Reply #75: Is this General Discussion:DLC? [View All]

[bloom]

Sheesh people - this is supposed to be a progressive website - not a site to support those who support coups against leaders of countries leaning left...

Like a lot a lot of people - I hadn't heard that much about NED or the IRI before the segment on Democracy Now!

Sounds like there are a lot of people who are afraid of people knowing about this stuff.


I suggest people read the Democracy Now! interview and explore the websites of these things themselves and not be bullied by the Clark or whoever people. And maybe NED does something good once in awhile. That would make it all the easier to hide/fund their nonsense.

This is a small snip of the larger interview:

Now, the historical record on the National Endowment for Democracy is very clear, when we look at the work of people like Philip Agee and William Robinson and William Blum, Noam Chomsky and others, and most recently, if we look at the work of attorney and independent journalist, Eva Golinger, who exposed, through Freedom of Information Act requests, the role that the N.E.D. played in attempting to subvert democracy and the revolutionary process that’s unfolding in Venezuela in 2002. The N.E.D. played a crucial role in fomenting the opposition to Hugo Chavez, and they did play a role in the attempted coup against him in April of 2002, and very much the same patterns we have seen develop in Haiti.

On your show, in 2004, you interviewed Max Blumenthal, who wrote an article, an important article for Salon that outlined the role of the International Republican Institute, and when we talk about the N.E.D., we can't talk about them without also talking about the International Republican Institute and the other affiliated organizations. There’s a virtual labyrinth of these organizations that receive funding that’s specifically earmarked for the undermining of any widespread social movements, any rudiments of popular democracy that should manifest, either in Latin America or anywhere in the world.

So, again, this is sort of the premise of what the National Endowment for Democracy really does, and as we look at what they're doing in Haiti – and how I was able to learn about what they’re currently doing in Haiti came about through the process of a first documentary reporting trip to Haiti in September and October of 2005, where we spoke to a number of N.E.D. grantees, Haitian organizations that received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy. I returned to Canada and set about to conduct a series of interviews with N.E.D. and any program officer, in particular, with I.R.I. officials, with in-country officials who are managing several million dollars in U.S.-funded democracy promotion activities, as you said also, that are linked closely to the Haitian elite, to the opposition organizations, such as the Group of 184, the Democratic Convergence. These are the organizations that agitated most strongly for the overthrow of Aristide and that were working with the N.E.D. and the I.R.I. in the years preceding the 2004 coup.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/23/1441204