Arab Spring: Egypt Strikes Back

US-funded agitators have office raids across Egypt.

Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

The LA Times reported, “Egypt raids foreign organizations’ offices in crackdown. Three U.S. groups are among those raided. Activists say the army is using the ruse of foreign intervention to stoke nationalism and deflect criticism of abuses.”

Photo: (AP) US State Department agitators from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) subsidary, the National Democratic Institute, standby as Egyptian security forces raid their offices. Despite NED veritably being run by Neo-Conservative, corporate-fascists who have signed PNAC documents declaring their intentions of achieving and maintaining a century of global hegemony, they and the US State Department would decry Egypt’s crackdown on their insidious activities as a slight against “human rights.”

However, it is no “ruse” as the US-funded “activists” claim. And while the LA Times denies its readership a documented back-story either confirming or denying “activist claims,” understanding the US role in funding sedition in Egypt is essential to understanding why not only are the raids of NGOs justified, but an absolute necessity to protect both Egyptian national sovereignty and international stability.

Documented Back-Story of the US-Engineered “Arab Spring” in Egypt

In January of 2011, we were told that “spontaneous,” “indigenous” uprising had begun sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, including Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, in what was hailed as the “Arab Spring.” It would be almost four months before the corporate-media would admit that the US had been behind the uprisings and that they were anything but “spontaneous,” or “indigenous.” In an April 2011 article published by the New York Times titled, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” it was stated:

A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.

The article would also add, regarding the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED):

The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department.

It is hardly a speculative theory then, that the uprisings were part of an immense geopolitical campaign conceived in the West and carried out through its proxies with the assistance of disingenuous organizations including NED, NDI, IRI, and Freedom House and the stable of NGOs they maintain throughout the world. Preparations for the “Arab Spring” began not as unrest had already begun, but years before the first “fist” was raised, and within seminar rooms in D.C. and New York, US-funded training facilities in Serbia, and camps held in neighboring countries, not within the Arab World itself.

In 2008, Egyptian activists from the now infamous April 6 movement were in New York City for the inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) summit, also known as Movements.org. There, they received training, networking opportunities, and support from AYM’s various corporate and US governmental sponsors, including the US State Department itself. The AYM 2008 summit report (page 3 of .pdf) states that the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, James Glassman attended, as did Jared Cohen who sits on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of State. Six other State Department staff members and advisers would also attend the summit along with an immense list of corporate, media, and institutional representatives.

Shortly afterward, April 6 would travel to Serbia to train under US-funded CANVAS, formally the US-funded NGO “Otpor” who helped overthrow the government of Serbia in 2000. Otpor, the New York Times would report, was a “well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States.” After its success it would change its name to CANVAS and begin training activists to be used in other US-backed regime change operations.

The April 6 Movement, after training with CANVAS, would return to Egypt in 2010, along with UN IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei. April 6 members would even be arrested while awaiting for ElBaradei’s arrival at Cairo’s airport in mid-February. Already, ElBaradei, as early as 2010, announced his intentions of running for president in the 2011 elections. Together with April 6, Wael Ghonim of Google, and a coalition of other opposition parties, ElBaradei assembled his “National Front for Change” and began preparing for the coming “Arab Spring.”

Clearly then, unrest was long planned, with activists from Tunisia and Egypt on record receiving training and support from abroad, so that they could return to their home nations and sow unrest in a region-wide coordinated campaign.

An April 2011 AFP report would confirm this, when US State Department’s Michael Posner stated that the “US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments.” The report went on to explain that the US “organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there.” Posner would add, “They went back and there’s a ripple effect.” That ripple effect of course, is the “Arab Spring.”

NED & Freedom House are Run by Warmongering Neo-Cons
The National Endowment for Democracy, despite the lofty mission statement articulated on its website, is nothing more than a tool for executing American foreign policy. Just as the military is used under the cover of lies regarding WMD’s and “terrorism,” NED is employed under the cover of bringing “democracy” to “oppressed” people. However, a thorough look at NED’s board of directors, as well as the board of trustees of its subsidiary, Freedom House, definitively lays to rest any doubts that may be lingering over the true nature of these organizations and the causes they support.

Upon NED’s board of directors we first find John Bohn who traded petrochemicals, was an international banker for 13 years with Wells Fargo, and is currently serving as a principal for a global advisory and consulting firm, GlobalNet Partners, which assists foreign businesses by making their “entry into the complex China market easy.” Surely Bohn’s ability to manipulate China’s political landscape through NED’s various activities both inside of China and along its peripheries constitutes an alarming conflict of interest. However, it appears “conflict of interest” is a reoccurring theme throughout both NED and Freedom House.

Bohn is joined by Rita DiMartino who worked for Council on Foreign Relations corporate member AT&T as “Vice President of Congressional Relations” as well as a member of the CFR herself. Also representing the Fortune 500 is Kenneth Duberstein, a board member of the war profiteering Boeing Company, big oil’s ConocoPhillips, and the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation. Duberstein also served as a director of Fannie Mae until 2007. He too is a CFR member as are two of the companies he chairs, Boeing and ConocoPhillips.

We then consider several of the certified warmongers serving upon NED’s board of directors including Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Will Marshall, and Vin Weber, all signatories of the pro-war, pro-corporate Project for a New American Century. Within the pages of documents produced by this “think tank” are pleas to various US presidents to pursue war against sovereign nations, the increase of troops in nations already occupied by US forces, and what equates to a call for American global hegemony in a Hitlerian 90-page document titled “Rebuilding Americas Defenses.” As we will see, this warmongering think tank serves as a nexus around which fellow disingenuous rights advocate Freedom House also gravitates.

The “Statement of Principles,” signed off by NED chairmen Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Vin Weber, states, “we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.” Of course by “international order” they mean meddling beyond the sovereign borders of the United States and is merely used as a euphemism for global imperialism. Other Neo-Con that signed their name to this statement include Freedom House’s Paula Dobriansky, Dan Quayle (formally), and Donald Rumsfeld (formally), along with Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Eliot Cohen, and Elliot Abrams.

A PNAC “Statment on Post-War Iraq” regarding a wholehearted endorsement of nation-building features the signatures of NED chairman Will Marshall, Freedom House’s Frank Carlucci (2002), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Martin Indyk (Lowy Institute board member, co-author of the conspiring “Which Path to Persia?” report), and William Kristol and Robert Kagan both of the warmongering Foreign Policy Initiative. It should be noted that the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is, for all intents and purposes, PNAC’s latest incarnation and just recently featured an open letter to House Republicans calling on them to disregard the will of the American people and continue pursuing the war in Libya. The FPI letter even suggests that the UN resolution authorizing the war in the first place, was holding America “hostage” and that it should be exceeded in order to do more to “help the Libyan opposition.”

An untitled PNAC letter addressed to then US President George Bush regarding a general call for global warmongering received the seal of approval from Freedom Houses’ Ellen Bork (2007), Ken Adelman (also former lobbyist for Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra via Edelman), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Neo-Con degenerates Richard Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the always disingenuous demagogue Daniel Pipes.

It is safe to say that neither NED nor Freedom House garners within its ranks characters appropriate for their alleged cause of “supporting freedom around the world.” It is also safe to say that the principles of “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights” they allegedly champion for, are merely being leveraged to co-opt well meaning people across the world to carry out their own self-serving agenda.

Considering NED and Freedom House’s role in fomenting the premeditated destabilization disingenuously titled the “spontaneous, indigenous” “Arab Spring,” and the true nature of those that constitute their boards of directors, we can examine the LA Times article regarding the recent raids for what it is – a white wash if not an outright lie. Similarly, the US State Department comments made condemning the recent raids in Egypt take on a new, farcical, and very hypocritical tone in light of the documented fraud the US is carrying out through the State Department and the organizations it is on record funding.

The Current NGO Raids in Egypt

The LA Times claims:

Egyptian security forces on Thursday raided the offices of 17 nongovernmental organizations, including three U.S.-based agencies, as part of a crackdown on foreign assistance that has drawn criticism from the West and threatened human rights groups and pro-democracy movements.

The move appeared to be part of a strategy to intimidate international organizations. The ruling military council has repeatedly blamed “foreign hands” for exploiting Egypt’s political and economic turmoil. But activists said the army was using the ruse of foreign intervention to stoke nationalism and deflect criticism of abuses.

The LA Times would go on to describe the US State Department’s response:

‘This action is inconsistent with the bilateral cooperation we have had over many years,’ State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said at a news briefing after the raids. ‘We call on the Egyptian government to immediately end the harassment of NGO staff, return all property and resolve this issue immediately.’

Egyptian soldiers and black-clad police officers swept into offices, interrogated workers and seized computers across the country. Those targeted included U.S. groups the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and Freedom House, which are funded by Congress to monitor elections and promote democracy overseas.

Ironically, US-stooge Mohamed ElBaradei would chime in on the side of the US State Department claiming, “human rights organizations are the guardians of the nascent freedom. Efforts to suffocate them will be a major setback and will surely backfire.” Freedom House director David Kramer, formally a State Department official under the Bush Administration, would claim the Egyptian army crackdown was “an intensive campaign by the Egyptian government to dismantle civil society through a politically motivated legal campaign aimed at preventing ‘illegal foreign funding’ of civil society operations in Egypt.” Meanwhile NDI president Ken Wollack said “cracking down on organizations whose sole purpose is to support the democratic process during Egypt’s historic transition sends a disturbing signal.”

We see then, US and Egyptian organizations that are documented frauds acting in absolute concert not only with each other, but in tandem with both the US State Department and a willfully ignorant corporate-media. These “NGOs” are the equivalent of Great Britain’s imperial networks that spanned the globe, supplanted national sovereignty in nation after nation and executed the will of the crown, not that of the people they ruled over from Ireland to India, from Myanmar to the American colonies.

Conclusion

Let us note and expose the perversion of ideals such as “representative governance” cheaply reduced to “democracy” or “mob rule,” and the obscene abuse of concepts such as “free speech” and “human rights” by organizations like NED and Freedom House who have themselves engineered conflicts that have resulted in genocide, state-sponsored terrorism, codified torture and indefinite detention as well as everything else that crawls out from beneath the rocks of Wall Street and London’s brand of corporate-fascism and its willing servants in America’s “Neo-Conservative” establishment and more recently Obama’s supposedly “liberal” presidency.

And while Egypt has taken up the challenge to directly confront traitors and foreign-funded sedition within their own sovereign borders, as has Belarus recently, Egypt is by far not the only nation suffering under the debilitating division and destruction NED and its US State Department-funded subsidiaries sow throughout nations.

Tunisia’s new president had literally served the US agenda for decades via his Paris-based, NED-funded “NGO.” The destabilization that his NGO contributed to paved the way for his coming to power. Likewise, a list of nations are documented to be under similar attack.

Myanmar: “Democracy icon” Aung San Suu Kyi’s entire political apparatus is US and British funded.

Thailand: Fraudulent NGOs like Prachatai, Thai Netizen, and many others are entirely funded by US State Department cash and are insidiously paving the way for Wall Street servant Thaksin Shinawatra to remove Thailand’s traditional institutions and replace it with US-installed “civil society.”

Russia: Moscow’s streets have been choked week after week with protesters led by verified servants of the US State Department, funded for years by NED and whose foreign-funded NGOs constitute the entirety of accusations of “fraud” in Russia’s recent elections.

Malaysia: NED-funded “Bersih” protesters are attempting to sow division and instability to pave the way for IMF stooge Anwar Ibrahim to return to power and enter the people of Malaysia back under Anglo-American servitude.

Egypt and Belarus have given the world a model to follow. Instead of striking out at throngs of protesters manipulated and used by these insidious organizations as the Egyptian military has been doing, they are now striking at the organizations and the foreign-funded traitors doing the manipulation in the first place. By exposing and attacking Wall Street and London’s network of insidious agents directly, the global destabilization they are attempting to carry out may just very well fail — and not only fail but leave those behind it naked in their megalomania and criminal intentions for all the world to see.

And finally, while Egyptians, and indeed the world, must scrutinize NGOs claiming to promote “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights,” they must likewise scrutinize those whom these NGOs are attacking. If the forces of “liberal activism” can be so completely hijacked, so can the forces of nationalism. We must then identify the corporate-financier interests driving this obscene agenda, and not only boycott and entirely replace them, but in the meantime, monitor their interactions not only with these NGOs now confirmed to be frauds, but inroads they may be making in compromising the nationalist forces they are attacking. Eternal vigilance is a price we must be willing to pay if freedom is truly something we aspire for.

Anthony Cartalucci is a syndicated independent journalist. Please visit and support him at landdestroyer.blogspot.com