David Morrison
March 2011
Standing beside US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in Washington on 18 March 2011, our new Foreign Minister, Labour leader Eamon Gilmore, gave Ireland’s backing to regime change in Libya and the Western intervention aimed at bringing it about. He said:
“As regards to Libya, I believe that Colonel Qadhafi has lost all legitimacy to rule and should be encouraged to leave the stage.” [1]
The encouragement is contained in two Security Council resolutions, number 1970 passed unanimously on 26 February 2011 and number 1973 passed on 17 March 2011 by 10 votes (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, France, Gabon, Lebanon, Nigeria, Portugal, South Africa, UK and the US) to none, with 5 abstentions (Brazil, China, Germany, India and Russia) [2].
Resolution 1970 imposed an arms embargo on Libya, a travel ban and assets freeze on the family of Muammar Al-Qadhafi and certain Government officials. It also referred “the situation in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya since15 February 2011” to the International Criminal Court (paragraphs 4-8).
Resolution 1973 authorised UN member states
“to take all necessary measures, notwithstanding paragraph 9 of resolution 1970 (2011), to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory” (paragraph 4).
“All necessary measures” is the traditional Security Council euphemism for armed force. The resolution also imposed
“a ban on all flights in the airspace of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya in order to help protect civilians” (paragraph 6)
that is, a No Fly Zone.
The Irish Times editorial of 21 March 2011 said that Resolution 1973 was “binding on Ireland to assist” [3], which implies that Ireland is required to assist in military operations against Libya. That is not so: the resolution allows UN member states to engage in such operations and requests member states to assist by, for example, allowing overflights, but a state is not obliged to do either.
However, it is binding on all member states, including Ireland, to apply the arms embargo, the travel ban and the assets freeze, that is, those aspects of the resolutions that do not involve military action.
Enough to overthrowing the Qadhafi regime?
Will the provisions of Resolutions 1970 and 1973 allow France and Britain, the prime movers in getting them through the Security Council, to achieve their goal of overthrowing the Qadhafi regime?
It’s unlikely that the rather limited economic sanctions in these resolutions will bring down the regime, certainly not in the short term. And it is by no means certain that the military action authorised in these resolutions are sufficient to break the present stalemate, in which the opposition forces are largely confined to the Benghazi area.
On the face of it, by “excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory”, Resolution 1973 bans the use of French or British ground troops to effect regime change, in which case they will have to rely on the opposition forces in the Benghazi area, supported by foreign air power.
Currently, these forces are poorly armed and utterly disorganised. Chris McGreal wrote in the Guardian on 22 March 2011 that “rebels manning an anti-aircraft gun were probably responsible for shooting down the revolutionaries' only fighter plane” [4].
The questions arises: do the resolutions permit the arming and training of this rudimentary force so that, coupled with foreign air support, it might be capable of overthrowing the Qadhafi regime?
The answer to that appears to be YES. Whereas paragraph 9 of Resolution 1970, imposes an arms embargo on Libya, paragraph 4 of Resolution 1973 cancels the embargo in the context of member states taking military action to protect civilians, authorising member states “to take all necessary measures, notwithstanding paragraph 9 of resolution 1970 (2011), to protect civilians”.
A further question is: what restrictions, if any, does Resolution 1973 impose on the use of foreign air power against Libyan military forces? A subsidiary question is: does Resolution 1973 empower foreign states to target and kill Colonel Qadhafi and other Libyan leaders?
At the time of writing, foreign air power has destroyed the Libyan air force and its air defence systems. This has been said to be necessary in order to make overflying Libya safe for foreign planes enforcing the No Fly Zone.
In addition, French planes destroyed an armoured column moving in the direction of Benghazi. This was justified on the grounds that the column was about to attack Benghazi and kill civilians.
However, it is clear that, as far as France and Britain are concerned, Libyan ground forces are fair game, whether or not they are acting in an aggressive manner. At the time of writing (25 March 2011), military bases are being bombed and deployed forces are being attacked from the air, even though they are not on the offensive.
No doubt, the justification for this will be that so long Qadhafi has any military forces at his disposal he will use them to kill civilians – and therefore destroying them is a measure necessary to protect civilians, within the terms of Resolution 1973, paragraph 4. It follows from this that providing air support for attacking anti-Qadhafi forces would also be within the terms of Resolution 1973, paragraph 4. The possibility of killing large numbers of civilians is the only restraint on this action.
Targeting and killing Colonel Qadhafi and other Libyan leaders could also be justified under Resolution 1973 on similar grounds. After all, since he has said to be giving the orders for his troops to kill civilians, then it’s not too much of a stretch to argue that killing him is necessary to protect civilians.
There has been a public dispute in Britain between the military and politicians on this question. When asked if Colonel Qadhafi was a legitimate target, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir David Richards, said: “Absolutely not. It is not allowed under the UN resolution.” However, the politicians were quick to deny this – a spokesman for Prime Minister Cameron explained that it was lawful to target Qadhafi if he was seen as organising the threat to civilians, since the Security Council’s objective was to protect civilians (Guardian, 22 March 2011, [5]).
Continuing stalement?
So, the provisions of Resolution 1973 with regard to the protection of civilians are extremely wide. They are being interpreted as giving carte blanche to attack and destroy Libyan government forces wherever they may be found. Nevertheless, without foreign troops on the ground, the likely outcome is a continuing stalemate with Qadhafi in power and controlling most of Libya.
Such an outcome with Qadhafi remaining in power would be intolerable to France and Britain, and the US. Success for them is the unseating of Qadhafi and it’s difficult to believe they will settle for less. For that, ground troops may be required.
It has been generally assumed that Resolution 1973 doesn’t permit that, since “a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory” is specifically excluded from the “necessary measures”. But, that doesn’t actually exclude a foreign liberation force to overthrow the Qadhafi regime, which, as British Foreign Minister, William Hague, told the House of Commons on 24 March 2011, is a sine qua non of “any peaceful or viable future for the people of Libya” [6].
No doubt there are some foreign boots on the ground there already.
Why has Libya been singled out?
Why has Qadhafi’s Libya been singled out for attention by the West when a matter of weeks ago he was a valued ally? Around 400 people were killed by state forces in Egypt without any suggestion of military action and all of them were unarmed, whereas some at least of the Libyan opposition forces are armed. Unarmed protestors are being shot down in the street in Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, without any suggestion that similar action is being contemplated.
It is inconceivable that the governments of France and Britain and the US embarked on this mission out of concern for the lives of Libyan civilians. In recent years, the US itself has killed hundreds of civilians in Pakistan in drone attacks, triggered from the safety of mainland US. The slaughter has intensified under the Obama administration and it is still going on. Has France or Britain has ever expressed any concern for these civilian killings, carried out regularly by their close ally? Of course not.
Israel killed around 1,500 Lebanese civilians from the air in the summer of 2006 and around 1,500 Palestinian civilians in Gaza in 2008/9. The chorus of demands for a No Fly Zone in Libya was prompted by claims that the Qadhafi regime was massacring civilians from the air, evidence for which is hard to come by.
But there is no doubt that Israel has killed thousands of Arab civilians from the air in the last few years, without any call for a No Fly Zone from Britain or France or the US. In the case of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the US and Britain acted to prolong the conflict, and the killing, in order, they hoped, to give Israel time to wipe out Hezbollah.
It isn’t credible that these governments are motivated by humanitarian concern for Libyan civilians. For them, humanitarian concern is merely an instrument for whipping up domestic and international support for action they want to embark on for other reasons.
Nor are the Imperial Powers motivated by a desire to see political systems in the Middle East that are responsive to the popular will. Such an Arab world would act far more in accord with its own interests, rather than being manipulated by Western interests. The idea therefore is to support limited change in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrein and Yemen, on the understanding that there is no revolution. The situation in Libya is different, where regime change is sought.
Though Qadhafi has accommodated himself to Western interests in recent years, and opposes Al Qaida, he has maintained the coherence of the Arab nationalist state he has built, and retained a form of Socialism in its structures. This is intolerable to Western interests, which prefer to see a mess a la Iraq, rather than a strong state pursuing the interests of its people in its own way. The plan, therefore, is to destroy the Libyan state under humanitarian and democratic guise. It is no concern of the West that it may be unleashing a bloodbath.
First Iraq, then Libya: that leaves the last Arab Socialist State, Syria. That’s why France and Britain and the US are bombing Libya.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
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?”
Sunday, August 28, 2011
C.I.A. Demands Cuts in Book About 9/11 and Terror Fight
Secrecy, leaks, and the real criminals
By Glenn Greenwald
Salon
Ali Soufan is a long-time FBI agent and interrogator who was at the center of the U.S. government's counter-terrorism activities from 1997 through 2005, and became an outspoken critic of the government's torture program. He has written a book exposing the abuses of the CIA's interrogation program as well as pervasive ineptitude and corruption in the War on Terror. He is, however, encountering a significant problem: the CIA is barring the publication of vast amounts of information in his book including, as Scott Shane details in The New York Times today, many facts that are not remotely secret and others that have been publicly available for years, including ones featured in the 9/11 Report and even in Soufan's own public Congressional testimony.
Shane notes that the government's censorship effort "amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath," particularly given the imminent publication of a book by CIA agent Jose Rodriguez -- who destroyed the videotapes of CIA interrogations in violation of multiple court orders and subpoenas only to be protected by the Obama DOJ -- that touts the benefits of the CIA's "tough" actions, propagandistically entitled: "Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives." Most striking about this event is the CIA's defense of its censorship of information from Soufan's book even though it has long been publicly reported and documented:
A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said . . . ."Just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean it's been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government."
Just marvel at the Kafkaesque, authoritarian mentality that produces responses like that: someone can be censored, or even prosecuted and imprisoned, for discussing "classified" information that has long been documented in the public domain. But as absurd as it is, this deceitful scheme -- suppressing embarrassing information or evidence of illegality by claiming that even public information is "classified" -- is standard government practice for punishing whistleblowers and other critics and shielding high-level lawbreakers.
The Obama DOJ has continuously claimed that victims of the U.S. rendition, torture and eavesdropping programs cannot have their claims litigated in court because what was done to them are "state secrets" -- even when what was done to them has long been publicly known and even formally, publicly investigated and litigated in open court in other countries. Identically, the Obama DOJ just tried (and failed) to prosecute NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake for "espionage" for "leaking," among other things, documents that do not even remotely contain properly classified information, leading to a formal complaint by a long-time NSA official demanding that the officials who improperly classified those documents themselves be punished. In a Washington Post Op-Ed today, Drake himself explains:
From 2001 through 2008, I was a senior executive at the National Security Agency. Shortly after Sept. 11, I heard more than rumblings about secret electronic eavesdropping and data mining against Americans that bypassed the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act . . .
I followed all the rules for reporting such activity until it conflicted with the primacy of my oath to defend the Constitution. I then made a fateful choice to exercise my fundamental First Amendment rights and went to a journalist with unclassified information about which the public had a right to know.
Rather than address its own corruption, ineptitude and illegal actions, the government made me a target of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar federal criminal "leak" investigation as part of a vicious campaign against whistleblowers that started under President George W. Bush and is coming to full fruition under President Obama.
To the government, I was a traitor and enemy of the state. As an American, however, I could not stand by and become an accessory to the willful subversion of our Constitution and our freedoms.
Far more often than anything else, that is the real purpose of government secrecy: to shield ineptitude, corruption, abuse of power and illegality from seeing the light of day, and -- as illustrated by the CIA's efforts to destroy Soufan's critical book while guaranteeing the predominance of Rodriguez's propaganda tract -- to ensure that the government controls what the public hears and what it does not hear.
Ironically, it is that behavior -- abusing secrecy powers to cover-up embarrassing and incriminating evidence -- that is a far more destructive and common crime than unauthorized leaks. As the Supreme Court explained in rejecting Nixon's classified-based censorship efforts of the Pentagon Papers: "The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of governmental suppression of embarrassing information." Indeed, abusing secrecy powers to conceal embarrassing and incriminating information has long been illegal, and is even expressly barred by President Obama's own Executive Order governing classified information:
Abusing government secrecy powers is a vastly more frequent and damaging illegal act than unauthorized leaks, yet the President obsesses on the latter while doing virtually nothing about the former other than continuing its worst manifestations. As the Supreme Court explained, few things are more damaging to a democracy than allowing political leaders to abuse secrecy powers to cover-up wrongdoing and control the flow of information the public hears, i.e., to propagandize the citizenry.
But that's exactly what Washington's secrecy fixation is designed to achieve. And while excessive secrecy has been a problem in the U.S. for decades, the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistleblowers makes it much more odious, since now it is about not only keeping vital information from the public and stifling public debate, but also threatening whistleblowers (and investigative reporters) with prolonged imprisonment. That's why they turn what candidate Obama called these "acts of courage and patriotism" (whistleblowing) into crimes, while the real criminals -- political officials who abuse their secrecy powers for corrupted, self-interested ends -- go unpunished.
This is a perfect symbol of the Obama administration: claims of secrecy are used to censor a vital critic of torture and other CIA abuses (Soufan) and to prosecute an NSA whistleblower who exposed substantial corruption and criminality (Drake), while protecting from all consequences the official who illegally destroyed video evidence of the CIA's torture program (Rodriguez) and then help ensure that his torture-hailing propaganda book becomes the defining narrative of those events. As usual, the real high-level criminals prosper while those who expose their criminality are the only ones punished.
____________
August 25, 2011
By SCOTT SHANE
New York Times
WASHINGTON — In what amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former F.B.I. agent who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda.
The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the C.I.A. missed a chance to derail the 2001 plot by withholding from the F.B.I. information about two future 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, according to several people who have read the manuscript. And he gives a detailed, firsthand account of the C.I.A.’s move toward brutal treatment in its interrogations, saying the harsh methods used on the agency’s first important captive, Abu Zubaydah, were unnecessary and counterproductive.
Neither critique of the C.I.A. is new. In fact, some of the information that the agency argues is classified, according to two people who have seen the correspondence between the F.B.I. and C.I.A., has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.
Mr. Soufan, an Arabic-speaking counterterrorism agent who played a central role in most major terrorism investigations between 1997 and 2005, has told colleagues he believes the cuts are intended not to protect national security but to prevent him from recounting episodes that in his view reflect badly on the C.I.A.
Some of the scores of cuts demanded by the C.I.A. from Mr. Soufan’s book, “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda,” seem hard to explain on security grounds.
Among them, according to the people who have seen the correspondence, is a phrase from Mr. Soufan’s 2009 testimony at a Senate hearing, freely available both as video and transcript on the Web. Also chopped are references to the word “station” to describe the C.I.A.’s overseas offices, common parlance for decades.
The agency removed the pronouns “I” and “me” from a chapter in which Mr. Soufan describes his widely reported role in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator and training camp boss. And agency officials took out references to the fact that a passport photo of one of the 9/11 hijackers who later lived in San Diego, Khalid al-Midhar, had been sent to the C.I.A. in January 2000 — an episode described both in the 9/11 commission report and Mr. Tenet’s book.
In a letter sent Aug. 19 to the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie E. Caproni, a lawyer for Mr. Soufan, David N. Kelley, wrote that “credible sources have told Mr. Soufan that the agency has made a decision that this book should not be published because it will prove embarrassing to the agency.”
In a statement, Mr. Soufan called the C.I.A’s redactions to his book “ridiculous” but said he thought he would prevail in getting them restored for a later edition.
He said he believed that counterterrorism officers have an obligation to face squarely “where we made mistakes and let the American people down.” He added: “It saddens me that some are refusing to address past mistakes.”
A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said, “The suggestion that the Central Intelligence Agency has requested redactions on this publication because it doesn’t like the content is ridiculous. The C.I.A.’s pre-publication review process looks solely at the issue of whether information is classified.”
She noted that under the law, “Just because something is in the public domain doesn’t mean it’s been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government.”
A spokesman for the F.B.I., Michael P. Kortan, declined to comment.
The book, written with the assistance of Daniel Freedman, a colleague at Mr. Soufan’s New York security company, is scheduled to go on sale Sept. 12. Facing a deadline this week, the publisher, W. W. Norton and Company, decided to proceed with a first printing incorporating all the C.I.A.’s cuts.
If Mr. Soufan ultimately prevails in negotiations or a legal fight to get the excised material restored, Norton will print the unredacted version, said Drake McFeely, Norton’s president. “The C.I.A.’s redactions seem outrageous to me,” Mr. McFeely said. But he noted that they are concentrated in certain chapters and said “the book’s argument comes across clearly despite them.”
The regular appearance of memoirs by Bush administration officials has continued a debate over the facts surrounding the failure to prevent 9/11 and the tactics against terrorism that followed. In former Vice President Dick Cheney’s memoir, set for publication next week, he writes of the harsh interrogations that “the techniques worked.”
A book scheduled for publication next May by José A. Rodriguez Jr., a former senior C.I.A. official, is expected to give a far more laudatory account of the agency’s harsh interrogations than that of Mr. Soufan, as is evident from its tentative title: “Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.”
Government employees who hold security clearances are required to have their books vetted for classified information before publication. But because decisions on what should be classified can be highly subjective, the prepublication review process often becomes a battle. Several former spies have gone to court to fight redactions to their books, and the Defense Department spent nearly $50,000 last year to buy and destroy the entire first printing of an intelligence officer’s book, which it said contained secrets.
The C.I.A. interrogation program sharply divided the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., whose director, Robert S. Mueller III, ordered agents to stop participating in the program after Mr. Soufan and other agents objected to the use of physical coercion. But some C.I.A. officers, too, opposed the brutal methods, including waterboarding, and it was their complaint to the C.I.A.’s inspector general that eventually led to the suspension of the program.
“The Black Banners” traces the origins and growth of Al Qaeda and describes the role of Mr. Soufan, 40, a Lebanese-American, in the investigations of the East African embassy bombings of 1998, the attack on the American destroyer Cole in 2000, 9/11 and the continuing campaign against terrorism.
Starting in May, F.B.I. officials reviewed Mr. Soufan’s 600-page manuscript, asking the author for evidence that dozens of names and facts were not classified. Mr. Soufan and Mr. Freedman agreed to change wording or substitute aliases for some names, and on July 12 the bureau told Mr. Soufan its review was complete.
In the meantime, however, the bureau had given the book to the C.I.A. Its reviewers responded this month with 78-page and 103-page faxes listing their cuts.
By Glenn Greenwald
Salon
Ali Soufan is a long-time FBI agent and interrogator who was at the center of the U.S. government's counter-terrorism activities from 1997 through 2005, and became an outspoken critic of the government's torture program. He has written a book exposing the abuses of the CIA's interrogation program as well as pervasive ineptitude and corruption in the War on Terror. He is, however, encountering a significant problem: the CIA is barring the publication of vast amounts of information in his book including, as Scott Shane details in The New York Times today, many facts that are not remotely secret and others that have been publicly available for years, including ones featured in the 9/11 Report and even in Soufan's own public Congressional testimony.
Shane notes that the government's censorship effort "amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath," particularly given the imminent publication of a book by CIA agent Jose Rodriguez -- who destroyed the videotapes of CIA interrogations in violation of multiple court orders and subpoenas only to be protected by the Obama DOJ -- that touts the benefits of the CIA's "tough" actions, propagandistically entitled: "Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives." Most striking about this event is the CIA's defense of its censorship of information from Soufan's book even though it has long been publicly reported and documented:
A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said . . . ."Just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean it's been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government."
Just marvel at the Kafkaesque, authoritarian mentality that produces responses like that: someone can be censored, or even prosecuted and imprisoned, for discussing "classified" information that has long been documented in the public domain. But as absurd as it is, this deceitful scheme -- suppressing embarrassing information or evidence of illegality by claiming that even public information is "classified" -- is standard government practice for punishing whistleblowers and other critics and shielding high-level lawbreakers.
The Obama DOJ has continuously claimed that victims of the U.S. rendition, torture and eavesdropping programs cannot have their claims litigated in court because what was done to them are "state secrets" -- even when what was done to them has long been publicly known and even formally, publicly investigated and litigated in open court in other countries. Identically, the Obama DOJ just tried (and failed) to prosecute NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake for "espionage" for "leaking," among other things, documents that do not even remotely contain properly classified information, leading to a formal complaint by a long-time NSA official demanding that the officials who improperly classified those documents themselves be punished. In a Washington Post Op-Ed today, Drake himself explains:
From 2001 through 2008, I was a senior executive at the National Security Agency. Shortly after Sept. 11, I heard more than rumblings about secret electronic eavesdropping and data mining against Americans that bypassed the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act . . .
I followed all the rules for reporting such activity until it conflicted with the primacy of my oath to defend the Constitution. I then made a fateful choice to exercise my fundamental First Amendment rights and went to a journalist with unclassified information about which the public had a right to know.
Rather than address its own corruption, ineptitude and illegal actions, the government made me a target of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar federal criminal "leak" investigation as part of a vicious campaign against whistleblowers that started under President George W. Bush and is coming to full fruition under President Obama.
To the government, I was a traitor and enemy of the state. As an American, however, I could not stand by and become an accessory to the willful subversion of our Constitution and our freedoms.
Far more often than anything else, that is the real purpose of government secrecy: to shield ineptitude, corruption, abuse of power and illegality from seeing the light of day, and -- as illustrated by the CIA's efforts to destroy Soufan's critical book while guaranteeing the predominance of Rodriguez's propaganda tract -- to ensure that the government controls what the public hears and what it does not hear.
Ironically, it is that behavior -- abusing secrecy powers to cover-up embarrassing and incriminating evidence -- that is a far more destructive and common crime than unauthorized leaks. As the Supreme Court explained in rejecting Nixon's classified-based censorship efforts of the Pentagon Papers: "The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of governmental suppression of embarrassing information." Indeed, abusing secrecy powers to conceal embarrassing and incriminating information has long been illegal, and is even expressly barred by President Obama's own Executive Order governing classified information:
Abusing government secrecy powers is a vastly more frequent and damaging illegal act than unauthorized leaks, yet the President obsesses on the latter while doing virtually nothing about the former other than continuing its worst manifestations. As the Supreme Court explained, few things are more damaging to a democracy than allowing political leaders to abuse secrecy powers to cover-up wrongdoing and control the flow of information the public hears, i.e., to propagandize the citizenry.
But that's exactly what Washington's secrecy fixation is designed to achieve. And while excessive secrecy has been a problem in the U.S. for decades, the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistleblowers makes it much more odious, since now it is about not only keeping vital information from the public and stifling public debate, but also threatening whistleblowers (and investigative reporters) with prolonged imprisonment. That's why they turn what candidate Obama called these "acts of courage and patriotism" (whistleblowing) into crimes, while the real criminals -- political officials who abuse their secrecy powers for corrupted, self-interested ends -- go unpunished.
This is a perfect symbol of the Obama administration: claims of secrecy are used to censor a vital critic of torture and other CIA abuses (Soufan) and to prosecute an NSA whistleblower who exposed substantial corruption and criminality (Drake), while protecting from all consequences the official who illegally destroyed video evidence of the CIA's torture program (Rodriguez) and then help ensure that his torture-hailing propaganda book becomes the defining narrative of those events. As usual, the real high-level criminals prosper while those who expose their criminality are the only ones punished.
____________
August 25, 2011
By SCOTT SHANE
New York Times
WASHINGTON — In what amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former F.B.I. agent who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda.
The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the C.I.A. missed a chance to derail the 2001 plot by withholding from the F.B.I. information about two future 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, according to several people who have read the manuscript. And he gives a detailed, firsthand account of the C.I.A.’s move toward brutal treatment in its interrogations, saying the harsh methods used on the agency’s first important captive, Abu Zubaydah, were unnecessary and counterproductive.
Neither critique of the C.I.A. is new. In fact, some of the information that the agency argues is classified, according to two people who have seen the correspondence between the F.B.I. and C.I.A., has previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.
Mr. Soufan, an Arabic-speaking counterterrorism agent who played a central role in most major terrorism investigations between 1997 and 2005, has told colleagues he believes the cuts are intended not to protect national security but to prevent him from recounting episodes that in his view reflect badly on the C.I.A.
Some of the scores of cuts demanded by the C.I.A. from Mr. Soufan’s book, “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda,” seem hard to explain on security grounds.
Among them, according to the people who have seen the correspondence, is a phrase from Mr. Soufan’s 2009 testimony at a Senate hearing, freely available both as video and transcript on the Web. Also chopped are references to the word “station” to describe the C.I.A.’s overseas offices, common parlance for decades.
The agency removed the pronouns “I” and “me” from a chapter in which Mr. Soufan describes his widely reported role in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an important terrorist facilitator and training camp boss. And agency officials took out references to the fact that a passport photo of one of the 9/11 hijackers who later lived in San Diego, Khalid al-Midhar, had been sent to the C.I.A. in January 2000 — an episode described both in the 9/11 commission report and Mr. Tenet’s book.
In a letter sent Aug. 19 to the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie E. Caproni, a lawyer for Mr. Soufan, David N. Kelley, wrote that “credible sources have told Mr. Soufan that the agency has made a decision that this book should not be published because it will prove embarrassing to the agency.”
In a statement, Mr. Soufan called the C.I.A’s redactions to his book “ridiculous” but said he thought he would prevail in getting them restored for a later edition.
He said he believed that counterterrorism officers have an obligation to face squarely “where we made mistakes and let the American people down.” He added: “It saddens me that some are refusing to address past mistakes.”
A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said, “The suggestion that the Central Intelligence Agency has requested redactions on this publication because it doesn’t like the content is ridiculous. The C.I.A.’s pre-publication review process looks solely at the issue of whether information is classified.”
She noted that under the law, “Just because something is in the public domain doesn’t mean it’s been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government.”
A spokesman for the F.B.I., Michael P. Kortan, declined to comment.
The book, written with the assistance of Daniel Freedman, a colleague at Mr. Soufan’s New York security company, is scheduled to go on sale Sept. 12. Facing a deadline this week, the publisher, W. W. Norton and Company, decided to proceed with a first printing incorporating all the C.I.A.’s cuts.
If Mr. Soufan ultimately prevails in negotiations or a legal fight to get the excised material restored, Norton will print the unredacted version, said Drake McFeely, Norton’s president. “The C.I.A.’s redactions seem outrageous to me,” Mr. McFeely said. But he noted that they are concentrated in certain chapters and said “the book’s argument comes across clearly despite them.”
The regular appearance of memoirs by Bush administration officials has continued a debate over the facts surrounding the failure to prevent 9/11 and the tactics against terrorism that followed. In former Vice President Dick Cheney’s memoir, set for publication next week, he writes of the harsh interrogations that “the techniques worked.”
A book scheduled for publication next May by José A. Rodriguez Jr., a former senior C.I.A. official, is expected to give a far more laudatory account of the agency’s harsh interrogations than that of Mr. Soufan, as is evident from its tentative title: “Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.”
Government employees who hold security clearances are required to have their books vetted for classified information before publication. But because decisions on what should be classified can be highly subjective, the prepublication review process often becomes a battle. Several former spies have gone to court to fight redactions to their books, and the Defense Department spent nearly $50,000 last year to buy and destroy the entire first printing of an intelligence officer’s book, which it said contained secrets.
The C.I.A. interrogation program sharply divided the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., whose director, Robert S. Mueller III, ordered agents to stop participating in the program after Mr. Soufan and other agents objected to the use of physical coercion. But some C.I.A. officers, too, opposed the brutal methods, including waterboarding, and it was their complaint to the C.I.A.’s inspector general that eventually led to the suspension of the program.
“The Black Banners” traces the origins and growth of Al Qaeda and describes the role of Mr. Soufan, 40, a Lebanese-American, in the investigations of the East African embassy bombings of 1998, the attack on the American destroyer Cole in 2000, 9/11 and the continuing campaign against terrorism.
Starting in May, F.B.I. officials reviewed Mr. Soufan’s 600-page manuscript, asking the author for evidence that dozens of names and facts were not classified. Mr. Soufan and Mr. Freedman agreed to change wording or substitute aliases for some names, and on July 12 the bureau told Mr. Soufan its review was complete.
In the meantime, however, the bureau had given the book to the C.I.A. Its reviewers responded this month with 78-page and 103-page faxes listing their cuts.
The fundamental unreliability of America's media
Jan 12, 2010 Salon
By Glenn Greenwald
Consider the record of the American media over the last two weeks alone. Justin Elliott of TPM documents how an absolute falsehood about the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing -- that Abdulmutallab purchased a "one-way ticket" to the U.S., when it was actually a round-trip ticket -- has been repeated far and wide by U.S. media outlets as fact. Two weeks ago, Elliott similarly documented how an equally false claim from ABC News -- that two of the Al Qaeda leaders behind that airliner attack had been released from Guantanamo -- became entrenched as fact in media reports (at most, it was one, not two). This week, Dan Froomkin chronicles how completely discredited claims about Guantanamo recidivism rates continue to be uncritically "reported" by The New York Times and then inserted into our debates as fact.
As I documented two weeks ago, government claims about which "top Al Qaeda fighters" were killed by our airstrikes turn out to be untrue far more often than not, yet are always mindlessly featured by our media, ensuring little questioning of those actions; and now, at least two of the three Top Terrorists claimed to have been killed by our recent airstrikes in Yemen -- and possibly all three -- are quite likely alive. As Greg Sargent writes, one of the most provocative and inflammatory claims of the trashy Halperin/Heilemann gossip book -- that Bill Clinton told Ted Kennedy that Obama would have been "getting us coffee" just a couple years earlier -- is not only completely unsourced (like virtually every one of their sleazy claims), but also "paraphrased."
Aside from falsity -- and the fact that they become irreversibly lodged in our political culture as fact -- what do all of these deceitful reports have in common? They're all the by-product of granting anonymity to people and then repeating what they claim as fact, with the falsehood-disseminators protected by "journalists" from any and all accountability for their falsehoods. It's exactly the same process that caused our leading media outlets to tell Americans about Iraq's massive WMD program and Al Qaeda connections; Jessica Lynch's heroic firefight with inhumane Iraqi devils and her "rescue" by our Marines; Pat Tillman's death at the hands of Al Qaeda monsters; and government tests that "confirmed" the presence of bentonite in the anthrax used to attack the U.S., which meant it was likely that Saddam was behind the attacks.
Unjustified anonymity -- especially when mindlessly repeating what shielded government sources claim in secret -- is the single greatest enabler of false and deceitful "reporting." Despite (or, really, because of) its unparalelled record of producing lies, it will never stop, because agreeing to it is how "journalists" end up being selected as favored message-carrying servants for the powerful. This falsehood-producing method isn't ancillary to American journalism but central to it; the book which is occupying the attention of America's political and media class is based exclusively on unattributed, shielded sources, and that seems to bother none of them.
None of the falsehoods documented here will ever lead to any accountability, because the identity of the falsehood-producers will be shielded by their loyal journalist-servants, and the journalists themselves will simply claim that they wrote what they did because their hidden sources told them to. That's not only the effect, but the intent, of the central method of American journalism: to disseminate outright falsehoods to the American public and ensure that neither the liars nor their loyal message-carriers ever face any consequences or even reputational loss. Anonymity is so common that "reporters" barely even bother any longer to explain why it's justified, notwithstanding numerous policies of media outlets requiring exactly that explanation. As the use of anonymity has escalated rapidly, so, too, has the pervasiveness of outright falsehoods and the inherent unreliability of much of what the American media "reports." Lying is so much easier -- and thus so much more common -- when you get to do it while remaining hidden.
* * * * *
By Glenn Greenwald
Consider the record of the American media over the last two weeks alone. Justin Elliott of TPM documents how an absolute falsehood about the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing -- that Abdulmutallab purchased a "one-way ticket" to the U.S., when it was actually a round-trip ticket -- has been repeated far and wide by U.S. media outlets as fact. Two weeks ago, Elliott similarly documented how an equally false claim from ABC News -- that two of the Al Qaeda leaders behind that airliner attack had been released from Guantanamo -- became entrenched as fact in media reports (at most, it was one, not two). This week, Dan Froomkin chronicles how completely discredited claims about Guantanamo recidivism rates continue to be uncritically "reported" by The New York Times and then inserted into our debates as fact.
As I documented two weeks ago, government claims about which "top Al Qaeda fighters" were killed by our airstrikes turn out to be untrue far more often than not, yet are always mindlessly featured by our media, ensuring little questioning of those actions; and now, at least two of the three Top Terrorists claimed to have been killed by our recent airstrikes in Yemen -- and possibly all three -- are quite likely alive. As Greg Sargent writes, one of the most provocative and inflammatory claims of the trashy Halperin/Heilemann gossip book -- that Bill Clinton told Ted Kennedy that Obama would have been "getting us coffee" just a couple years earlier -- is not only completely unsourced (like virtually every one of their sleazy claims), but also "paraphrased."
Aside from falsity -- and the fact that they become irreversibly lodged in our political culture as fact -- what do all of these deceitful reports have in common? They're all the by-product of granting anonymity to people and then repeating what they claim as fact, with the falsehood-disseminators protected by "journalists" from any and all accountability for their falsehoods. It's exactly the same process that caused our leading media outlets to tell Americans about Iraq's massive WMD program and Al Qaeda connections; Jessica Lynch's heroic firefight with inhumane Iraqi devils and her "rescue" by our Marines; Pat Tillman's death at the hands of Al Qaeda monsters; and government tests that "confirmed" the presence of bentonite in the anthrax used to attack the U.S., which meant it was likely that Saddam was behind the attacks.
Unjustified anonymity -- especially when mindlessly repeating what shielded government sources claim in secret -- is the single greatest enabler of false and deceitful "reporting." Despite (or, really, because of) its unparalelled record of producing lies, it will never stop, because agreeing to it is how "journalists" end up being selected as favored message-carrying servants for the powerful. This falsehood-producing method isn't ancillary to American journalism but central to it; the book which is occupying the attention of America's political and media class is based exclusively on unattributed, shielded sources, and that seems to bother none of them.
None of the falsehoods documented here will ever lead to any accountability, because the identity of the falsehood-producers will be shielded by their loyal journalist-servants, and the journalists themselves will simply claim that they wrote what they did because their hidden sources told them to. That's not only the effect, but the intent, of the central method of American journalism: to disseminate outright falsehoods to the American public and ensure that neither the liars nor their loyal message-carriers ever face any consequences or even reputational loss. Anonymity is so common that "reporters" barely even bother any longer to explain why it's justified, notwithstanding numerous policies of media outlets requiring exactly that explanation. As the use of anonymity has escalated rapidly, so, too, has the pervasiveness of outright falsehoods and the inherent unreliability of much of what the American media "reports." Lying is so much easier -- and thus so much more common -- when you get to do it while remaining hidden.
* * * * *
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Voltaire Network denounces the attempt by the "rebels" to arrest Thierry Meyssan
by Voltaire Network
VOLTAIRE NETWORK | 25 AUGUST 2011
Voltaire Network, Thursday, 25 August 25, 2011, 3:25 p.m. - The journalists who had been trapped inside the hotel Rixos in Tripoli since Sunday were evacuated yesterday, 24 August 2011, at 5 p.m, by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The four members of the Voltaire Network team - journalists Thierry Meyssan, Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Mathieu Ozanon and Julien Teil - were among them.
However, after their release, the rebels tried to detain Thierry Meyssan, well known for his articles exposing the crimes of NATO. The ICRC intervened to prevent his arrest.
The journalists were taken to another hotel, where they are no longer under ICRC protection.
The journalists have thus far been unable to reach the ship chartered by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which is supposed to have already docked in Tripoli.
Voltaire Network is extremely concerned about the attitude showed by the NATO-sponsored "rebels" towards its journalists. It is hereby launching an international appeal to the international community urging for the protection of its journalists and for their safe departure from Libya.
Thierry Meyssan is a French national residing in Lebanon. He is registered at the French consulate in Beirut. A journalist for more than twenty-five years, he is a frequent contributor to Arab, Latin American and Russian publications, such as Odnako in Russia and La Jornada in Mexico. He has written several books on international policy issues and has regularly cooperated with television media, such as RT, Telesur or PressTV. He is the president of Voltaire Network, a network of independent press agencies, grouping a dozen publications from around the world.
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is a Canadian national. He lives in Ottawa and is currently a Global Research correspondent in Tripoli. An independent journalist, he has published widely in several languages and given interviews to various media, including Russia Today, Press TV, Al Jazeera, Pacifica KPFA, Global Research, China Life Magazine. Several of his works have also been featured by Voltaire Network.
Mathieu Ozanon and Julien Teil are also Voltaire Network contributing authors.
The Labyrinthian International Geopolitics of the Libyan Conflict
The Labyrinthian International Geopolitics of the Libyan Conflict
by Peter Lee
The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 31 No 2,
August 1, 2011
by Peter Lee
The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 31 No 2,
August 1, 2011
Western self-regard was on full display in a United States headline describing the Libya Contact Group (LCG) meeting in Istanbul over the weekend of July 15. It read: World leaders open Libya talks in Turkey.1 Well, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was there. Much-diminished leaders of 19th-century world powers Britain and France - and Italy - were there, too. But attendance from the BRIC countries was patchy: Russia, boycotted the talks. China declined to send a representative. Brazil and India only sent observers, which meant they had no vote in the proceedings. South Africa didn't attend, and blasted the outcome of the meeting.2
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U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (C), Spanish Foreign Minister Trinidad Jimenez (L) and UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan (2nd R) during the Libya Contact Group meeting in Istanbul July 15, 2011. |
It is indicative of the desultory reporting on Libya that there has been little effort to determine the Libya Contact Group's constituting authority, its decision-making processes, or even its membership, let alone the legitimacy of its pretensions to set international policy on Libya at a time when the US may be moving toward involvement in yet other wars in Libya and beyond.
The LCG was formed in London on March 29 under the auspices of the United Kingdom, at a conference attended by 40 foreign ministers and a smattering of international organizations. Its declared mission was to "support and be a focal point of contact with the Libyan people, coordinate international policy and be a forum for discussion of humanitarian and post-conflict support".3 Since then, the group has met three times and its attendance seems to have stabilized around a core of 20 or 30 countries, mostly drawn from members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), conservative oil-rich states in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and GCC cadets Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco. Dutiful ally Japan has also tagged along.
The unambiguous American template for Libya - and the LCG - is Kosovo, another humanitarian bombing campaign cum secession exercise led by NATO while sidelining the United Nations to a subordinate role.
US Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg invoked the Kosovo precedent - and a prolonged diplomatic and sanctions campaign that grew out of a "humanitarian military action" - in testimony before the US Congress on Libya:
Our approach is one that has succeeded before. In Kosovo, we built an international coalition around a narrow civilian protection mission. Even after Milosevic withdrew his forces and the bombing stopped, the political and economic pressure continued. Within two years, Milosevic was thrown out of office and turned over to The Hague.4
As a matter of fact, the Libya adventure mimics the Kosovo action in general legal flimsiness and its inflammatory deployment of exaggerated claims of massacre and atrocity, but differs in some revealing specifics.
The justification for diplomatic and political intervention on the issue of Kosovo was relatively robust, growing out of the EU’s understandable desire to put a lid on the chaos and instability in its Balkan backyard, and a lengthy history of bilateral and multilateral negotiations between Serbia and its local and European interlocutors.
The NATO air war versus Serbia, on the other hand, although understandable as an expression of the international community’s exhausted patience with Milosevic’s serial mendacity and skullduggery in the use of military and militia assets against his victims, is not easy to defend either under the NATO doctrine of joint defense or the temporary waiver the UN gives for states or regional groupings to engage in immediate military action to defend themselves against an imminent threat when getting prior UNSC approval is impractical.
The NATO air attack on Serbian targets was triggered by Serbia’s refusal to sign the Rambouillet Agreement—which would have given Serbia’s explicit endorsement of the injection of NATO ground forces in Kosovo—a rather dubious casus belli.
The demands appear to have been deliberately pitched so high as to be assure their rejection, thereby highlighting Serbian intransigence (which only slightly exceeded Kosovar intransigence) so that NATO would finally do what perhaps it should have done earlier in the much more clear-cut case of Serbian aggression against Bosnia: vigorously bomb Serbian military positions. In the matter of Libya, the situation is reversed.
Military action (leaving aside the question of what particular kind of military action) is clearly permitted by the remarkably accommodating UN Security Council Resolution 1973. In calling for protection of civilians, UNSCR 1973:
Authorizes Member States that have notified the Secretary-General, acting nationally or through regional organizations or arrangements, and acting in cooperation with the Secretary-General, to take all necessary measures, notwithstanding paragraph 9 of resolution 1970 (2011), to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory, and requests the Member States concerned to inform the Secretary-General immediately of the measures they take pursuant to the authorization conferred by this paragraph which shall be immediately reported to the Security Council.
The wording for the no-fly zone is equivalent. In other words, any interested power can attack Libya as long as it writes a prompt letter to Ban Ki-moon and keeps boots off the ground. Of course, the resolution specifically excludes only foreign “occupation” forces, giving the UK and France ample room to send in special forces as advisors/auxiliaries to the overmatched Benghazi rebels.
The passivity of the UN has been complemented by considerable overreach in the military effort against Libya. With the destruction of Libya’s air assets, the no fly zone issue is moot. At the same time the “civilian protection” mandate has been stretched to cover offensive air operations assisting the rebel drive to conquer western Libya.
As to the diplomatic element, the resolution
[s]tresses the need to intensify efforts to find a solution to the crisis which responds to the legitimate demands of the Libyan people and notes the decisions of the Secretary-General to send his Special Envoy to Libya and of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union to send its ad hoc High Level Committee to Libya with the aim of facilitating dialogue to lead to the political reforms necessary to find a peaceful and sustainable solution.
There is no mention, let alone endorsement, of a Libya Contact Group. However, by endorsing parallel efforts by the UN Special Envoy and the African Union (AU), the resolution implies that there is to be no coordinated negotiation effort and the UN has effectively abdicated any central role in negotiating an end to the crisis.The attacking powers have exploited the UN’s latitude on the negotiation front to assemble their own political initiative, the Libya Contact Group.
The situation in Libya appears to be the reverse of Kosovo: instead of a military effort supplementing a negotiation strategy, a negotiating strategy is being cobbled together as an adjunct to military operations. On the one hand, this rescues the Libya operation from the prolonged and deadly dithering that characterized the West’s efforts to sort out the Yugoslavian mess. On the other hand, the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has little to show for its multi-year attempt to handle the political brief in Afghanistan.
As a look at NATO decision-making indicates, militarized policy-making through the Libya Contact Group is likely to provide no more than the illusion of international consensus and accountability. NATO's political policy on Libya is in the hands of the "North Atlantic Council" or NAC; for obvious reasons this crusaderish piece of nomenclature is not often invoked in the Libyan situation.
A 2003 paper by the Congressional Research Service described the decision-making process in the Kosovo air war in ways that are suggestive of the Barack Obama administration's template for the Libyan operation:
The NAC achieves consensus through a process in which no government states its objection. A formal vote in which governments state their position is not taken. During the Kosovo conflict, for example, it was clear to all governments that Greece was immensely uncomfortable with a decision to go to war. NATO does not require a government to vote in favor of a conflict, but rather to object explicitly if it opposes such a decision. Athens chose not to object, knowing its allies wished to take military action against Serbia. In contrast to NATO, the EU seeks unanimity on key issues.5
Inside NATO, it appears that most countries choose to opt out in order to adhere to their diplomatic, doctrinal or political concerns, but not raise a formal, explicit objection. For instance, when NATO took over the Libya mission, a US State Department official noted that the
. . . Germans have made from the very beginning a very clear - a clear statement that they would not participate militarily with their own troops in any operation. But they've also made clear that they would not block any activity by NATO to move forward.6
In short, it appears that NATO countries vote as a bloc when it comes to LCG matters despite continuing differences among members.
GCC decision-making is even more opaque, but it is not unreasonable to assume that the smaller states are voting in a bloc with lead member Saudi Arabia on the Libya issue.
NATO and the GCC hammer out their position before the LCG meetings, which then provide political window-dressing to convince Western opinion that a legitimate international process is going on.
China and Russia recognize the LCG as an effort by the proponents of military intervention in Libya to advance their agenda and keep further Libya discussions out of the UN Security Council where China and Russia - which were spectacularly burned by Resolution 1973 – would have the opportunity to sidetrack the NATO/GCC-led campaign.
In its attitude toward the Libyan air war, China is probably also guided by bitter memories of the destruction of its embassy in Belgrade on May 7, 1999 during the Kosovo air campaign, an incident virtually ignored by NATO as nothing more than an unfortunate accident, but widely regarded in China as intentional. The result was to trigger a 9/11-style shock in elite and popular Chinese attitudes toward the United States (link).
China does not have large economic interests at stake in the Libya fight. It had a significant exposure to Libyan infrastructure projects, particularly a multi-billion dollar contract to build 28,000 apartment units, but only minor involvement in the Libyan oil industry.
In the original vote on UNSCR 1973, China abstained. This apparently had much to do with concern about antagonizing the United States, Saudi Arabia and others. Saudi Arabia, China’s main oil supplier and implacable foe of Gaddafi, was aggressively pushing a hard line against Gaddafi at the Gulf Co-operation Council, the Arab League and the United Nations (link).
China has been relatively circumspect in its criticisms of the LCG, in part out of deference to Turkey, which has been doggedly promoting an Islamic and non-aligned style of Libyan engagement inside the councils of NATO and the LCG. Nevertheless, Beijing politely declined Turkey's invitation to join the Istanbul meeting - thereby refusing to add a further veneer of political legitimacy to the exercise - "because the function and method of operation of this contact group need further study".7
The Russians have been much more blunt. In May, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared that it was the LCG, and not Muammar Gaddafi, that had a legitimacy problem: "The contact group is a self-appointed organizational structure that somehow made itself responsible for how the (UN) resolution is carried out," Lavrov continued, "From the point of view of international law this group has no legitimacy."8
In rejecting the Turkish invitation to join the meeting in Istanbul, the Russian Foreign Ministry reiterated its objections stating that, “the Russian approach to this issue has not changed. We are not a member of the Group and do not participate in its work. This applies to the upcoming meeting in Istanbul as well.”9
In sum, the LCG is not a united effort by "the leaders of the world"; it is an effort to circumvent the UN Security Council, largely coordinated by Atlantic ex-colonial powers and anxious Arab autocrats who are most deeply committed to the bombing campaign to eliminate Gaddafi.
That effort is not going particularly well. NATO has strayed well beyond its "protect civilians" UN mandate to conduct air operations against Gaddafi's forces and targets of dubious military legitimacy for the past four months.
For all their LCG support, the Libyan rebels have been unable to drive Gaddafi from power and thereby demonstrate the potency of Western arms, sanctions, embargoes, and self-righteous bluster, even against an isolated Third World potentate.
Alexander Cockburn has punctured the rebels, the media and European delusions that this would be a quick and politically advantageous war:
In a hilarious inside account of the NATO debacle, Vincent Jauvert of Le Nouvel Observateur has recently disclosed that French intelligence services assured [President Nicolas] Sarkozy and foreign minister [Alain] Juppe "from the first [air] strike, thousands of soldiers would defect from Gaddafi". They also predicted that the rebels would move quickly to Sirte, the hometown of the Qaddafi and force him to flee the country. This was triumphantly and erroneously trumpeted by the NATO powers, which even proclaimed that he had flown to Venezuela. By all means opt for the Big Lie as a propaganda ploy, but not if it is inevitably going to be discredited 24 hours later.
"We underestimated al-Gaddafi," one French officer told Jauvert. "He was preparing for forty-one years for an invasion. We did not imagine he would adapt as quickly. No one expects, for example, to transport its troops and missile batteries, Gaddafi will go out and buy hundreds of Toyota pick-ups in Niger and Mali. It is a stroke of genius: the trucks are identical to those used by the rebels. NATO is paralyzed. It delays its strikes. Before bombing the vehicles, drivers need to be sure whose forces are Gaddafi's. ‘We asked the rebels to [provide] a particular signal on the roof of their pickup truck, said a soldier, but we were never sure. They are so disorganized ...' "10
In fact, it appears that an important purpose of the Istanbul meeting was to jump start the ineffectual efforts by the Libyan rebels and, in particular, deal with calls by Turkey and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) for a ceasefire during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan (approximately August 1 to August 29 this year).
Ramadan is traditionally a time of fasting and peaceful reflection. In Libya, it would also undoubtedly be an opportunity for Gaddafi to regroup his forces and engage with the myriad interlocutors and negotiators - in addition to the African Union, France and Italy were also reportedly meeting with Gaddafi's representatives – in an effort to end the embarrassing mess.
Both Turkey and the OIC - as well as otherwise disengaged Islamic power Indonesia - have warned NATO that continuing the bombing campaign during Ramadan would be a dangerous political miscue. Therefore, to guard against the dread prospect of peace breaking out in unwelcome ways post Ramadan – that is, with Gaddafi remaining in Tripoli without having received the necessary chastisement by the powers - the LCG recognized the Transitional National Council (TNC) headquartered in Benghazi as the legitimate government of Libya and declared that Gaddafi's regime had lost its legitimacy. This was despite the fact that the TNC probably controls less than half of Libya's sparse population and vast territory while Gaddafi is still apparently in firm control of the western half of the country with most of the population and the capital.
Foreign Policy's Joshua Keating noted that, before Libya, only twice has the United States declined to acknowledge the legitimacy of a nation's ruling power. The first came in 1913, when president Woodrow Wilson, who objected to the unsavory (and suspected anti-US business) tendencies of Mexico's strongman Victoriano Huerta, refused to recognize his government until it collapsed, courtesy of Pancho Villa and the US occupation of Veracruz. The second is China. The US not only refused to recognize the communist conquest of the mainland for 50 years; it also countenanced Chiang Kai-shek's pretensions to rule all of China, even as he exercised sway over Taiwan alone.11
Recognition of the TNC supposedly served the purpose of unlocking the frozen assets for the Benghazi forces, which were officially blessed as freedom-loving, not riddled with al-Qaeda sympathizers, and committed to honoring previous foreign contracts in Libya, thereby reducing the cash-strapped Western forces' financial exposure to the Libyan imbroglio in general and the TNC in particular. This is not unrelated to the fact that the Western powers, notably the US and Britain but also the EU generally, while laboring through recessions, cutbacks in government services, and political gridlock, have taken steps to minimize the stated cost of the Libya intervention.
Brad Sherman, a US Congressman from California - and an accountant - pointed out that the US has decided to count only marginal expenditures as costs of the Libyan conflict: that means direct costs such as munitions and fuel consumed and combat pay disbursed, leaving a misleading impression of how much it costs to pound even a third-rate power into submission.
United Nations ambassador Susan Rice, one of the architects of the Libyan ‘humanitarian intervention’, countered with the assertion that all those US seamen and airmen would be getting paid anyway even if they weren't bombing Libya: "The Libya mission is not one that falls under UN accounting or US budgeting. It is something we are undertaking in a national capacity."12
Even by Rice's limited yardstick, however, the Western alliance has already disbursed a hefty US$1 billion on the war. By September 30, when the second NATO authorization for the war expires, the U.S. projects its own total Department of Defense (DoD) expenditures will have reached $1.1 billion (link).
[Since this is not officially a war, the Obama administration has insisted that it is under no obligation to report its costs to Congress. The US wrote a letter to Congress descrobomg its DoD accounting, and France and the UK have estimated the costs of their contributions at irregular intervals. UK: EP 260 million as of June 24 (link); France Euros 160 million by July 13 (link).]
In any event, there is no obvious political constituency in Europe or the US for pouring foreign dollars into Benghazi. Sherman, for instance, proposed that the operation be funded by confiscating Gaddafi's frozen assets in the US[ms6] , reminiscent of US efforts to pay for the Iraq War with Iraqi oil revenues. The desire to make Gaddafi pay for the war against him by seizing his frozen assets is widespread. Nevertheless, a hitch remains: countries such as Canada have laws on their books that prevent them from unfreezing Libyan assets until the UN Security Council gives its OK - a virtual impossibility given Russian and Chinese opposition to the West's adventurism.13
In an uncanny reprise of the enthusiasm for financial derivatives that plunged the world into the Great Recession, the LCG is encouraging interested states such as Canada to evade the UN process by lending cash to the TNC, with the loans collateralized by frozen assets.
In a further sign that the US is not confident that the TNC can run its finances any better than it runs its war (and perhaps has achieved a belated awareness of the risks involve in lending ready cash against illiquid assets) it declared that most of the $30 billion in Gaddafi assets in the US were illiquid, i.e. real estate, hence a mere $3.5 billion could potentially be funneled to the TNC.14
Nevertheless, Western financial creativity, once again deployed in the absence of Western hard cash, will undoubtedly succeed in forestalling the collapse of the Benghazi authority for the foreseeable future.
The second purpose of the Istanbul meeting was to cut the legs out from under other negotiators - such as the Gaddafi-friendly African Union, which was holding talks with regime representatives in Ethiopia and, for that matter, the French, who were sowing epic confusion through equivocal secret contacts with Gaddafi's representatives - by setting up a single, publicly-endorsed channel.
Apparently, despite its new-found ascendancy as Libya's legitimate ruling authority, the Transitional National Council does not, in the opinion of the LCG, have the wherewithal to engage in direct negotiations with Gaddafi's rebel bastion in Tripoli.
But the TNC was not the only organization to receive the back of the hand treatment from the Libya Contact Group. The UN also got a slap.
Initial reports indicated that the UN's special envoy for Libya, Abdul Elah al-Khatib, would be the sole designated interlocutor for the LCG. Franco Frattini, Italy's loquacious foreign minister, told reporters in Istanbul: “Mr Khatib is entitled to present a political package. This political package is a political offer including a ceasefire.”15 His remarks on Khatib’s "authorized" status were echoed by Frattini's British counterpart, William Hague. This raises the interesting question of how the LCG, an ad hoc organization with no legal standing, can order around the UN's Khatib as its errand boy.
The problem has apparently been rectified. It seems that Ban Ki-moon, the ever-pliant UN secretary general, has agreed to put the LCG program into effect without the inconvenience and embarrassment of a UN Security Council discussion or vote, as Bloomberg reports:
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will be the only person authorized by the contact group to negotiate with both sides in Libya. Ban will set up a board of two to three interlocutors from Tripoli and the rebel-held town of Benghazi, Frattini said.16
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Ban Ki-moon arrives in Doha on April 14 to attend the first meeting of the Libyan Contact Group (Photo Paulo Filgueiras) |
The Financial Times suggests that the passion to claim Gaddafi's scalp has evaporated in France and Italy and the Western powers will accept anything short of Gaddafi taunting them from his presidential throne in order to end the embarrassing conflict:
On Thursday it emerged that the western-led coalition confronting Colonel Muammer Gaddafi was beginning to examine the possibility of offering him a face-saving deal that removes him from power in Tripoli but allows him to stay inside Libya as a means of bringing a swift end to the conflict.
As some 40 nations prepare to meet in Istanbul on Friday to discuss progress in the NATO-led operation against the Libyan leader, Britain, France and the US continue to state publicly that the war can only end with Col Gaddafi's physical departure from Libya.
But behind the scenes in Paris and London, senior officials are discussing whether the international community and the Libyan opposition could offer a deal that sees Col Gaddafi surrendering all power while going into internal exile in Libya.
For several days, French officials have made clear that Col Gaddafi could stay in Libya if he makes a clear statement that he will abdicate all military and political power.17
In the best tradition of Western peacemaking, it appears that a Ramadan ceasefire will be preceded by a two-week barrage of bombs and missiles that will demonstrate both to the Gaddafi regime and world opinion that, despite its abject and obvious desperation to disengage, the NATO/GCC coalition is still a force to be reckoned with, even as it hastens to fulfill its publicly-stated ambition to be "out of there" by September.
The most plausible roadmap for Libya's post-conflict (or perhaps more accurately, mid-conflict) future is Turkey's roadmap, which foresees a Ramadan ceasefire, Gaddafi leaving power but not the country, and a constitutional commission.
As floated in the Turkish media, "the core of the commission would consist of five people: Two from Tripoli who would be accepted to Benghazi, two from Benghazi who would be acceptable to Tripoli and a fifth who would be named by those four who would set up the basis for a new constitution in Libya."18
A prompt ceasefire and a negotiated settlement do not leave the TNC with a very attractive hand. It controls less than half the country (albeit the predominantly oily half). Furthermore, it is unlikely to perform outstandingly in any nationwide democratic contest that would involve canvassing for votes among the inhabitants of western Libya, a certain number of whom are likely to regard the TNC as venal and incompetent eastern adventurers who conspired with foreign powers to bomb and sanction the residents of Tripoli into misery and poverty.
No wonder the TNC spokesperson, Mahmoud Shamam, harrumphed to journalists in Istanbul that the TNC would ignore a ceasefire saying, "Even the Prophet Mohammed fought during Ramadan. We will continue to fight for our lives."19
However, if the West's Libya fatigue holds and the war doesn't re-ignite, the TNC may find itself lording itself over Benghazi in a de facto partitioned Libya, using its advantageous location vis-a-vis Libya's oil reserves to sustain its economy and its diplomatic standing.
In an indication of world resignation to a divided Libya, even China and Russia, who regard the TNC as a travesty and calamity, have pledged money for "humanitarian assistance" to "the Libyan people".
TNC Executive Board Chairman Mahmoud Jibril visited Beijing in late June for a meeting that Beijing used to announce that it had decided to engage with the TNC as “a powerful opposition force” and highlight the PRC’s hopes for a mediated political solution to the Libyan conflict through the African Union mechanism (link).
The LCG’s decision to withdraw Gaddafi and anoint the TNC as Libya’s sovereign, even as momentum seemed to build for a negotiated settlement, was reflected in an unenthusiastic show of Chinese support for the TNC.
On the heels of a Russian announcement that it was sending 36 tons of aid to Benghazi, a terse announcement from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated on July 11:
Q: The prolonged war in Libya deteriorates the humanitarian situation there. Will China consider providing humanitarian assistance to Libya?
A: In a bid to alleviate the humanitarian disaster faced by the Libyan people, China has decided to provide 50 million RMB [US$8 million] worth of humanitarian assistance to them.20
This may be symbolically important, but - considering that the TNC has consistently declared it needs $3 billion in cash to keep the doors open in Benghazi – the offer amounts to little.
On the other hand, China made its feelings about the LCG clear as it publicized a phone call by Hu Jintao to South African president Joseph Zuma endorsing the AU peace process. The AU initiative appears to differ from the LCG/Turkish initiative in one crucial aspect: it recognizes the continued legitimacy and sovereignty of the regime in Tripoli.
As for the West, it can content itself with the observation that, if it wasn't able to save Libya, at least it was able to cripple it. It is a pattern that the West has repeated in its engineered partition instead of national reconciliation in Kosovo and Sudan, and in midwifing the fragmentation of the Soviet Union into a suspicious Russia and a host of new NATO members.
It is another lesson in US "nation-building" - born of a characteristic disregard for sovereignty, circumvention of the United Nations, a cavalier attitude toward international law and a reckless deployment of military power – to which China, one of the last remaining multinational empires, is likely to pay close attention.
Peter Lee writes on East and South Asian affairs and their intersection with US foreign policy.
This is a revised and expanded version of an article that appeared at Asia Times.
Recommended citation: Peter Lee, "The Labyrinthian International Geopolitics of the Libyan Conflict," The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 31 No 2, August 1, 2011.
Articles on related subjects:
• Peter Dale Scott, Bosnia, Kosovo and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington’s On-going Collusion with Terrorists
• Tim Shorrock, Reading the Egyptian Revolution Through the Lens of US Policy in South Korea Circa 1980: Revelations in US Declassified Documents
• Peter Dale Scott, Rape in Libya: America’s recent major wars have all been accompanied by memorable falsehoods
• Peter Dale Scott, The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System
• Peter Dale Scott, Who are the Libyan Freedom Fighters and Their Patrons?
• Herbert P. Bix, The Middle East Revolutions in Historical Perspective: Egypt, Occupied Palestine, and the United States
Notes
1 World leaders open Libya talks in Turkey, The Raw Story, Jul 15, 2011.
2 Zuma, Cameron Set to Clash, IOL News, Jul 16, 2011.
3 Libya Contact Group: Chair's statement, UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Apr 13, 2011.
4 Assessing the Situation in Libya, US Department of State, May 12, 2011.
5 NATO's Decision-Making Procedure, CRS Report for Congress, May 5, 2003.
6 Teleconference Background Briefing on North Atlantic Council (NAC) Discussions on Libya, US Department of State, Mar 24, 2011.
7 Russia not to attend Libya Contact Group meeting July 15, ITAR-TASS News Agency, Jul 13, 2011.
8 Russia denounces Libya contact group as 'illegitimate' , Telegraph, May 13, 2011.
9 Russia not to attend Libya Contact Group meeting July 15, ITAR-TASS News Agency, Jul 13, 2011.
10 NATO's Debacle in Libya, Counter Punch, Jul 15, 2011.
11 A Wilsonian move by the White House in Libya, Foreign Policy, Jul 15, 2011.
12 Democrat says Libya costs run much higher, Washington Times, Apr 7, 2011.
13 Canada mulls ways to fund Libyan rebels with frozen Gadhafi assets, Jul 16, 2011.
14 Summary of the American and International Press on the Libyan Revolution - Morgan Strong, Tripoli Post, Jul 17, 2011.
15 UN Envoy to Lead Libya Talks, Al Arabiya News, Jul 16, 2011.
16 Libyan Rebels Get U.S. Recognition Without Keys to Qaddafi's Frozen Cash, Bloomberg, Jul 15, 2011.
17 Click here for text.
18 Turkey seeks Libyan truce before Ramadan, Hurriyet Daily News, Jul 14, 2011.
19 Libyan TNC vows to continue military action in Ramadan, People's Daily, Jul 16, 2011.
20 Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hong Lei's Remarks on China Providing Humanitarian Assistance to Libya, Chinese Foreign Ministry, Jul 11, 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.
….
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)
….
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.
________________
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
....
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.
....
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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