Veteran Journalist Reveals CIA Funding Anti-Duterte Media Outfits To Destroy Duterte Gov’t
The National Endowment For Democracy (NED), accused of being
a channel for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) propaganda and destabilization
operations in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, has stepped up its funding for
three local media outfits that have been publishing articles in the Internet
very critical of President Duterte and his administration.
These media outfits getting substantial amounts from NED are
the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ), the Center for Media
Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR), and Vera Files.
NED documents show that for 2015 – the earliest year for
which data is available – 2016 and 2017, it gave the PCIJ $106,900; Vera Files
$70,000, and CMFR, $278,000. (Another funder of Vera Files is Reporters without
Borders, which is also recipient of NED funds.)
Even if NED wasn’t a CIA conduit, it is an institution
funded by the US government, and therefore advances US interests. Shouldn’t we
be outraged that the US government is funding anti-Duterte media outfits here?
While these moneys may seem small, an NGO activist in Europe
pointed out this was the same pattern in Ukraine several years back. The NED
initially extended modest funds to Ukrainian opposition groups, and increased
them substantially as the political crisis in that country broke out that led
to the overthrow in 2014 of pro-Russia Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych, to
be replaced by pro-US leaders.
NED president Carl Gershman, who has been openly rabidly
anti-Russian would boast after Yanukovych’s fall: “Ukraine is the biggest
prize“. (Another US outfit that has funded NGOs in Ukraine that helped topple
Yanukovych is Omidyar Network, owned by tycoon Pierre Omdiyar. It is one of the
two foreign financiers of another anti-Duterte media outfit, Rappler.)
Banned by Russia
Convinced that it has been a CIA front, Russia banned NED in
2015, claiming that it “poses a threat to the constitutional order of the
Russian Federation and the defensive capability and security of the government.”
An editorial in the Washington Times recently urged Trump to
stop Congress’ funding of NED: “Killing the NED would have another big benefit
to America and the world: It would end the meddlesome activities of the
endowment’s longtime leader, Gershman, who as president of the organization
since its founding, has acted as a kind of grand-scale global busybody,
dispensing some $100 million a year in behalf of efforts to undermine
governments around the world.”
Among the many respected investigative journalists who have
exposed the NED as a CIA conduit is Robert Perry, who broke many of the
Iran-Contra stories for the Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. He was
awarded the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984 and the I.F. Stone
Medal for Journalistic Independence by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for
Journalism in 2015.
He explained in a 2014 article in consortiumnews.com, which
he founded in 1995 as the first investigative news magazine in the Internet:
“NED is a US government-funded organization created in 1983
to do what the Central Intelligence Agency previously had done in financing
organizations inside target countries to advance US policy interests and, if
needed, help in ‘regime change.’
It was founded at the initiative of Cold War hardliners in
the Reagan administration, including then-CIA Director William J. Casey.
Essentially, NED took over what had been the domain of the CIA, i.e. funneling
money to support foreign political movements that would take the US side
against the Soviet Union.
Though the Reagan administration’s defenders insist that
this “democracy” project didn’t “report” to Casey, documents that have been
declassified from the Reagan years show Casey as a principal instigator of this
operation, which also sought to harness funding from right-wing billionaires
and foundations to augment these activities.
In one note to then-White House counselor Edwin Meese, Casey
endorsed plans ‘for the appointment of a small Working Group to refine the
proposal and make recommendations to the President on the merit of creating an
Institute, Council or National Endowment in support of free institutions
throughout the world.’
Casey’s note, written on CIA stationery, added, “Obviously
we here should not get out front in the development of such an organization,
nor do we wish to appear to be a sponsor or advocate. We would be pleased to
make suggestions on the composition of the Working Group and Commission.’”
Trojan Horse
William Blum, a former State Department official and author
of several books critical of US foreign policy called NED the “CIA’s Trojan
horse”. He quoted NED co-founder Allen Weinstein as telling the Washington Post
in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
The NED has telegraphed its message that Duterte is now on
its cross-hairs.
In an article in a journal last July, Christopher Walker,
NED vice president for studies and analysis, claimed that the Philippines had
caught the “authoritarian virus.” He lumped the Philippines with Tanzania,
Bangladesh, South Africa and Hungary where “there has been a swift decline in
democratic accountability”. In its website, NED declares: “The Duterte
administration represents a sharp break from the Aquino administration and its
emphasis on good governance.”
If you were media outfits relying on its funds, wouldn’t you
toe NED’s anti-Duterte line and prove it through your articles?
I asked Vera Files president Ellen Tordesillas if she was
aware of claims by respected researchers that the NED has been and is a conduit
of the CIA. She replied: “I have not heard or read from any ‘respected
researcher’ about NED and CIA.”
Tordesillas, a veteran columnist of the Malaya and Abante
newspapers, has been known to be a shrill critic of Duterte, and has been
active in social media posting anti-Duterte memes. Her favorite target has been
blogger Mocha Uson, now an assistant secretary in the Malacañang communications
group.
Hostile to CMFR
I asked CMFR’s executive director Melinda Quintos-de Jesus
who are the funders of her outfit. She gave me a list of 12 funders, 10 of
which were foreign, including NED.
When I asked her the same question on whether she was aware
of NED’s alleged links to the CIA, she replied: “There is no point in further
engaging in this conversation as you are clearly hostile to CMFR.” If
government officials and other subjects of journalists behaved like de Jesus,
newspapers would contain only press releases.
(De Jesus is the wife of Edilberto de Jesus who had been
personally very close to the Cojuangco family and was President Cory Aquino’s
adviser on rural development. He writes a very pro-Yellow column in the
Philippine Daily Inquirer. His most recent column gloated that the Philippines
under Duterte is now No. 1 in the Global Impunity Index. He didn’t mention that
the index was based on data for 2014, when his idol President Aquino had been
president for four years.)
I posed the same questions through several emails to PCIJ
executive director Malou Mangahas, an old friend and colleague in the outfit
which I helped found in 1989, but which the center denies. (The PCIJ chairman
is GMA7 media man Howie Severino.)
At the deadline for submitting this column, I had not
received any response from Mangahas, not even an acknowledgement of the receipt
of my emails, or that reply I often get from people who can’t be told the
truth, “Go to hell.”
I have not been a fan of Vera Files, PCIJ, and CMFR because
these have had that distinct Yellow DNA: hypocrisy and a holier-than-thou
attitude. Aquino, the Liberal Party and their gang profess to be crusading for
some noble cause – democracy, rule of law, human rights – but in reality have
only advanced the interests of their gang of oligarchs.
These three outfits – include Rappler, of course – all
profess to have as their goal the professionalism of journalism as a tool for
democracy.
They claim to be objective, but any casual reading of the
posts of these outfits will show beyond any doubt that they are merely
following the agenda of the Yellow Cult based on that worn-out EDSA playbook:
To demonize Duterte so much for public outrage to unseat him. That they are
funded by an alleged CIA conduit is huge slap on our nation, and my profession.
Shouldn’t we do what the US does through its Foreign Agents
Registration Act, and require political and media enterprises to first register
their foreign funders? PCIJ, Vera, and CMFR appear to be 90 percent funded by
foreign entities, while Rappler, about 50 percent.
But then that wouldn’t be fair, when we allow the country’s
biggest media outfits to be controlled or funded by foreigners, namely
Indonesian magnate Anthoni Salim in Philippine Star and TV5 and North Base
Media and Omidyar in Rappler. Isn’t this an outright violation of the
Constitution?
Can somebody please explain to me: Why is it that
foreign-funded media outfits, newspapers in the West, and those who have
abandoned their country to enjoy life abroad are the most critical of Duterte,
while Filipinos living here who are and will be affected by this President’s
actions are mostly supportive of him?
By: Rigoberto Tiglao
Source: The Manila Times
Veteran Journalist Reveals CIA Funding Anti-Duterte Media Outfits To Destroy Duterte Gov’t
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October 17, 2017
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