National Endowment for Democracy
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has been termed the "traditional intermediary of the CIA".[1][2]
Contents
Official narrative
The National Endowment for Democracy is a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization in the United States founded in 1983 to advance democracy worldwide, by promoting political and economic institutions, such as political groups, trade unions, free markets, and business groups. The NED was created as a bipartisan, private grant-making foundation, funded primarily by an annual allocation from the U.S. Congress.[3][4]
CIA
Wikipedia terms it a "soft-power organization". The NED's president Carl Gershman explained, "It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60’s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created."[5]
New York Times reporter John Broder wrote in 1997 that NED was created:
“to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades,”
John Broder (March 31, 1997) [6]
Allen Weinstein, who worked in the same framework of NGO activity, commented about the general situation in an interview by the Washington Post in 1991:
“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,”
Allen Weinstein (September 22, 1991) [7]
And CIA whistleblower Philip Agee described the NED as:
“Nowadays, instead of having the CIA going around behind the scenes and trying to manipulate the process by inserting money here and giving instructions secretly and so forth, they have now a sidekick, which is this National Endowment for Democracy, NED”
Philip Agee [8]
Frances Stonor Saunders, who researched covert CIA funding of cultural organizations during the Cold War, described it as:
“The NED is the umbilical cord of gold that leads directly back to Washington...And by this I’m not only referring to official U.S. government programmes, but to the vast network of clandestine players that plan and enact its information warfare operations. The cultural Cold War has never gone away, it’s just shifted from target to target.”
Frances Stonor Saunders (January 2022) [9]
Founding
When the NED was founded, 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. A Congressional aide who helped write the legislation told [[Robert Parry] 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.[10]
Activities
In July 2015, Vladimir Putin banned the NED from Russia as the first "undesirable NGO".[11]
In 1993, Barbara Conry, a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute an article on the group entitled "Loose Cannon: The National Endowment for Democracy".[12]
Steven Gowens has written that "The Dalai Lama is hardly a democrat, yet he has received Washington’s lucre for decades, including from the CIA and later the NED... old Tibet, then, was hardly a society of peace and tranquility ruled over by a benign ruler. It was a class society torn by conflict and predicated on brutal, naked, exploitation. Despite this, a February 16, 2010 NED press release describes the former Tibetan feudal overlord "not only as a moral and religious leader respected throughout the world but as a fellow democrat who shares America’s deepest values...The NED does, however, care deeply about the interests of US corporations, banks and investors which, after all, play the dominant role in shaping US policy and whose representatives staff the key positions of the US state.""[13]
Staff
- Full article: National Endowment for Democracy/board
- Full article: National Endowment for Democracy/board
Institutes
The NED distributes most of its money through four core channels. The National Democratic Institute seems to be the most active of them.
- Full article: National Democratic Institute
- Full article: Solidarity Center
- Full article: International Republican Institute
- Full article: Center for International Private Enterprise
- Full article: National Democratic Institute
Funding
The NED is funded by the US Congress. The very incomplete list of sponsored organiations is from their 990-tax form for 2017[14][15][16][17].
Related Documents
| Title | Type | Publication date | Author(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Document:Bangkok Blast - Who the Liars Say Did It, Says it All | article | 18 August 2015 | 'Tony Cartalucci' | Analysis of the 18 August terrorist bombing in Bangkok illustrating western media (especially the BBC) bias by omission of major salient points |
| Document:Is Oil Behind Washington’s Venezuela Coup Madness | Article | 3 February 2019 | William Engdahl | Leaving aside whether or not Maduro is a saint, the decision by President Trump to back the Bolton-Pence call for a US intervention in Venezuela may prove a fatal error for the Trump presidency. |
| Document:The Making of Juan Guaidó: How the US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela’s Coup Leader | Article | 29 January 2019 | Dan Cohen Max Blumenthal | Juan Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington’s elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy, Guaidó has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilisation in Venezuela |
Rating
References
- ↑ Document:Understanding the War in Libya
- ↑ https://archive.is/eN0fr
- ↑ https://www.ned.org/about/
- ↑ http://www.ned.org/about/history
- ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/1986/06/01/world/missionaries-for-democracy-us-aid-for-global-pluralism.html
- ↑ https://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/31/us/political-meddling-by-outsiders-not-new-for-us.html
- ↑ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1991/09/22/innocence-abroad-the-new-world-of-spyless-coups/92bb989a-de6e-4bb8-99b9-462c76b59a16/
- ↑ https://thegrayzone.com/2018/08/20/inside-americas-meddling-machine-the-us-funded-group-that-interferes-in-elections-around-the-globe/
- ↑ https://consortiumnews.com/2022/01/20/73853/
- ↑ https://archive.is/eN0fr#selection-2659.115-2659.122
- ↑ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/28/national-endowment-for-democracy-banned-russia
- ↑ http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb-027.html
- ↑ https://gowans.wordpress.com/category/national-endowment-for-democracy/
- ↑ https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/521344831/10_2018_prefixes_52-54%2F521344831_201709_990_2018102315823464https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/521344831/10_2018_prefixes_52-54%2F521344831_201709_990_2018102315823464
- ↑ Bellingcat https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/828554441485869056
- ↑ https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search/-/charity-details/327421/accounts-and-annual-returns
- ↑ https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search/-/charity-details/4042383/accounts-and-annual-returns
