~snip~
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 programmes 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 programmes 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, organisations 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 destabilisation."
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/NED/NED_of_US.html
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