I think that this article contains important information.
Miriam
Parry writes: "The neoconservative president of the U.S.-taxpayer-funded
National Endowment for Democracy has called for the U.S. government to
'summon the will' to engineer the overthrow of Russian President Vladimir
Putin, saying that the 10-year-old murder case of a Russian journalist
should be the inspiration."
Russian president Vladimir Putin. (photo: Reuters)
Key Neocon Calls on US to Oust Putin
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
10 October 16
A prominent neocon paymaster, whose outfit dispenses $100 million in U.S.
taxpayers' money each year, has called on America to "summon the will" to
remove Russian President Putin from office, reports Robert Parry.
The neoconservative president of the U.S.-taxpayer-funded National
Endowment for Democracy [NED] has called for the U.S. government to "summon
the will" to engineer the overthrow of Russian President Vladimir Putin,
saying that the 10-year-old murder case of a Russian journalist should be
the inspiration.
Carl Gershman, who has headed NED since its founding in 1983, doesn't cite
any evidence that Putin was responsible for the death of Anna Politkovskaya
but uses a full column in The Washington Post on Friday to create that
impression, calling her death "a window to Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin
autocrat whom Americans are looking at for the first time."
Gershman wraps up his article by writing: "Politkovskaya saw the danger [of
Putin], but she and other liberals in Russia were not strong enough to stop
it. The United States has the power to contain and defeat this danger. The
issue is whether we can summon the will to do so. Remembering Politkovskaya
can help us rise to this challenge."
That Gershman would so directly call for the ouster of Russia's clearly
popular president represents further proof that NED is a neocon-driven
vehicle that seeks to create the political circumstances for "regime change"
even when that means removing leaders who are elected by a country's
citizenry.
And there is a reason for NED to see its job in that way. In 1983, NED
essentially took over the CIA's role of influencing electoral outcomes and
destabilizing governments that got in the way of U.S. interests, except that
NED carried out those functions in a quasi-overt fashion while the CIA did
them covertly.
NED also serves as a sort of slush fund for neocons and other favored U.S.
foreign policy operatives because a substantial portion of NED's money
circulates through U.S.-based non-governmental organizations or NGOs.
That makes Gershman an influential neocon paymaster whose organization
dispenses some $100 million a year in U.S. taxpayers' money to activists,
journalists and NGOs both in Washington and around the world. The money
helps them undermine governments in Washington's disfavor - or as Gershman
would prefer to say, "build democratic institutions," even when that
requires overthrowing democratically elected leaders.
NED was a lead actor in the Feb. 22, 2014 coup ousting Ukraine's elected
President Viktor Yanukovych in a U.S.-backed putsch that touched off the
civil war inside Ukraine between Ukrainian nationalists from the west and
ethnic Russians from the east. The Ukraine crisis has become a flashpoint
for the dangerous New Cold War between the U.S. and Russia.
Before the anti-Yanukovych coup, NED was funding scores of projects inside
Ukraine, which Gershman had identified as "the biggest prize" in a Sept. 26,
2013 column also published in The Washington Post.
In that column, Gershman wrote that after the West claimed Ukraine,
"Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end
not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself." In other words,
Gershman already saw Ukraine as an important step toward an even bigger
prize, a "regime change" in Moscow.
Less than five months after Gershman's column, pro-Western political
activists and neo-Nazi street fighters - with strong support from U.S.
neocons and the State Department - staged a coup in Kiev driving Yanukovych
from office and installing a rabidly anti-Russian regime, which the West
promptly dubbed "legitimate."
In reaction to the coup and the ensuing violence against ethnic Russians,
the voters of Crimea approved a referendum with 96 percent of the vote to
leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia, a move that the West's governments and
media decried as a Russian "invasion" and "annexation."
The new regime in Kiev then mounted what it called an "Anti-Terrorism
Operation" or ATO against ethnic Russians in the east who had supported
Yanukovych and refused to accept the anti-constitutional coup in Kiev as
legitimate.
The ATO, spearheaded by neo-Nazis from the Azov battalion and other
extremists, killed thousands of ethnic Russians, prompting Moscow to
covertly provide some assistance to the rebels, a move denounced by the West
as "aggression."
Blaming Putin
In his latest column, Gershman not only urges the United States to muster
the courage to oust Putin but he shows off the kind of clever sophistry that
America's neocons are known for. Though lacking any evidence, he intimates
that Putin ordered the murder of Politkovskaya and pretty much every other
"liberal" who has died in Russia.
It is a technique that I've seen used in other circumstances, such as the
lists of "mysterious deaths" that American right-wingers publish citing
people who crossed the paths of Bill and Hillary Clinton and ended up dead.
This type of smear spreads suspicion of guilt not based on proof but on the
number of acquaintances and adversaries who have met untimely deaths.
In the 1990s, one conservative friend of mine pointed to the Clintons'
"mysterious deaths" list and marveled that even if only a few were the
victims of a Clinton death squad that would be quite a story, to which I
replied that if even one were murdered by the Clintons that would be quite a
story - but that there was no proof of any such thing.
"Mysterious deaths" lists represent a type of creepy conspiracy theory that
shifts the evidentiary burden onto the targets of the smears who must
somehow prove their innocence, when there is no evidence of their guilt
(only vague suspicions). It is contemptible when applied to American leaders
and it is contemptible when applied to Russian leaders, but it is not
beneath Carl Gershman.
Beyond that, Gershman's public musing about the U.S. somehow summoning "the
will" to remove Putin might - in a normal world - disqualify NED and its
founding president from the privilege of dispensing U.S. taxpayers' money to
operatives in Washington and globally. It is extraordinarily provocative and
dangerous, an example of classic neocon hubris.
While the neocons do love their tough talk, they are not known for thinking
through their "regime change" schemes. The idea of destabilizing
nuclear-armed Russia with the goal of ousting Putin, with his 82 percent
approval ratings, must rank as the nuttiest and most reckless neocon scheme
of all.
Gershman and his neocon pals may fantasize about making Russia's economy
scream while financing pro-Western "liberals" who would stage disruptive
protests in Red Square, but he and his friends haven't weighed the
consequences even if they could succeed.
Given the devastating experience that most Russians had when NED's beloved
Russian "liberals" helped impose American "shock therapy" in the 1990s - an
experiment that reduced average life expectancy by a full decade - it's hard
to believe that the Russian people would simply take another dose of that
bitter medicine sitting down.
Even if the calculating Putin were somehow removed amid economic
desperation, he is far more likely to be followed by a much harder-line
Russian nationalist who might well see Moscow's arsenal of nuclear weapons
as the only way to protect Mother Russia's honor. In other words, the
neocons' latest brash "regime change" scheme might be their last - and the
last for all humanity.
A Neocon Slush Fund
Gershman's arrogance also raises questions about why the American taxpayer
should tolerate what amounts to a $100 million neocon slush fund which is
used to create dangerous mischief around the world. Despite having
"democracy" in its name, NED appears only to favor democratic outcomes when
they fit with Official Washington's desires.
If a disliked candidate wins an election, NED acts as if that is prima facie
evidence that the system is undemocratic and must be replaced with a process
that ensures the selection of candidates who will do what the U.S.
government tells them to do. Put differently, NED's name is itself a fraud.
But that shouldn't come as a surprise since NED was created in 1983 at the
urging of Ronald Reagan's CIA Director William J. Casey, who wanted to
off-load some of the CIA's traditional work ensuring that foreign elections
turned out in ways acceptable to Washington, and when they didn't - as in
Iran under Mossadegh, in Guatemala under Arbenz or in Chile under Allende -
the CIA's job was to undermine and remove the offending electoral winner.
In 1983, Casey and the CIA's top propagandist, Walter Raymond Jr., who had
been moved to Reagan's National Security Council staff, wanted to create a
funding mechanism to support outside groups, such as Freedom House and other
NGOs, so they could engage in propaganda and political action that the CIA
had historically organized and paid for covertly. The idea emerged for a
congressionally funded entity that would serve as a conduit for this money.
In one undated letter to then-White House counselor Edwin Meese III, Casey
urged creation of a "National Endowment," but he recognized the need to hide
the strings being pulled by the CIA. "Obviously we here [at CIA] should not
get out front in the development of such an organization, nor should we
appear to be a sponsor or advocate," Casey wrote.
The National Endowment for Democracy took shape in late 1983 as Congress
decided to also set aside pots of money - within NED - for the Republican
and Democratic parties and for organized labor, creating enough bipartisan
largesse that passage was assured.
But some in Congress thought it was important to wall the NED off from any
association with the CIA, so a provision was included to bar the
participation of any current or former CIA official, according to one
congressional aide who helped write the legislation.
This aide told me that one night late in the 1983 session, as the bill was
about to go to the House floor, the CIA's congressional liaison came
pounding at the door to the office of Rep. Dante Fascell, a senior Democrat
on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a chief sponsor of the bill.
The frantic CIA official conveyed a single message from CIA Director Casey:
the language barring the participation of CIA personnel must be struck from
the bill, the aide recalled, noting that Fascell consented to the demand,
not fully recognizing its significance - that it would permit the continued
behind-the-scenes involvement of Raymond and Casey.
The aide said Fascell also consented to the Reagan administration's choice
of Carl Gershman to head NED, again not recognizing how this decision would
affect the future of the new entity and American foreign policy.
Gershman, who had followed the classic neoconservative path from youthful
socialism to fierce anticommunism, became NED's first (and, to this day,
only) president. Though NED is technically independent of U.S. foreign
policy, Gershman in the early years coordinated decisions on grants with
Raymond at the NSC.
For instance, on Jan. 2, 1985, Raymond wrote to two NSC Asian experts that
"Carl Gershman has called concerning a possible grant to the Chinese
Alliance for Democracy (CAD). I am concerned about the political dimension
to this request. We should not find ourselves in a position where we have to
respond to pressure, but this request poses a real problem to Carl.
"Senator [Orrin] Hatch, as you know, is a member of the board. Secondly, NED
has already given a major grant for a related Chinese program."
Neocon Tag Teams
From the start, NED became a major benefactor for Freedom House, beginning
with a $200,000 grant in 1984 to build "a network of democratic
opinion-makers." In NED's first four years, from 1984 and 1988, it lavished
$2.6 million on Freedom House, accounting for more than one-third of its
total income, according to a study by the liberal Council on Hemispheric
Affairs that was entitled "Freedom House: Portrait of a Pass-Through."
Over the ensuing three decades, Freedom House has become almost an NED
subsidiary, often joining NED in holding policy conferences and issuing
position papers, both organizations pushing primarily a neoconservative
agenda, challenging countries deemed insufficiently "free," including Syria,
Ukraine (in 2014) and Russia.
Indeed, NED and Freedom House often work as a kind of tag-team with NED
financing "non-governmental organizations" inside targeted countries and
Freedom House berating those governments if they crack down on U.S.-funded
NGOs.
For instance, on Nov. 16, 2012, NED and Freedom House joined together to
denounce legislation passed by the Russian parliament that required
recipients of foreign political money to register with the government.
Or, as NED and Freedom House framed the issue: the Russian Duma sought to
"restrict human rights and the activities of civil society organizations and
their ability to receive support from abroad. Changes to Russia's NGO
legislation will soon require civil society organizations receiving foreign
funds to choose between registering as 'foreign agents' or facing
significant financial penalties and potential criminal charges."
Of course, the United States has a nearly identical Foreign Agent
Registration Act that likewise requires entities that receive foreign
funding and seek to influence U.S. government policy to register with the
Justice Department or face possible fines or imprisonment.
But the Russian law would impede NED's efforts to destabilize the Russian
government through funding of political activists, journalists and civic
organizations, so it was denounced as an infringement of human rights and
helped justify Freedom House's rating of Russia as "not free."
Another bash-Putin tag team has been The Washington Post's editors and NED's
Gershman. On July 28, 2015, a Post editorial and a companion column by
Gershman led readers to believe that Putin was paranoid and "power mad" in
worrying that outside money funneled into NGOs threatened Russian
sovereignty.
The Post and Gershman were especially outraged that the Russians had enacted
the law requiring NGOs financed from abroad and seeking to influence Russian
policies to register as "foreign agents" and that one of the first funding
operations to fall prey to these tightened rules was Gershman's NED.
The Post's editors wrote that Putin's "latest move . is to declare the NED
an 'undesirable' organization under the terms of a law that Mr. Putin signed
in May [2015]. The law bans groups from abroad who are deemed a 'threat to
the foundations of the constitutional system of the Russian Federation, its
defense capabilities and its national security.'
"The charge against the NED is patently ridiculous. The NED's grantees in
Russia last year ran the gamut of civil society. They advocated transparency
in public affairs, fought corruption and promoted human rights, freedom of
information and freedom of association, among other things. All these
activities make for a healthy democracy but are seen as threatening from the
Kremlin's ramparts.
"The new law on 'undesirables' comes in addition to one signed in 2012 that
gave authorities the power to declare organizations 'foreign agents' if they
engaged in any kind of politics and receive money from abroad. The
designation, from the Stalin era, implies espionage."
However, among the relevant points that the Post's editors wouldn't tell
their readers was the fact that Russia's Foreign Agent Registration Act was
modeled after the American Foreign Agent Registration Act and that NED
President Gershman had already publicly made clear - in his Sept. 26, 2013
column - that his goal was to oust Russia's elected president.
In his July 28, 2015 column, Gershman further deemed Putin's government
illegitimate. "Russia's newest anti-NGO law, under which the National
Endowment for Democracy . was declared an "undesirable organization"
prohibited from operating in Russia, is the latest evidence that the regime
of President Vladimir Putin faces a worsening crisis of political
legitimacy," Gershman wrote, adding:
"This is the context in which Russia has passed the law prohibiting Russian
democrats from getting any international assistance to promote freedom of
expression, the rule of law and a democratic political system.
Significantly, democrats have not backed down. They have not been deterred
by the criminal penalties contained in the 'foreign agents' law and other
repressive laws. They know that these laws contradict international law,
which allows for such aid, and that the laws are meant to block a better
future for Russia."
The reference to how a "foreign agents" registration law conflicts with
international law might have been a good place for Gershman to explain why
what is good for the goose in the United States isn't good for the gander in
Russia. But hypocrisy is a hard thing to rationalize and would have
undermined the propagandistic impact of the column.
Also undercutting the column's impact would be an acknowledgement of where
NED's money comes from. So Gershman left that out, too. After all, how many
governments would allow a hostile foreign power to sponsor politicians and
civic organizations whose mission is to undermine and overthrow the existing
government and put in someone who would be compliant to that foreign power?
And, if you had any doubts about what Gershman's intent was regarding
Russia, he dispelled them in his Friday column in which he calls on the
United States to "summon the will" to "contain and defeat this danger,"
which he makes clear is the continued rule of Vladimir Putin.
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Victory of Perception
Management."]
________________________________________
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories
for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest
book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from
Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
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Russian president Vladimir Putin. (photo: Reuters)
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/10/07/key-neocon-calls-on-us-to-oust-putin/h
ttps://consortiumnews.com/2016/10/07/key-neocon-calls-on-us-to-oust-putin/
Key Neocon Calls on US to Oust Putin
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
10 October 16
A prominent neocon paymaster, whose outfit dispenses $100 million in U.S.
taxpayers' money each year, has called on America to "summon the will" to
remove Russian President Putin from office, reports Robert Parry.
he neoconservative president of the U.S.-taxpayer-funded National Endowment
for Democracy [NED] has called for the U.S. government to "summon the will"
to engineer the overthrow of Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that
the 10-year-old murder case of a Russian journalist should be the
inspiration.
Carl Gershman, who has headed NED since its founding in 1983, doesn't cite
any evidence that Putin was responsible for the death of Anna Politkovskaya
but uses a full column in The Washington Post on Friday to create that
impression, calling her death "a window to Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin
autocrat whom Americans are looking at for the first time."
Gershman wraps up his article by writing: "Politkovskaya saw the danger [of
Putin], but she and other liberals in Russia were not strong enough to stop
it. The United States has the power to contain and defeat this danger. The
issue is whether we can summon the will to do so. Remembering Politkovskaya
can help us rise to this challenge."
That Gershman would so directly call for the ouster of Russia's clearly
popular president represents further proof that NED is a neocon-driven
vehicle that seeks to create the political circumstances for "regime change"
even when that means removing leaders who are elected by a country's
citizenry.
And there is a reason for NED to see its job in that way. In 1983, NED
essentially took over the CIA's role of influencing electoral outcomes and
destabilizing governments that got in the way of U.S. interests, except that
NED carried out those functions in a quasi-overt fashion while the CIA did
them covertly.
NED also serves as a sort of slush fund for neocons and other favored U.S.
foreign policy operatives because a substantial portion of NED's money
circulates through U.S.-based non-governmental organizations or NGOs.
That makes Gershman an influential neocon paymaster whose organization
dispenses some $100 million a year in U.S. taxpayers' money to activists,
journalists and NGOs both in Washington and around the world. The money
helps them undermine governments in Washington's disfavor - or as Gershman
would prefer to say, "build democratic institutions," even when that
requires overthrowing democratically elected leaders.
NED was a lead actor in the Feb. 22, 2014 coup ousting Ukraine's elected
President Viktor Yanukovych in a U.S.-backed putsch that touched off the
civil war inside Ukraine between Ukrainian nationalists from the west and
ethnic Russians from the east. The Ukraine crisis has become a flashpoint
for the dangerous New Cold War between the U.S. and Russia.
Before the anti-Yanukovych coup, NED was funding scores of projects inside
Ukraine, which Gershman had identified as "the biggest prize" in a Sept. 26,
2013 column also published in The Washington Post.
In that column, Gershman wrote that after the West claimed Ukraine,
"Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end
not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself." In other words,
Gershman already saw Ukraine as an important step toward an even bigger
prize, a "regime change" in Moscow.
Less than five months after Gershman's column, pro-Western political
activists and neo-Nazi street fighters - with strong support from U.S.
neocons and the State Department - staged a coup in Kiev driving Yanukovych
from office and installing a rabidly anti-Russian regime, which the West
promptly dubbed "legitimate."
In reaction to the coup and the ensuing violence against ethnic Russians,
the voters of Crimea approved a referendum with 96 percent of the vote to
leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia, a move that the West's governments and
media decried as a Russian "invasion" and "annexation."
The new regime in Kiev then mounted what it called an "Anti-Terrorism
Operation" or ATO against ethnic Russians in the east who had supported
Yanukovych and refused to accept the anti-constitutional coup in Kiev as
legitimate.
The ATO, spearheaded by neo-Nazis from the Azov battalion and other
extremists, killed thousands of ethnic Russians, prompting Moscow to
covertly provide some assistance to the rebels, a move denounced by the West
as "aggression."
Blaming Putin
In his latest column, Gershman not only urges the United States to muster
the courage to oust Putin but he shows off the kind of clever sophistry that
America's neocons are known for. Though lacking any evidence, he intimates
that Putin ordered the murder of Politkovskaya and pretty much every other
"liberal" who has died in Russia.
It is a technique that I've seen used in other circumstances, such as the
lists of "mysterious deaths" that American right-wingers publish citing
people who crossed the paths of Bill and Hillary Clinton and ended up dead.
This type of smear spreads suspicion of guilt not based on proof but on the
number of acquaintances and adversaries who have met untimely deaths.
In the 1990s, one conservative friend of mine pointed to the Clintons'
"mysterious deaths" list and marveled that even if only a few were the
victims of a Clinton death squad that would be quite a story, to which I
replied that if even one were murdered by the Clintons that would be quite a
story - but that there was no proof of any such thing.
"Mysterious deaths" lists represent a type of creepy conspiracy theory that
shifts the evidentiary burden onto the targets of the smears who must
somehow prove their innocence, when there is no evidence of their guilt
(only vague suspicions). It is contemptible when applied to American leaders
and it is contemptible when applied to Russian leaders, but it is not
beneath Carl Gershman.
Beyond that, Gershman's public musing about the U.S. somehow summoning "the
will" to remove Putin might - in a normal world - disqualify NED and its
founding president from the privilege of dispensing U.S. taxpayers' money to
operatives in Washington and globally. It is extraordinarily provocative and
dangerous, an example of classic neocon hubris.
While the neocons do love their tough talk, they are not known for thinking
through their "regime change" schemes. The idea of destabilizing
nuclear-armed Russia with the goal of ousting Putin, with his 82 percent
approval ratings, must rank as the nuttiest and most reckless neocon scheme
of all.
Gershman and his neocon pals may fantasize about making Russia's economy
scream while financing pro-Western "liberals" who would stage disruptive
protests in Red Square, but he and his friends haven't weighed the
consequences even if they could succeed.
Given the devastating experience that most Russians had when NED's beloved
Russian "liberals" helped impose American "shock therapy" in the 1990s - an
experiment that reduced average life expectancy by a full decade - it's hard
to believe that the Russian people would simply take another dose of that
bitter medicine sitting down.
Even if the calculating Putin were somehow removed amid economic
desperation, he is far more likely to be followed by a much harder-line
Russian nationalist who might well see Moscow's arsenal of nuclear weapons
as the only way to protect Mother Russia's honor. In other words, the
neocons' latest brash "regime change" scheme might be their last - and the
last for all humanity.
A Neocon Slush Fund
Gershman's arrogance also raises questions about why the American taxpayer
should tolerate what amounts to a $100 million neocon slush fund which is
used to create dangerous mischief around the world. Despite having
"democracy" in its name, NED appears only to favor democratic outcomes when
they fit with Official Washington's desires.
If a disliked candidate wins an election, NED acts as if that is prima facie
evidence that the system is undemocratic and must be replaced with a process
that ensures the selection of candidates who will do what the U.S.
government tells them to do. Put differently, NED's name is itself a fraud.
But that shouldn't come as a surprise since NED was created in 1983 at the
urging of Ronald Reagan's CIA Director William J. Casey, who wanted to
off-load some of the CIA's traditional work ensuring that foreign elections
turned out in ways acceptable to Washington, and when they didn't - as in
Iran under Mossadegh, in Guatemala under Arbenz or in Chile under Allende -
the CIA's job was to undermine and remove the offending electoral winner.
In 1983, Casey and the CIA's top propagandist, Walter Raymond Jr., who had
been moved to Reagan's National Security Council staff, wanted to create a
funding mechanism to support outside groups, such as Freedom House and other
NGOs, so they could engage in propaganda and political action that the CIA
had historically organized and paid for covertly. The idea emerged for a
congressionally funded entity that would serve as a conduit for this money.
In one undated letter to then-White House counselor Edwin Meese III, Casey
urged creation of a "National Endowment," but he recognized the need to hide
the strings being pulled by the CIA. "Obviously we here [at CIA] should not
get out front in the development of such an organization, nor should we
appear to be a sponsor or advocate," Casey wrote.
The National Endowment for Democracy took shape in late 1983 as Congress
decided to also set aside pots of money - within NED - for the Republican
and Democratic parties and for organized labor, creating enough bipartisan
largesse that passage was assured.
But some in Congress thought it was important to wall the NED off from any
association with the CIA, so a provision was included to bar the
participation of any current or former CIA official, according to one
congressional aide who helped write the legislation.
This aide told me that one night late in the 1983 session, as the bill was
about to go to the House floor, the CIA's congressional liaison came
pounding at the door to the office of Rep. Dante Fascell, a senior Democrat
on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a chief sponsor of the bill.
The frantic CIA official conveyed a single message from CIA Director Casey:
the language barring the participation of CIA personnel must be struck from
the bill, the aide recalled, noting that Fascell consented to the demand,
not fully recognizing its significance - that it would permit the continued
behind-the-scenes involvement of Raymond and Casey.
The aide said Fascell also consented to the Reagan administration's choice
of Carl Gershman to head NED, again not recognizing how this decision would
affect the future of the new entity and American foreign policy.
Gershman, who had followed the classic neoconservative path from youthful
socialism to fierce anticommunism, became NED's first (and, to this day,
only) president. Though NED is technically independent of U.S. foreign
policy, Gershman in the early years coordinated decisions on grants with
Raymond at the NSC.
For instance, on Jan. 2, 1985, Raymond wrote to two NSC Asian experts that
"Carl Gershman has called concerning a possible grant to the Chinese
Alliance for Democracy (CAD). I am concerned about the political dimension
to this request. We should not find ourselves in a position where we have to
respond to pressure, but this request poses a real problem to Carl.
"Senator [Orrin] Hatch, as you know, is a member of the board. Secondly, NED
has already given a major grant for a related Chinese program."
Neocon Tag Teams
From the start, NED became a major benefactor for Freedom House, beginning
with a $200,000 grant in 1984 to build "a network of democratic
opinion-makers." In NED's first four years, from 1984 and 1988, it lavished
$2.6 million on Freedom House, accounting for more than one-third of its
total income, according to a study by the liberal Council on Hemispheric
Affairs that was entitled "Freedom House: Portrait of a Pass-Through."
Over the ensuing three decades, Freedom House has become almost an NED
subsidiary, often joining NED in holding policy conferences and issuing
position papers, both organizations pushing primarily a neoconservative
agenda, challenging countries deemed insufficiently "free," including Syria,
Ukraine (in 2014) and Russia.
Indeed, NED and Freedom House often work as a kind of tag-team with NED
financing "non-governmental organizations" inside targeted countries and
Freedom House berating those governments if they crack down on U.S.-funded
NGOs.
For instance, on Nov. 16, 2012, NED and Freedom House joined together to
denounce legislation passed by the Russian parliament that required
recipients of foreign political money to register with the government.
Or, as NED and Freedom House framed the issue: the Russian Duma sought to
"restrict human rights and the activities of civil society organizations and
their ability to receive support from abroad. Changes to Russia's NGO
legislation will soon require civil society organizations receiving foreign
funds to choose between registering as 'foreign agents' or facing
significant financial penalties and potential criminal charges."
Of course, the United States has a nearly identical Foreign Agent
Registration Act that likewise requires entities that receive foreign
funding and seek to influence U.S. government policy to register with the
Justice Department or face possible fines or imprisonment.
But the Russian law would impede NED's efforts to destabilize the Russian
government through funding of political activists, journalists and civic
organizations, so it was denounced as an infringement of human rights and
helped justify Freedom House's rating of Russia as "not free."
Another bash-Putin tag team has been The Washington Post's editors and NED's
Gershman. On July 28, 2015, a Post editorial and a companion column by
Gershman led readers to believe that Putin was paranoid and "power mad" in
worrying that outside money funneled into NGOs threatened Russian
sovereignty.
The Post and Gershman were especially outraged that the Russians had enacted
the law requiring NGOs financed from abroad and seeking to influence Russian
policies to register as "foreign agents" and that one of the first funding
operations to fall prey to these tightened rules was Gershman's NED.
The Post's editors wrote that Putin's "latest move . is to declare the NED
an 'undesirable' organization under the terms of a law that Mr. Putin signed
in May [2015]. The law bans groups from abroad who are deemed a 'threat to
the foundations of the constitutional system of the Russian Federation, its
defense capabilities and its national security.'
"The charge against the NED is patently ridiculous. The NED's grantees in
Russia last year ran the gamut of civil society. They advocated transparency
in public affairs, fought corruption and promoted human rights, freedom of
information and freedom of association, among other things. All these
activities make for a healthy democracy but are seen as threatening from the
Kremlin's ramparts.
"The new law on 'undesirables' comes in addition to one signed in 2012 that
gave authorities the power to declare organizations 'foreign agents' if they
engaged in any kind of politics and receive money from abroad. The
designation, from the Stalin era, implies espionage."
However, among the relevant points that the Post's editors wouldn't tell
their readers was the fact that Russia's Foreign Agent Registration Act was
modeled after the American Foreign Agent Registration Act and that NED
President Gershman had already publicly made clear - in his Sept. 26, 2013
column - that his goal was to oust Russia's elected president.
In his July 28, 2015 column, Gershman further deemed Putin's government
illegitimate. "Russia's newest anti-NGO law, under which the National
Endowment for Democracy . was declared an "undesirable organization"
prohibited from operating in Russia, is the latest evidence that the regime
of President Vladimir Putin faces a worsening crisis of political
legitimacy," Gershman wrote, adding:
"This is the context in which Russia has passed the law prohibiting Russian
democrats from getting any international assistance to promote freedom of
expression, the rule of law and a democratic political system.
Significantly, democrats have not backed down. They have not been deterred
by the criminal penalties contained in the 'foreign agents' law and other
repressive laws. They know that these laws contradict international law,
which allows for such aid, and that the laws are meant to block a better
future for Russia."
The reference to how a "foreign agents" registration law conflicts with
international law might have been a good place for Gershman to explain why
what is good for the goose in the United States isn't good for the gander in
Russia. But hypocrisy is a hard thing to rationalize and would have
undermined the propagandistic impact of the column.
Also undercutting the column's impact would be an acknowledgement of where
NED's money comes from. So Gershman left that out, too. After all, how many
governments would allow a hostile foreign power to sponsor politicians and
civic organizations whose mission is to undermine and overthrow the existing
government and put in someone who would be compliant to that foreign power?
And, if you had any doubts about what Gershman's intent was regarding
Russia, he dispelled them in his Friday column in which he calls on the
United States to "summon the will" to "contain and defeat this danger,"
which he makes clear is the continued rule of Vladimir Putin.
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Victory of Perception
Management."]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories
for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest
book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from
Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
