief Sam LaHood. But all we see is the arrogance of "Dulles," "Albright," "Kissinger" and Condoleezza Rice.
We have a right to ask: What does charity work and spreading democracy have to do with taking photographs of churches, noting their locations and numbers? How is this related to identifying the bases of the Egyptian Armed Forces in cities along the Nile canal? Isn’t this an act of espionage against our national security for the benefit of foreign parties? Or does this qualify as charitable work in your lexicon?
And how can we explain the existence of maps that divide a unified nation into four distinct states?
Another question: It has been said that the total amount of money these American NGOs poured into Egyptian organizations from 2006 to 2010 amounted to $60 million - and that in the year since the dawn of the revolution, the amount jumped to $400 million. Is such generosity out of a love for the revolution and support for the revolutionaries, or something else, perhaps?!
I want to say that the U.S. administration only reluctantly accepted the revolution and had to bite its collective tongue by removing Mubarak - but then supported the counter-revolution in order to keep the Mubarak regime without Mubarak. How else can we explain what these organizations have done to our country?
The Egyptian revolution has stood against them. It has deviated from the path sought by Tony Blair - who feels hatred and vindictiveness for everything Muslim, Arabic and Palestinian - and who said as our revolution began that any change the revolution may bring must be controlled and consistent with the economic and strategic interests of the West. Could it be that Egypt's change in course has led to attempts to seek revenge, drive the Egyptian people back onto the American reservation, and operations by American and German organizations to spy and cause chaos in support of counter revolution?
A series of moves to pressure and warn Egypt came from the U.S. administration and European Union. But so far, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, expressing itself on behalf of the revolution, has rejected these threats and announced that they would not give in - and would not be the instrument for bringing the Egyptian people to their knees again - even if Washington cuts its aid. Boosting the Army’s position were the results of NGO investigation and the discovery of the maps dividing Egypt into four entities!
The message of the revolution hasn't reached them yet. They have yet to absorb the lessons and the defeats in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. This is the era of the people. A tiny and poor country south of Egypt, Eritrea, has refused U.S. aid and its so-called non-governmental organization and is relying on its own resources, which cannot be compared to the tremendous resources and potential of Egypt - despite its great upheavals and hard times.
Final words: If America wants to ensure its interests in our Arab East, and balanced and respectful relations with Egypt, then it has to recognize revolutionary Egypt is different from the Egypt of “Mubarak” or his heir “Gamal.”
Oh Allah, save our country of Egypt from all evil, and link our hearts to the people of the cave.
________________
Egypt Leads Fight Against NGO Agitators
A real revolution may be about to follow.
by Tony Cartalucci
February 20, 2012 - 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.
Image: The Serbian Otpor fist... in Egypt? The same US organizations that trained & funded Serbians to overthrow their government in 2000, were behind the April 6 Movement and the Egyptian "Arab Spring." Sun Tzu in the Art of War said, "all warfare is deception." In fourth generation warfare, no deceit is greater than convincing people they are "liberating" themselves when in reality they are dividing and destroying their nation so that Wall Street & London's network of already in place NGOs can take over, while a suitable proxy is put in office as PM or president. In Egypt, these NGOs would already have a new constitution drafted and ready before the fall of Hosni Mubarak.
....
While Tunisia celebrates it's 1 year anniversary of Wall Street domination with a US NED-funded president in office, and Libya celebrates their February 17th uprising with militants carrying out nation-wide murder sprees, the Egyptians seems to have ground the foreign-funded destabilization effort to a halt and are finishing it off with a "revolution" of their own.
As Max Boot says:
"If any of these NGO workers wind up in prison, it will be a permanent blot not only on the Egyptian government but also on the Obama administration for letting it happen. Put simply, nations do not act like this if they fear American power. Clearly we are not inducing enough respect even in a country such as Egypt which is dependent on over $1.5 billion in annual U.S. aid.
President Obama must intervene personally if necessary to resolve this crisis and get the authorities in Cairo to let our people go. Anything less would make us a laughingstock and a certain target of more affronts."
Indeed, Egypt standing up to the US and its global network of meddlers would encourage other nations to follow suit. It would help expose the "Arab Spring" as the foreign-plot it really was and balk currently ongoing efforts by Wall Street & London to overthrow governments in Belarus, Myanmar, Malaysia, the old guard in Thailand, and even Russia and China. People in the streets may want change, but they do not want it at the expense of procuring a foreign dictator reinstating its old colonial role.
For those that doubt US-funded NGOs were meddling in Egypt...
In January of 2011, we were told that "spontaneous," "indigenous" uprising had begun sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, including Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, 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 (emphasis added):
"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 organizations including NED, NDI, LaHood's IRI, and Freedom House and the stable of NGOs they maintain throughout the world. Preparations for the "Arab Spring" 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.
In 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.
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."
An April 2011 AFP report would confirm that the US government had trained armies of "activists" to return to their respective countries and enact political "change," 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."
Video: The Revolution Business. The revolutions are fake, the people behind them illegitimate.
That ripple effect of course, was the "Arab Spring" and the subsequent destabilization, violence, and even US armed and backed warfare that followed. While nations like Libya and Tunisia are now run by a BP, Shell, and Total-funded Petroleum Institute chairman and a US NED-funded "activist" respectively, Egypt has managed to ward off and expose the US proxy of choice, Mohammed ElBaradei, who's own movement was forced to denounce him as a Western agent.
By striking at the meddling, seditious NGOs, Egypt seeks to undermine the source of destabilization, the conduit through which US money and support is funneled through to "activists," and expose the true foreign-funded nature of the political division that has gripped the nation for now over a year.
Message to all who seek national sovereignty...
Join in solidarity with Egypt, and after a brief amnesty period, go to the offices of each and every US National Endowment for Democracy, Open Society, USAID-funded NGO and propaganda outlet, round up their staff, and put them on trial for sedition and treason. For too long have nations tolerated the incessant meddling of foreign powers in their internal affairs. For too long have they faced ridicule and accusations by warmongers like Max Boot who has endorsed conflicts that have destroyed millions of lives. It is only a matter of time before the US, if left to its own devices, reaches a critical mass in any given nation with its networks of NGOs, its system administrators, where they begin running the nation on Wall Street & London's behalf while the sovereign institutions of the targeted state whither and die.
Video: Fourth generation warfare explained. US-enabled "Leviathan" force destroys nations, another army of "system administrators" including civil society, NGOs, and "international institutions" of the West replace it. It is modern empire in motion.
This is 4th generation warfare, not British imperial gunboats anchored off the coast and occupying armies, but sloppy, unkempt civil society workers taking millions of dollars from Wall Street's George Soros through his Open Society Institute, and the US State Department's National Endowment for Democracy, and ceaselessly eroding the sovereignty of a nation, poisoning the will of people against one another, and laying the ground work for a suitable proxy of choice to enter into office and "mislead" the nation down the path to neo-colonialism. There is nothing progressive about it, and there is nothing wrong with defending against it.
Should Egypt jail these agents of sedition, and embolden other nations to follow suit, the model of 4th generation warfare that the US has spent so much time and money perfecting will collapse. Perhaps global empire may find another way to succeed, perhaps another nation will rise and take the Anglo-American's ignominious role as global tormenter, but for a brief time, nations may be able to enjoy a constructive, multi-polar world, and this real revolution of national sovereignty will have ironically started approximately one year on from the beginning of another, disingenuous, insidious "revolution."
Showing posts with label ned. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ned. Show all posts
Friday, March 09, 2012
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
NGOs: the West’s soft instrument for hegemonic policies
By Tahir Mahmoud
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become an important political tool in the hands of the West. Like the word “aid”, the NGOs (they also use the alias non-profit organizations) are used to penetrate and undermine other societies, especially in the Muslim world. Looked at superficially, the concept of NGOs may appear practical and beneficial, but the manner in which they are used by the US and the West in general is not only a distortion of their original aim but borders on the scandalous.
The role of US-backed NGOs was best summarized by Allen Weinstein, one of the founders of the National Endowment for Democracy who stated in a 1991 Washington Post article: “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” In order to be able to identify which NGOs are used as political instruments there is need to examine their links with state institutions, their operational modes and the sources of their funding.
It was US President John F. Kennedy (1961–63) who pioneered the politicization of NGOs when he US established the Peace Corps in 1961. Even though the Peace Corps is a government organization, its concept and model were later used to establish several other NGOs backed by the US government. The so-called Peace Corps sends American “volunteers” to promote “the understanding of Americans abroad.” The Peace Corps was the answer to the Soviet Union’s grass roots activism in Latin America and Africa. In 1981 anti-communist training was provided to Peace Corps volunteers and the US government hired Dean Coston Associates, a consulting firm, to train volunteers to undermine communist efforts by presenting communism in a negative light. However, since the Peace Corps is known as a governmental organization it does not always succeed in portraying its agenda or policies as unbiased. It seems that this weakness in the Peace Corps was first realized by US President Ronald Reagan who helped establish another NGO, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), in 1983, in order to promote “democracy.” NED is directly financed by the US Congress and has played an important role in advancing US interests in different parts of the world to the detriment of local populations. In the mid-1980s, the NED openly backed Manuel Noriega in Panama and the anti-Castro groups in order to advance US hegemony in Central America. Today through so called grants, the NED finances several anti-Islamic groups that work to sabotage the Islamic system of governance in Iran.
Since the 1980s, the US has adopted a more sophisticated approach to advancing its agenda through NGOs. One contemporary example of “NGO” work is the involvement of the Open Society Institute (OSI) in the so-called “Rose Revolution” in Georgia which brought to power a staunchly pro-US government. Instead of being directly involved, the US government remained in the background by using individuals such as George Soros, the billionaire financier, who funds the OSI. Organizations such as the OSI are given political and economic space to operate independently as long as their work does not impede US global designs at the strategic level. This provides the US a way to implement certain policies without taking official responsibility and therefore cannot be held directly liable politically, socially, economically and in some cases even legally.
The operational mode of US-backed NGOs is quite simple. They finance so-called projects and programs in many impoverished countries where the ruling system does little to improve the life of its citizens. Such brutal and corrupt regimes are sustained in power by the US itself; examples of Azerbaijan, Egypt, and Pakistan readily come to mind. In such cases it becomes easy for foreign NGOs to attract the local population to cooperate with it because the alternative is often unemployment and starvation. By providing even minimum services which the local government should have but does not provide, US-backed NGOs project themselves as benefactors of people. This garners support for them among local populations.
Western NGOs skilfully exploit the unpopularity of corrupt regimes in order to further the foreign policy objectives of their own governments. Since foreign NGOs have the money to implement vital projects, many local NGOs which are sincere in improving the conditions in their own countries become vulnerable to manipulation by receiving grants from outsiders. Lack of funding forces local NGOs in the developing world to surrender their integrity and lose their identity as truly non-governmental bodies since they become the extended arm of foreign governments.
Apart from NGOs that focus on social services, there are several so-called think-tanks and foundations that play an important role in policy formulation and implementation. The US has the world’s largest number of think-tanks which not only serve as policy formulation institutions, but also as a staffing center for the US government to recruit experts from various fields. Think-tanks and foundations became incorporated into the “non-governmental” scheme of the US government in the early 1900s. While foundations deal mainly with financing individuals and organizations, think-tanks are supposed to provide a non-biased second opinion. However, even though think-tanks claim to provide alternative perspectives they often promote policies that benefit their financiers. RAND Corporation, one of the leading US think-tanks, established in 1945 right after the Second World War by the commander of the US Air Force, General Henry H. Arnold, offers a good example. In 2008, RAND spent $230.07 million on research. Many RAND studies directly or indirectly advocated large military spending and in particular spending on the air force. The US Air Force contributed $42 million to RAND in the same year.
The so-called NGOs that are financed by the US government are an important part of US policy to advance its hegemonic goals. It is likely that during the presidency of Barack Obama the NGO sector may be used even more frequently as a tool of US foreign policy. In 2009 Obama openly proclaimed that Americans cannot only rely on their military and need a “civilian national security which is as well trained and funded.” Since NGOs often play a positive role in a society’s development, serious thought must be given to how best to protect NGOs from government manipulation. The best way to do this would be by making the NGOs less dependent on direct governmental funding. One way would be to establish an independent international fund for supplementary NGO funding.
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become an important political tool in the hands of the West. Like the word “aid”, the NGOs (they also use the alias non-profit organizations) are used to penetrate and undermine other societies, especially in the Muslim world. Looked at superficially, the concept of NGOs may appear practical and beneficial, but the manner in which they are used by the US and the West in general is not only a distortion of their original aim but borders on the scandalous.
The role of US-backed NGOs was best summarized by Allen Weinstein, one of the founders of the National Endowment for Democracy who stated in a 1991 Washington Post article: “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” In order to be able to identify which NGOs are used as political instruments there is need to examine their links with state institutions, their operational modes and the sources of their funding.
It was US President John F. Kennedy (1961–63) who pioneered the politicization of NGOs when he US established the Peace Corps in 1961. Even though the Peace Corps is a government organization, its concept and model were later used to establish several other NGOs backed by the US government. The so-called Peace Corps sends American “volunteers” to promote “the understanding of Americans abroad.” The Peace Corps was the answer to the Soviet Union’s grass roots activism in Latin America and Africa. In 1981 anti-communist training was provided to Peace Corps volunteers and the US government hired Dean Coston Associates, a consulting firm, to train volunteers to undermine communist efforts by presenting communism in a negative light. However, since the Peace Corps is known as a governmental organization it does not always succeed in portraying its agenda or policies as unbiased. It seems that this weakness in the Peace Corps was first realized by US President Ronald Reagan who helped establish another NGO, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), in 1983, in order to promote “democracy.” NED is directly financed by the US Congress and has played an important role in advancing US interests in different parts of the world to the detriment of local populations. In the mid-1980s, the NED openly backed Manuel Noriega in Panama and the anti-Castro groups in order to advance US hegemony in Central America. Today through so called grants, the NED finances several anti-Islamic groups that work to sabotage the Islamic system of governance in Iran.
Since the 1980s, the US has adopted a more sophisticated approach to advancing its agenda through NGOs. One contemporary example of “NGO” work is the involvement of the Open Society Institute (OSI) in the so-called “Rose Revolution” in Georgia which brought to power a staunchly pro-US government. Instead of being directly involved, the US government remained in the background by using individuals such as George Soros, the billionaire financier, who funds the OSI. Organizations such as the OSI are given political and economic space to operate independently as long as their work does not impede US global designs at the strategic level. This provides the US a way to implement certain policies without taking official responsibility and therefore cannot be held directly liable politically, socially, economically and in some cases even legally.
The operational mode of US-backed NGOs is quite simple. They finance so-called projects and programs in many impoverished countries where the ruling system does little to improve the life of its citizens. Such brutal and corrupt regimes are sustained in power by the US itself; examples of Azerbaijan, Egypt, and Pakistan readily come to mind. In such cases it becomes easy for foreign NGOs to attract the local population to cooperate with it because the alternative is often unemployment and starvation. By providing even minimum services which the local government should have but does not provide, US-backed NGOs project themselves as benefactors of people. This garners support for them among local populations.
Western NGOs skilfully exploit the unpopularity of corrupt regimes in order to further the foreign policy objectives of their own governments. Since foreign NGOs have the money to implement vital projects, many local NGOs which are sincere in improving the conditions in their own countries become vulnerable to manipulation by receiving grants from outsiders. Lack of funding forces local NGOs in the developing world to surrender their integrity and lose their identity as truly non-governmental bodies since they become the extended arm of foreign governments.
Apart from NGOs that focus on social services, there are several so-called think-tanks and foundations that play an important role in policy formulation and implementation. The US has the world’s largest number of think-tanks which not only serve as policy formulation institutions, but also as a staffing center for the US government to recruit experts from various fields. Think-tanks and foundations became incorporated into the “non-governmental” scheme of the US government in the early 1900s. While foundations deal mainly with financing individuals and organizations, think-tanks are supposed to provide a non-biased second opinion. However, even though think-tanks claim to provide alternative perspectives they often promote policies that benefit their financiers. RAND Corporation, one of the leading US think-tanks, established in 1945 right after the Second World War by the commander of the US Air Force, General Henry H. Arnold, offers a good example. In 2008, RAND spent $230.07 million on research. Many RAND studies directly or indirectly advocated large military spending and in particular spending on the air force. The US Air Force contributed $42 million to RAND in the same year.
The so-called NGOs that are financed by the US government are an important part of US policy to advance its hegemonic goals. It is likely that during the presidency of Barack Obama the NGO sector may be used even more frequently as a tool of US foreign policy. In 2009 Obama openly proclaimed that Americans cannot only rely on their military and need a “civilian national security which is as well trained and funded.” Since NGOs often play a positive role in a society’s development, serious thought must be given to how best to protect NGOs from government manipulation. The best way to do this would be by making the NGOs less dependent on direct governmental funding. One way would be to establish an independent international fund for supplementary NGO funding.
Ukraine: The Clockwork Orange Revolution
via David Morrison
April 2011
“Well, I think any election [in Ukraine], if there is one, ought to be free from any foreign influence.” (President Bush, White House, 2 December 2004)
The elections in Ukraine last autumn were almost universally portrayed in our media as a David and Goliath contest between the new, squeaky clean, people’s champion, Viktor Yushchenko, and the corrupt state apparatus backed by Moscow, which was a relic of the Soviet era. Happily, so the story goes, the people’s champion prevailed, and democracy has finally come to Ukraine, and brought joy to George Bush’s heart. The story bears only a passing resemblance to reality.
Few journalists challenged that view, and those who did, for example, Jonathan Steele of the Guardian in an article entitled Ukraine's postmodern coup d'etat on 26 November 2004, came in for dog’s abuse.
OSCE Watch
Another proponent of an alternative view has been John Laughland, who writes for the Spectator and the Guardian, and is associated with the British Helsinki Human Rights Group.
(The Group takes its name from the Helsinki Agreement of 1975, whereby the states in Europe, and the US and Canada, agreed that the then frontiers in Europe should stand. The Agreement was the product of what was called the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which acquired a permanent secretariat in 1992 and became the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).)
According to the Group’s website, http://www.oscewatch.org/, “its purpose is educational - to provide original research information to a broad range of people interested in human rights issues in the OSCE area” and “it does not receive funding from any government”. Certainly, there is a lot of interesting information on the Group’s website about the states that have emerged from the Soviet bloc and Yugoslavia, information which is sadly lacking in our media. Generally speaking, the latter present the break up of the Soviet bloc and of Yugoslavia as a triumph of democracy over tyranny with barely a mention of the economic misery into which large swathes of the population were catapulted, while a few people became filthy rich by acquiring state assets for a pittance.
The Group had monitors on the ground in the Ukraine last autumn, and provided a continuous commentary on its website on the presidential electoral processes there. These involved a first round on 31 October, in which 24 candidates stood, and the then Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich narrowly beat Viktor Yushchenko (by 40.1% to 39.2%), and a run off second round on 21 November between Yanukovich and Yushchenko, in which, according to the Central Election Commission, Yanukovich again beat Yushchenko (by 49.5% to 46.6%). However, this was overturned by the Supreme Court after accusations of widespread electoral fraud, and a re-run was ordered, which took place on 26 December. This time a new Central Election Commission declared Yushchenko the winner (by 52.0% to 44.2%), and he was inaugurated on 23 January as the successor to Leonid Kuchma as the President of Ukraine.
The Group has now produced a report entitled Ukraine's Clockwork Orange Revolution. It is well worth reading. The following are a few of the points it makes.
West’s favourite
Yushchenko became the West’s favourite despite the fact that he was as much part of the old guard as his rival Yanukovich. Yushchenko himself was Prime Minister from December 1999 until April 2001, when he was voted out of office by the Ukrainian parliament.
He began his career in the agricultural division of the Soviet state banking system, Gosbank. In 1989, he became Deputy Chairman of the Ukrainian division of the Agro-Industrial Bank (Agroprombank), which after independence became the independent Bank Ukraina. If he didn’t enrich himself at that point when he had the chance, he showed unique self-restraint.
Since his election, he has appointed Yulia Tymoshenko, a prominent ally in his Our Ukraine movement, as Prime Minister. She is a billionaire with vast interests in gas distribution: it is unlikely that she acquired this in a few years merely by hard work. She is wanted in Moscow under an Interpol warrant for, allegedly, bribing and blackmailing energy executives.
So the notion that Yushchenko and his associates are clean, in contrast to his opponent, is simply unsustainable.
One fact about Yushchenko has received very little attention in our media, namely, that he is married to a US citizen of Ukrainian descent, who worked for the Reagan administration. Her name is Yekaterina Chumachenko. In the 1980s, she worked as assistant to the US Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, then in different capacities in the White House Office of Public Affairs and the Department of the Treasury. From 1994-99 she was head of the Ukrainian representation at Barents Group LLC, which acted as a consultant to the National Bank of Ukraine, when Yushchenko was chairman. It was at this time that she met Yushchenko. Conceivably, this may have something to do with him being selected by the US as the candidate to support, despite his questionable past.
Yushchenko poisoned?
The most bizarre incident that occurred during the election campaign was Yushchenko’s allegation that he had been poisoned by dioxin-related substances, which left his face pock marked and disfigured. This, he claimed, took place in September during a meeting with Colonel General Ihor Smeshko, head of the Ukrainian security services, a meeting to which he had gone voluntarily and with the foreknowledge of his aides. This was presented in the West as the ultimate example of the Ukrainian state apparatus acting on behalf of his opponent. But the story doesn’t stand up: it makes no sense for the security services to poison him at a time when he was known to be in their company. In any case, if they wanted rid of him, why didn’t they employ some more reliable means, like putting a bullet in his head?
An alternative explanation for Yushchenko’s condition is offered by Chad Nagle in an article for Counterpunch entitled Booze, Salo and Mare's Milk... Did Yushchenko Poison Himself? . He claims that his medical records show that over the past ten years he has had a variety of intestinal problems, which were severely aggravated by booze at his meeting with Colonel Smeshko last September, and that he invented the poisoning allegation to cover up his serious health problems, lest the public revelation of them lessen his chances of election. Nagle also claims that, back in September last year, the clinic that treated Yushchenko (Rudolfinerhaus Clinic in Vienna, Austria, which now publicly supports the dioxin story) described the poison rumours as "fallacious" and diagnosed Yushchenko with “severe pancreatitis, severe intestinal ulcers, gastritis, proctitis, peripheral paresis and a viral skin condition”.
Strategic orientation
The Western media gave the impression that there was a clear distinction between Yushchenko and Yanukovich on Ukraine’s strategic orientation, that the former saw its future in the EU, while the latter was wedded to a close and enduring alliance with Russia. But, according to BHHRG, no such clear distinction was evident in the electoral campaign in Ukraine.
Furthermore, the impression was given that Yushchenko stood for “economic reform”, which is the normal code word for free market economics, including privatisation of state assets. In fact, formally at least, there was very little difference between their economic programmes: Yushchenko fought on a rather populist platform promising more jobs, an increase in pensions and wages and an improved infrastructure for the country.
Yushchenko also undertook to withdraw Ukrainian troops from Iraq, if elected. Numbering 1,650, they are the sixth largest national contingent there (17 of them have been killed). And it now looks as if the withdrawal is actually going to happen: the BBC reported on 2 March that Yushchenko has announced a schedule for their departure beginning this month and ending in October. They serve under Polish command and Polish troops are also due to be withdrawn sometime this year.
Money from America
Another impression given by Western media was that Yanukovich had a near monopoly in the domestic media, even though it is almost all privately owned, a significant amount by allies of Yushchenko. According to the BHHRG, this was a gross exaggeration, and in the third election the opposite was the case – Yushchenko had a near monopoly.
Western media portrayed Yanukovich as Vladimir Putin’s man and implied that he received lots of assistance, including finance, from Russia. The BHHRG is of the opinion that although Yanukovich got the nod from Putin, he got very little else. One thing is certain: he got nowhere like the assistance that Yushchenko got from the West, including from the US taxpayer, through monies donated to local NGOs which supported his campaign. The total amount will never be known, but it probably runs into tens of millions of US dollars.
Money from the West funded the exit polls after the second election, which, by purporting to show that Yushchenko had won by a distance, were the trigger for the agitation which eventually led to the re-run of the election and Yushchenko’s final victory. President Clinton’s favourite pollster, Dick Morris, boasted after the event that he had provided advice on how to conduct the exit polls (Washington Post, 2 January 2005).
Foreign money funded the supposedly spontaneous “tent city” in Kiev, complete with concert stage and plasma screens, and paid for the rock bands to entertain the crowds. According to the BHHRG who had a representative on the spot throughout, the crowds were a fraction of the size – hundreds of thousands – reported in the Western media.
Ron Paul is a maverick Republican member of the US House of Representatives from Texas, and a member of the House International Relations Committee, with a particular interest in how US tax dollars are spent, since he believes in no, or at least very low, taxes. He told the Committee on 7 December 2004:
“We do not know exactly how many millions - or tens of millions - of dollars the United States government spent on the presidential election in Ukraine. We do know that much of that money was targeted to assist one particular candidate, and that through a series of cut-out non-governmental organizations (NGOs) - both American and Ukrainian - millions of dollars ended up in support of the presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko.”
He went on to give specific examples of US tax dollars funding NGOs in the Ukraine that supported Yushchenko.
Needless to say, the US doesn’t allow this kind of foreign interference in its own elections – foreign funding of domestic elections is illegal in the US.
Clearly, when President Bush asserted that any election in Ukraine “ought to be free from any foreign influence”, he didn’t mean American influence.
This reminds me of a remark by Paul Wolfowitz a few months after the US invaded Iraq:
“I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq. Those who want to come and help are welcome. Those who come to interfere and destroy are not.” (New York Times, 22 July 2003)
Obviously, Americans aren’t foreigners, no matter where they are in the world.
Second election fraudulent?
But was the second election on 21 November fraudulent? Was Yushchenko cheated out of a victory, as the exit polls seemed to indicate? It’s impossible to say for certain, but it is certainly not unknown for exit polls to be wrong, even those carried out by impartial and expert polling organisations. They were wrong in Ohio last November: had they been accepted as definitive on that occasion, John Kerry, and not George Bush, would now be President of the US. Overall, President Bush prevailed by 3 million votes in the official, tallied vote count, even though exit polls had projected a margin of victory of 5 million votes for Kerry.
Two exit polls were done in the Ukraine, giving quite different results. In its report, the BHHRG casts some doubt on the expertise with which one of them was carried out.
But wasn’t there widespread evidence of fraud, and didn’t the Supreme Court accept this evidence as compelling in ruling that the election be re-run? Well, no. The BHHRG report reproduces the Supreme Court ruling. It doesn’t mention fraud, but focuses on procedural violations, including violations that occurred in the pre-election period, for instance, in the drawing up of the election lists, composition of the election commissions, absentee voting and the media campaign.
Different electoral rules
But didn’t the fact that Yushchenko won the re-run on 26 December prove that the election on 21 November was fraudulent? Again, no. The momentum was clearly with Yushchenko once the election of 21 November was declared invalid. Furthermore, before the re-run on 26 December, the electoral rules were changed and so was the composition of the Central Election Commission.
On 7 December, in response to the outcry about the alleged misuse of absentee voting, parliament announced a package of reforms that amended the election law to limit absentee and home voting, which was restricted to ‘Group 1’ invalids and thereby excluded people infirm due to old age. Strange that none of the supposedly impartial outside observers complained about this disenfranchisement of the elderly, nor about the fact that the next day parliament approved a new Central Election Commission on which Yushchenko’s representatives formed an absolute majority and from which all pro-Yanukovich nominees were excluded.
US interference
The true story of the Ukrainian presidential elections is one of mass interference in the affairs of a sovereign nation by Western governments, especially the US. This type of interference began in Serbia in 2000, and was tried unsuccessfully in Belarus the following year. It was successful in Georgia in 2003, and now in Ukraine in 2004.
The notion that the US has a principled commitment to bringing representative government to every state in the world is an absurdity. The US has a principled commitment to bringing to power, and keeping in power, in every state in the world, governments that do its bidding, and it will interfere in any democratic process anywhere, anytime, in order to bring that about, if it serves its purpose to do so.
When he was running for election in 2000, it was possible to imagine that a Bush presidency would bring about a shift in US foreign policy towards less foreign intervention. His criticism of the Clinton era, as expressed by his foreign policy adviser, Condoleeza Rice, was that Clinton had engaged in intervention, which were not justifiable in terms of US national interests. Whatever substance there was to that stance, it disappeared after the events of 9/11: foreign intervention is now on the agenda with a vengeance: even though it was US foreign intervention in the Muslim world which triggered the events of 9/11, the US response has been to interfere a great deal more.
There are very few voices in the US who suggest that a more sensible response would be to interfere much less. One of them is Michael Scheuer, the ex-CIA man who wrote Imperial Hubris: Why the West is losing the War on Terror published last year. Another is the aforementioned Representative Ron Paul, who is a thoroughgoing isolationist and opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Here are the opening lines of a remarkable speech he delivered in the House of Representatives on 26 January 2005:
“America's policy of foreign intervention, while still debated in the early 20th century, is today accepted as conventional wisdom by both political parties. But what if the overall policy is a colossal mistake, a major error in judgment? Not just bad judgment regarding when and where to impose ourselves, but the entire premise that we have a moral right to meddle in the affairs of others?
“Think of the untold harm done by years of fighting - hundreds of thousands of American casualties, hundreds of thousands of foreign civilian casualties, and unbelievable human and economic costs. What if it was all needlessly borne by the American people?
“If we do conclude that grave foreign policy errors have been made, a very serious question must be asked: What would it take to change our policy to one more compatible with a true republic's goal of peace, commerce, and friendship with all nations? Is it not possible that Washington's admonition to avoid entangling alliances is sound advice even today?”
April 2011
“Well, I think any election [in Ukraine], if there is one, ought to be free from any foreign influence.” (President Bush, White House, 2 December 2004)
The elections in Ukraine last autumn were almost universally portrayed in our media as a David and Goliath contest between the new, squeaky clean, people’s champion, Viktor Yushchenko, and the corrupt state apparatus backed by Moscow, which was a relic of the Soviet era. Happily, so the story goes, the people’s champion prevailed, and democracy has finally come to Ukraine, and brought joy to George Bush’s heart. The story bears only a passing resemblance to reality.
Few journalists challenged that view, and those who did, for example, Jonathan Steele of the Guardian in an article entitled Ukraine's postmodern coup d'etat on 26 November 2004, came in for dog’s abuse.
OSCE Watch
Another proponent of an alternative view has been John Laughland, who writes for the Spectator and the Guardian, and is associated with the British Helsinki Human Rights Group.
(The Group takes its name from the Helsinki Agreement of 1975, whereby the states in Europe, and the US and Canada, agreed that the then frontiers in Europe should stand. The Agreement was the product of what was called the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which acquired a permanent secretariat in 1992 and became the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).)
According to the Group’s website, http://www.oscewatch.org/, “its purpose is educational - to provide original research information to a broad range of people interested in human rights issues in the OSCE area” and “it does not receive funding from any government”. Certainly, there is a lot of interesting information on the Group’s website about the states that have emerged from the Soviet bloc and Yugoslavia, information which is sadly lacking in our media. Generally speaking, the latter present the break up of the Soviet bloc and of Yugoslavia as a triumph of democracy over tyranny with barely a mention of the economic misery into which large swathes of the population were catapulted, while a few people became filthy rich by acquiring state assets for a pittance.
The Group had monitors on the ground in the Ukraine last autumn, and provided a continuous commentary on its website on the presidential electoral processes there. These involved a first round on 31 October, in which 24 candidates stood, and the then Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich narrowly beat Viktor Yushchenko (by 40.1% to 39.2%), and a run off second round on 21 November between Yanukovich and Yushchenko, in which, according to the Central Election Commission, Yanukovich again beat Yushchenko (by 49.5% to 46.6%). However, this was overturned by the Supreme Court after accusations of widespread electoral fraud, and a re-run was ordered, which took place on 26 December. This time a new Central Election Commission declared Yushchenko the winner (by 52.0% to 44.2%), and he was inaugurated on 23 January as the successor to Leonid Kuchma as the President of Ukraine.
The Group has now produced a report entitled Ukraine's Clockwork Orange Revolution. It is well worth reading. The following are a few of the points it makes.
West’s favourite
Yushchenko became the West’s favourite despite the fact that he was as much part of the old guard as his rival Yanukovich. Yushchenko himself was Prime Minister from December 1999 until April 2001, when he was voted out of office by the Ukrainian parliament.
He began his career in the agricultural division of the Soviet state banking system, Gosbank. In 1989, he became Deputy Chairman of the Ukrainian division of the Agro-Industrial Bank (Agroprombank), which after independence became the independent Bank Ukraina. If he didn’t enrich himself at that point when he had the chance, he showed unique self-restraint.
Since his election, he has appointed Yulia Tymoshenko, a prominent ally in his Our Ukraine movement, as Prime Minister. She is a billionaire with vast interests in gas distribution: it is unlikely that she acquired this in a few years merely by hard work. She is wanted in Moscow under an Interpol warrant for, allegedly, bribing and blackmailing energy executives.
So the notion that Yushchenko and his associates are clean, in contrast to his opponent, is simply unsustainable.
One fact about Yushchenko has received very little attention in our media, namely, that he is married to a US citizen of Ukrainian descent, who worked for the Reagan administration. Her name is Yekaterina Chumachenko. In the 1980s, she worked as assistant to the US Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, then in different capacities in the White House Office of Public Affairs and the Department of the Treasury. From 1994-99 she was head of the Ukrainian representation at Barents Group LLC, which acted as a consultant to the National Bank of Ukraine, when Yushchenko was chairman. It was at this time that she met Yushchenko. Conceivably, this may have something to do with him being selected by the US as the candidate to support, despite his questionable past.
Yushchenko poisoned?
The most bizarre incident that occurred during the election campaign was Yushchenko’s allegation that he had been poisoned by dioxin-related substances, which left his face pock marked and disfigured. This, he claimed, took place in September during a meeting with Colonel General Ihor Smeshko, head of the Ukrainian security services, a meeting to which he had gone voluntarily and with the foreknowledge of his aides. This was presented in the West as the ultimate example of the Ukrainian state apparatus acting on behalf of his opponent. But the story doesn’t stand up: it makes no sense for the security services to poison him at a time when he was known to be in their company. In any case, if they wanted rid of him, why didn’t they employ some more reliable means, like putting a bullet in his head?
An alternative explanation for Yushchenko’s condition is offered by Chad Nagle in an article for Counterpunch entitled Booze, Salo and Mare's Milk... Did Yushchenko Poison Himself? . He claims that his medical records show that over the past ten years he has had a variety of intestinal problems, which were severely aggravated by booze at his meeting with Colonel Smeshko last September, and that he invented the poisoning allegation to cover up his serious health problems, lest the public revelation of them lessen his chances of election. Nagle also claims that, back in September last year, the clinic that treated Yushchenko (Rudolfinerhaus Clinic in Vienna, Austria, which now publicly supports the dioxin story) described the poison rumours as "fallacious" and diagnosed Yushchenko with “severe pancreatitis, severe intestinal ulcers, gastritis, proctitis, peripheral paresis and a viral skin condition”.
Strategic orientation
The Western media gave the impression that there was a clear distinction between Yushchenko and Yanukovich on Ukraine’s strategic orientation, that the former saw its future in the EU, while the latter was wedded to a close and enduring alliance with Russia. But, according to BHHRG, no such clear distinction was evident in the electoral campaign in Ukraine.
Furthermore, the impression was given that Yushchenko stood for “economic reform”, which is the normal code word for free market economics, including privatisation of state assets. In fact, formally at least, there was very little difference between their economic programmes: Yushchenko fought on a rather populist platform promising more jobs, an increase in pensions and wages and an improved infrastructure for the country.
Yushchenko also undertook to withdraw Ukrainian troops from Iraq, if elected. Numbering 1,650, they are the sixth largest national contingent there (17 of them have been killed). And it now looks as if the withdrawal is actually going to happen: the BBC reported on 2 March that Yushchenko has announced a schedule for their departure beginning this month and ending in October. They serve under Polish command and Polish troops are also due to be withdrawn sometime this year.
Money from America
Another impression given by Western media was that Yanukovich had a near monopoly in the domestic media, even though it is almost all privately owned, a significant amount by allies of Yushchenko. According to the BHHRG, this was a gross exaggeration, and in the third election the opposite was the case – Yushchenko had a near monopoly.
Western media portrayed Yanukovich as Vladimir Putin’s man and implied that he received lots of assistance, including finance, from Russia. The BHHRG is of the opinion that although Yanukovich got the nod from Putin, he got very little else. One thing is certain: he got nowhere like the assistance that Yushchenko got from the West, including from the US taxpayer, through monies donated to local NGOs which supported his campaign. The total amount will never be known, but it probably runs into tens of millions of US dollars.
Money from the West funded the exit polls after the second election, which, by purporting to show that Yushchenko had won by a distance, were the trigger for the agitation which eventually led to the re-run of the election and Yushchenko’s final victory. President Clinton’s favourite pollster, Dick Morris, boasted after the event that he had provided advice on how to conduct the exit polls (Washington Post, 2 January 2005).
Foreign money funded the supposedly spontaneous “tent city” in Kiev, complete with concert stage and plasma screens, and paid for the rock bands to entertain the crowds. According to the BHHRG who had a representative on the spot throughout, the crowds were a fraction of the size – hundreds of thousands – reported in the Western media.
Ron Paul is a maverick Republican member of the US House of Representatives from Texas, and a member of the House International Relations Committee, with a particular interest in how US tax dollars are spent, since he believes in no, or at least very low, taxes. He told the Committee on 7 December 2004:
“We do not know exactly how many millions - or tens of millions - of dollars the United States government spent on the presidential election in Ukraine. We do know that much of that money was targeted to assist one particular candidate, and that through a series of cut-out non-governmental organizations (NGOs) - both American and Ukrainian - millions of dollars ended up in support of the presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko.”
He went on to give specific examples of US tax dollars funding NGOs in the Ukraine that supported Yushchenko.
Needless to say, the US doesn’t allow this kind of foreign interference in its own elections – foreign funding of domestic elections is illegal in the US.
Clearly, when President Bush asserted that any election in Ukraine “ought to be free from any foreign influence”, he didn’t mean American influence.
This reminds me of a remark by Paul Wolfowitz a few months after the US invaded Iraq:
“I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq. Those who want to come and help are welcome. Those who come to interfere and destroy are not.” (New York Times, 22 July 2003)
Obviously, Americans aren’t foreigners, no matter where they are in the world.
Second election fraudulent?
But was the second election on 21 November fraudulent? Was Yushchenko cheated out of a victory, as the exit polls seemed to indicate? It’s impossible to say for certain, but it is certainly not unknown for exit polls to be wrong, even those carried out by impartial and expert polling organisations. They were wrong in Ohio last November: had they been accepted as definitive on that occasion, John Kerry, and not George Bush, would now be President of the US. Overall, President Bush prevailed by 3 million votes in the official, tallied vote count, even though exit polls had projected a margin of victory of 5 million votes for Kerry.
Two exit polls were done in the Ukraine, giving quite different results. In its report, the BHHRG casts some doubt on the expertise with which one of them was carried out.
But wasn’t there widespread evidence of fraud, and didn’t the Supreme Court accept this evidence as compelling in ruling that the election be re-run? Well, no. The BHHRG report reproduces the Supreme Court ruling. It doesn’t mention fraud, but focuses on procedural violations, including violations that occurred in the pre-election period, for instance, in the drawing up of the election lists, composition of the election commissions, absentee voting and the media campaign.
Different electoral rules
But didn’t the fact that Yushchenko won the re-run on 26 December prove that the election on 21 November was fraudulent? Again, no. The momentum was clearly with Yushchenko once the election of 21 November was declared invalid. Furthermore, before the re-run on 26 December, the electoral rules were changed and so was the composition of the Central Election Commission.
On 7 December, in response to the outcry about the alleged misuse of absentee voting, parliament announced a package of reforms that amended the election law to limit absentee and home voting, which was restricted to ‘Group 1’ invalids and thereby excluded people infirm due to old age. Strange that none of the supposedly impartial outside observers complained about this disenfranchisement of the elderly, nor about the fact that the next day parliament approved a new Central Election Commission on which Yushchenko’s representatives formed an absolute majority and from which all pro-Yanukovich nominees were excluded.
US interference
The true story of the Ukrainian presidential elections is one of mass interference in the affairs of a sovereign nation by Western governments, especially the US. This type of interference began in Serbia in 2000, and was tried unsuccessfully in Belarus the following year. It was successful in Georgia in 2003, and now in Ukraine in 2004.
The notion that the US has a principled commitment to bringing representative government to every state in the world is an absurdity. The US has a principled commitment to bringing to power, and keeping in power, in every state in the world, governments that do its bidding, and it will interfere in any democratic process anywhere, anytime, in order to bring that about, if it serves its purpose to do so.
When he was running for election in 2000, it was possible to imagine that a Bush presidency would bring about a shift in US foreign policy towards less foreign intervention. His criticism of the Clinton era, as expressed by his foreign policy adviser, Condoleeza Rice, was that Clinton had engaged in intervention, which were not justifiable in terms of US national interests. Whatever substance there was to that stance, it disappeared after the events of 9/11: foreign intervention is now on the agenda with a vengeance: even though it was US foreign intervention in the Muslim world which triggered the events of 9/11, the US response has been to interfere a great deal more.
There are very few voices in the US who suggest that a more sensible response would be to interfere much less. One of them is Michael Scheuer, the ex-CIA man who wrote Imperial Hubris: Why the West is losing the War on Terror published last year. Another is the aforementioned Representative Ron Paul, who is a thoroughgoing isolationist and opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Here are the opening lines of a remarkable speech he delivered in the House of Representatives on 26 January 2005:
“America's policy of foreign intervention, while still debated in the early 20th century, is today accepted as conventional wisdom by both political parties. But what if the overall policy is a colossal mistake, a major error in judgment? Not just bad judgment regarding when and where to impose ourselves, but the entire premise that we have a moral right to meddle in the affairs of others?
“Think of the untold harm done by years of fighting - hundreds of thousands of American casualties, hundreds of thousands of foreign civilian casualties, and unbelievable human and economic costs. What if it was all needlessly borne by the American people?
“If we do conclude that grave foreign policy errors have been made, a very serious question must be asked: What would it take to change our policy to one more compatible with a true republic's goal of peace, commerce, and friendship with all nations? Is it not possible that Washington's admonition to avoid entangling alliances is sound advice even today?”
Thursday, August 25, 2011
EXPOSED: Indy “Newspaper” Funded by US Government
Deep network uncovered as fake “indy” rag is forced to disclose funding.
August 11, 2011
landdestroyer
by Tony Cartalucci
Bangkok, Thailand August 11, 2011 – After initially trying to downplay, obfuscate, and deny accusations that the Thai “independent, non-profit, daily web newspaper” Prachatai was in fact a US-funded propaganda front, a series of reports from Land Destroyer provided irrefutable evidence taken directly from the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy website. Additional backpedaling, lying, and obfuscating prompted a follow-up report on Prachatai featuring several unlisted funding sources the duplicitous organization most likely thought were well buried.
Perhaps fearing a third onslaught, or in a desperate attempt to salvage its sagging legitimacy, just this week Prachatai has made a seemingly complete disclosure of their US government and US corporate foundation funding laying to rest its own supporter’s erroneous assumptions and defense that the organization was “just barely getting by.” In fact, they are doing quite well and receive millions of baht consistently year to year from the US National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros’ Open Society Institute, and more recently USAID. In fact, an overwhelming 77% of Prachatai’s nearly 8 million baht in funding during 2011 has come directly from Uncle Sam – overt funding that would cut the legs of legitimacy out from under any alleged “news organization.”
Still, Prachatai’s utter contempt for both journalism and their readerships’ intelligence is best encapsulated in a cautionary reminder posted directly before their full financial disclosure which claims, “it is important to state here that none of our foreign donors has ever put up any demands connected to the funds they provided, nor did they ever interfere with our reporting.” One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at such overt duplicity from an organization that has just spent the last 2 months trying to laugh-off, ignore, or otherwise belittle very legitimate concerns regarding its lack of transparency.
The nature of Prachatai’s political narrative is confrontational, directed at Thailand’s establishment, especially Thailand’s traditional institutions which exist independently of the Soros-funded networks of which Prachatai is now irrefutably exposed to be a part. Prachatai’s goal is to undermine the Thai establishment’s legitimacy while concurrently building up the legitimacy of the “international community,” global “civil society,” and to promote globalist talking points. A visit to Prachatai’s homepage reveals links running off to Soros-funded “Open Democracy,” Soros and Ford Foundation funded “Global Voices,” the globalist International Institute for Strategic Studies (which includes Robert Blackwill, former lobbyist of Thailand’s globalist-backed stooge Thaksin Shinawatra), as well as a myriad of pro-Thaksin, pro-globalist, pro-color revolution websites that form the nucleus of Thailand’s foreign-funded “civil society” movement both in and out of the country.
This is analogous to other US-funded organizations, opposition groups, and NGOs around the world including those of the recent US-funded “Arab Spring” which were all admittedly organized, trained, funded, and equipped (in some cases armed) years in advance by the United States government for the expressed purpose of initiating regime change throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa. In fact, the New York Times itself would confirm this, stating that, “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 New York Times would go on to explain that “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.”
The Funding
Digging into Prachatai’s globalist funding exposes further the inner workings of the Wall Street-London global corporatocracy and how they disingenuously promote their agenda through NGOs, “civil society,” and by perverting the noble ideals of human rights, freedom, and democracy. Prachatai, like its counterparts throughout the world, is a disingenuous and complicit helping hand, pleading ignorance and literally saying “so what?” when the subject of just who funds them is brought up.
Image: Taken from Heinrich Böll Foundation’s 2009 Annual Report, globalist criminal bankster George Soros’ ubiquity within socially engineered movements is confirmed once again. Here he is listed under “Prominent Guests and Partners of the Foundation.” (click image to enlarge)
….
Prachatai, in their latest disclosure, breaks their funding down year-to-year. One name that is ubiquitous is George Soros and his Open Society Institute which has funded Prachatai millions of baht over the years, beginning in 2005 and continuing until today under the Soros-connected Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBF). HBF is a shameless promoter of supranational governance, pushing the verified fraud that is the “climate change agenda,” and even helped Soros’ Global Voices in networking and training Arab bloggers in 2009 to prepare them for the upcoming “Arab Spring.” HBF’s 32 page 2009 annual report is a globalist progress report that includes funding and supporting fake progressive-liberal projects and outright worldwide sedition.
Image: From IMS’s 2010 Annual Report, Wikileaks figurehead Julian Assange pops in on a George Soros, ICFJ, IMS orgy of disinformation. Soros’ various funded revolutions have used Assange’s handy work as a rhetorical springboard to get into motion, therefore it is only right that Assange be given yet another stage upon which to promote the ongoing hoax that is Wikileaks. Anti-establishment, Julian Assange is not. (click image to enlarge)
….
Prachatai’s 2009-2010 funding included 1.79 million baht from the Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF), yet another Soros-funded globalist organization which also includes the US State Department and Soros-infested International Media Support (IMS) as donors. IMS literally trains foreigners to report the news according to Western standards & values, or in other words, according to the Western narrative. It is not surprising to see IMS active in every nation the US State Department is feverishly attempting to create unrest via its National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House organizations, including Belarus, China, Iran, Ukraine, and across the Middle East. In one truly surreal scene taken from IMS’s 2010 annual report, Wikileaks fraud Julian Assange appears via video link on a stage littered with the logos of IMS, George Soros’ Open Society Institute, and the Fortune 500 corporate-fascist infested “International Center for Journalists” which suspiciously includes Bank of America’s marketing officer and PR firm representatives from McKinsey & Co. and Edelman (a proud corporate sponsor of the Egyptian revolutions) on its board of directors.
Another name that seems quite active throughout Prachatai’s 8 year existence is the Rockefeller Foundation which initially bought the organization its computers and whose partner, the “Community Organization Development Institute (CODI),” funded Prachatai 1.89 million baht in 2004. CODI also boasts UN support as well as a partnership with the eugenicists at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. There is also the Fund for Global Human Rights (FGHR) which has funded Prachatai over half a million baht over the course of two consecutive years. FGHR is nothing more than a funding arm for the Sigrid Trust who also funds the International Crisis Group, an unelected US think-tank that meddles directly in the internal affairs of other nations. In fact, ICG member Mohammed ElBaradei literally led the US-funded Egyptian revolution, a true testament to the disingenuous nature of both these “democratic awakenings” and the dubious personalities attempting to wrestle control away from embattled regimes around the world.
We finally make our way to by far Prachatai’s number one patron, certainly not its own readership – not by a long shot – but rather the US State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), one of the most notorious, duplicitous organization in America, on par with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as it literally works in tandem with the CIA’s activities (along with USAID who is also funding Prachatai via their SAPAN project) in subverting governments and overthrowing entire nations for US corporate-financier interests.
NED has funded Prachatai 1.5 million baht 3 years consecutively, including this year, along with USAID who has funded Prachatai an additional 2 million baht under the guise of the SAPAN Project which presumes to teach Thais how to conduct local government.
Image: NED-funded Freedom House nominates Thailand’s NED-funded Prachatai for the Deutsche Welle Blog Awards earlier this year, thus illustrating the contrived circus that is the collective propaganda outfit’s legitimacy. (click on image to enlarge)
….
And while Freedom House is not listed by Prachatai as a contributing, as it itself is also funded by NED, it is surely worthy of honorable mention. Freedom House contributes a steady stream of rhetorical support and nominations for various contrived awards like this years’ “Deutsche Welle Blog Award” while Prachatai reciprocates by loyally copying and pasting any “helpful” Freedom House reports targeting Thailand or neighboring Asian nations.
NED & Freedom House are run by Warmongering Imperialists
Despite Prachatai’s own “who cares?” attitude regarding especially their NED funding, in reality there exists an immense disparity between the stated goal of NED, that is, “supporting freedom around the world,” and the backgrounds and stated agendas of those populating NED’s board of directors. The same could easily be said of Freedom House and its board of directors.
Upon that board of directors, who, judging by their supposed mission to support “freedom around the world,” we should find Nobel Peace Prize laureates, accomplished diplomats, and definitive examples of democracy in action. Instead, we have John Bohn who traded petrochemicals, was an international banker for 13 years with Wells Fargo, and is currently serving as a principal for a global advisory and consulting firm, GlobalNet Partners, which assists foreign businesses by making their “entry into the complex China market easy.” Surely Bohn’s ability to manipulate China’s political landscape through NED’s various activities both inside of China and along its peripheries constitutes an alarming conflict of interests. However, it appears “conflict of interests” is a reoccurring theme throughout both NED and Freedom House.
Bohn is joined by Rita DiMartino who worked for Council on Foreign Relations corporate member AT&T as “Vice President of Congressional Relations” as well as a member of the CFR herself. Also representing the Fortune 500 is Kenneth Duberstein, a board member of the war profiteering Boeing Company, big oil’s ConocoPhillips, and the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation. Duberstein also served as a director of Fannie Mae until 2007. He too is a CFR member as are two of the companies he chairs, Boeing and ConocoPhillips.
We then consider several of the certified warmongers serving upon NED’s board of directors including Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Will Marshall, and Vin Weber, all signatories of the pro-war, pro-corporate, utterly insane Project for a New American Century. Within the pages of documents produced by this “think tank” are pleas to various US presidents to pursue war against sovereign nations, the increase of troops in nations already occupied by US forces, and what equates to a call for American global hegemony in a Hitlerian 90 page document titled “Rebuilding Americas Defenses.” As we will see, this warmongering think tank serves as a nexus around which fellow disingenuous rights advocate Freedom House also gravitates.
The “Statement of Principles,” signed off by NED chairmen Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Vin Weber, states, “we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.” Of course by “international order” they mean meddling beyond the sovereign borders of the United States and is merely used as a euphemism for global imperialism. Other Neo-Con degenerates that signed their name to this statement include Freedom House’s Paula Dobriansky, Dan Quayle (formally), and Donald Rumsfeld (formally), along with Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Eliot Cohen, and Elliot Abrams.
A PNAC “Statment on Post-War Iraq” regarding a wholehearted endorsement of nation-building features the signatures of NED chairman Will Marshall, Freedom House’s Frank Carlucci (2002), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Martin Indyk (Lowy Institute board member, co-author of the conspiring “Which Path to Persia?” report), and William Kristol and Robert Kagan both of the warmongering Foreign Policy Initiative. It should be noted that the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is, for all intents and purposes, PNAC’s latest incarnation and just recently featured an open letter to House Republicans calling on them to disregard the will of the American people and continue pursuing the war in Libya. The FPI letter even suggests that the UN resolution authorizing the war in the first place, was holding America “hostage” and that it should be exceeded in order to do more to “help the Libyan opposition.”
An untitled PNAC letter addressed to then US President George Bush regarding a general call for global warmongering received the seal of approval from Freedom Houses’ Ellen Bork (2007), Ken Adelman (also former lobbyist for Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra via Edelman), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Neo-Con degenerates Richard Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the always disingenuous demagogue Daniel Pipes.
The list goes on further, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leonard Sussman, and Max Kampelman. It is safe to say that neither NED nor Freedom House garners within its ranks characters appropriate for their alleged cause of “supporting freedom around the world.” It is also safe to say that the principles of “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights” they allegedly champion for, are merely being leveraged to co-opt well meaning people across the world to carry out their own self-serving agenda.
Conclusion
Organizations like Prachatai that take money from these confessed, ill-intentioned, meddling, neo-imperialist dens of degeneracy, are either knowing accomplices or remiss beyond explanation. In either case, their legitimacy was not compromised the moment they decided to hide their funding, nor after they fully admitted the compromised nature of their paid-for “journalism” when pressured with persistent irrefutable evidence. Instead, Prachtai’s legitimacy was entirely lost the monument they decided to accept foreign funding in the first place – which as their own disclosure accounts for, was on day-one of their operations.
Image: While immature minds succumb to a Pavlovian giggle at the mere mention of the “New World Order,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, formally of the US State Department, has written an entire book about the inevitable global governance she has dedicated her life to ushering in.
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It is undeniable that a global oligarchy of incredibly wealthy and powerful corporate-financier interests are moving to consolidate power on a global scale, as imperialists have done throughout human history. They are destabilizing and destroying the old world, nation by nation, and replacing it with a new world of their own design, their “civil society.” However, we see the means and ends to which these megalomaniacs gravitate toward. These are means and ends that are entirely abhorrent, self-serving and encapsulated in horrifying dystopian nomenclatures such as “planetary regimes” (current White House Science Adviser John P. Holdren, Ecoscience 1977), or as recent US State Department Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter calls it, the “New World Order.”
Image: A graphical representation of the global corporate-financiers’ emerging “international order.” From the left policy is created by unelected corporate-funded think tanks, where funding arms, contrived international NGOs, and local street fronts like Prachatai carry it out. What is produced is a global, homogenous “civil society” that answers directly to the corporate-financiers that created it. (click image to enlarge)
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The nefarious, sycophantic helping-hands making this nightmare possible are foreign-funded traitors like Prachatai helping destabilize the old world and eagerly promoting the corporate-fascist funded, globally homogeneous “civil society.” They are traitors not just to the Thai people and the Thai nation, but traitors to humanity, traitors willfully helping usher in global governance under the dominion of autocrats who openly plot a global scientific dictatorship. Prachatai most certainly looked at NED’s board of directors during the last two months the Land Destroyer Report has been pressuring them to disclose their full funding and they most certainly know who the absolute degenerate scum is that funds them and what their warmongering agenda is. Yet they press on, indifferent, even elated over rubbing their duplicity in the face of their own readership.
Their financial disclosure begins with a brief history of Prachatai which includes sniveling accounts of police raiding their office, their director being arrested, and their foreign-funded propaganda website being systematically blocked by the Thai government, as if they are the victims of some gross injustice. They act as if anyone should be allowed to take foreign money, masquerade as journalists, intentionally mislead people, and undermine their own nation on behalf of a foreign government. As mentioned before, Prachatai, according to their own financial disclosure, year-to-year is anywhere between 77% and 100% funded by the US government and/or US corporate-funded foundations. This behavior here in Thailand, and around the world, by the helping hands of the globalist corporate-financier agenda is unacceptable.
Stand up to these paid-for liars. Expose their treachery and their disingenuous abuse of liberal and progressive ideals. Stand up against their horrific exploitation of human rights and representative governance to promote their paymasters’ agenda. The world does face tyranny and its name is globalization. Globalization can be seen in full effect across the deserts of Iraq, throughout the mountains of Afghanistan, and now along the shores of Libya and in the streets of Syria’s border cities. That is the globalist future fake-progressives like Prachatai are the harbingers of.
There will be no liberal singing tomorrows in Prachatai’s Thailand, just as there are no singing tomorrows in Egypt where the paymasters, like John McCain of the International Republican Institute, instrumental in funding and training the Egyptian protesters, now squat upon the Egyptian economy with Fortune 500 corporate-fascists prepared to sink their parasitic probosces into their “newly liberated” markets. That is the future of globalization. That is the future Prachatai is trying to sell Thailand, and just like with their funding, they will deny the truth until the very bitter end.
Notes: 1 US Dollar is equal to approximately 30 Thai Baht/baht. Prachatai also has done a “project” for the “People’s Empowerment Foundation,” another NED-funded NGO front that most recently took part in a Bangkok demonstration for Malaysia’s NED-funded Bersih movement.
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Tuesday, July 12, 2011
The Anatomy of Globalist-Funded Sedition
And the true path to freedom.
by Tony Cartalucci
Editor's Addition: James Woolsey, formally of the Freedom House, is now on the "leadership council" of the Neo-Con warmongering Foundation for Defense of Democracies along with fellow Freedom House members Jeane Kirkpatrick, Max Kampelman, and Paula Dobriansky. Woolsey recently signed off on the Neo-Con war propaganda film Iranium - propaganda so absurd it calls into question the sanity of those that created it. This represents further evidence illustrating how disingenuous "democracy advocates" like Freedom House are and why those receiving their funding & support are cause for alarm.
Bangkok, Thailand July 12, 2011 - While we are told by the self-proclaimed arbiters of humanity the merits of "human rights," "transparency," and "open society," these arbiters themselves are the poorest examples of such values. People indeed do have the right to know who is behind their government, the organizations that support it, and the corporations that fund them, not just in the nations and governments targeted by these nefarious arbiters, but the arbiters themselves. To this end, we hack off one tentacle of the growing Anglo-American planetary regime and dissect it - because indeed, people have a right to know the truth.
Thailand's Prachatai, as described by their US government granters at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), allegedly provides the Thai public with "a credible and respected source of independent news reporting and editorial commentary." It is also supposed to "foster a higher level of public participation and community involvement in Thai political affairs."
However a quick visit to Prachatai's website reveals links running off to Soros-funded "Open Democracy," Soros and Ford Foundation funded "Global Voices," the globalist International Institute for Strategic Studies (which includes Robert Blackwill, former lobbyist of Thailand's globalist-backed stooge Thaksin Shinawatra), as well as a myriad of pro-Thaksin, pro-globalist, pro-color revolution websites that form the nucleus of Thailand's foreign-funded "civil society" movement both in and out of the country. These include Bangkok Pundit, New Mandala of the Australian National University, and Asia Sentinel which frequently features the writings of Giles Ungpakorn, Marxist color revolution leader, author of the "Red Siam Manifesto," and brother of Prachatai founder Jon Ungpakorn. In all, Prachatai is yet another propaganda outlet serving the globalist agenda.
A 2007 cached version of Prachatai's "About Us" page did in fact mention some of their funding - however, they have since taken this down and now entirely obfuscate their finances, year to year from their own readership in a display of grotesque hypocrisy even as they demand "transparency" and "openness" from the Thai government. The 2007 cached version is as follows:
Prachatai (www.prachatai.com or www.prachathai.com ) is an independent, non-profit, daily web newspaper established in June 2004 to provide reliable and relevant news and information to the Thai public during an era of serious curbs on the freedom and independence of Thai news media.
Prachathai was established by a group of concerned Thais who include a senior member of the Press Council of Thailand, a well-known lecturer in Journalism, two members of the Thai Senate, a number of senior journalists, and a number of Thai NGO leaders.
Prachatai has a 19-member Board and a 7-member Management Committee which consists of 4 Board representatives and 3 senior staff. Since January 2006 Prachatai also been registered as a Thai non-profit foundation, named The Foundation for Community educational Media.
On September 6th 2004, Prachatai began its daily publication on the web with a staff of one editor and five reporters. At present Prachathai has a staff of 14: a Manager, Editor, Network Co-ordinator, 6 central office reporters, 3 regional reporters, a web manager, and a finance officer.
Prachatai run the program by received funding support from the Thai Health Promotion Foundation (www.thaihealth.or.th/en), the Community Organization Development Institute (CODI) (www.codi.or.th), the Open Society Institution (www.soros.org/initiatives/bpsai/about) and The Rockefeller Foundation (www.rockfound.org/iandr/SouthEastAsia) Regional Office in Bangkok supported the purchase of US$ 5,000 worth of computer equipment.
Prachatai Objectives
1. To provide the Thai public with access to reliable news and information relevant to developing and strengthening the democratic functions of Thai civil society.
2. To focus news coverage on the problems, concerns, activities and accomplishments of local communities and civil society movements and organisations.
3. To strive for freedom and independence of Thai news media.
4. To promote active public participation in Thai news media.
Prachatai Policies
1. To present news and information as professionally as possible with strict adherence to high ethical standards of journalism.
2. To establish mutual co-operation with civil society networks and organisations and particularly with community media such as community radio stations.
3. To recruit civil society leaders in various fields of work and experience as writers for Prachatai.
4. To promote active reader participation in Prachatai as volunteer news sources, writers, commentators, contributors to the Prachatai Community Section etc.
5. Not to accept paid advertising.
Contact to Prachatai:
Mr.Chuwat Rerksirisuk, Editor
E-mail: chuwat@prachatai.com
Send e-mail to Editorial Team at editor@prachatai.com
Ms.Supapan Palangsak, Network Co-ordinator
E-mail: netcord@prachatai.com
Ms.Chiranuch Premchaiporn, Manager
E-mail: chiranuch@prachatai.com
Mr. Jon Ungphakorn General Secretary of Prachatai and the Foundation for Community educational Media
E-mail: ungjon@prachatai.com
Mailing Address: 3/16 Soi Kerdsap, Bangkhunnon, Bangkoknoi, Bangkok 10700 Thailand Telephone: 66-2-8860427 to 8
Facsimile: 66-2-4340906
E-mail: fcem@prachatai.com
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Interestingly enough, Rockefeller Foundation's regional office, who Prachatai cites as donating to them $5,000 for computer equipment, works in tandem with another globalist Fortune 500-funded NGO called "Ashoka" who features vulgar degenerate Sombat Boonngamanong as yet another key figure within Thaksin Shinawatra's "red shirt" color revolution movement. These are foreign corporations and governments facilitating protests, even violence on the streets of a foreign nation - an act of war as pointed out by US Representative Ron Paul.
Photo: Thailand's "progressive hero" Sombat Boonngamanong thrives on negative attention. While foreign-funded, corporate-serving organizations like "Youth Leader" expound the virtues of Sombat and his contributions to Thailand via the UN and Fortune 500-funded organizations like Ashoka, his recent support of globalist-stooge billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra's "red shirt" street front appears more opportunistic than virtuous.
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To illustrate the depth these contrived organizations go through to lend themselves badly needed, otherwise non-existent legitimacy, yet another contrived, globalist corporate-financier funded organization, "Youth Leader" wrote a reality-defying biography of degenerate foreign-subsidized meddler Sombat Boonngamanong calling him "one of the most respected leaders’ and cultural activist in Thailand." Of course, "Youth Leader" makes no mention of how the Thai "red shirt" movement is a street-front for globalist-backed Thaksin Shinawatra. Such convenient omissions allows statements like "most respected" to go unchallenged by a readership overwhelmed by slanted, biased, flowery depictions they emotionally want to be true.
Other organizations not listed by Prachatai that have funded their activities over the years include the Sigrid Rausing Trust (who also funds the International Crisis Group) via the Global Human Rights Fund (2008) and the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Prachatai receives rhetorical support from these organizations as well as from Freedom House and a myriad of contrived, corporate-funded organizations that shower the seditious website with various "awards" year to year in yet another example of how the global elite lend themselves otherwise nonexistent legitimacy.
While some may claim receiving such funds from organizations with names like "Freedom House" and "National Endowment for Democracy" is entirely innocuous and that these foreign interests are truly dedicated to worthwhile causes, any thorough examination of these organizations reveals otherwise.
NED & Freedom House are run by warmongering imperialists
We begin with the board of directors of NED, who, judging by their supposed mission to support "freedom around the world," should be filled with Nobel Peace Prize laureates, accomplished diplomats, and definitive examples of democracy in action. Instead, we have John Bohn who traded petrochemicals, was an international banker for 13 years with Wells Fargo, and is currently serving as a principal for a global advisory and consulting firm, GlobalNet Partners, which assists foreign businesses by making their "entry into the complex China market easy." Surely Bohn's ability to manipulate China's political landscape through NED's various activities both inside of China and along its peripheries constitutes an alarming conflict of interests. However, it appears "conflict of interests" is a reoccurring theme throughout both NED and Freedom House.
Bohn is joined by Rita DiMartino who worked for Council on Foreign Relations corporate member AT&T as "Vice President of Congressional Relations" as well as a member of the CFR herself. Also representing the Fortune 500 is Kenneth Duberstein, a board member of the war profiteering Boeing Company, big oil's ConocoPhillips, and the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation. Duberstein also served as a director of Fannie Mae until 2007. He too is a CFR member as are two of the companies he chairs, Boeing and ConocoPhillips.
We then consider several of the certified warmongers serving upon NED's board of directors including Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Will Marshall, and Vin Weber, all signatories of the pro-war, pro-corporate, utterly insane Project for a New American Century. Within the pages of documents produced by this "think tank" are pleas to various US presidents to pursue war against sovereign nations, the increase of troops in nations already occupied by US forces, and what equates to a call for American global hegemony in a Hitlerian 90 page document titled "Rebuilding Americas Defenses." As we will see, this warmongering think tank serves as a nexus around which fellow disingenuous rights advocate Freedom House also gravitates.
The "Statement of Principles," signed off by NED chairmen Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Vin Weber, states, "we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles." Of course by "international order" they mean meddling beyond the sovereign borders of the United States and is merely used as a euphemism for global imperialism. Other Neo-Con degenerates that signed their name to this statement include Freedom House's Paula Dobriansky, Dan Quayle (formally), and Donald Rumsfeld (formally), along with Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Eliot Cohen, and Elliot Abrams.
A PNAC "Statment on Post-War Iraq" regarding a wholehearted endorsement of nation-building features the signatures of NED chairman Will Marshall, Freedom House's Frank Carlucci (2002), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Martin Indyk (Lowy Institute board member, co-author of the conspiring "Which Path to Persia?" report), and William Kristol and Robert Kagan both of the warmongering Foreign Policy Initiative. It should be noted that the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is, for all intents and purposes, PNAC's latest incarnation and just recently featured an open letter to House Republicans calling on them to disregard the will of the American people and continue pursuing the war in Libya. The FPI letter even suggests that the UN resolution authorizing the war in the first place, was holding America "hostage" and that it should be exceeded in order to do more to "help the Libyan opposition."
An untitled PNAC letter addressed to then US President George Bush regarding a general call for global warmongering received the seal of approval from Freedom Houses' Ellen Bork (2007), Ken Adelman (also former lobbyist for Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra via Edelman), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Neo-Con degenerates Richard Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the always disingenuous demagogue Daniel Pipes.
The list goes on further, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leonard Sussman, and Max Kampelman. It is safe to say that neither NED nor Freedom House garners within its ranks characters appropriate for their alleged cause. It is also safe to say that the principles of "democracy," "freedom," and "human rights" they allegedly champion for, are merely being leveraged to co-opt well meaning people across the world to carry out their own self-serving agenda.
Globalist "Freedom" vs. Real Freedom
Organizations like Prachatai are knowingly or unknowingly carrying along the agenda of modern day imperialists. While they propose they are there to keep the Thai government "in check" for the Thai people, in reality they are doing so for the global corportocracy to which they clearly owe their existence to. When Thaksin Shinawatra was in office, Prachatai's US funding was meant to keep him from becoming a nationalist autocratic strongman. With him removed and fully in the service of the global corporatocracy, Prachatai's job has now become undermining the current government and making way for an indebted Thaksin to return to power and pay back his Western patrons. While Thailand will be free of any Thai autocrat, they will be subservant to the various unelected authors and signatories within PNAC calling for American global hegemony. Ironically, the "freedom" Prachatai believes it is bringing to Thailand through the nihilistic destruction of Thailand's traditional institutions will usher in the very colonialism those institutions had warded off for centuries - Thailand being the only Southeast Asian nation to escape European colonization.
Image: Illustrating how large the actual globalist machine is and how small both Thaksin Shinawatra and Prachatai are in comparison. Either is entirely replaceable at any given moment. And while Prachatai was initially receiving money to keep Thaksin in order and now being used to undermine the current Thai establishment, it is being done so not for the Thai people's benefit, but for a globalist empire attempting to prevent any strong nationalist entity from controlling land, resources, and people they presume dominion over. (click image to enlarge)
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Reading the "Rebuilding of America's Defenses" and the various documents promoted by PNAC and now FPI and even throughout the CFR, Brookings Institution and others, we can see clearly the proposal and pursuit of an international order presumably led by Anglo-American interests with their system of "liberal democracy" imposed upon the collective population of the world. They are building a global homogeneous network they refer to as "civil society" to slowly take over the roles various national governments carry out today. When these networks reach critical mass, or when an opportunity to remove a nationalist government presents itself, governments are toppled, stooges installed, and "civil society" groomed until it reaches full maturity. In turn this "civil society" then interfaces with the myriad of contrived "international institutions" like the UN, IMF, World Bank, the fraudulent International Criminal Court, and the World Trade Organization.
Image: Illustrated are the policy think-tanks funded by the largest, most powerful corporations on earth and representing their collective interests. They are the unelected authors of human destiny. Their funding arms channel money into propaganda, contrived international arbiters, illegitimate "international institutions" like the International Criminal Court, and of course the various armies of dupes, propagandists, and street fronts that operate within any given nation. (click image to enlarge)
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In the United States we can see the total pervasion of the global corporatocracy in everyday life. Laws and regulations are dictated by unelected policy wonks within organizations like the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, which are then rubber-stamped by feckless, corporate-serving politicians and enforced by an omnipresent, ever growing national security force. We are then expected to believe, somehow, that these very same organizations are "exporting" freedom, democracy, and human rights abroad. Indeed they are not. What is being built in Thailand, as is being built in Malaysia, across the US-backed destabilization of the Middle East and North Africa, and along Russia's western border with Belarus, is the modern day equivalent of Britain's or even Rome's imperial networks.
Consider the insidious methods used by the Romans to pacify and conquer entire populations by "integrating" them into their own Roman "international order."
From HistoryWorld.net:
'His object was to accustom them to a life of peace and quiet by the provision of amenities. He therefore gave official assistance to the building of temples, public squares and good houses. He educated the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts, and expressed a preference for British ability as compared to the trained skills of the Gauls. The result was that instead of loathing the Latin language they became eager to speak it effectively. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptation of arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as 'civilization', when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.'
Tacitus Annals of Imperial Rome, translated Michael Grant, Penguin 1956, 1975, page 72
Indeed the alleged freedom proposed to us by the likes of NED and Freedom House and the myriad of foreign-funded dupes carrying out their agenda, is nothing more than features of our own enslavement. As Egyptians rallied to "free" themselves, they toppled a nationalist government and let in Mohammed ElBaradei, a stooge in full service of the United States via the International Crisis Group. Just recently, Senator John McCain, chairman of the International Republican Institute, a NED-funded NGO on record for being behind the "Arab Spring," took with him members of various Fortune 500 corporations for a tour of newly "freed" Cairo. Their agenda is "economic liberalization" and the total integration of Egypt's once sovereign economy into the Anglo-American empire. Like the ancient British, the Egyptian youth are dazzled with their Western trappings and their new liberal democracy, courtesy of the insidious, unseen tentacles emanating from the globalist oligarchy.
Conclusion
True freedom comes from self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and economic and political independence as a community, as a state or province, and as a sovereign nation. Those peddling the allure of regional integration and global community are nothing more than the very same agents that peddled Roman culture to young British tribesmen. For all the promise the Roman Empire proclaimed, it festered into a despotic global regime which eventually collapsed in on itself leaving much of the world in a feudal dark age for centuries. The promise of globalization is no different, with cracks already beginning to show, it is disingenuous in both its intentions and its final outcome. We will not be one world living harmoniously, we will be one world under the thumb of a degenerate self-anointed elite.
If you are not self-sufficient and truly independent, you are not free, no matter how many paper ballots you stuff in a box, no matter how many marches you attend, and no matter how many Freedom House wires you cut & paste onto your foreign-funded "independent media" website. As long as you depend on these corporations, you belong to them, just as you did as a child dependent on your parents. The real revolution, and the real political awakening will occur when the people realize they do not need politicians or their contrived systems to lead and manage them, and begin using their own two hands to work from the land beneath them their own existence.
August 11, 2011
landdestroyer
by Tony Cartalucci
Bangkok, Thailand August 11, 2011 – After initially trying to downplay, obfuscate, and deny accusations that the Thai “independent, non-profit, daily web newspaper” Prachatai was in fact a US-funded propaganda front, a series of reports from Land Destroyer provided irrefutable evidence taken directly from the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy website. Additional backpedaling, lying, and obfuscating prompted a follow-up report on Prachatai featuring several unlisted funding sources the duplicitous organization most likely thought were well buried.
Perhaps fearing a third onslaught, or in a desperate attempt to salvage its sagging legitimacy, just this week Prachatai has made a seemingly complete disclosure of their US government and US corporate foundation funding laying to rest its own supporter’s erroneous assumptions and defense that the organization was “just barely getting by.” In fact, they are doing quite well and receive millions of baht consistently year to year from the US National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros’ Open Society Institute, and more recently USAID. In fact, an overwhelming 77% of Prachatai’s nearly 8 million baht in funding during 2011 has come directly from Uncle Sam – overt funding that would cut the legs of legitimacy out from under any alleged “news organization.”
Still, Prachatai’s utter contempt for both journalism and their readerships’ intelligence is best encapsulated in a cautionary reminder posted directly before their full financial disclosure which claims, “it is important to state here that none of our foreign donors has ever put up any demands connected to the funds they provided, nor did they ever interfere with our reporting.” One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at such overt duplicity from an organization that has just spent the last 2 months trying to laugh-off, ignore, or otherwise belittle very legitimate concerns regarding its lack of transparency.
The nature of Prachatai’s political narrative is confrontational, directed at Thailand’s establishment, especially Thailand’s traditional institutions which exist independently of the Soros-funded networks of which Prachatai is now irrefutably exposed to be a part. Prachatai’s goal is to undermine the Thai establishment’s legitimacy while concurrently building up the legitimacy of the “international community,” global “civil society,” and to promote globalist talking points. A visit to Prachatai’s homepage reveals links running off to Soros-funded “Open Democracy,” Soros and Ford Foundation funded “Global Voices,” the globalist International Institute for Strategic Studies (which includes Robert Blackwill, former lobbyist of Thailand’s globalist-backed stooge Thaksin Shinawatra), as well as a myriad of pro-Thaksin, pro-globalist, pro-color revolution websites that form the nucleus of Thailand’s foreign-funded “civil society” movement both in and out of the country.
This is analogous to other US-funded organizations, opposition groups, and NGOs around the world including those of the recent US-funded “Arab Spring” which were all admittedly organized, trained, funded, and equipped (in some cases armed) years in advance by the United States government for the expressed purpose of initiating regime change throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa. In fact, the New York Times itself would confirm this, stating that, “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 New York Times would go on to explain that “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.”
The Funding
Digging into Prachatai’s globalist funding exposes further the inner workings of the Wall Street-London global corporatocracy and how they disingenuously promote their agenda through NGOs, “civil society,” and by perverting the noble ideals of human rights, freedom, and democracy. Prachatai, like its counterparts throughout the world, is a disingenuous and complicit helping hand, pleading ignorance and literally saying “so what?” when the subject of just who funds them is brought up.
Image: Taken from Heinrich Böll Foundation’s 2009 Annual Report, globalist criminal bankster George Soros’ ubiquity within socially engineered movements is confirmed once again. Here he is listed under “Prominent Guests and Partners of the Foundation.” (click image to enlarge)
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Prachatai, in their latest disclosure, breaks their funding down year-to-year. One name that is ubiquitous is George Soros and his Open Society Institute which has funded Prachatai millions of baht over the years, beginning in 2005 and continuing until today under the Soros-connected Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBF). HBF is a shameless promoter of supranational governance, pushing the verified fraud that is the “climate change agenda,” and even helped Soros’ Global Voices in networking and training Arab bloggers in 2009 to prepare them for the upcoming “Arab Spring.” HBF’s 32 page 2009 annual report is a globalist progress report that includes funding and supporting fake progressive-liberal projects and outright worldwide sedition.
Image: From IMS’s 2010 Annual Report, Wikileaks figurehead Julian Assange pops in on a George Soros, ICFJ, IMS orgy of disinformation. Soros’ various funded revolutions have used Assange’s handy work as a rhetorical springboard to get into motion, therefore it is only right that Assange be given yet another stage upon which to promote the ongoing hoax that is Wikileaks. Anti-establishment, Julian Assange is not. (click image to enlarge)
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Prachatai’s 2009-2010 funding included 1.79 million baht from the Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF), yet another Soros-funded globalist organization which also includes the US State Department and Soros-infested International Media Support (IMS) as donors. IMS literally trains foreigners to report the news according to Western standards & values, or in other words, according to the Western narrative. It is not surprising to see IMS active in every nation the US State Department is feverishly attempting to create unrest via its National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House organizations, including Belarus, China, Iran, Ukraine, and across the Middle East. In one truly surreal scene taken from IMS’s 2010 annual report, Wikileaks fraud Julian Assange appears via video link on a stage littered with the logos of IMS, George Soros’ Open Society Institute, and the Fortune 500 corporate-fascist infested “International Center for Journalists” which suspiciously includes Bank of America’s marketing officer and PR firm representatives from McKinsey & Co. and Edelman (a proud corporate sponsor of the Egyptian revolutions) on its board of directors.
Another name that seems quite active throughout Prachatai’s 8 year existence is the Rockefeller Foundation which initially bought the organization its computers and whose partner, the “Community Organization Development Institute (CODI),” funded Prachatai 1.89 million baht in 2004. CODI also boasts UN support as well as a partnership with the eugenicists at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. There is also the Fund for Global Human Rights (FGHR) which has funded Prachatai over half a million baht over the course of two consecutive years. FGHR is nothing more than a funding arm for the Sigrid Trust who also funds the International Crisis Group, an unelected US think-tank that meddles directly in the internal affairs of other nations. In fact, ICG member Mohammed ElBaradei literally led the US-funded Egyptian revolution, a true testament to the disingenuous nature of both these “democratic awakenings” and the dubious personalities attempting to wrestle control away from embattled regimes around the world.
We finally make our way to by far Prachatai’s number one patron, certainly not its own readership – not by a long shot – but rather the US State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), one of the most notorious, duplicitous organization in America, on par with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as it literally works in tandem with the CIA’s activities (along with USAID who is also funding Prachatai via their SAPAN project) in subverting governments and overthrowing entire nations for US corporate-financier interests.
NED has funded Prachatai 1.5 million baht 3 years consecutively, including this year, along with USAID who has funded Prachatai an additional 2 million baht under the guise of the SAPAN Project which presumes to teach Thais how to conduct local government.
Image: NED-funded Freedom House nominates Thailand’s NED-funded Prachatai for the Deutsche Welle Blog Awards earlier this year, thus illustrating the contrived circus that is the collective propaganda outfit’s legitimacy. (click on image to enlarge)
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And while Freedom House is not listed by Prachatai as a contributing, as it itself is also funded by NED, it is surely worthy of honorable mention. Freedom House contributes a steady stream of rhetorical support and nominations for various contrived awards like this years’ “Deutsche Welle Blog Award” while Prachatai reciprocates by loyally copying and pasting any “helpful” Freedom House reports targeting Thailand or neighboring Asian nations.
NED & Freedom House are run by Warmongering Imperialists
Despite Prachatai’s own “who cares?” attitude regarding especially their NED funding, in reality there exists an immense disparity between the stated goal of NED, that is, “supporting freedom around the world,” and the backgrounds and stated agendas of those populating NED’s board of directors. The same could easily be said of Freedom House and its board of directors.
Upon that board of directors, who, judging by their supposed mission to support “freedom around the world,” we should find Nobel Peace Prize laureates, accomplished diplomats, and definitive examples of democracy in action. Instead, we have John Bohn who traded petrochemicals, was an international banker for 13 years with Wells Fargo, and is currently serving as a principal for a global advisory and consulting firm, GlobalNet Partners, which assists foreign businesses by making their “entry into the complex China market easy.” Surely Bohn’s ability to manipulate China’s political landscape through NED’s various activities both inside of China and along its peripheries constitutes an alarming conflict of interests. However, it appears “conflict of interests” is a reoccurring theme throughout both NED and Freedom House.
Bohn is joined by Rita DiMartino who worked for Council on Foreign Relations corporate member AT&T as “Vice President of Congressional Relations” as well as a member of the CFR herself. Also representing the Fortune 500 is Kenneth Duberstein, a board member of the war profiteering Boeing Company, big oil’s ConocoPhillips, and the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation. Duberstein also served as a director of Fannie Mae until 2007. He too is a CFR member as are two of the companies he chairs, Boeing and ConocoPhillips.
We then consider several of the certified warmongers serving upon NED’s board of directors including Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Will Marshall, and Vin Weber, all signatories of the pro-war, pro-corporate, utterly insane Project for a New American Century. Within the pages of documents produced by this “think tank” are pleas to various US presidents to pursue war against sovereign nations, the increase of troops in nations already occupied by US forces, and what equates to a call for American global hegemony in a Hitlerian 90 page document titled “Rebuilding Americas Defenses.” As we will see, this warmongering think tank serves as a nexus around which fellow disingenuous rights advocate Freedom House also gravitates.
The “Statement of Principles,” signed off by NED chairmen Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Vin Weber, states, “we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.” Of course by “international order” they mean meddling beyond the sovereign borders of the United States and is merely used as a euphemism for global imperialism. Other Neo-Con degenerates that signed their name to this statement include Freedom House’s Paula Dobriansky, Dan Quayle (formally), and Donald Rumsfeld (formally), along with Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Eliot Cohen, and Elliot Abrams.
A PNAC “Statment on Post-War Iraq” regarding a wholehearted endorsement of nation-building features the signatures of NED chairman Will Marshall, Freedom House’s Frank Carlucci (2002), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Martin Indyk (Lowy Institute board member, co-author of the conspiring “Which Path to Persia?” report), and William Kristol and Robert Kagan both of the warmongering Foreign Policy Initiative. It should be noted that the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is, for all intents and purposes, PNAC’s latest incarnation and just recently featured an open letter to House Republicans calling on them to disregard the will of the American people and continue pursuing the war in Libya. The FPI letter even suggests that the UN resolution authorizing the war in the first place, was holding America “hostage” and that it should be exceeded in order to do more to “help the Libyan opposition.”
An untitled PNAC letter addressed to then US President George Bush regarding a general call for global warmongering received the seal of approval from Freedom Houses’ Ellen Bork (2007), Ken Adelman (also former lobbyist for Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra via Edelman), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Neo-Con degenerates Richard Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the always disingenuous demagogue Daniel Pipes.
The list goes on further, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leonard Sussman, and Max Kampelman. It is safe to say that neither NED nor Freedom House garners within its ranks characters appropriate for their alleged cause of “supporting freedom around the world.” It is also safe to say that the principles of “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights” they allegedly champion for, are merely being leveraged to co-opt well meaning people across the world to carry out their own self-serving agenda.
Conclusion
Organizations like Prachatai that take money from these confessed, ill-intentioned, meddling, neo-imperialist dens of degeneracy, are either knowing accomplices or remiss beyond explanation. In either case, their legitimacy was not compromised the moment they decided to hide their funding, nor after they fully admitted the compromised nature of their paid-for “journalism” when pressured with persistent irrefutable evidence. Instead, Prachtai’s legitimacy was entirely lost the monument they decided to accept foreign funding in the first place – which as their own disclosure accounts for, was on day-one of their operations.
Image: While immature minds succumb to a Pavlovian giggle at the mere mention of the “New World Order,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, formally of the US State Department, has written an entire book about the inevitable global governance she has dedicated her life to ushering in.
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It is undeniable that a global oligarchy of incredibly wealthy and powerful corporate-financier interests are moving to consolidate power on a global scale, as imperialists have done throughout human history. They are destabilizing and destroying the old world, nation by nation, and replacing it with a new world of their own design, their “civil society.” However, we see the means and ends to which these megalomaniacs gravitate toward. These are means and ends that are entirely abhorrent, self-serving and encapsulated in horrifying dystopian nomenclatures such as “planetary regimes” (current White House Science Adviser John P. Holdren, Ecoscience 1977), or as recent US State Department Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter calls it, the “New World Order.”
Image: A graphical representation of the global corporate-financiers’ emerging “international order.” From the left policy is created by unelected corporate-funded think tanks, where funding arms, contrived international NGOs, and local street fronts like Prachatai carry it out. What is produced is a global, homogenous “civil society” that answers directly to the corporate-financiers that created it. (click image to enlarge)
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The nefarious, sycophantic helping-hands making this nightmare possible are foreign-funded traitors like Prachatai helping destabilize the old world and eagerly promoting the corporate-fascist funded, globally homogeneous “civil society.” They are traitors not just to the Thai people and the Thai nation, but traitors to humanity, traitors willfully helping usher in global governance under the dominion of autocrats who openly plot a global scientific dictatorship. Prachatai most certainly looked at NED’s board of directors during the last two months the Land Destroyer Report has been pressuring them to disclose their full funding and they most certainly know who the absolute degenerate scum is that funds them and what their warmongering agenda is. Yet they press on, indifferent, even elated over rubbing their duplicity in the face of their own readership.
Their financial disclosure begins with a brief history of Prachatai which includes sniveling accounts of police raiding their office, their director being arrested, and their foreign-funded propaganda website being systematically blocked by the Thai government, as if they are the victims of some gross injustice. They act as if anyone should be allowed to take foreign money, masquerade as journalists, intentionally mislead people, and undermine their own nation on behalf of a foreign government. As mentioned before, Prachatai, according to their own financial disclosure, year-to-year is anywhere between 77% and 100% funded by the US government and/or US corporate-funded foundations. This behavior here in Thailand, and around the world, by the helping hands of the globalist corporate-financier agenda is unacceptable.
Stand up to these paid-for liars. Expose their treachery and their disingenuous abuse of liberal and progressive ideals. Stand up against their horrific exploitation of human rights and representative governance to promote their paymasters’ agenda. The world does face tyranny and its name is globalization. Globalization can be seen in full effect across the deserts of Iraq, throughout the mountains of Afghanistan, and now along the shores of Libya and in the streets of Syria’s border cities. That is the globalist future fake-progressives like Prachatai are the harbingers of.
There will be no liberal singing tomorrows in Prachatai’s Thailand, just as there are no singing tomorrows in Egypt where the paymasters, like John McCain of the International Republican Institute, instrumental in funding and training the Egyptian protesters, now squat upon the Egyptian economy with Fortune 500 corporate-fascists prepared to sink their parasitic probosces into their “newly liberated” markets. That is the future of globalization. That is the future Prachatai is trying to sell Thailand, and just like with their funding, they will deny the truth until the very bitter end.
Notes: 1 US Dollar is equal to approximately 30 Thai Baht/baht. Prachatai also has done a “project” for the “People’s Empowerment Foundation,” another NED-funded NGO front that most recently took part in a Bangkok demonstration for Malaysia’s NED-funded Bersih movement.
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Tuesday, July 12, 2011
The Anatomy of Globalist-Funded Sedition
And the true path to freedom.
by Tony Cartalucci
Editor's Addition: James Woolsey, formally of the Freedom House, is now on the "leadership council" of the Neo-Con warmongering Foundation for Defense of Democracies along with fellow Freedom House members Jeane Kirkpatrick, Max Kampelman, and Paula Dobriansky. Woolsey recently signed off on the Neo-Con war propaganda film Iranium - propaganda so absurd it calls into question the sanity of those that created it. This represents further evidence illustrating how disingenuous "democracy advocates" like Freedom House are and why those receiving their funding & support are cause for alarm.
Bangkok, Thailand July 12, 2011 - While we are told by the self-proclaimed arbiters of humanity the merits of "human rights," "transparency," and "open society," these arbiters themselves are the poorest examples of such values. People indeed do have the right to know who is behind their government, the organizations that support it, and the corporations that fund them, not just in the nations and governments targeted by these nefarious arbiters, but the arbiters themselves. To this end, we hack off one tentacle of the growing Anglo-American planetary regime and dissect it - because indeed, people have a right to know the truth.
Thailand's Prachatai, as described by their US government granters at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), allegedly provides the Thai public with "a credible and respected source of independent news reporting and editorial commentary." It is also supposed to "foster a higher level of public participation and community involvement in Thai political affairs."
However a quick visit to Prachatai's website reveals links running off to Soros-funded "Open Democracy," Soros and Ford Foundation funded "Global Voices," the globalist International Institute for Strategic Studies (which includes Robert Blackwill, former lobbyist of Thailand's globalist-backed stooge Thaksin Shinawatra), as well as a myriad of pro-Thaksin, pro-globalist, pro-color revolution websites that form the nucleus of Thailand's foreign-funded "civil society" movement both in and out of the country. These include Bangkok Pundit, New Mandala of the Australian National University, and Asia Sentinel which frequently features the writings of Giles Ungpakorn, Marxist color revolution leader, author of the "Red Siam Manifesto," and brother of Prachatai founder Jon Ungpakorn. In all, Prachatai is yet another propaganda outlet serving the globalist agenda.
A 2007 cached version of Prachatai's "About Us" page did in fact mention some of their funding - however, they have since taken this down and now entirely obfuscate their finances, year to year from their own readership in a display of grotesque hypocrisy even as they demand "transparency" and "openness" from the Thai government. The 2007 cached version is as follows:
Prachatai (www.prachatai.com or www.prachathai.com ) is an independent, non-profit, daily web newspaper established in June 2004 to provide reliable and relevant news and information to the Thai public during an era of serious curbs on the freedom and independence of Thai news media.
Prachathai was established by a group of concerned Thais who include a senior member of the Press Council of Thailand, a well-known lecturer in Journalism, two members of the Thai Senate, a number of senior journalists, and a number of Thai NGO leaders.
Prachatai has a 19-member Board and a 7-member Management Committee which consists of 4 Board representatives and 3 senior staff. Since January 2006 Prachatai also been registered as a Thai non-profit foundation, named The Foundation for Community educational Media.
On September 6th 2004, Prachatai began its daily publication on the web with a staff of one editor and five reporters. At present Prachathai has a staff of 14: a Manager, Editor, Network Co-ordinator, 6 central office reporters, 3 regional reporters, a web manager, and a finance officer.
Prachatai run the program by received funding support from the Thai Health Promotion Foundation (www.thaihealth.or.th/en), the Community Organization Development Institute (CODI) (www.codi.or.th), the Open Society Institution (www.soros.org/initiatives/bpsai/about) and The Rockefeller Foundation (www.rockfound.org/iandr/SouthEastAsia) Regional Office in Bangkok supported the purchase of US$ 5,000 worth of computer equipment.
Prachatai Objectives
1. To provide the Thai public with access to reliable news and information relevant to developing and strengthening the democratic functions of Thai civil society.
2. To focus news coverage on the problems, concerns, activities and accomplishments of local communities and civil society movements and organisations.
3. To strive for freedom and independence of Thai news media.
4. To promote active public participation in Thai news media.
Prachatai Policies
1. To present news and information as professionally as possible with strict adherence to high ethical standards of journalism.
2. To establish mutual co-operation with civil society networks and organisations and particularly with community media such as community radio stations.
3. To recruit civil society leaders in various fields of work and experience as writers for Prachatai.
4. To promote active reader participation in Prachatai as volunteer news sources, writers, commentators, contributors to the Prachatai Community Section etc.
5. Not to accept paid advertising.
Contact to Prachatai:
Mr.Chuwat Rerksirisuk, Editor
E-mail: chuwat@prachatai.com
Send e-mail to Editorial Team at editor@prachatai.com
Ms.Supapan Palangsak, Network Co-ordinator
E-mail: netcord@prachatai.com
Ms.Chiranuch Premchaiporn, Manager
E-mail: chiranuch@prachatai.com
Mr. Jon Ungphakorn General Secretary of Prachatai and the Foundation for Community educational Media
E-mail: ungjon@prachatai.com
Mailing Address: 3/16 Soi Kerdsap, Bangkhunnon, Bangkoknoi, Bangkok 10700 Thailand Telephone: 66-2-8860427 to 8
Facsimile: 66-2-4340906
E-mail: fcem@prachatai.com
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Interestingly enough, Rockefeller Foundation's regional office, who Prachatai cites as donating to them $5,000 for computer equipment, works in tandem with another globalist Fortune 500-funded NGO called "Ashoka" who features vulgar degenerate Sombat Boonngamanong as yet another key figure within Thaksin Shinawatra's "red shirt" color revolution movement. These are foreign corporations and governments facilitating protests, even violence on the streets of a foreign nation - an act of war as pointed out by US Representative Ron Paul.
Photo: Thailand's "progressive hero" Sombat Boonngamanong thrives on negative attention. While foreign-funded, corporate-serving organizations like "Youth Leader" expound the virtues of Sombat and his contributions to Thailand via the UN and Fortune 500-funded organizations like Ashoka, his recent support of globalist-stooge billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra's "red shirt" street front appears more opportunistic than virtuous.
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To illustrate the depth these contrived organizations go through to lend themselves badly needed, otherwise non-existent legitimacy, yet another contrived, globalist corporate-financier funded organization, "Youth Leader" wrote a reality-defying biography of degenerate foreign-subsidized meddler Sombat Boonngamanong calling him "one of the most respected leaders’ and cultural activist in Thailand." Of course, "Youth Leader" makes no mention of how the Thai "red shirt" movement is a street-front for globalist-backed Thaksin Shinawatra. Such convenient omissions allows statements like "most respected" to go unchallenged by a readership overwhelmed by slanted, biased, flowery depictions they emotionally want to be true.
Other organizations not listed by Prachatai that have funded their activities over the years include the Sigrid Rausing Trust (who also funds the International Crisis Group) via the Global Human Rights Fund (2008) and the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Prachatai receives rhetorical support from these organizations as well as from Freedom House and a myriad of contrived, corporate-funded organizations that shower the seditious website with various "awards" year to year in yet another example of how the global elite lend themselves otherwise nonexistent legitimacy.
While some may claim receiving such funds from organizations with names like "Freedom House" and "National Endowment for Democracy" is entirely innocuous and that these foreign interests are truly dedicated to worthwhile causes, any thorough examination of these organizations reveals otherwise.
NED & Freedom House are run by warmongering imperialists
We begin with the board of directors of NED, who, judging by their supposed mission to support "freedom around the world," should be filled with Nobel Peace Prize laureates, accomplished diplomats, and definitive examples of democracy in action. Instead, we have John Bohn who traded petrochemicals, was an international banker for 13 years with Wells Fargo, and is currently serving as a principal for a global advisory and consulting firm, GlobalNet Partners, which assists foreign businesses by making their "entry into the complex China market easy." Surely Bohn's ability to manipulate China's political landscape through NED's various activities both inside of China and along its peripheries constitutes an alarming conflict of interests. However, it appears "conflict of interests" is a reoccurring theme throughout both NED and Freedom House.
Bohn is joined by Rita DiMartino who worked for Council on Foreign Relations corporate member AT&T as "Vice President of Congressional Relations" as well as a member of the CFR herself. Also representing the Fortune 500 is Kenneth Duberstein, a board member of the war profiteering Boeing Company, big oil's ConocoPhillips, and the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation. Duberstein also served as a director of Fannie Mae until 2007. He too is a CFR member as are two of the companies he chairs, Boeing and ConocoPhillips.
We then consider several of the certified warmongers serving upon NED's board of directors including Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Will Marshall, and Vin Weber, all signatories of the pro-war, pro-corporate, utterly insane Project for a New American Century. Within the pages of documents produced by this "think tank" are pleas to various US presidents to pursue war against sovereign nations, the increase of troops in nations already occupied by US forces, and what equates to a call for American global hegemony in a Hitlerian 90 page document titled "Rebuilding Americas Defenses." As we will see, this warmongering think tank serves as a nexus around which fellow disingenuous rights advocate Freedom House also gravitates.
The "Statement of Principles," signed off by NED chairmen Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Vin Weber, states, "we need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles." Of course by "international order" they mean meddling beyond the sovereign borders of the United States and is merely used as a euphemism for global imperialism. Other Neo-Con degenerates that signed their name to this statement include Freedom House's Paula Dobriansky, Dan Quayle (formally), and Donald Rumsfeld (formally), along with Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Eliot Cohen, and Elliot Abrams.
A PNAC "Statment on Post-War Iraq" regarding a wholehearted endorsement of nation-building features the signatures of NED chairman Will Marshall, Freedom House's Frank Carlucci (2002), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Martin Indyk (Lowy Institute board member, co-author of the conspiring "Which Path to Persia?" report), and William Kristol and Robert Kagan both of the warmongering Foreign Policy Initiative. It should be noted that the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is, for all intents and purposes, PNAC's latest incarnation and just recently featured an open letter to House Republicans calling on them to disregard the will of the American people and continue pursuing the war in Libya. The FPI letter even suggests that the UN resolution authorizing the war in the first place, was holding America "hostage" and that it should be exceeded in order to do more to "help the Libyan opposition."
An untitled PNAC letter addressed to then US President George Bush regarding a general call for global warmongering received the seal of approval from Freedom Houses' Ellen Bork (2007), Ken Adelman (also former lobbyist for Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra via Edelman), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Neo-Con degenerates Richard Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the always disingenuous demagogue Daniel Pipes.
The list goes on further, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leonard Sussman, and Max Kampelman. It is safe to say that neither NED nor Freedom House garners within its ranks characters appropriate for their alleged cause. It is also safe to say that the principles of "democracy," "freedom," and "human rights" they allegedly champion for, are merely being leveraged to co-opt well meaning people across the world to carry out their own self-serving agenda.
Globalist "Freedom" vs. Real Freedom
Organizations like Prachatai are knowingly or unknowingly carrying along the agenda of modern day imperialists. While they propose they are there to keep the Thai government "in check" for the Thai people, in reality they are doing so for the global corportocracy to which they clearly owe their existence to. When Thaksin Shinawatra was in office, Prachatai's US funding was meant to keep him from becoming a nationalist autocratic strongman. With him removed and fully in the service of the global corporatocracy, Prachatai's job has now become undermining the current government and making way for an indebted Thaksin to return to power and pay back his Western patrons. While Thailand will be free of any Thai autocrat, they will be subservant to the various unelected authors and signatories within PNAC calling for American global hegemony. Ironically, the "freedom" Prachatai believes it is bringing to Thailand through the nihilistic destruction of Thailand's traditional institutions will usher in the very colonialism those institutions had warded off for centuries - Thailand being the only Southeast Asian nation to escape European colonization.
Image: Illustrating how large the actual globalist machine is and how small both Thaksin Shinawatra and Prachatai are in comparison. Either is entirely replaceable at any given moment. And while Prachatai was initially receiving money to keep Thaksin in order and now being used to undermine the current Thai establishment, it is being done so not for the Thai people's benefit, but for a globalist empire attempting to prevent any strong nationalist entity from controlling land, resources, and people they presume dominion over. (click image to enlarge)
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Reading the "Rebuilding of America's Defenses" and the various documents promoted by PNAC and now FPI and even throughout the CFR, Brookings Institution and others, we can see clearly the proposal and pursuit of an international order presumably led by Anglo-American interests with their system of "liberal democracy" imposed upon the collective population of the world. They are building a global homogeneous network they refer to as "civil society" to slowly take over the roles various national governments carry out today. When these networks reach critical mass, or when an opportunity to remove a nationalist government presents itself, governments are toppled, stooges installed, and "civil society" groomed until it reaches full maturity. In turn this "civil society" then interfaces with the myriad of contrived "international institutions" like the UN, IMF, World Bank, the fraudulent International Criminal Court, and the World Trade Organization.
Image: Illustrated are the policy think-tanks funded by the largest, most powerful corporations on earth and representing their collective interests. They are the unelected authors of human destiny. Their funding arms channel money into propaganda, contrived international arbiters, illegitimate "international institutions" like the International Criminal Court, and of course the various armies of dupes, propagandists, and street fronts that operate within any given nation. (click image to enlarge)
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In the United States we can see the total pervasion of the global corporatocracy in everyday life. Laws and regulations are dictated by unelected policy wonks within organizations like the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, which are then rubber-stamped by feckless, corporate-serving politicians and enforced by an omnipresent, ever growing national security force. We are then expected to believe, somehow, that these very same organizations are "exporting" freedom, democracy, and human rights abroad. Indeed they are not. What is being built in Thailand, as is being built in Malaysia, across the US-backed destabilization of the Middle East and North Africa, and along Russia's western border with Belarus, is the modern day equivalent of Britain's or even Rome's imperial networks.
Consider the insidious methods used by the Romans to pacify and conquer entire populations by "integrating" them into their own Roman "international order."
From HistoryWorld.net:
'His object was to accustom them to a life of peace and quiet by the provision of amenities. He therefore gave official assistance to the building of temples, public squares and good houses. He educated the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts, and expressed a preference for British ability as compared to the trained skills of the Gauls. The result was that instead of loathing the Latin language they became eager to speak it effectively. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptation of arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as 'civilization', when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.'
Tacitus Annals of Imperial Rome, translated Michael Grant, Penguin 1956, 1975, page 72
Indeed the alleged freedom proposed to us by the likes of NED and Freedom House and the myriad of foreign-funded dupes carrying out their agenda, is nothing more than features of our own enslavement. As Egyptians rallied to "free" themselves, they toppled a nationalist government and let in Mohammed ElBaradei, a stooge in full service of the United States via the International Crisis Group. Just recently, Senator John McCain, chairman of the International Republican Institute, a NED-funded NGO on record for being behind the "Arab Spring," took with him members of various Fortune 500 corporations for a tour of newly "freed" Cairo. Their agenda is "economic liberalization" and the total integration of Egypt's once sovereign economy into the Anglo-American empire. Like the ancient British, the Egyptian youth are dazzled with their Western trappings and their new liberal democracy, courtesy of the insidious, unseen tentacles emanating from the globalist oligarchy.
Conclusion
True freedom comes from self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and economic and political independence as a community, as a state or province, and as a sovereign nation. Those peddling the allure of regional integration and global community are nothing more than the very same agents that peddled Roman culture to young British tribesmen. For all the promise the Roman Empire proclaimed, it festered into a despotic global regime which eventually collapsed in on itself leaving much of the world in a feudal dark age for centuries. The promise of globalization is no different, with cracks already beginning to show, it is disingenuous in both its intentions and its final outcome. We will not be one world living harmoniously, we will be one world under the thumb of a degenerate self-anointed elite.
If you are not self-sufficient and truly independent, you are not free, no matter how many paper ballots you stuff in a box, no matter how many marches you attend, and no matter how many Freedom House wires you cut & paste onto your foreign-funded "independent media" website. As long as you depend on these corporations, you belong to them, just as you did as a child dependent on your parents. The real revolution, and the real political awakening will occur when the people realize they do not need politicians or their contrived systems to lead and manage them, and begin using their own two hands to work from the land beneath them their own existence.
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