[southnews] Behind the anti-China Olympics campaign
Dave Muller
China targeting the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing?
The events that unfolded at the lighting of the Olympic flame March 24
in Greece were most revealing. A protest briefly disrupted the
ceremonies. The news reports all said that the protest was about Tibet.
Three protesters were arrested, but then immediately released. None were
Tibetan.
On March 24, in a Hobart Mercury article with the fairly blunt heading
"US finger in unrest pie", Greg Barns (writing of the Tibetan exiles
grouped around the Dalai Lama) noted "the CIA gave the Tibetans and the
Dalai Lama money and support through the 1950s and 1960s".
US policy in that period was to try to provoke war with China, using the
US, Taiwanese and South Korean military as well as CIA-funded
"guerrillas" operating out of Thailand.
"On September 15, 1998", notes Barns, "a Los Angeles Times investigation
revealed that during the 1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile
movement with US$1.7 million? (AU$1.9 million) a year for operations
against China including an annual subsidy of US$180,000? (AU$197,000)
for the Dalai Lama".
Time magazine revealed back in the beginning of 2003 that under the
current US President, the CIA had rebuilt its paramilitary outfit, the
euphemistically named Special Operations Group. One of SOGs roles is to
do the stirring when the US needs trouble stirred up somewhere in the world.
As Barns writes in the Mercury: "One cannot rule out the possibility, or
indeed the probability, that this group and other CIA operatives have
had some role in fuelling unrest in Tibet over the past few weeks".
_____________________________________________________________
US finger in unrest pie
The Mercury
GREG BARNS
March 24, 2008 12:00am
WHICH country's interests are best served by an uprising in Tibet on the
eve of the Beijing Olympics?
The USA's, of course.
The Bush administration has long been frightened of China's burgeoning
rival superpower status, and US stoking of the Tibetan fires to provide
maximum international embarrassment to China cannot be ruled out.
Tibet is a cause celebre for the Hollywood glitterati, pop stars and
celebrity politicians. They imagine it to be some sort of wondrous
Shangri-la led by a beacon of peace and light, the Dalai Lama. The vast
majority of the Western media is in love with the Dalai Lama and the
Free Tibet movement. In fact, so blinkered are the Free Tibet and
I-love-the-Dalai-Lama types that they will line up with their No. 1
enemy, the Bush administration, to throw darts at China for seeking to
restore order in a land that China has occupied since 1951.
So what evidence do we have of US involvement in this latest round of
Tibetan violence? History suggests it might be the case. The CIA gave
the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama money and support through the 1950s and
1960s. On September 15, 1998, a Los Angeles Times investigation revealed
that during "the 1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile movement with
$1.7 million ($1.83 million) a year for operations against China,
including an annual subsidy of $180,000 ($193,500) for the Dalai Lama".
The CIA trained Tibetan guerrillas in Nepal and in Colorado during that
period. This CIA support petered out in the 1970s.
So what is the situation today? Michael Barker, a PhD student at
Griffith University in Brisbane who studies social and political
movements, says much of the present international campaigning for a free
Tibet is financed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which
is closely linked to the CIA.
Mr Barker, in a paper written in August last year, notes that the NED
was established in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan. The role of the NED,
which admits to receiving funds directly from the CIA, is to foster
democracy throughout the world.
The NED has financed the work of the International Campaign for Tibet,
the Tibet Fund and the Tibetan Information Network, the three leading
anti-Chinese Tibetan advocacy organisations. In short, the CIA/NED
directly bankrolls the apparatus that runs the Dalai Lama's
international campaign for a non-violent revolution in Tibet to
overthrow the Chinese.
But is the CIA on the ground in Tibet and working with the locals to
whip up riots against China? It cannot be ruled out altogether. As Time
magazine revealed in a January 2003 report, the CIA under President
George W. Bush has rebuilt its Special Operations Group, a paramilitary
force. One cannot rule out the possibility, or indeed the probability,
that this group and other CIA operatives have had some role in fuelling
unrest in Tibet over the past few weeks.
But, you might ask, in any event aren't the Chinese the oppressors here,
and the Dalai Lama and the Free Tibet movement the good guys? Shouldn't
our Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister Kevin Rudd be berating the Chinese
leadership about Tibet?
The answer to those questions is that things are not that simple.
The Dalai Lama heads an elite of families and religious figures that
once ruled Tibet. And the Tibet they ruled was one of the most backward
and inhumane societies in the world. Almost 90 per cent of Tibetans were
slaves before the Chinese invaded the country.
As an Indian commentator, Aniket Alam, wrote last week: "Far from any
democratic rights, for an overwhelming majority of Tibetans, the rule of
the Dalai Lama was one of unending unpaid labour, cruelty and
debt-bondage and not some spiritual Shangri-La. Some historians have
even asserted that Tibetan feudal oppression was even worse than its
Chinese counterpart, while one prisoner in the Dalai Lama's prison in
the 1950s called it hell on Earth."
The Dalai Lama himself today supports some dubious causes. In 2000 he
joined Pope John Paul, Margaret Thatcher and George Bush senior in
pleading with the British government to let former serial human rights
abuser and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet go free. And while Catholic
bishops and Muslim clergy are frequently castigated by the media for
their eccentric views on sexuality, no one raises an eyebrow when the
Dalai Lama says that "using one's hand, that is sexual misconduct".
It would be ironic if those who uncritically adore the Dalai Lama and
support the Free Tibet campaign realised that their inherent enemies in
the Bush administration and the CIA were bankrolling the cause, wouldn't
it? But it certainly looks that way.
China is not perfect, but nor are the Dalai Lama and the Free Tibet
crowd, who are being used as pawns by the US.
http://www.news.com.au/mercury/story/0,22884,23423457-5006550,00.html
________________________________________
Behind the anti-China Olympics campaign
By Gary Wilson
www.*iac*enter.org/ Mar 27, 2008
Can there be any doubt that the U.S. government is behind the attacks on
China targeting the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing?
The events that unfolded at the lighting of the Olympic flame March 24
in Greece were most revealing. A protest briefly disrupted the
ceremonies. The news reports all said that the protest was about Tibet.
Three protesters were arrested, but then immediately released. None were
Tibetan.
The three French men, it turns out, are all from a notorious right-wing
organization thats funded by the governments of France and the United
States as well as some of the richest capitalists in the world. They all
are employees of the outfit called Reporters Without Borders.
Based in France, the group gets funding from the U.S. governments
National Endowment for Democracy as well as the Soros Foundation and the
Center for a Free Cuba. U.S. State Department Special Envoy Otto Reich
is a trustee of the Center. He was also the lawyer for the Bacardi
liquor dynasty that was kicked out of Cuba, along with the hated
dictator Fulgencio Batista. The president of the Center is Frank Calzsn,
a former leader of the terrorist organization Cuban American National
Foundation.
Reporters Without Borders unmasked
Reporters Without Borders Unmasked is the title of a report by Diana
Barahona on Counterpunch.org. RWB has an obsession with Cuba, which
Barahona says can be directly traced to its funding. What may not be
obvious is that the Center for a Free Cuba is a front organization for
U.S. covert operations against Cuba. It is completely funded by the U.S.
Agency for International Development, an agency that has long fronted
for U.S. covert operations.
RWB does not just target Cuba, though Cuba has been its primary target
for many yearsthe Cuban press generally refers to RWB as an
ultra-reactionary organization with ties to counterrevolutionary
terrorists. At the time of the U.S. contra war against the Sandinista
government, the RWB carried on operations against Nicaragua.
Today it also has operations targeting Venezuela, Bolivia, Iran,
Peoples Korea, and the Palestinians, according to a report by French
journalist Salim Lamrani. (The deceit of Reporters Without Borders,
ZNet.com)
RWB was merely fulfilling its contract with the U.S. government when it
carried out the little disruption of the Olympic Games opening ceremony.
It got maximum publicity in the compliant U.S. media for its anti-China
message.
NED: CIA of the 21st century
The shadowy hand of the National Endowment for Democracy can be found in
many of the anti-China reports over the last few weeks.
The NED is a U.S. government agency that does in the post-Cold War era
much of what the CIA had been doing during the U.S.
counter-revolutionary operations against the Soviet Union. In fact,
thats almost exactly how its role was described by the NEDs first
acting president, Allen Weinstein, who said, A lot of what we [the NED]
do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA. (Washington Post,
Sept. 22, 1991)
In the U.S., little is known about the NED except for its public
relations handouts. The big business-controlled press usually just
repeats whats in those handouts.
Australian writer Michael Barker, in a report last Aug. 13 published by
Canada-based Global Research, detailed at that time the rise of groups
aimed at breaking Tibet away from China, all of which were NED-funded.
The International Campaign for Tibet, for example, not only is funded by
the NED but also has a board of directors that includes several former
assistant secretaries of the U.S. State Department and former U.S. AID
officials.
The Tibet Fund is another NED payee, as is the Tibet Information Network
and the Tibetan Literary Society, Barker reports. Also getting funds
from the NED is the Tibetan Review Trust Society, which publishes the
English-only Tibetan Review magazine. Finally, Barker says, the NED also
set up the Voice of Tibet short-wave radio station.
About 38 percent of the U.S. governments nonmilitary China-related
programs are allocated through the NED. According to the NEDs Web site,
other recipients of its China funds include the Gu-Chu-Sum Movement of
Tibet, the Tibetan Womens Association and the Longsho Youth Movement of
Tibet.
All this raises more questions than answers about what is now happening
in China. Many events that are reported to be about Tibet focus on the
2008 Olympics in Beijing. Like the disruption of the Olympic torch
lighting in Greece, the commentators quoted most frequently in the U.S.
media are not Tibetans; most are from the U.S. and say they are speaking
for the Tibetans.
http://www.iacenter.org/o/world/china-olympics033008/
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