CIA SURROGATE SPREADING DISINFORMATION IN U.S.

CIA SURROGATE SPREADING DISINFORMATION IN U.S.
http://alternet.org/mediaculture/20760/

EARTHA MELZER, IN THESE TIMES - Just before the election, a film
about Iraq hit art house theaters around the country. "Voices of
Iraq" claimed to be a groundbreaking film in which "150 DV cameras
[are] distributed across Iraq for the Iraqi people to show the world
who they are and what Iraq will be."

The results? People seem happy that Saddam is gone and optimistic
that, if the United States stays in Iraq, democracy will prevail.
They seem unafraid of bombs going off nearby. People say Saddam
funded al Qaeda. Former Iraqi political prisoners are shown laughing
off the stories of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib – what Arab man
wouldn't want a female American soldier to play with his penis?. . .

"Voices of Iraq" was promoted as a project in which "thousands of
ordinary Iraqis become filmmakers" as the cameras are passed hand to
hand and – amazingly – all returned to the filmmakers. But Archie
Drury, the Gulf War vet and actor who went to Iraq with the cameras,
told me that he actually shot some of the footage himself. Drury
also said that the Iraq Foundation was "extremely helpful" to him as
he tried to figure out how to get around and who to give the cameras
to. The foundation also supplied the torture footage.

The Iraq Foundation, based in Washington, is funded by the State
Department and the National Endowment for Democracy.

THIRD WORLD TRAVELER - The NED was set up in the early 1980s under
President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about
the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. ; The latter was a
remarkable period. ; Spurred by Watergate-the Church committee of
the Senate, the Pike committee of the House, and the Rockefeller
Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating
the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about
the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the
CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an
exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much
embarrassment.

Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these
awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of
these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name-
The National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED
would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for
decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with
CIA covert activities. It was a masterpiece. Of
politics, of public relations, and of cynicism. Thus it was that in
1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to "support
democratic institutions throughout the world through private, non-
governmental efforts". Notice the "non-governmental-part of the
image, part of the myth.

In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the
federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial
statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to
itself as an NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps
to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US
government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED
is a GO. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation
establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in 1991: "A
lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."
In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/National%20EndowmentDemo.html

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MOCKINGBIRD - The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA