Important players linked to the National Endowment for Democracy an extension of the CIA

Source: http://landdestroyer.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/national-endowment-for-democracy-is-now.html

The NED, along with Freedom House, has been at the center of all major US State Department-financed ‘color revolutions’ in the world since 2000 when it was used to topple Milosevic in Serbia. The NED was created during the Reagan Administration to function as a de facto CIA, privatized so as to allow more freedom of action. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, said in a Washington Post interview in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

The NED was the brainchild of Reagan’s CIA Director, Bill Casey. Casey wanted to create a funding mechanism to support groups inside foreign countries that would engage in propaganda and political action that the CIA had historically organized and paid for covertly. To partially replace that CIA role, the idea emerged for a congressionally funded entity that would serve as a conduit for this money. The main revenue to finance NED activities in countries like Russia, China, Myanmar, Venezuela, Uzbekistan and other places where the regime is not 100% on Washington’s music page, comes from the United States Congress. That is supplemented by such dubious organizations as George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, which seems to always pop up where the CIA and NED want to topple a regime as in Ukraine in 2013-14.

Casey wanted to be sure to hide the strings being pulled by the CIA. In a letter to Reagan’s White House Counselor, Edwin Meese III, Casey wrote, “Obviously we here [at CIA] should not get out front in the development of such an organization, nor should we appear to be a sponsor or advocate.” To hide the CIA’s role, Casey urged creation of a “National Endowment.”

NED President since 1984 has been Carl Gershman, previously with the Freedom House, another “democracy” front for the US intelligence community involved in every Color Revolution. NATO General and former Presidential candidate Wesley Clark, the man who led the US bombing of Serbia in 1999, and who recently called for aggressive US military response to Russia, also sat on the NED Board.

The majority of the historic figures linked to clandestine CIA actions have at some time been members of the Board of Directors or the Administrative Council of the NED, including Otto Reich, John Negroponte, Henry Cisneros, and Elliot Abrams. The Chairman of the NED Board of Directors in 2008 was Vin Weber, campaign fundraiser for George W. Bush in 2000. Gershman, head of the NED since its creation to the present, worked closely with Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams and Frank Gaffney. Gershman was in a sense ‘present at the creation’ of the political-intelligence faction known as neo-conservativism.

Among NED projects in Russia has been to finance Russian anti-Putin opposition activist Alexei Navalny, member of a group called Russian Opposition Coordination Council. Navalny received money from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The NED has sub-units: National Republican Institute, which is headed by Senator John McCain, the man who played a key role in the 2014 USA coup d’etat in Ukraine. The National Democratic Institute, tied to USA Democratic Party and chaired now by Clinton Secretary of State and Serbian bombing advocate, Madeline Albright. The NED Board of Directors includes the kernel of the Bush-Cheney neo-conservative warhawks like Elliott Abrams; Francis Fukuyama; Zalmay Khalilzad, former Iraq and Afghan US ambassador, and architect of Afghan war; Robert Zoellick, Bush family insider and ex-World Bank President.

Article: John Pilger - From Pol Pot to ISIS: Anything that flies on everything that moves

http://johnpilger.com/articles/from-pol-pot-to-isis-anything-that-flies-on-everything-that-moves

In transmitting President Richard Nixon's orders for a "massive" bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, "Anything that flies on everything that moves".  As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger's murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery - including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields - I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today's Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of "fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders". Once Nixon's and Kissinger's B52 bombers had gone to work as part of "Operation Menu", the west's ultimate demon could not believe his luck.

The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They levelled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors "froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told... That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over."

A Finnish Government Commission of Enquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the "first stage in a decade of genocide". What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.

ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush and Blair's invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of some 700,000 people - in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common. Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.

Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism. Al-Qaeda - like Pol Pot's "jihadists" - seized the opportunity provided by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed. "Rebel" Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf state ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote recently, "The [Cameron] government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy - and in particular our Middle East wars - had been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here."

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington and London who, in destroying Iraq as both a state and a society, conspired to commit an epic crime against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in "our" societies.

It is 23 years since this holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations Security Council and imposed punitive "sanctions" on the Iraqi population - ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam Hussein. It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, "blocked" - from chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with Depleted Uranium.

Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, explained why. "The children's vaccines", he said, "were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction". The British Government could get away with such an outrage because media reporting of Iraq - much of it manipulated by the Foreign Office - blamed Saddam Hussein for everything.

Under a bogus "humanitarian" Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire society's infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water. "Imagine," the UN Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von Sponeck, told me, "setting that pittance against the lack of clean water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable."

Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior UN official, had also resigned. "I was instructed," Halliday said, "to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults."

A study by the United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, found that between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000 "excess" deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. An American TV reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United Nations, asking her, "Is the price worth it?" Albright replied, "We think the price is worth it."

In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, Carne Ross, known as "Mr. Iraq", told a parliamentary selection committee, "[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire population a means to live."  When I interviewed Carne Ross three years later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. "I feel ashamed," he said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and maintaining the deception. "We would feed [journalists] factoids of sanitised intelligence," he said, "or we'd freeze them out."

On 25 September, a headline in the Guardian read: "Faced with the horror of Isis we must act." The "we must act" is a ghost risen, a warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq for which the Blair Government shared primary responsibility, Hain abused him on the BBC's Newsnight as an "apologist for Saddam". In 2003, Hain backed Blair's invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed the invasion as a "fringe issue".

Now Hain is demanding "air strikes, drones, military equipment and other support" for those "facing genocide" in Iraq and Syria. This will further "the imperative of a political solution". Obama has the same in mind as he lifts what he calls the "restrictions" on US bombing and drone attacks. This means that missiles and 500-pound bombs can smash the homes of peasant people, as they are doing without restriction in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia - as they did in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. On 23 September, a Tomahawk cruise missile hit a village in Idlib Province in Syria, killing as many as a dozen civilians, including women and children. None waved a black flag.

The day Hain's article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other across a table. Why not now in Iraq and Syria.

Like Ebola from West Africa, a bacteria called "perpetual war" has crossed the Atlantic. Lord Richards, until recently head of the British military, wants "boots on the ground" now. There is a vapid, almost sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Obama and their "coalition of the willing" - notably Australia's aggressively weird Tony Abbott - as they prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the blood of previous adventures never dried. They have never seen bombing and they apparently love it so much they want it to overthrow their one potentially valuable ally,  Syria. This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence file illustrates:

"In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces... a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals... a necessary degree of fear... frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention... the CIA and SIS should use... capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension."

That was written in 1957, though it could have been written yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. Last year, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that "two years before the Arab spring", he was told in London that a war on Syria was planned. "I am going to tell you something," he said in an interview with the French TV channel LPC, "I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria... Britain was organising an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate... This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned."

The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the west - Syria, Iran, Hezbollah. The obstacle is Turkey, an "ally" and a member of Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf medievalists to channel support to the Syrian "rebels", including those now calling themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of the most ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.

A truce - however difficult to achieve - is the only way out of this imperial maze; otherwise, the beheadings will continue. That genuine negotiations with Syria should be seen as "morally questionable" (the Guardian) suggests that the assumptions of moral superiority among those who supported the war criminal Blair remain not only absurd, but dangerous.

Together with a truce, there should be an immediate cessation of all shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the region's most festering open wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear. Palestine also offers hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world around them.

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq. With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger's latest self-serving tome has just been released with its satirical title, "World Order". In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a "key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century". Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his "statecraft".  Only when "we" recognise the war criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry.

ISIS: Is Baghdadi fictional?

http://landdestroyer.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/us-fightingterror-group-with-fictional.html


In 2007, the New York Times revealed that long-vilified "Islamic State" leader Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi did not exist, and that the creation of this fictional character was a ruse to obfuscate the role of foreigners in the creation and perpetuation of "Al Qaeda in Iraq." 

In an article titled, "Leader of Al Qaeda group in Iraq was fictional, U.S. military says," the NYT reports that: 

Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, the chief American military spokesman, said the elusive Baghdadi was actually a fictional character whose audio-taped declarations were provided by an elderly actor named Abu Adullah al-Naima.

The NYT would also reveal the purpose of the deception: 

The ruse, Bergner said, was devised by Abu Ayub al-Masri, the Egyptian-born leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who was trying to mask the dominant role that foreigners play in that insurgent organization.  

The ploy was to invent Baghdadi, a figure whose very name establishes his Iraqi pedigree, install him as the head of a front organization called the Islamic State of Iraq and then arrange for Masri to swear allegiance to him. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, sought to reinforce the deception by referring to Baghdadi in his video and Internet statements.

The admission by US military leaders, reported in the NYT, reveals that the so-called "Islamic State" was nothing more than an appendage of Al Qaeda - with Al Qaeda itself directly armed, funded, and backed by stalwart US allies, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Despite the NYT and the Pentagon's admissions, the entire ruse has continued, on an exponential scale.

US Intentionally Raised and Unleashed Al Qaeda Upon Iraq and Syria 

Al Qaeda's current presence in Iraq and Syria, and their leading role in the fight against the Iranian-leaning government's of Damascus and Baghdad, are the present-day manifestation of a Western criminal conspiracy exposed as early as 2007.  Revealed by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his 2007 article,  "The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?" it was stated explicitly that (emphasis added): 

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda. 

The Daily Beast would report in an article literally titled, "America's Allies Are Funding ISIS," that: 

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), now threatening Baghdad, was funded for years by wealthy donors in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, three U.S. allies that have dual agendas in the war on terror.
The extremist group that is threatening the existence of the Iraqi state was built and grown for years with the help of elite donors from American supposed allies in the Persian Gulf region. There, the threat of Iran, Assad, and the Sunni-Shiite sectarian war trumps the U.S. goal of stability and moderation in the region. 

Baghdadi Ruse Not Only to Hide "Foreign" role, but to Hide US-Saudi Involvement

Today, another "al-Baghdadi" allegedly leads the "Islamic State." His existence and leadership role is also unconfirmed and the likelihood that Al Qaeda's "Baghdadi ruse" is simply being repeated, amid feigned and complicit ignorance by the Pentagon, is all but confirmed.  Not only does the "Islamic State's" leader appear to be entirely fictional, but so is ISIS itself. It is nothing more than the rebranding of Al Qaeda, working seamlessly with other Western and Persian Gulf-backed militant fronts including Al Nusra, for the explicit goal of overthrowing the government of Syria and using the despoiled nation as a staging ground for a similar proxy war to be waged upon Iran.

The United States, bombing a fictional terrorist organization led by a non-existent, fictional character, is at the very heart of the ruse described by the NYT in 2007, a ruse that continues to present day. The goal is not to eliminate ISIS, but to use the fictional front as a pretext to further intervene on behalf of real militant extremists forming the core of the joint US-NATO-Saudi proxy front for the purpose of overthrowing the government in Damascus.

At face value, it would seem as if US policy has failed utterly, if in fact its goal was to truly neutralize ISIS. But with ISIS a fictional creation led by non-existent leaders, and the stated goal of the US being the overthrow of the Syrian government, the doubling of territory held by Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda's approach to cities like Aleppo on the brink of being liberated by Syrian troops, it is clear that America's presence in Syria - not to mention in neighboring Iraq - is to support, not stop these terrorist forces. 

Pretext for War in Afghanistan haunts Bush and Blair 10 years on.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/europe/16551-the-man-who-haunts-bush-and-blair

Yvonne Ridley

However, today, Middle East Monitor can publish the real story about the man who was used so ruthlessly to start the war in Iraq; it was his evidence, extracted under torture, which George W Bush and Tony Blair exploited to push for the invasion.

Powell revealed that the source for this information was a top asset, the most senior Al-Qaida operative in captivity. While he did not name him at the time it transpired that the intelligence had come from a Libyan man called Ibn Al-Shaikh Al-Libi. The details he passed over would turn out to be a tissue of lies and an embarrassment to US and UK spy agencies the following year.

It was the Libyan's evidence that had led to reports about the Ricin Plot when, just a few weeks earlier, sections of the British media scared the hell out of readers by revealing that anti-terror police had raided an Al-Qaida "factory of death" where equipment to make the deadly poison ricin had been found. One of the tabloid newspapers had a map of Britain plastered over its front page with a massive skull and crossbones in the middle just to make sure that readers realised the real horror of the situation. British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that, "The danger is present and real and with us now."

Yet the truth is that within 48 hours of the police raid Blair knew that the "poison-making equipment" was actually a coffee pot; scientists from the government's Porton Down "military science" laboratories informed Downing Street and the police that the suspicious substance was nothing more dangerous than coffee granules. Nevertheless, Tony Blair continued to let the British public believe that Al-Qaida was out to get them.

Blair also:

• Remained silent and allowed Colin Powell to brief the UN on a lie;
• Remained silent and allowed the public to continue to be terrified;
• Remained silent and allowed a group of innocent Algerians to be locked up for more than two years until their trial; and
• Remained silent when the trial collapsed after the jury at the Old Bailey discovered that there was no ricin and there was no plot.

When I tracked Ibn Al-Shaikh's family down to their home in Ajdabiya in north east Libya they told me that they believed that their son's death was some sort of macabre gift from Muammar Gaddafi to Bush and Blair. Of course, such an allegation is difficult to prove but there is no doubt that the news of his death will have come as a relief to those who were uneasy that the "man who started a war" was no longer alive and able to tell the world his account of what had happened in the run-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq.

What I have established is that Ibn Al-Shaikh did not take his own life; he was actually killed on the direct orders of the then Libyan leader Gaddafi. The date given to world was true, but the cause of death was not; Ibn Al-Shaikh did not commit suicide. People to whom I spoke who had met him in Abu Salim doubted the suicide story, as did his parents.

After the Libyan regime was toppled, one of the most senior prison guards accused of carrying out some of the most heinous crimes against inmates in Abu Salim was captured. I was allowed to meet him in a prison in Zawiyah, where he was being held anonymously and for his own safety; hundreds of ex-prisoners and their families wanted to mete out their own form of justice without his vile torture and abuse ever being discussed in an open court.

This man had nothing to lose by speaking to me and he met me freely and of his own accord. He told me quietly and in detail that Ibn Al-Shaikh had indeed been murdered. He described his injuries and explained that his body was left hanging by a bed sheet in his cell to give the impression that he had committed suicide.

It remains to be seen if any letters of thanks from Western governments to Gaddafi surface among the thousands of documents recovered from Libyan government offices following the 2011 revolution yet to be translated and read. Only recently did it emerge that Blair had written to Gaddafi thanking him for the "excellent cooperation" between the two countries after British and Libyan counter-terrorism agencies had worked together to arrange for Libyan dissidents to be kidnapped and flown to Tripoli, along with their families.

That letter was written in 2007 at the end of a period during which the dictator's intelligence officers were permitted to operate in Britain. According to the Guardian newspaper, they were approaching and intimidating Libyan refugees in an attempt to persuade them to work as informants for both countries.