Project Empire: NED and 'spontaneous' separatist movements
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Richard Moore
May 24, 2008, 4:12:13 PM5/24/08
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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/resources/forum/viewtopic.php?p=21008&sid=1dba58135f68ccc35c7f69da0212c381
National Endowment for Devouring Countries
One of the American foundations which featured prominently in every color-coded "revolution" and every enforced regime change throughout the world during the past three decades, the allegedly non-government National Endowment for Democracy (NED), is currently charged of supporting at least three present day projects for dismantling the state sovereignty in Myanmar, China's Tibet and the continued devouring of Serbian state, through the northern region of Vojvodina.
In the article titled Risky Geopolitical Game: Washington Plays ‘Tibet Roulette’ with China, F. William Engdahl asserts that the the current on-again, off-again "Saffron Revolution" in Myanmar and Tibet “Crimson revolution” are another set of Washington-orchestrated campaigns aimed against China, fashioned after the cookie-cutter 'revolutions' imitating popular uprisings that swept through the Eastern Europe.
The kind of activities that previously belonged almost exclusively to the realm of covert CIA operations have, for the past couple of decades, been taken over by its extended arm, US Congress-funded NED.
Under the subtitle The NED at work again…, Engdahl reveals that "According to declassified US intelligence documents released in the late 1990s, 'for much of the 1960s, the CIA provided the Tibetan exile movement with $1.7 million a year for operations against China, including an annual subsidy of $180,000 for the Dalai Lama.'
"With help of the CIA, the Dalai Lama fled to Dharamsala, India where he lives to the present. He continues to receive millions of dollars in backing today, not from the CIA but from a more innocuous-sounding CIA front organization, funded by the US Congress, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED has been instrumental in every US-backed Color Revolution destabilization from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine to Myanmar. Its funds go to back opposition media and global public relations campaigns to popularize their pet opposition candidates. [emphasis added]
"As in the other recent Color Revolutions, the US Government is fanning the flames of destabilization against China by funding opposition protest organizations inside and outside Tibet through its arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
"The NED was founded by the Reagan Administration in the early 1980’s, on the recommendation of Bill Casey, Reagan’s Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), following a series of high-publicity exposures of CIA assassinations and destabilizations of unfriendly regimes. The NED was designed to pose as an independent NGO, one step removed from the CIA and Government agencies so as to be less conspicuous, presumably. The first acting President of the NED, Allen Weinstein, commented to the Washington Post that, 'A lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.'
"American intelligence historian, William Blum states, 'The NED played an important role in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, funding key components of Oliver North's shadowy 'Project Democracy.' This network privatized US foreign policy, waged war, ran arms and drugs, and engaged in other equally charming activities. In 1987, a White House spokesman stated that those at NED 'run Project Democracy.'
"The most prominent pro-Dalai Lama Tibet independence organization today is the International Campaign for Tibet, founded in Washington in 1988. Since at least 1994 the ICT has been receiving funds from the NED. The ICT awarded their annual Light of Truth award in 2005 to Carl Gershman, founder of the NED. Other ICT award winners have included the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation and Czech leader, Vaclav Havel. The ICT Board of Directors is peopled with former US State Department officials including Gare Smith and Julia Taft.
"Another especially active anti-Beijing organization is the US-based Students for a Free Tibet, founded in 1994 in New York City as a project of US Tibet Committee and the NED-financed International Campaign for Tibet (ICT). The SFT is most known for unfurling a 450 foot banner atop the Great Wall in China; calling for a free Tibet, and accusing Beijing of wholly unsubstantiated claims of genocide against Tibet. Apparently it makes good drama to rally naïve students.
"The SFT was among five organizations which this past January that proclaimed start of a 'Tibetan people's uprising' on Jan 4 this year and co-founded a temporary office in charge of coordination and financing.
"Harry Wu is another prominent Dalai Lama supporter against Beijing. He became notorious for claiming falsely in a 1996 Playboy interview that he had 'videotaped a prisoner whose kidneys were surgically removed while he was alive, and then the prisoner was taken out and shot. The tape was broadcast by BBC.' The BBC film showed nothing of the sort, but the damage was done. How many people check old BBC archives? Wu, a retired Berkeley professor who left China after imprisonment as a dissident, is head of the Laogai Research Foundation, a tax-exempt organization whose main funding is from the NED.
"Among related projects, the US Government-financed NED also supports the Tibet Times newspaper, run out of the Dalai Lama’s exile base at Dharamsala, India. The NED also funds the Tibet Multimedia Center for 'information dissemination that addresses the struggle for human rights and democracy in Tibet,' also based in Dharamsala. And NED finances the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy."
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