Troy, 12th century
BC.
The Greeks' decade-long siege of Troy is drawing to a close. The
cunning Odysseus has hit upon a plan to subvert the Trojans'
defenses.
The Greeks build a
giant wooden horse and then pretend to sail away, leaving the
horse at the gates of Troy as an apparent offering to the
goddess Athena.
The Trojans,
believing the gift will make their city impregnable, take it
within the city gates.
But it is a trick...
Odysseus and his men are hidden inside the
hollow horse and they emerge during the night to open the gates
and let in the Greek army, who have returned to take the city.
The Trojans don't get
a chance to learn from their mistake.
The Greeks sack the city
and massacre its inhabitants.
The Trojan horse was the earliest recorded military psyop...
The
lesson of the story, recorded in the counsel to "beware of
Greeks bearing gifts," is that we should not let down our
defenses when an erstwhile enemy offers us aid...
Today, that counsel
is as useful as ever, but today's tricksters have donned the
mantle of philanthropy, and their Trojan horses are not wooden
statues but non-governmental organizations offering "aid" to
foreign nations.
The bitter truth is that in a surprising number of cases, NGOs
are the
Deep State's Trojan Horses.
This is The Corbett Report...
In 2015,
Kyrgyzstan made what might seem at first glance to be a
surprising move:
It canceled
a cooperation treaty with the US that had been in place
since 1993...
The treaty
granted tax breaks and customs privileges to organizations like
the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and gave
their workers diplomatic immunity in the country.
All of that
came to an end after the US
granted a human rights award to Azimjon Askarov, an activist
swept up and thrown in jail for life for "creating a threat to
civil peace and stability in society" after the Uzbek riots in
South Kyrgyzstan in 2010.
Reaction from
the usual Western outlets was swift and predictable:
Kyrgyzstan
has lost its mind...
Or, to be more
precise:
It's all Putin's fault... Somehow...
But don't
worry, the US will
continue aiding Kyrgyzstan anyway, whether they like it or
not, because that's just how they roll. Go, Team
America...!
But Kyrgyzstan
is not the only country to crack down on "aid" from foreign
NGOs.
In the last few
years a series of countries, including Russia,
China and India,
have passed laws placing stricter controls on the operations of
these organizations within their borders.
MARGARET HOWELL:
Russia is throwing the smackdown on poor little old NGOs,
these charitable organizations that were set up.
Their
reasoning behind them? That they might be trying to take
down the Kremlin.
The Kremlin
is moving to ban the US-backed MacArthur Foundation,
George
Soros' Open Society Institute and ten of their foreign
groups, calling them "unwelcome organizations" by law.
They're also mulling over something called a "patriotic stop
list."
Anyone caught collaborating with these groups,
they're facing six years in prison.
SOURCE:
Russia Bans Foreign NGOs
ANCHOR: China
has passed the country's first law regulating overseas NGOs,
or non-governmental organizations.
HAO
YUNHONG (VOICEOVER):
The Chinese government always welcomes foreign NGOs to come
to China to expand cultural and charity activities, and your
achievements are highly spoken of by the Chinese
authorities.
But there are a few illegal exceptions in which
NGOs came to China to harm its national security.
ANCHOR: The
law covers activities of NGOs founded outside the Chinese
mainland. They must register with public security
authorities and declare where their funding is coming from.
SOURCE:
China adopts law regulating
overseas NGOs
REPORTER:
India has placed Ford Foundation on a watch list and ordered
all funds from the US-based nonprofit organization to be
routed to recipients only after the Home Ministry's
approval.
Citing national security concerns, the Home
Ministry has asked the Reserve Bank of India to ensure funds
given by Ford Foundation to Indian recipients be brought to
its notice and dispersed only after its clearance.
The
ministry said in its order that it wanted to ensure funds
coming from Ford Foundation were utilized for bona fide
welfare activities without compromising on concerns of
national interest and security.
SOURCE:
Ford Foundation on India
government watch list
REPORTER: An
Egyptian Court has convicted 43 Egyptian and 16 American NGO
workers for working illegally in Egypt while encouraging
unrest.
The defendants, who were mostly absent from court,
were sentenced to up to five years in jail.
The verdict
calls for the closing of US nonprofit groups such as the
International Republican Institute and the National
Democratic Institute and Freedom House, which back in 2012
Egypt accused of receiving illegal funding and operating
without licenses.
SOURCE:
Egyptian court sentences NGO
workers including Americans to up to five years in prison
So,
What on
earth is going on?
Why are all of these countries kicking out
all of these US-based non-governmental and quasi-governmental
entities?
Why would they be opposed to charity and aid?
The answer is
not difficult to understand.
These
organizations are Trojan horses:
designed to appear as gifts,
but containing secret trap doors through which hidden forces can
enter the country and covertly undermine the governments in
question.
This
explanation only sounds outlandish to those who look no further
than the organizations' names and have no idea of their history
of operations.
Take USAID, for
example.
Created in 1961 by executive order, it's a US
government agency
that seeks,
"to end
extreme poverty and to promote resilient, democratic
societies while advancing our security and prosperity."
So why did
President Morales
kick them out of Bolivia in 2013?
Because he's crazy and
irrational?
Or because
USAID ran a program through its remarkably frankly-named
Office of Transition Initiatives that provided $10.5 million
of funding for "Strengthening Democratic Institutions"
throughout the country, including in opposition stronghold
areas?
Was it paranoia
on Morales' part, or merely the recognition that mealy-mouthed
rhetoric about "Strengthening Democratic Institutions" is a
thinly veiled euphemism for "overthrowing the government,"
exactly as
leaked diplomatic documents proved was the case for USAID's
identically named program in Venezuela?
EVA
GOLINGER:
USAID was originally an agency created to provide
humanitarian aid and disaster relief to countries in need,
and throughout the 1980s and the 1990s and more into the
21st century it's evolved into a political arm and a funding
branch of the US government for what they call "promoting
democracy."
And it's
actually now a part of US counterinsurgency campaigns that
involve the Pentagon [and] the State Department, in terms of
diplomacy and obviously war activities.
And USAID
is the third agency involved in counterinsurgency, and their
goal precisely is to provide what they called aid for
promoting democracy or stabilizing or helping a country
through some kind of political transition or economic
transition.
In the case
of Venezuela, Venezuela is a country that is oil wealthy so
it's never qualified for any kind of direct USAID help.
Therefore,
USAID has never had an office here officially, and they
didn't actually come the country and set up an office until
2002, right before the coup d'etat against President Chavez.
And the
documents - internal documents obtained under Freedom of
Information Act - reveal that the sole intention of setting
up the office here in Venezuela was to aid opposition forces
to eventually ouster Chavez from power.
SOURCE:
Is the US trying to "fix"
Venezuela?
Should
governments trust USAID after it was revealed that the agency
secretly created its own social media network in
Cuba for
the express purpose of undermining the Castro government?
Or when it was
revealed that USAID had
sent a team of agents to Cuba under the guise of "health and
civic programs" to incite rebellion amongst youth, including
creating a phony HIV-prevention workshop that the agency itself
described as the "perfect excuse" to "identify potential
social-change actors?"
Or when it was
revealed that the agency had attempted (and miserably failed) to
infiltrate Cuba's hip-hop scene "to break the information
blockade" and spark a youth movement of "social change" in the
country?
ANCHOR: A US
agency infiltrated the Cuban hip-hop world in an attempt to
launch a youth movement against the government there.
The secret
operation tried to use Cuban rappers to build a network of
young people seeking social change.
But the
Cuban regime caught on and the operation failed.
In the
process the US Agency for International Development
unintentionally compromised a vibrant music culture that
produced hard-hitting grassroots criticism of the country.
Several
artists that the agency tried to promote ended up leaving
Cuba or stopped performing after pressure from the
government.
SOURCE:
USAID Attempt to Co-opt Cuban
Hip-Hop Scene Fails
In fact,
USAID's black ops programs for undermining foreign governments
go all the way back to the founding of the agency itself.
Some of the
lowlights include,
FAREED ZAKARIA:
George Soros, pleasure to have you on.
GEORGE SOROS:
Same here.
ZAKARIA:
First, on Ukraine: One of the things that many people
recognize about you was that you - during the revolutions of
1989 - funded a lot of dissident activity, civil society
groups in Eastern Europe and Poland, the Czech Republic.
Are you
doing similar things in Ukraine?
SOROS: Well, I
set up a foundation in Ukraine before Ukraine became
independent of Russia, and the foundation has been
functioning ever since and played an important part in
events now.
SOURCE:
George Soros admits playing an
integral part in the Ukraine crisis
But this
NGO/Trojan horse problem is by no means confined to USAID and
its associated organizations.
Take the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED) as another example.
The
official story is that the NED was created in 1983 by
an act of Congress in order to "encourage the establishment
and growth of democratic development" in target countries around
the world in line with US foreign policy goals.
The
actual story is that the NED was created expressly as a
front for funding CIA activities inside target countries, a fact
that Allen Weinstein, one of the members of the study
group that led to NED's founding, openly bragged about in
The Washington Post:
"A lot of
what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,"
he was quoted as saying.
Even more
blatant is an admission by then-Director of Central Intelligence
William Casey, who
wrote a memo to the White House advocating for the creation
of NED but cautioning that,
"we here
[at the CIA] should not get out front in the development of
such an organization, nor do we wish to appear to be a
sponsor or advocate."
The NED's
participation in covert destabilization campaigns rivals that of USAID and, like USAID, involves too many operations to detail
them all here.
Lowlights include:
RON
PAUL: What
about Ukraine? I understand there are a few organizations
that have been involved through this in Ukraine, trying to
disturb that government.
Of course, we have visited on this
subject quite a bit, but I didn't realize how much the NED
is involved over there.
DANIEL MCADAMS:
And this is a big issue, because I think the argument could
definitely be made that NATO should have ended after the
Cold War, but definitely
the National Endowment for Democracy should have been ended
after the Cold War.
Instead,
they say, like with every government program,
"No,
now's the time we need more!"
But in
Ukraine just this past year... Ah, this is an interesting
article written by the president of the National Endowment
for Democracy - he's president for life - Carl Gershman.
I know this
might shock you, but he's actually a Trotskyite.
He was a
founding member of a communist breakaway party, the
Trotskyite Social Democrats USA.
He wrote
an editorial in The
Washington Post [in] September of '13, just before the
events happened in Ukraine, and he wrote as the president of
the National Endowment for Democracy.
He said,
"Ukraine is the biggest prize."
And he
mentioned that,
"Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the
demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin
represents," and "Putin may find himself on the losing
end not just in the near abroad but within Russia
itself."
So his real
goal is regime change.
He spelled it out just before all of
these events took place.
SOURCE:
National Endowment for
Democracy? Hardly!
These types of
Trojan horse operations have been used hundreds of times in the
past, and there is no sign that the Deep State is ready to
abandon the trick now.
Quite the
opposite...
It worked
during the "Arab Spring" when even The New York Times
blithely admitted that the leaders of the protests had,
"received training and financing from groups like the
International Republican Institute, the National Democratic
Institute and Freedom House",
...and the State Department
blithely admitted they had spent $50 million helping
activists in the region network, communicate and organize with
each other through Trojan horse NGOs like
Movements.org.
The deception
also worked in Syria, where
leaked documents proved the US had been providing millions
of dollars of support to opposition groups in the country since
2006 through a variety of Trojan horse NGOs like the Movement
for Justice and Development.
And as we saw
earlier this year in "The
White Helmets are a Propaganda Construct," even first
responder groups like the "Syria Civil Defense" (founded by an
ex-British military intelligence officer) have been used as
Trojan horses to spread propaganda and advance the agenda of the
US and its allies in their quest to topple President Assad.
Let's be clear:
This is not
to say that all NGOs are
Trojan horses.
It is
not the case that every
group or program that receives money from USAID or the
National Endowment for Democracy or a similar organization
is thereby automatically a Deep State change agent.
That is
not how the Trojan horse
technique works.
No, what makes
these NGOs so effective as disguises for regime change
operations is that much of the time, they
are doing what they claim to
be doing:
providing
aid, assistance and charity where it is needed.
It is for
this very reason that the US and its allies can so
effectively smear NGO skeptics as crazy.
But consider
this:
In 1938, the US Congress passed the
Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
With the
notable exception of AIPAC, NGOs, lobby groups and individuals
who are representing a foreign agent are required to register
under the act and are subjected to greater scrutiny of financial
records and other activities.
The irony is
that FARA is essentially the same type of legislation that has
recently been passed in China, but,
-
when the Chinese do it,
it's craziness
-
when the US did it 70 years ago, it was just
good common sense
Once again, the
hypocrisy is evident for those who wish to see it.
If there is any
good to come out of this, it is that the public is increasingly
aware of these types of covert activities.
Perhaps more to
the point, victims of these operations are now more willing to
stand up to the US (and suffer its potential diplomatic wrath)
by scrutinizing, monitoring, watch-listing, regulating, or even
kicking out these agents of chaos.
And now, just
like the Trojans thousands of years ago, the world is learning
the hard way that sometimes a "gift" is better left unopened...
