by B. Raman
March 2006
from
ThereAreNoSunGlasses Website
The following, by a former
RAW chieftain, is a daring assessment of America's foreign
policy of fomenting democratic-revolution, or outright terrorism
by the NED, Reagan's privatized CIA.
It is brutally honest about
the repercussions for India for supporting such a policy in
Asia, without condemning the criminal American policies that are
discussed.
This position of the author is predicated on the
prevailing wisdom in India that the American side will be
victorious in its grand game.
My own assessment is in RED,
embedded within Mr. Raman's work.
- Peter C.
National Endowment for Democracy of U.S.
The post-Watergate enquiries into the activities of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) of the US exposed details of its covert political activities in
other countries in order to promote US foreign policy objectives.
Amongst such activities were the secret funding
of individuals, political parties and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
favorable to US interests and funneling of money to counter the activities
of those considered anti-US.
After taking over as the President in January,
1977, Mr. Jimmy Carter banned such activities and imposed strict limits on
the CIA’s covert operations in foreign countries.
During the election campaign of 1980, Mr. Ronald
Reagan used effectively against Mr. Carter the argument that the post-Vietnam
and post-Watergate decline of the US under Mr.Carter was due to the
emasculation of its military and intelligence apparatus.
[The real reason for the American
decline was the period of national shame we had entered into, for what we
had sent our sons to Vietnam to do, and what we, as a people, had become in
the process. The falsehoods at the base of every Reagan Doctrine, both
economic and military, created the national delusion that we had not become
monsters in our lust to kill and dominate the world. The national Republican
delusion must be brought to an end, by clarifying the moral focus of what
monsters we have become, by highlighting our monstrous crimes against
humanity that take place everyday, all over the world.]
After his election in November, 1980, and before his taking-over as the
President in January, 1981, Mr. Reagan appointed a transition group headed by
the late William Casey, an attorney and one of his campaign managers, who
was to later take over as the CIA Director, to recommend measures for
strengthening the USA’s intelligence capability abroad.
[Mr. Raman tends to hide the worst
truths about the lone superpower, in this case, covering-up Casey's
purloining of Jimmie Carter's debate preparation book, as well as his
helping George Bush pull-off the October Surprise and the deal to hold the
Iranian hostages until after Carter left office. Wm. Casey was an amoral
monster who created the menace of international "Islamic" terrorism and set
it loose upon the world, in a concerted plan to gain total American world
dominion.
That plan (later dubbed by others, the New American Century)
included future false flag "Pearl Harbor type attacks to shock the American
people into accepting the final steps into a militarized garrison state as
the ultimate price tag for totally dominating the world by seizing control
over limited energy reserves. The United States has been on the course to
total world war set by Mr. Casey and all his collaborators in the greatest
crime wave that the world has ever seen.]
One of its recommendations was to revive covert political activities.
Since
there might have been opposition from the Congress and public opinion to
this task being re-entrusted to the CIA, it suggested that this be given to
an NGO with no ostensible links with the CIA.
[Right here is the point in the
narrative of an insane Republican foreign policy, where the Constitution was
subverted, international law was thrown out the window, and the American
anti-Communist right wing created a private CIA, beyond the control and
oversight of the American people.
With the help of America's foreign
partners in previous CIA crimes (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, France,
Israel and others), an international organization was begun, that worked
through the subversive NED, dedicated to helping Reagan's CIA bypass the
American Congress and Constitution.
The new multinational entity, called the
"Safari Club" was a secret funding and recruitment effort for illegal
foreign wars. The international "Islamic" army organized by it, was known as
bin Laden's "International Islamic Front," Arabic elements of this group
later became known as "al Qaida."]
The matter was further examined in 1981-82 by the American Political
Foundation’s Democracy Program Study and Research Group and, finally, the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was born under a Congressional
enactment of 1983 as a,
"non-profit, non-governmental, bipartisan,
grant-making organization to help strengthen democratic institutions
around the world."
Though it is projected as an NGO, it is actually a quasi-governmental
organization because till 1994 it was run exclusively from funds voted by
the Congress (average of about US $ 16 million per annum in the 1980s and
now about US $ 30 million) as part of the budget of the US Information
Agency (USIA).
Since 1994, it has been accepting contributions from the
private sector too to supplement the congressional appropriations.
Thirty per cent of the budgetary allocations constitute the discretionary
fund of the NED to be distributed directly by it to overseas organizations
and the balance is distributed through what are called four "core
organizations",
-
the International Republican Institute (IRI)
-
the National
Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI)
-
the Centre for
International Private Enterprise (CIPE)
-
the Free Trade Union Institute (FTUI)
In 1994, the NED set up two other organizations called the
International
Forum for Democratic Studies (IFDS) and the Democracy Resource Centre (DRC),
both largely funded by the private sector.
Since its inception, the NED and its affiliates have been mired in
controversy in the US itself as well as abroad.
Amongst its strongest
supporters in the US is the Heritage Foundation of Washington DC, a
conservative think tank, which played an active role in influencing the
policies of the Reagan and
Bush Administrations.
[The Heritage Foundation is at the
center of the American brainwashing campaign/arms venture described in the
Iran/Contra reports' "Lost Chapter," entitled "Launching the Private
Network."]
It brought out two papers on the justification for the NED, when questions
were raised in the US on the continued need for it after the collapse of the
communist regimes of East Europe.
In the first paper of July 8,1993, (Executive
Memorandum No. 360) it described the NED as "an important weapon in the war
of ideas" and said:
"The NED has played a vital role in
providing aid to democratic movements in the former Soviet Union,
Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Nicaragua, Vietnam and
elsewhere… Communist dictatorships still control China, Cuba, North
Korea and Vietnam.
Moreover, ex-communists masquerading as nationalists
continue to dominate several of the Soviet successor states. The NED can play an important role in
assisting those countries in making the turbulent transition to
democracy…
Local political activists often prefer
receiving assistance from a non-governmental source, as aid from a US
government agency may undermine their credibility in the eyes of their
countrymen."
In the second paper of September 13, 1996,
(Executive Memorandum No.461), it said:
"The NED advances American national
interests by promoting the development of stable democracies friendly to
the US in strategically important parts of the world. The US cannot
afford to discard such an effective instrument of foreign policy at a
time when American interests and values are under sustained ideological
attack from a wide variety of anti-democratic forces around the world…
The NED has aided Lech Walesa’s Solidarity
movement in Poland, Harry Wu’s human rights efforts in China and
independent media outlets in former Yugoslavia. Russian political
activists affiliated with the NED also played a major role in President
Boris Yeltsin’s re-election campaign against the reinvigorated Communist
Party earlier this year…
The NED is a cost-effective way to encourage
captive nations to liberate themselves without committing the US to a
prohibitively risky and costly military crusade to free them from
communism."
Testifying before the Sub-committee on
International Operations and Human Rights of the Committee on International
Relations of the House of Representatives on March 13,1997, Mr. Carl
Gershman, President of the NED, said:
"I just want to say that the Endowment’s
work is based upon a very, very simple proposition. And that is, where
there are people who share our values, where there are people who might
be called the natural friends of America, then it is our obligation to
help those people in some way."
Amongst the critics of the NED are Ms. Barbara Conry, a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute of Washington D.C. and
Mr. Ralph McGehee, stated to be a former CIA official.
In a paper of November 8,1993 (Foreign Policy Briefing No.27), Ms. Conry said:
"NED is resented (abroad) as American
interference; it is often further resented because it attempts to
deceive foreigners into viewing its programs as private assistance…
On a
number of occasions, NED has taken advantage of its alleged private
status to influence foreign elections, an activity that is beyond the
scope of AID (Agency For International Development) or USIA and would
otherwise be possible only through a CIA covert operation…
What finally drew public attention to NED’s
meddling in foreign elections was an aborted attempt to provide
opposition candidate Violeta Chamorro with $ 3 million in funding for
her 1989 election campaign against Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
The plan was abandoned after it was determined that NED’s charter, which
expressly forbids campaign contributions, would be violated.
In the end, the money was channeled to
programs that aided Chamorro indirectly rather than through direct
campaign contributions."
In a statement of January 19,1996, Mr. McGehee
described the post-1991 activities of the NED as,
"political action operations targeting China
and Cuba."
Another NGO of the US has said:
"NED engages in much of the same kinds of
interference in the internal affairs of foreign countries, which were
the hallmark of the CIA.
The NED has financed, advised and supported
in many ways selected political parties, election campaigns, unions,
student groups, book publishers, newspapers, other media, even guerillas
in Afghanistan and, in general, organizations and individuals which mesh
well with the gears of the globalised-economy machine…
Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the
legislation establishing NED, and also founded the Centre for Democracy,
one of NED’s funding middlemen, was quite candid when he said in 1991:
"A lot of what we do today was done
covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." The NED, like the CIA before it,
calls what it does supporting democracy. The governments and
movements whom the NED targets call it destabilization."
Initially, the NED’s activities were directed
mainly against the communist regimes of East Europe, but, subsequently, it
started combating the communist parties in multi-party democracies of West
Europe too.
In the 1980s, when the late Francois Mitterrand was the French
President, an NED report showed an expenditure of US $ 1.5 million,
"to promote democracy in France."
There was an uproar in France when the French press discovered that part of
this amount had been given by the NED, through the FTUI, to the National
Inter-University Union of France, allegedly a right-extremist and xenophobic
organization, in an attempt to use it to defeat communist candidates in the
elections to the National Assembly.
Embarrassed by the controversy, the
Reagan Administration dissociated itself from the NED activities in France.
After the collapse of the communist regimes of East Europe, the NED has been
focusing its activities against the communist regimes of Cuba, Vietnam,
China and North Korea and the Myanmarese military regime and against the
resurgence of the communist parties in East Europe due to the economic
difficulties there.
Its activities relating to China are of two kinds:
-
Those, which are legitimate in the
Chinese perception such as training of local village officials in
the holding of elections, training of local business executives in
better management practices, advice on the drafting of economic
reform legislation etc.
-
Those, which are legitimate in the US
perception, but interference in internal affairs in the Chinese
view, such as support to political dissidents, human rights
activists and Tibetan exiles and projection of Taiwan as a
democratic model worthy of emulation.
The first type of activities is carried out by
workers of organizations affiliated to the NED, either based in China or
visiting the country and the second by off-shore offices of the NED, which
were located in Hong Kong before its reversion to China in June, 1997, and
which were thereafter reportedly shifted to Australia since the ASEAN
countries would not host them.
Finding Australia not a convenient place, the
NED has reportedly been eyeing India as a possible base for its activities
directed against China.
Beijing has reasons to be concerned over what it considers as the
illegitimate activities of the NED.
Of the 28 NGOs of Asia funded by the
NED,
-
14 focus on China, 4 of them of Tibetan exiles
-
5 on Myanmar
-
2
on Cambodia
-
1 each on Vietnam and North Korea
-
the remaining 5 on the Asia-Pacific
region as a whole
In his testimony of March 13,1997, before the House Sub-committee on
International Operations and Human Rights, Mr. Gershman said:
"There has been a doubling of resources
spent in Asia (primarily China, Burma and Cambodia) and a tripling of
resources for the Middle East. There were also dramatic increases in
Central Asia and the former Yugoslavia…
While the discretionary programs and those
of our affiliated labour institute support the activities of various
pro-democracy networks, among them Human Rights in China, the China
Strategic Institute, the Laogai Research Foundation, and the Hong Kong
based activities of labour activist Han Dongfang, IRI and CIPE have
targeted opportunities created by the official reform policy in the
areas of local elections and economic modernization.
Additional grants support the democracy
movements in Hong Kong and Tibet and, through the International Forum,
we have highlighted the role of Taiwan as an Asian model of successful
democratization."
The trans-border activities of the NED against
the Myanmarese military regime seem to be directed mainly from Thailand and
India.
This is evident from a testimony given by Ms. Louisa Coan, NED’s
Program Officer for Asia, before the House Sub-committee on Asia and the
Pacific on September 17,1997.
She said:
"NED has been able through its direct grants
program to support the dissidents, to support the democracy movement of
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, particularly through assistance to the groups
along the borders in Thailand and in India, including twice daily radio
programming through the Democratic Voice of Burma (author’s comment:
based in Scandinavia), newsletters, underground newspaper, underground
labour organizing, particular programs to foster inter-ethnic
co-operation and unity among the opposition forces in support of Aung
San Suu Kyi’s call for tripartite dialogue and national reconciliation."
It is not known whether New Delhi was aware of
the India-based activities of the NED against the Yangon regime.
Before the recent visit of the US President, Mr.
Bill Clinton, to India, the
NED headquarters in Washington issued the following press release:
"Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
announced on Tuesday March 14 that the US and India will launch a joint
non-governmental initiative called the Asian Centre for Democratic
Governance during President Clinton’s upcoming trip to South Asia.
"Jointly organized by the Confederation of
Indian Industry (CII) and the NED, the Centre will be based at CII’s
offices in New Delhi, The Bureau of Parliamentary Studies and Training,
an affiliate of the Indian Parliament, will partner with the CII in
implementing the activities of the Centre."
The press release said the expenditure on the
initiative would be shared by the CII and the NED.
It is an interesting case of an important member of the Clinton Cabinet,
announcing on behalf of a self-proclaimed NGO of the US funded by the
Congress, a non-governmental initiative in collaboration with a
non-governmental Indian business organization with which an office of the
Indian Parliament would also be associated.
This launching was duly done at New Delhi.
There are three likely implications of this unusual venture:
-
Possibility of misunderstanding with
China which might interpret it as directed against it and its
presence in Tibet.
-
Impropriety in co-operating with an
American organization working against the present Government at
Yangon, which has normal diplomatic relations with New Delhi and has
been co-operating in counter-insurgency measures in the North-East.
-
The presence in Indian territory, with
official blessing, of an organization, which aims to wipe out
communism as a political and ideological movement all over the world
and which might utilize its presence to undermine the Indian
communist movement.
NED has never criticized the Indian Communist
parties, but a reading of the past statements of those in the US
supporting the NED would indicate that they hold communism and
democracy as incompatible.
[Mr. Raman's honesty in appraising the
dangers to India from cooperating with the American destabilization
program, without describing it as criminal actions in the extreme,
is an act of well-intentioned cowardice. Terrorism and overthrowing
foreign governments who have no disagreements with the United States
other than resistance to domination are war crimes, considering that
the intended purpose of all these intrigues is world war III, the
military's "generational war," which we engineered.]
The US has also announced the association of
India as co-sponsor with a forthcoming conference of "communities of
democracies" in Poland being funded by the Stefan Batory Foundation
of Poland, set up by
George Soros in 1998, to counter the resurgence
of communism in East Europe, and the Freedom House of the US.
The
Freedom House was founded in the 1940s,
"to strengthen free institutions
at home and abroad".
It played an active role in carrying on a psychological
warfare (PsyWar) against the troops of the USSR and the late President
Najibullah in Afghanistan during the 1980s through the Afghanistan
Information Centre set up by it, allegedly with CIA funds.
The offices of this centre at Peshawar in
Pakistan trained the Afghan Mujahedeen groups and Pakistani organizations
such as the Harkat-ul-Mujahedeen (formerly known as the Harkat-ul-Ansar) and
the Lashkar-e-Taiba, presently active in Kashmir, in techniques of media
management and psywar.
[Freedom House is the instrument for all the colored
revolutions in Central Asia. The MAK office in Peshawar was bin Laden's
supply and recruitment headquarters. The following was the address for bin
Laden's MAK office: MAKHTAB AL-KHIDAMAT/AL KIFAH, House no. 125, Street 54,
Phase II, Hayatabad, Peshawar, Pakistan]
Since 1983, part of the funds voted by the Congress to the NED are funneled
to the Freedom House, which also gets contributions from the private sector.
The Freedom House focuses its activities on
media and communications and, according to a 1990 study by the
Interhemispheric Resource Center of the US, more than 400 journalists in
55 countries were collaborating with the Freedom House in its activities
against communist parties and regimes.
Before going ahead with these projects, there is an urgent need for an
examination of the implications of our collaboration with such organizations
from the point of view of our national security and political stability.