Truth as first casualty: Deconstructing disinformation campaign on Iran riots death toll
By Yousef Ramazani | Press TV | January 19, 2026
Amid the foreign-instigated riots and terrorism that struck Iran in recent weeks, a parallel narrative war also unfolded, centered on the deliberate propagation of wildly inflated and unverifiable casualty figures.
These figures were designed to manufacture global outrage and legitimize calls for American military intervention and yet another aggression against the Islamic Republic.
The discourse surrounding riot-related casualties in the past few weeks has been fundamentally shaped by a coordinated disinformation campaign originating from US-funded organizations operating entirely outside Iran. Central to this campaign was the circulation of sensational death tolls that bore little resemblance to verifiable facts on the ground.
The figure of 12,000 deaths was initially promoted by the New York–based Center for Human Rights in Iran, an organization financially linked to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US Congress–funded entity with a well-documented history of interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states.
This claim was presented without transparent methodology, primary data, or independent verification, raising eyebrows both inside and outside the country.
Despite this lack of evidence, the narrative was uncritically amplified by major Western media outlets and online influencers, creating a pervasive – but demonstrably false – impression of mass violence. Iranian officials consistently rejected these claims, presenting forensic evidence of manipulated datasets and instead reporting a death toll in the hundreds, the majority of whom were security personnel and civilians killed by armed rioters with foreign backing.
The subsequent escalation of these figures to even more implausible numbers – such as claims of 52,000 dead – underscores the persistence of a hybrid warfare strategy aimed at demonizing Iran while obscuring or outright excusing the violence committed by its adversaries.
Genesis of a false narrative: Center for Human Rights in Iran and its backers
The primary source of the sensational 12,000-fatality claim was neither an Iranian authority nor a verifiable international body, but the Center for Human Rights in Iran, an organization headquartered in New York. Despite its name, the group operates entirely outside Iran and has no physical presence or investigative capacity within the country.
An examination of its leadership and funding reveals a clear political orientation inconsistent with impartial human rights monitoring. The chair of its board is Minky Worden, an American activist with a documented history of spearheading anti-China advocacy campaigns, including efforts to politicize the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Financially, the organization relies heavily on grants from the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, D.C. The NED is a privately managed but publicly funded institution that receives annual allocations from the US Congress through the State Department budget.
Historians, observers, and former intelligence officials have long characterized the NED as a transparent successor to activities once conducted covertly by the Central Intelligence Agency, particularly the funding of political opposition groups and media outlets under the banner of “democracy promotion.”
The NED’s record includes extensive involvement in “regime-change” efforts across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Asia – regions that have consistently featured in American foreign policy campaigns.
Amplification network: From NED grantees to global headlines
The unfounded casualty figure did not remain confined to a single organization. It was rapidly injected into the global media bloodstream through a tightly networked ecosystem of interconnected groups.
Other NED-funded entities, including the Human Rights Activists News Agency and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, echoed and cross-cited the same unsubstantiated statistics.
Operating largely from the US, these organizations function within a closed loop of mutual citation, manufacturing the illusion of multiple independent confirmations.
This echo chamber was then leveraged by major Western media outlets, including BBC Persian, Voice of America, The Washington Post, and ABC News, which incorporated the figures into their reporting.
Typically, these outlets attributed the numbers vaguely to “human rights groups” or “activists,” effectively laundering the information and granting it a veneer of credibility without conducting any independent verification. This failure is particularly striking given the well-documented funding sources and political objectives of the originating organizations.
Crucially, much of this coverage omitted the context that these groups are financially and ideologically aligned with the very governments actively seeking to pressure, isolate, and destabilize the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Iranian rebuttal and exposure of fabricated evidence
Iranian government officials and domestic media mounted a comprehensive, forensic rebuttal to the widespread disinformation campaign. The judiciary’s spokesperson and the head of the Supreme National Security Council categorically denounced the claim of 12,000 deaths as “psychological warfare” and a “complete fabrication.”
They publicly challenged the originators of the figure to provide a single verifiable name, death certificate, or precise locational detail to substantiate their alleged casualty lists, a challenge that was never answered.
Cyber units affiliated with Iranian media conducted technical analyses tracing the viral dissemination of the figures to known bot networks operating from locations in the United States, Israeli-occupied territories, and Albania.
Further investigations revealed that purported “martyr lists” were riddled with fraud: hundreds of duplicate entries, names of individuals who had died decades earlier during the Holy Defense war, and even names copied directly from public cemetery records in other countries.
The case of Saghar Etemadi became emblematic of the deception. Widely declared a “martyr” by external outlets, she was later confirmed by the Iranian judiciary and by her own family to be alive and receiving medical treatment for injuries sustained during a riot.
Iranian reports emphasized that the actual death toll, resulting from terrorist acts carried out by foreign-backed armed rioters, numbered in the hundreds. A significant proportion of the victims were police officers, Basij forces, and civilians deliberately targeted by violent saboteurs.
Escalation to absurdity and the weaponization of atrocity propaganda
The disinformation ecosystem demonstrated its capacity for rapid and unchecked escalation.
From the initial claim of 12,000 deaths, narratives soon proliferated across social media platforms and activist circles alleging 52,000 fatalities and more than 300,000 wounded.
These figures, divorced from any conceivable reality, serve a deliberate psychological and political function. They are designed to induce global emotional shock, overwhelm critical scrutiny, and portray the Iranian state as uniquely and exceptionally undemocratic
This narrative fulfills a dual geopolitical purpose, according to experts. First, it seeks to manufacture consent for foreign intervention, intensified sanctions, or diplomatic isolation by invoking a humanitarian pretext. Second, it functions as a tool of distraction and moral laundering.
By creating a false equivalence, or even attempting to eclipse, the documented casualties inflicted by the Israeli regime in Gaza, the campaign aims to redirect global outrage and obscure the horrendous crimes of Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s allies.
Influencers and online networks aligned with the Israeli regime aggressively promoted the fabricated Iranian casualty figures in an effort to undermine the global Palestine solidarity movement and digitally overwrite the extensive evidence of Israeli war crimes.
Underlying architecture: NED as a US “regime-change” instrument
The role of the National Endowment for Democracy is central to understanding the structural foundations of this disinformation campaign. Leaked documents and historical analyses reveal the NED as a key instrument of US foreign policy, operating as a conduit for government funds to support political movements aligned with American strategic interests abroad.
The organization was established following congressional scrutiny of CIA covert operations. One of its founders, Allen Weinstein, openly acknowledged that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
The NED’s activities extend far beyond Iran. It has been a principal funder and organizer of so-called “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and has been formally designated an “undesirable organization” by Russia for interference in domestic affairs. Its involvement in Hong Kong and Xinjiang has prompted sanctions from China.
In the Iranian context, the NED has for decades funded an array of exile media outlets, advocacy groups, and cultural figures, with the explicit aim of cultivating an alternative political leadership.
A leaked 2024 proposal revealed NED plans to funnel State Department resources into an “Iran Freedom Coalition” composed of US neoconservatives and selected exile figures, exposing the direct link between humanitarian narrative construction and overt regime-change ambitions.
A perennial pattern of narrative warfare
The manipulation of casualty figures during the 2025–2026 unrest is not an isolated episode, but part of a recurring tactic in the long-running hybrid war against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The pattern is consistent and predictable: a US-funded NGO, operating safely from New York or Washington, releases an unverifiable and sensational claim. A network of affiliated organizations and social media assets amplifies it, after which mainstream Western media repackages it as credible reporting.
The objective is never truth, but the construction of a carefully engineered perceptual reality serving strategic interests. This reality is designed to demonize independent states, legitimize coercive policies, and erase or minimize the crimes of allied regimes.
The Iranian experience, from the myth of 12,000 deaths to the even more fantastical claim of 52,000, stands as a stark case study in the weaponization of information in the 21st century.
In this domain, the battlefield is not only the street, but global consciousness itself, and the most powerful weapons are often not missiles, but meticulously crafted falsehoods.
Every House Democrat Votes Against Defunding A Cutout Of The CIA
The Dissident | January 18, 2026
Recently, U.S. representative Eli Crane introduced a provision into the recent spending package that would cut funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a cutout of the CIA used to advance regime change abroad.
In response to his “amendment to defund NED” every House Democrat, including progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, and Ilhan Omar, voted against it, along with 81 Republicans, slapping down the amendment 291 to 127.
But what is the NED, the CIA cutout that the Washington uniparty rejected ending funding for?
The NED, which was officially created by Ronald Regan in 1984, was described in 1995 by CIA whistleblower Philip Agee as the CIA’s “sidekick” which functioned as “a mega conduit” for “the millions or the tens of millions that are set aside for the meddling in the internal affairs of other countries”.
Allen Weinstein, the head of the NED, boasted in a interview with the Washington Post in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”.
Indeed, the NED has been used for America’s “meddling in the internal affairs of other countries”, playing a role in U.S. coups and coup attempts in Venezuela (2002-2025), Haiti (2004), Ukraine (2014), Nicaragua (2018), Bolivia (2019), Belarus (2020), and Romania (2024).
In 2004, the NED provided funding and training for opposition activists who overthrew Haiti’s democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Mother Jones reported at the time when the coup took place, “several of the people who had attended IRI (International Republican Institute, a subsidiary of the NED) trainings were influential in the toppling of Aristide”.
Mother Jones noted, “In 2002 and 2003, IRI used funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to organize numerous political training sessions in the Dominican Republic and Miami for some 600 Haitian leaders. Though IRI’s work is supposed to be nonpartisan — it is official U.S. policy not to interfere in foreign elections — a former U.S. diplomat says organizers of the workshops selected only opponents of Aristide and attempted to mold them into a political force”.
Similarly, in 2002, the NED, through the IRI, helped support a U.S. backed military coup against Venezuela’s elected president, Hugo Chavez, with Mother Jones noting, “In April 2002, a group of military officers launched a coup against Chavez, and leaders of several parties trained by IRI joined the junta.”
In 2015, the NED gave $300,000 to another one of its subsidiaries the National Democratic Institute (NDI) to meddle in Venezuela’s National Assembly elections of 2015 and swing them to the U.S.-backed opposition through “mobilizing a voter database that identified and targeted swing voters through social media”.
As Jacobin Magazine noted , “indeed, in December 2015, the opposition won a majority in the Venezuelan National Assembly for the first time since Chávez came to power in 1999” adding, “the NDI claims credit for the opposition’s success, writing that this strategy ‘ultimately played an important role in their resounding victory in the 2015 election’ and that a ‘determining factor in the success of the coalition in the parliamentary elections of 2015 was a two-year effort prior to the election”.
Along with this, the NED funded opposition politicians such as Maria Corina Machado, who helped certify the 2002 coup, drove a failed referendum against Chavez in 2004, and “was also one of the political architects of La Salida, the 2014 opposition campaign that called for escalated protests, including guarimba tactics”, which- as journalist Michelle Ellner noted, “weren’t ‘peaceful protests’ as the foreign press claimed; they were organized barricades meant to paralyze the country and force the government’s fall. Streets were blocked with burning trash and barbed wire, buses carrying workers were torched, and people suspected of being Chavista were beaten or killed. Even ambulances and doctors were attacked. Some Cuban medical brigades were nearly burned alive. Public buildings, food trucks, and schools were destroyed. Entire neighborhoods were held hostage by fear while opposition leaders like Machado cheered from the sidelines and called it ‘resistance.’”
Similarly, the NED played a role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine against the country’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, which turned Ukraine into a U.S. proxy state.
As journalist Branko Marcetic reported, “Just two months before they (protests in Ukraine) broke out, the NED’s then president, pointing to Yanukovych’s European outreach, wrote that ‘the opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help.’ In practice, this meant funding groups like New Citizen, which the Financial Times reported ‘played a big role in getting the protest up and running,’ led by a pro-EU opposition figure. Journalist Mark Ames discovered the organization had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from US democracy promotion initiatives.”
The protests were eventually taken over by far-right paramilitary groups, who fired sniper shots at protestors in the Maidan square, a massacre that was falsely blamed on Yanukovych’s forces by the U.S. and used to justify supporting his removal and installing a puppet government.
The real motive behind the coup, as Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko put it was because “The West, however, did not want a Ukrainian president who pursued a multi-vector foreign policy; the West needed Ukraine to be anti-Russia, with clear opposition between Kyiv and Moscow. Yanukovych was open to broad cooperation with the West, but he was not willing to confront Russia and China. The West could not accept this ambivalence. The West needed a Ukraine charged for confrontation and even war against Russia, a Ukraine it could use as a tool in the fight against Russia” adding, “this was why Western politicians, diplomats, and civil society representatives actively supported the Euromaidan as a mechanism for overthrowing Yanukovych, even going as far as providing financial support for the ‘revolutionary’ process”
The NED tried and failed to foment another “Maidan” in Nicaragua from 2014-2018, in an attempt to remove the country’s leader, Daniel Ortega, the head of the Sandinista party, which fought the CIA-backed contras in the 1980s.
When riots broke out in the country in 2018, the outlet Global Americans reported that the NED, “laid the groundwork for insurrection” noting that, “Since 2014, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), … has spent $4.1 million on projects in Nicaragua” adding, “it’s becoming more and more clear that the U.S. support has helped play a role in nurturing the current uprisings.”
The uprising was not peaceful protests but a violent NED backed coup attempt. Journalist John Perry, who reported on the coup attempt from the ground noted , “Public buildings and the houses of government supporters were burnt down by protesters; shops were ransacked; most businesses and all banks and schools were closed. The main secondary school for 3,700 pupils was burnt out twice. The police station was under siege for 45 days, so no police were on patrol. No cars or taxis could use the streets; passing the barricades on foot involved being checked by youths with weapons and on occasion threatened. Dissent was met with violence (before the barricades went up, I took part in a ‘peace’ march which was pelted with stones). At first protesters had homemade mortars, but later many acquired more serious weapons such as AK-47s; paid troublemakers manned the barricades at night-time. A police official captured nearby was tortured and then killed, his body burnt at a barricade.”
Similarly, the NED played a role in the U.S. backed military coup against Bolivia’s elected leader, Evo Morales, in 2019.
The U.S. backed coup was sparked when the Organization of American States (OSA) falsely claimed that Evo Morales stole the 2019 election, which was used to justify a military coup and the installation of a military dictatorship led by U.S. puppet, Jeanine Añez.
As journalist Yanis Iqbal, reported the lie that Evo Morales stole the elected was heavily pushed by the NED writing that, “In 2019, NED ran programmes such as Countering Disinformation in the Political Process, Informing Citizens Via Digital Platforms, Monitoring the National Electoral Process, Promoting an Informed Electorate, Providing Independent Analysis and Information, Providing Independent Political News and Election Information and Stimulating an Informed National Debate” which pushed the lie used to justify the coup, adding, “These NED tactics conclusively point towards a scheme of carefully choreographed propaganda and electoral interventionism which contributed to the 2019 Bolivia coup.”
Similar to the Maidan coup in Ukraine, the NED continued to undermine governments in Eastern Europe, which were seen as too close to Russia.
When protests broke out against Belarus’ Russia-aligned president, Aleksandr Lukashenko in 2020, journalist Alan Macleod reported, “on a Zoom meeting infiltrated by activists and released to the public, the NED’s senior Europe Program officer, Nina Ognianova, boasted that the groups leading the nationwide demonstrations against Lukashenko … were trained by her organization. ‘We don’t think that this movement that is so impressive and so inspiring came out of nowhere — that it just happened overnight,’ she said, noting that the NED had made a ‘modest but significant contribution’ to the protests.”
He added, “On the same call, NED President Carl Gershman added that ‘we support many, many groups and we have a very, very active program throughout the country, and many of the groups obviously have their partners in exile.’ Gershman also boasted that the Belarusian government was powerless to intervene and stop them: ‘We’re not like Freedom House or NDI [the National Democratic Institute] and the IRI [International Republican Institute]; we don’t have offices. So if we’re not there, they can’t kick us out.’”
Similarly, the NED intervened in the 2024 election in Romania to back a judicial coup against the candidate Calin Georgescu, because he was opposed to funding the proxy war in Ukraine (which was in large part sparked by the NED backed coup in 2014).
Romania’s intelligence agencies released an evidence-free report which falsely claimed that a TikTok campaign backed by Russia was supporting his campaign.
As the New York Times noted, “The intelligence documents released publicly by Romania provided no evidence of a Russian role, only the observation that ‘Russia has a history of interfering in the electoral processes of other states’ and vague claims that what happened in Romania was ‘similar’ to well-documented Russian election interference in neighboring Moldova”.
Furthermore, the investigative outlet Snoop reported that the TikTok campaign cited in the intelligence report was actually paid for by the Romanian National Liberal Party, the party opposing Calin Georgescu.
Based on this fabricated report, Calin Georgescu was barred from running in the election, despite winning the first round of the vote.
His opponent, Elena Lascon, said at the time, “Today is the moment when the Romanian state trampled over democracy. God, the Romanian people, the truth and the law will prevail and will punish those who are guilty of destroying our democracy”.
This lawfare campaign was backed by the NED. Journalist Lee Fang uncovered that, “think tanks and civil society NGOs funded by the U.S. – via USAID foreign aid programs, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and the State Department – have served as the most vocal voices championing the judicial coup”.
The fact that every House Democrat and many House Republicans voted against defunding the ostensible NGO that has been used by the CIA to back coups around the world – including against democratically elected leaders – that do not bow down to Washington’s demands shows that both parties will continue to keep the deep state’s infrastructure running.
Deep-state forces from abroad instigated violence in Nepal – former foreign minister
RT | January 13, 2026
External deep-state forces were instrumental in instigating the September 2025 violence in Nepal that led to the ouster of the government, its former foreign minister has told RT India.
K.P. Sharma Oli resigned as Nepal’s prime minister after violent clashes – known as the Gen Z protests – killed 77 and injured more than 2,000. Pradeep Kumar Gyawali, a former foreign minister, has now backed Oli’s assertion that Gen Z protests that led to the ouster of the government were backed by external forces.
“Those elements who were actively engaged with the deep state, who used the cross-border misinformation and disinformation to instigate the violence, they were active,” he told RT India in an exclusive interview.
The remarks came after Oli told RT India about external influences in the uprising last year.
Gyawali said Kathmandu’s growing engagement with India and China and its aspiration of being a bridge for the economic development of Nepal between the two neighboring countries “was not a very good message to some powers.”
He added, “[They] wanted to use Nepal’s geostrategic location for their policy in their favor. So maybe our engagement with our neighboring countries may have some grievances to the big powers as well.”
The Grayzone has cited leaked documents to reveal that the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED) had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars tutoring Nepalese young people to stage the protests.
The Gen Z protests happened as the US sought to neutralize Chinese and Indian influence over Kathmandu, Grayzone investigations revealed.
The NED is officially a US State Department-funded nonprofit that provides grants to support ‘democratic initiatives’ worldwide.
The International Republican Institute (IRI), a NED division, has been accused of funding clandestine activities in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, apart from funneling tens of millions of dollars to Ukrainian political entities and anti-Russian interests.
Hungary: Major opposition news portal funded by USAID, NED as well as Soros foundation to spread disinformation
Remix News | November 21, 2025
Hungary’s Office for the Protection of Sovereignty has revealed new details regarding the Telex news portal and the funding it has received from the United States, including USAID.
Telex has claimed that it does not depend on foreign funding, but year after year, according to an analysis by the Office, it has received money from foreign governments, including the U.S., and Brussels, reports the Mandiner news portal.
Of note is that Telex received $10,000 through the Internews EPIC applications implemented within the framework of USAID’s activities in Hungary.
USAID and its activities have since been terminated by the Trump administration.
According to the office, headed by Tamás Lanczi, the president of the Office for the Protection of Sovereignty, Telex received the money from the machine controlled as a political weapon by the democratic American government through the “Independent Media Center.”
The Office for Sovereignty Protection has already identified the Internews Foundation in previous reports as a key player in the media manipulation machine that the American deep state has been operating for more than four decades.
Among the organization’s funders are: USAID, used by the Biden administration to fund political interventions around the world, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has been described in detail in the office’s previous reports.
NED, Mandiner notes, played a major role in the illegal foreign campaign financing of the opposition coalition in the 2022 parliamentary elections.
Internews provides media outlets not only with money, but also with technology and content suitable for spreading narratives, which must represent given values and messages and produce activity on designated topics.
The condition for the support, the Office emphasized, is the creation of narratives that allow the American progressive elite to put pressure on the governments and decision-makers of the given countries, and to influence the citizens of the given country.
The organization is highly active in the Central European region, primarily in Hungary and Poland. Its joint media development programs with USAID have played a role in the operation of certain Hungarian media outlets since 2010 in the form of tenders, professional training, and infrastructure support.
The Office’s investigations revealed that, in exchange for money, Internews expects the media outlets to make the topics it determines part of the public discourse, to frame narratives that are contrary to the interests of the client as disinformation, and to provide the funded editorial offices with mandatory content.
As Tamás Lánczi wrote previously, “Telex.hu journalists received almost HUF 200 million of U.S. government money.”
The president of the Office for the Protection of Sovereignty announced that documents reviewed by his organization show that the project called Telex Academy was also implemented with a grant of approximately $740,000 from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) of the United States Department of State.
The vast majority of the money was paid to Telex journalists.
Kyrgyzstan’s Forgotten Colour Revolution
By Kit Klarenberg | Global Delinquents | November 6, 2025
October 5th marked the 25th anniversary of the world’s first “colour revolution”, in Yugoslavia. A lavishly-funded, multi-pronged CIA, NED and USAID campaign exploited civil society actors, in particular youth groups, to dislodge President Slobodan Milosevic from power. Such was the effort’s success, US officials and media openly boasted about Washington’s central role. A slick ‘documentary’ on the unrest, Bringing Down A Dictator, was even produced. Milosevic’s fall also provided a blueprint for countless future ‘soft coups’, which continue to this day.
So it was, one by one in the early 2000s, insufficiently pro-Western governments throughout the former Soviet sphere were toppled using strategies and tactics identical to those deployed against Belgrade. A common ruse was for the US to fund, via local NGOs, a “parallel vote tabulation” to project an election’s outcome in advance, and publicise the data before results were officially announced. As in Yugoslavia, PVT figures differing from formal tallies were the spark that ignited Georgia’s 2003 ‘Rose Revolution’, and Ukraine’s 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’.
Over subsequent years, much has been written by academics, historians and independent journalists about those colour revolutions. Conversely, Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 ‘Tulip Revolution’ has gone almost entirely unremarked upon, and is largely forgotten now. Yet, its destructive consequences reverberate today. Hitherto the freest and most stable state in Central Asia, post-colour revolution Bishkek careened from crisis to crisis, with multiple governments collapsing along the way. It’s only in recent years – following another Anglo-American coup in 2020 – the country has regained its economic, political, and social balance.
Pre-2005, Kyrgyzstan was not an obvious colour revolution candidate. Upon its 1991 independence from the Soviet Union, the country quickly established itself not only as the most democratic and open in the region, but a dependable US ally. President Askar Akayev, a former scientist with zero political background, was organically popular, and moreover made clear his economic policies were informed by arch-capitalist Adam Smith, not Karl Marx. In other words, Bishkek was primed to do business with the West.
Akayev moreover allowed a relatively free media to develop, and welcomed widespread foreign civil society penetration. Thousands of European and US-funded non-governmental organisations duly opened up shop locally. At one stage, the President quipped, “if the Netherlands is a land of tulips, then Kyrgyzstan is a land of NGOs.” His comments proved bitterly ironic, given the title of the colour revolution that eventually unseated him. In another deeply sour twist, it was precisely Akayev’s welcoming of Western financial and societal infiltration that was his undoing.
A self-laudatory USAID factsheet on the President’s removal notes, from 1994 onwards $68 million was funnelled into Kyrgyzstan. This vast windfall was used to train NGOs “to lobby government,” finance “private newspapers” critical of Akayev, establish an “American University” locally, and much more besides. The Tulip Revolution stands today as a stark warning to governments the world over of the dangers of permitting such entities to operate on their soil with impunity – and how often, even pro-Western leaders can fall victim to their mephitic influence.
‘Defeat Dictators’
Despite much goodwill built up since 1991, in October 2003 Akayev angered Washington by inviting Moscow to open an airbase not far from Bishkek, and just a few dozen kilometres from the Empire’s vast Manas military installation, one of a cluster constructed by the US across Central Asia post-9/11 to facilitate the War On Terror. Such insubordination was sufficient to mark the President for removal, and preparations for a colour revolution according to a by-then well-honed formula began almost immediately.
Akayev was not unwise to this risk, warning in December 2004 of an “orange danger” of the kind that had just engulfed Ukraine threatening Kyrgyzstan, in advance of the country’s elections in February the next year. As it was, the results were far too clean to allege rigging or other shenanigans, as with prior colour revolutions. A detailed investigation by the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations in fact praised a “positive… lack of reports of vote-buying, voter intimidation, and harassment of journalists.”
Washington’s vast local standing army of civil society insurrectionists began causing havoc anyway. Some operated under the banner of KelKel, a group directly inspired by US-sponsored revolutionary youth factions in Yugoslavia, Georgia and Ukraine, and trained by their alumni. Moreover, as the Wall Street Journal revealed just before the elections, an ostensibly “independent” local printing company in receipt of Freedom House, NED, Soros and USAID cash was responsible for publishing a panoply of opposition pamphlets.
Days earlier, the firm’s electricity was cut off by local authorities. Kyrgyzstan’s US embassy “stepped in with emergency generators” to maintain its anti-government propaganda deluge. This included a prominent newspaper that published “front-page photos of a palatial mansion purportedly owned by the President and of a boy in a decrepit alleyway,” highlighting state embezzlement versus citizen poverty. Another was a handbook produced by CIA-connected Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy, dubbed “the bible” of Ukraine’s US-sponsored youth activists at the forefront of the Orange Revolution.
This “manual on how to defeat dictators, including tips on hunger strikes and civil disobedience,” includes guidance “on nonviolent resistance – such as ‘display of flags and symbolic colors’.” However, the protests that instantly erupted after the elections were highly belligerent from inception, with bomb attacks, police pelted with bricks and beaten with sticks, and government buildings torched and forcibly occupied. The New York Times contemporaneously acknowledged broadcasts by US-funded local TV stations inspired violence in certain areas of Kyrgyzstan.
Upheaval raged for weeks, prompting a personal intervention from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who expressed significant alarm over “the use of violence and intimidation to resolve electoral and political disputes.” He welcomed Akayev’s invitation to instigate dialogue with protesters. They demanded he resign instantly – despite the President having already pledged before the election to do so in October that year. In March, Akayev acquiesced and stood down, replaced by Kurmanbek Bakiyev.
‘Terribly Disappointing’
Bakiyev’s seizure of power was initially framed by Western journalists, politicians and pundits as a sparkling victory for people power, and the dawning of a new era of democracy and freedom in Kyrgyzstan. Yet, five years later, he fled the country, following mass protests over his savage, corrupt rule. The tipping point for Bakiyev’s ouster was the April 7th 2010 mass shooting of demonstrators by security forces, which killed up to 100 people and wounded at least 450 more.
As Forbes recorded at the time, the level of graft under his Presidency was “mind-boggling”. Bakiyev appointed close relatives to key positions, allowing his family to profit handsomely from legally questionable privatisation of state industries, and supply of fuel to Washington’s Manas base. Bakiyev’s son Maxim, who oversaw the latter, was described by US diplomats in leaked cables as “smart and corrupt.” By some estimates, companies he ran reaped $1.8 billion from these deals, close to Kyrgyzstan’s total GDP in 2003.
Meanwhile, Bakiyev’s brother Zhanysh ran Bishkek’s security apparatus with an iron fist. Harsh restrictions on political freedoms were enacted, while arbitrary detentions, bogus convictions, torture, and killings of opposition activists, journalists, and politicians became commonplace. For example, in March 2009 Bakivey’s former chief of staff Medet Sadyrkulov died in an alleged road traffic accident. It was later revealed he was brutally slain upon Zhanysh’s order. That December, dissident reporter Gennady Pavlyuk was murdered, thrown out of a sixth-floor apartment with his arms and legs bound.
Bishkek’s Tulip Revolution wasn’t unique in producing such horrors. A March 2013 essay in elite imperial journal Foreign Policy acknowledged the results of every US-orchestrated government overthrow in the first years of the new millennium were “terribly disappointing”, and “far-reaching change never really materialized” resultantly. This is quite an understatement. Most target countries slid into autocracy, chaos and poverty as a result of Washington’s meddling. It has typically taken years for the damage to be corrected, if at all.
Still, despite this disgraceful legacy, the US appetite for fomenting colour revolutions – and the willingness of groomed citizens, particularly youth, the world over to serve as Washington’s regime change footsoldiers – remains undimmed. In September, Nepal’s elected government was overthrown by disaffected ‘Gen Z’ activists, with the full support of the country’s powerful military. The palace coup bore all the hallmarks of a colour revolution. Who and what will replace the felled administration still remains far from clear.
As a September 15th New York Times editorial noted, “Nepalis from all walks were ready to reject the system they had fought for decades to achieve,” but lack “any clear sense of what comes next.” There is an extraordinary political vacuum in Kathmandu presently, which elements within the country are seeking to exploit for malign ends. As before, Nepal’s “revolution” is likely to produce a government far worse than that which preceded it.
Nepal’s color revolution: US funding under scrutiny amid country’s political upheaval
By Kit Klarenberg | Press TV | September 17, 2025
In recent weeks, Nepal has been engulfed in chaos. Public and private buildings have been set ablaze, and dozens of civilians have been killed in incidents that many believe bear the imprint of Western involvement.
On September 9, Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli resigned. The Western media has universally framed the upheaval as spontaneous revolutionary fervour on the part of Kathmandu’s “Gen Z”, motivated by anger over official corruption, unemployment, state efforts to censor social media, and more.
However, there are unambiguous indications that the insurrectionary disarray has been long in the making and assisted by spectral, foreign forces.
The so-called “Gen Z” protests comprise a cluster of local youth activist groups, and are widely dubbed “leaderless”, although Hami Nepal has clearly emerged at the movement’s forefront.
English language Nepali Times has reported that the hitherto unknown NGO “played a central role in guiding the demonstrations, using its Instagram and Discord platforms to circulate protest information and share guidelines.”
The group was established to assist victims of earthquakes – a common occurrence in the country – and provide food, medical and other aid to disadvantaged Nepalese communities.
Subsequently, Hami Nepal oversaw the election of Kathmandu’s interim premier Sushila Karki on September 12, via the highly unorthodox and completely unprecedented expedient of an online vote via Discord.
The NGO’s chat group reportedly boasts 145,000 members, although it’s unclear how many people ultimately voted for Karki. The Western media, and local journalist Prayana Rana, a fervent supporter of the unrest who considers the palace coup to be wholly legitimate and organic, has acknowledged choosing a leader in this manner to be deeply problematic:
“It is much more egalitarian than a physical forum that many might not have access to. Since it is virtual and anonymous, people can also say what they want to without fear of retaliation. But there are also challenges, in that anyone could easily manipulate users by infiltration, and using multiple accounts to sway opinions and votes.”
Still, Karki has firmly pledged to only serve six months in the post until elections are held. She herself has an impressive revolutionary history, having participated in the 1990 People’s Movement that successfully overthrew Nepal’s absolute monarchy, for which she was jailed.
In June 1973, her husband hijacked a plane, stealing vast sums of money to fund armed resistance against the country’s brutal regime, which similarly landed him in prison. Karki’s commitment to seriously tackling corruption as Nepal’s Chief Justice led to her politically-motivated impeachment in June 2017, after just one year.
It is entirely uncertain who or what will replace Karki, and by which mechanism they will attain office. Nonetheless, that Hami Nepal, a previously obscure NGO with no history of political activism, has played such an outsized role in ousting the government of a country of 30 million people and installing its new ruler within mere days, should give us pause.
While the organization’s activities appear benevolent, its rollcall of “brands that support us” contains some puzzling entries, if not outright concerning.
Anonymous profiles
It is unclear what forms of “support” Hami Nepal has received from its sponsors, or when it was provided, but they run quite the gamut. For one, the list includes luxury Western hotels in Kathmandu, clothing and shoe brands, local conglomerate Shanker – the country’s biggest private investor – messaging app Viber, and Coca Cola, notorious for its complicity in countless human rights abuses in the Global South. Elsewhere, the Gurkha Welfare Trust appears.
The Gurkhas have for centuries served as an elite, unique force within the British Army, often tasked with sensitive missions. The Trust, which provides financial aid to Gurkha veterans, their widows and families, is financed by the British Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence.
Meanwhile, Students for a Free Tibet is also listed. The NGO receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, an avowed CIA front. In a striking coincidence, NED is deeply concerned about the precise issue that triggered Nepal’s recent protests.
In August 2023, Nepal’s government signed off on a National Cyber Security Policy, imitating China’s “Great Firewall”, which limits foreign internet traffic into the country, while allowing for the proliferation of homegrown ecommerce platforms, social networks, and other online resources. The move was harshly condemned by Digital Rights Nepal, which is bankrolled by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations – a repeat sponsor of government overthrows. Digital Rights Nepal claimed the Policy would lead to mass censorship and threaten citizens’ privacy.
Fast forward to February, and NED published a report warning “countries worldwide,” including Cambodia, Nepal and Pakistan, were looking to China’s internet sovereignty as a “potential model” to emulate.
Rather than acknowledge the threat to Washington’s waning global web dominance posed by such ambitions, the Endowment asserted the real risk was Beijing’s “prestige” being enhanced internationally, thus helping “make the world safe” for the Chinese Communist Party. That month, Nepalese lawmakers began voting on a bill supporting the National Cyber Security Policy.
The legislation required foreign social media networks and messaging apps to formally register with Kathmandu’s Ministry of Communication and Information Technology.
This was intended to not only make these platforms more legally accountable but also ensure the government could collect taxes on revenues they generated locally.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) issued a statement imploring parliamentarians to reject the bill, on the basis that it posed a grave threat to press freedom, due to potential content restriction and banning of “creation or use of anonymous profiles.”
The CPJ is bankrolled by Open Society Foundations, a welter of leading Western news outlets, US corporate and financial giants, and Google and Meta, both of which would be adversely affected by the legislation.
The law nonetheless passed, imposing a deadline of September 3rd for registration. While TikTok and Viber complied, US platforms – including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and YouTube – refused, prompting Kathmandu to ban usage of 26 foreign-owned sites. This was the spark that ultimately toppled Nepal’s government.
Secure environment
On September 4, the Federation of Nepali Journalists published a statement signed by 22 civil society organizations, expressing “strong objection” to the mass shutdown.
FNJ is funded by NED and the Open Society Foundations. Most of its co-signatories receive money from the same sources, and other Western foundations, governments, and social media platforms. For Hami Nepal, the ban was a “tipping point”, scheduling a mass rally for four days later.
The NGO extensively prepared participants in advance, even establishing a “protest support helpline”.
The September 8 protests quickly turned violent. “Gen Z” leaders distanced themselves from the destruction, claiming their peaceful action had been “hijacked” by “opportunists”.
Yet, Hami Nepal’s Discord server had bristled with belligerent messages in the preceding days. Some users openly advocated killing politicians and their children. Others posted requests for weapons, including machine guns, and openly announced their intention to “burn everything”.
So it was Nepal’s parliament that got set ablaze and the Prime Minister’s official residence torched, prompting ministers to flee in helicopters.
The next night, in the wake of K. P. Sharma Oli’s resignation, Nepalese military chiefs met with protesters to discuss the shape of the country’s future government.
As The New York Times reported on September 11, chief “Gen Z” agitators told army officials they wanted Sushila Karki as interim leader – days before this was apparently confirmed by a competitive Discord vote. Kathmandu’s powerful, popular military has pledged to “create a secure environment until the election is held,” effectively signing off on the violent coup.
It may be significant that one of Hami Nepal’s donors isn’t publicised on its website – arms dealer Deepak Bhatta. He has an extensive history of procuring weapons for Nepal’s military and security forces, and allegations of corruption have swirled around many of these deals.
For example, in July 2022, he was accused of sourcing small arms for local police from an Italian company at four times the actual unit price. Bhatta’s long-running relationship with the army could well have facilitated its friendly contact with protest leaders.
Yugoslavia’s CIA, NED and USAID-orchestrated “Bulldozer Revolution” in 2000 was the world’s first “color revolution”. Over subsequent decades, the US has ousted governments the world over using strategies and tactics identical to those that successfully dislodged Slobodan Milosevic from office.
In almost all cases, youth groups have been key “regime change” foot soldiers. In Belgrade, after almost a decade of lethally destructive sanctions, capped off with a criminal 78-day-long NATO bombing campaign, many residents of the country had legitimate grievances and wished to see Milosevic fall.
Nonetheless, the aftermath was a blunt-force lesson in the importance of being careful about what one wishes for. Milosevic’s downfall is dubbed the Bulldozer Revolution due to iconic scenes during the much-publicised unrest of a wheel loader helping anti-government agitators occupy state buildings, and shield activists from police gunfire. Its driver quickly turned against the “Revolution”.
Subsequent Western-imposed privatization decimated Yugoslavia’s economy, causing his successful independent business to fail, and him to go bankrupt. He subsisted until his dying day on meager state welfare payments.
Herein lies the rub. There’s little doubt that many Nepalese citizens were justifiably disillusioned with their government and sought change. Yet, colour revolutions invariably exploit grassroots public discontent to install governments considerably worse than those that preceded them.
In this context, the military, including disgraced local businessman Durga Prasai, who supports the restoration of Kathmandu’s monarchy, in transition talks with “Gen Z” activists, is rendered deeply suspect. That he has been falsely promoted by the BBC as the protesters’ leader is all the more ominous.
Even enthusiastic local supporters of Nepal’s “revolution” acknowledge it is uncertain whether Sushila Karki will be able to convene elections in six months.
In any event, all established political parties were in the firing line of demonstrators, leaving the question of who will contest any future vote likewise an open one.
There is quite a political vacuum in Kathmandu presently, and history shows us NED, Open Society Foundations, and intelligence-connected Western foundations are ever-poised to seize such “windows of opportunity”. Watch this space.
And what is particularly revealing is a fact, as reported in sections of Indian media, that a plan was in the works for years to bring about a “regime change” in Nepal, engineered by the US.
Internal USAID communications reviewed by The Sunday Guardian, together with program outputs released by US democracy organizations, show that since 2020, the US has committed over $900 million in assistance to Nepal. A significant portion of this funding has been directed toward programs administered through the Washington-based consortium CEPPS, which comprises the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES).
As the report states, $900 million represents one of the largest per-capita US democracy investments in the region, and the goal was to have a government that serves the US interests.
Ukraine’s Corporate Carve-Up Collapses?
By Kit Klarenberg | Al Mayadeen | July 11, 2025
On July 5th, Bloomberg reported that a BlackRock-administered multibillion-dollar fund for Kiev’s reconstruction, due to be unveiled at a dedicated Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome July 10th/11th, had been placed on hold at the start of 2025 “due to a lack of interest” among institutional, private, and state financiers. As the summit looms, lack of investor enthusiasm persists, and “the project’s future is now uncertain.” It’s just the latest confirmation that the West’s long-running mission to carve up Ukraine verges on total disintegration.
BlackRock’s Ukraine Development Fund has been in the works since May 2023. It was originally envisaged as one of the most ambitious public-private finance collaborations in history, which would rival Washington’s Marshall Plan that rebuilt – and heavily indebted – Western Europe in World War II’s wake. With vast returns promised, initially investors were reportedly “ready to plow funds” into the endeavour, due to widespread optimism Kiev’s much-hyped “counteroffensive” later that year “might end the war quickly.”
In the event, the counteroffensive was an unmitigated disaster. Ukraine suffered up to 100,000 casualties, with much of its arsenal of Western-supplied armour, vehicles, and weapons obliterated, in return for recapturing just 0.25% of the territory occupied by Russia in the proxy war’s initial phases. As BlackRock vice chair Philipp Hildebrand explained, the results killed off investor exuberance, as they required “the cessation of hostilities, or at the very least a perspective for peace.” Concerns about Ukraine’s ever-reducing skilled workforce were also widespread.
Fast forward to today there is no indication of any peace deal on the horizon, Russia is rapidly advancing across multiple fronts, and the Ukrainian government estimates the country has lost around 40% of its working-age population due to the proxy war. No wonder there is zero foreign interest in investing in Kiev’s reconstruction. Quite what will remain of Ukraine when the conflict is over, and whether any financial returns can be gleaned from its ruins, are open, grave questions.
The collapse of BlackRock’s Ukraine Development Fund is not only a microcosm of the impending, inevitable defeat of Kiev and its overseas puppet masters in Donbass. It also reflects the death of the dream of breaking apart Ukraine’s industries and resources to untrammelled rape and pillage, long-held by Western corporations, oligarchs, and governments. Planning for this eventuality dates back to the country’s 1991 independence, producing concrete results following the 2014 Western-orchestrated Maidan coup, and becoming turbocharged once all-out proxy war erupted in February 2022.
‘Investment Climate’
From the start of 2013, Western corporations began moving en masse to buy up Ukraine wholesale. It was widely expected across Europe and North America Kiev would enter into an “association agreement” with the EU, facilitating privatisation, and tearing up of longstanding laws restricting foreign purchase and ownership of the country’s untold agricultural riches. The former “breadbasket of the Soviet Union” was equivalent to one-third of the EU’s total arable land, and potential profits could be voluminous.
That January, Anglo-Dutch MI6-linked energy giant Shell signed a 50-year deal with the Ukrainian government to explore and drill for natural gas via fracking in areas of Donetsk and Kharkov “believed to hold substantial natural gas.” Then, in May, notorious, now-defunct chemical giant Monsanto announced plans to invest $140 million in constructing a corn seed plant in the country’s agricultural heartlands. The company was a founding member of the US-Ukraine Business Council, established in October 1995 to “improve” Kiev’s “investment climate.”
USUBC’s treasurer was and remains David Kramer, who then-served as president of Freedom House, a National Endowment for Democracy division. NED was avowedly founded by the CIA to do publicly what the Agency historically did publicly. The Endowment and Freedom House were responsible for Ukraine’s 2004 “Orange Revolution”, which brought pro-Western puppet Viktor Yushchenko to power. He immediately implemented deeply unpopular neoliberal economic reforms, including slashing regulations and social spending. Yushchenko was voted out in 2010, securing just 5% of the vote.
Following Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s rejection of the EU association agreement in favour of a more advantageous deal offered by Russia in November 2013, mass protests – later dubbed “Maidan” – in Kiev were ignited by NED-affiliated actors, and fascist agitators. They raged until late February 2014, when Yanukovych fled the country. In the meantime, Ukraine was plunged into total chaos – yet, firms associated with USUBC weren’t deterred. Many, including major companies with representatives on the organisation’s executive committee, continued making sizeable investments in Ukraine.
Their undimmed enthusiasm may be explained by David Kramer being an alumni of Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank widely credited with masterminding the Bush administration’s “War on Terror”. The organisation’s cofounder Robert Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, at this time the State Department’s point person on Ukraine. She visited Kiev repeatedly during the Maidan “revolution”, and hand-picked Yanukovych’s replacement interim government. Nuland was thus well-placed to know USUBC member investments in Ukraine would be safe long-term.
‘Trade Opportunities’
Nuland’s fascist interim government was replaced in June 2014 by an administration led by far-right Petro Poroshenko, who stood on an explicit platform of privatising state industries. The President passed legislation enabling this in March 2016. Two years later, his government adopted sweeping laws to further facilitate the auctioning off of Kiev’s public assets and industry to foreign actors. However, a moratorium on private sale of arable land, imposed in 2001, remained in place. No matter – in August 2018, the European Court of Human Rights ruled this was illegal.
There was still one problem, though. Opinion polls consistently showed Ukrainian citizens overwhelmingly rejected privatisation, and the sale of their country’s agricultural land to overseas buyers. As luck would have it, the proxy war’s eruption, and imposition of martial law, allowed for industrial scale trampling by Volodomyr Zelensky’s government over public opinion, and political opposition. Throughout 2022, a series of laws intended to “make privatization as easy as possible for foreign investors” were passed.
In the process, close to 1,000 nationalised enterprises were offered up for overseas sale, and auctions for purchase of these entities “under simplified terms” convened. The next year, these efforts intensified, with further legislation enacted enabling “large-scale privatisation of state assets and state companies.” This was reportedly motivated by “the attractiveness” of Ukraine’s “large state assets to institutional investors.” They included an Odessa-based ammonia factory, major mining and chemical firms, one of the country’s leading power generators, and a producer of high-quality titanium products.
Encouraged by the West’s reception to these moves, in July 2024, Kiev announced a dedicated “Large-Scale Privatisation” plan, with more prized assets under the hammer. Little wonder that two months later, a British Foreign Office briefing document acknowledged it viewed “the invasion not only as a crisis, but also as an opportunity.” London’s primary economic aid project in Ukraine is explicitly concerned with ensuring the country “adopts and implements economic reforms that create a more inclusive economy, enhancing trade opportunities with the UK.”
The previous January, the World Economic Forum’s annual congress was convened in Davos, Switzerland. The proxy war, and Kiev’s economic future loomed large on the event’s agenda. Its centrepiece was a breakout breakfast attended by political leaders and business bigwigs, where Zelensky appeared via videolink. The President thanked “giants of the international financial and investment world,” including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan, for buying up his country’s assets during wartime. He boldly promised, “everyone can become a big business by working with Ukraine.”
Subsequently, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink pledged to coordinate billions of dollars in reconstruction financing for Kiev, forecasting the country would become a “beacon of capitalism” resultantly. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs chief David Solomon spoke with intense optimism about Kiev’s post-war future, and the gains his firm and other major Western financial institutions could reap. “There is no question that as you rebuild, there will be good economic incentives for real return and real investment,” he crowed.
Zelensky spoke at multiple events held in Davos over the five-day-long conference’s course, where pro-Kiev sentiment was reportedly “overwhelming”. The President spoke of recapturing Crimea, and demanded attendees “give us your weapons.” His audiences were invariably highly receptive. On one panel, Boris Johnson, who personally sabotaged fruitful peace talks between Kiev and Moscow in April 2022, urged that Zelensky be given “the tools he needs to finish the job.” Johnson boomed, “Give them the tanks! There’s absolutely nothing to be lost!”
In years to come, the January 2023 Davos summit may be viewed both as the high point of Ukraine’s proxy war effort, and roughly when everything began to spectacularly unravel. The desired weapons arrived in huge quantities, to no effect. Kiev’s three biggest military efforts since that year’s counteroffensive, the Krynky incursion, and Kursk “counterinvasion” – were all deeply costly cataclysms, leaving the country undermanned and ill-equipped to fend off Russian advances. Countries that supplied munitions borderline disarmed themselves in the process.
On June 10th, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Ukraine would receive no further military aid from Washington, save for remaining shipments agreed by the Biden administration. On July 1st, even this much-reduced commitment was jettisoned, due to Pentagon concerns over artillery, air defense missiles, and precision munition stockpile shortages. Kiev is now permanently out of American weapons, and it will take years for Europe to plug the gap, if at all.
In the intervening time, Ukraine has been subject to ever-increasingly devastating Russian drone and missile attacks, and Moscow’s forces appear to be going in for the kill across the frontline. Public and political support for keeping the proxy war grinding on is waning across the West. BlackRock’s once-vaunted Ukraine Development Fund failing to drum up a single dollar for the country’s reconstruction strongly suggests international investors foresee Kiev’s post-war corpse offering them nothing to pick at.
US President Trump Streamlined the National Endowment for Democracy, not Dismantled it
By Brian Berletic – New Eastern Outlook – June 11, 2025
While many believe that under the Trump administration the controversial National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was defunded, dismantled, or otherwise dissolved, the reality is far less dramatic and far more dangerous.
Despite President Donald Trump’s outspoken criticism of global entanglements and calls of “ending the era of endless wars,” stretching back all the way to his first term in office, the NED not only continues to receive taxpayer funding under his administration to facilitate instability and conflict worldwide, it has quietly expanded its reach behind a newly adopted policy that makes its activities less transparent than ever.
On its official website, the NED recently revealed what it calls a “duty to care” policy – an internal shift that effectively ends the organization’s long-standing practice of openly listing most of the foreign organizations and movements it finances. This change, framed as a protective measure for recipients in “high-risk environments,” marks a complete reversal of one of the few things that previously distinguished NED operations from covert CIA influence campaigns – the veneer of transparency.
A “Pro-Democracy” Front With Covert DNA
Founded in 1983, the NED was created to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, according to former NED co-founder Allen Weinstein. For decades, it served as the US arm of so-called “soft power,” funneling money to foreign political groups, media outlets, labor unions, and activist organizations deemed favorable to US interests – usually under the banner of “promoting democracy.”
But “democracy” in this context is indistinguishable from regime change. From Venezuela to Belarus, from Hong Kong to Myanmar, NED-funded groups have played central roles in political destabilization and even precipitating war, many of them advocating positions explicitly aligned with US foreign policy and done entirely at the cost of their own nation’s stability and best interests.
The obvious purpose of creating the NED wasn’t to end covert interference around the globe, but rather to continue the CIA’s work Americans and people worldwide were increasingly aware of and opposed to, by whitewashing it and repackaging it as transparently “promoting democracy.”
Since the NED’s founding, the Western media has intermittently admitted the NED has been involved in global-spanning regime change. In 2004, the London Guardian admitted the US government through the NED overthrew governments in Serbia in 2000 and Georgia in 2003, while unsuccessfully attempting to do so in Belarus and Ukraine.
The article described unrest taking place in Ukraine at the time as:
… an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.
Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.
Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.
Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.
The article names the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), and Freedom House by name, all three of which are subsidiaries of the NED.
In 2011, the NYT would admit the US government through the NED was behind the regional destabilization and regime change in 2011 referred to as the “Arab Spring.”
The article explained:
A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region 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, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.
And that:
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.
The US-engineered “Arab Spring” would precipitate multiple US-led wars across the region, ravaging Libya, Yemen, Syria, and affecting every nation in between.
US political interference continues up to and including today under the current Trump administration with attempts to once again destabilize the nation of Georgia along Russia’s borders, continued US-sponsored violence in Myanmar along China’s borders, attacks by US-backed militant groups in southwest Pakistan targeting China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and the continued operation of virtually every NED-funded organization operating elsewhere along China’s periphery including in Thailand and the Philippines.
Democracy as a Cover for Political Interference
Democracy, by definition, is a form of self-determination. If a political movement relies on, or is shaped by the funding and direction of a foreign government – especially one with a track record of overt military invasion, occupation, and conquest like the United States – it is not “promoting democracy,” but rather political interference.
Any nation whose internal political affairs are subject to the influence of the US government through the NED, its subsidiaries or adjacent organizations is not exercising democratic self-rule, but living under a subtler form of political occupation – one where ballots replace bullets, but the end result is the same – the replacement of sovereign leadership with a US-installed client regime.
In many cases, US NED-funded and directed instability takes the form of armed-violence amid which “activists” rather than invading US troops seize critical government buildings, attack critical infrastructure, and carry out other objectives an invading US military force would seek to achieve including the destruction of specific infrastructure and the ousting of ruling governments.
The End of “Transparency”
The NED’s decision to stop publishing the identities of the groups it funds represents more than just an administrative shift. It is a turning point, following years of growing public awareness both in the US and worldwide of what the NED is really doing and why.
In the past, critics were at least able to track and expose how NED money was flowing into particular movements – from opposition parties in Nicaragua to protest organizers in Hong Kong. That visibility, however minimal, imposed some form of political pressure and constraint on the US.
With the “duty to care” policy, even that has now been eliminated.
Today, the NED operates with the same impunity as any covert intelligence operation – only without the oversight, legal restrictions, or classification protocols typically associated with CIA activity.
In practice, this allows the US to wage political war under the pretense of “promoting democracy,” while overall leaving fewer fingerprints behind.
And while the shift within the NED and across US foreign policy as a whole should prompt nations to respond with stricter scrutiny and regulation of the organizations still likely receiving US support, even when US interference was more transparent, many nations failed categorically to protect national security from it. Now that US interference is being done more covertly, it will be even more difficult for advocates of greater national security regarding foreign-funded NGOs to spur governments around the world into action.
Under Trump, Business as Usual
Despite the perception among some that the Trump administration intended to dismantle or defund the NED, no such action occurred. In fact, NED funding is continuing after only a brief pause, with the majority of NED operations continuing uninterrupted.
Much like the US military-industrial complex which continues expanding despite President Trump’s rhetorical opposition to “forever wars” – the regime change-industrial-complex led by the NED, its affiliates, and subsidiaries, have likewise not only continued, but are enhancing their menace to peace and stability worldwide.
Some may argue that recent attention placed on the NED and adjacent organizations like USAID is positive progress in the right direction. In reality, this recent attention has more in common with what is known as a “limited hangout,” a method of perception management used when state secrecy has been compromised, and “limited” information is either admitted to or even volunteered, while central information is still withheld from the public. The public is often distracted by or satisfied with this limited admission and fails to pursue the issue further.
In the case of NED and USAID funding, after many years of growing awareness of and opposition to both, many Americans believe both organizations have now been dismantled, oblivious to the fact that both are still operational and the global network of political subversion they facilitate continues operating uninterrupted.
A Hidden Hand With Open Consequences
The NED’s new era of covert funding and hidden recipients marks a dangerous evolution in US foreign policy. Under the guise of care and caution, the organization has closed the one window that allowed even limited public scrutiny of its global interference.
Regardless of whether the CIA or NED fund and direct foreign interference worldwide and regardless of the degree of transparency involved, the outcome remains the same – a world where real decisions are not made by people on the ground in any one of the many nations targeted by US interference, but by politicians in Washington and policymakers at corporate-funded think tanks.
While American voters and many around the globe held hope that the incoming Trump administration would make good on its promises to roll back US interference abroad and focus instead on the best interests of Americans in America, the administration has instead continued US wars and proxy wars in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia together with sharpening and streamlining the military and non-military means with which to expand them even further.
Despite the illusions of reform or even “revolution” under the Trump administration, the truth is the NED (and USAID) remains as active as ever, more unaccountable than ever, and continue to serve as a sophisticated instrument of political manipulation for the very special interests of the “deep state” many Americans voted President Trump into office to oppose.
A Message to Georgians: America Will Not Protect You
No offense, but Georgia’s interests are just none of my affair. It’s such a long way from here.
I know my government has been messing around there since the 1990s, picking winners and losers, making big promises and causing lots of trouble.
Keeping Russia out of their former sphere of influence was thought by Washington to be its most important goal.
Under the Bill Clinton administration, it was decided that building the BTC Pipeline across Georgia was the highest priority – to prevent Azeri gas from flowing north through Russia or south through Iran.
Under George W. Bush, it was decided that the government of Edward Shevardnadze was too close to Russia, compromising with them over Abkhazia, making deals with Gazprom, and joining the CIS, and had to go.
USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and the rest of the regime change industry poured in tens of millions of dollars to support the groups supporting Mikhail Saakaashvili’s rise and the Rose Revolution of 2003, which installed him in power. This included a Soros front called the Liberty Institute – not to be confused with the Libertarian Institute, I assure you.
As I’m sure you all know, former President Salome Zourabichvili was born in France, not Georgia, and was just parachuted in by the new regime to take over as Finance Minister after the overthrow of 2003. She later explained that:
“These institutions were the cradle of democratization, notably the Soros Foundation. … The NGOs which gravitate around the Soros Foundation undeniably carried the revolution. However, one cannot end one’s analysis with the revolution and one clearly sees that, afterwards, the Soros Foundation and the NGOs were integrated into power.”
Soros’s business partner Kaka Bendukidze became the new economy minister. Alexander Lomaia, the director of Open Society Georgia, was made education minister. At the same time, Giga Bokeria, co-founder of the Liberty Institute, became the leader of the National Movement party in the parliament. In the name of fighting against corruption, they stayed on Soros’s payroll. Saakashvili too.
“I’m delighted by what happened in Georgia, and I take great pride in having contributed to it,” Soros told the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.
How y’all let her become the president of the country is a mystery. Oh yeah. All the foreign money.
I sure hope that Mr. Saakashvili’s trial was more fair than his opponents received while he was in power. And that Saakashvili is not being tortured in prison the way his regime tortured people. No human deserves to be treated in such a barbarian fashion.
Do I believe Georgia country is better off under the domination of Russia or any other significant power?
Of course not. But I do mean that American intervention is not in the interest of either country.
I’ve read that current Georgian leaders have expressed frustration that they have not been able to reach the new Trump administration to see if they can get a reset in America’s Georgia policy. Be careful what you wish for. Georgians are more likely to be better off when America does not have a Georgia policy at all than even a favorable one, with strings attached.
As far as the difficulties Georgia may face in maintaining full independence as a small country in a world of major competing powers and Georgia’s advantageous or disadvantageous geographic position relative to important resources, I could not say what your best solution must be.
I could say that at the end of the day, America will not guarantee Georgia’s independence, which is why there is no major U.S. troop presence there, and why NATO membership has not moved forward since W. Bush’s foolish declaration at Bucharest in April 2008.
Perhaps maintaining Tbilisi’s neutrality in these major contests could be the path to maintaining independence from outright control.
Even after Russia intervened to reverse Saakashvili’s attempt to forcefully reintegrate South Ossetia in 2008, Moscow did not sever the BTC, nor roll its tanks into Tblisi, thank goodness. Though Putin and Medvedev had plenty of counter-incentives, they certainly had the pretext to go that far if they had chosen to do so.
President Bush, in his lame-duck year, had already chosen not to intervene, despite the protests of then-Vice President Cheney, who insisted on strikes against Russian forces coming through the Roki tunnel, risking World War III.
Thank goodness the cool, patient wisdom of George W. Bush, relative to Cheney anyway, prevailed that day.
Surely Russia would have escalated in kind, and Tbilisi would have lost its independence to the Federation after Bush had inevitably backed down. Thank goodness it did not come to that.
Making sure the Russians continue to feel like such a move would be unnecessary and unreasonably costly would probably be the best course of action.
Of course, USAID, NED, IRI, NDI, and all the usual suspected Soros-backed groups have spent a ton to keep the current ruling party out of power. I’m sure the permanent professional protestors — analyst Brad Pearce calls their rallies an “organized labor protest by the foreign influence industry” — have some real concerns, just as I’m sure that any protestor receiving the backing of a foreign regime can only be taken so seriously by anyone else.
Again, ultimately, America is too far away and has too little to lose if Tbilisi’s status were to truly change to truly be motivated to do anything about it. When Russia came across the mountains in 2008, many Americans were terrified – they thought that our Georgia was under attack, the state between South Carolina and Florida. They either had never heard of your country, or they could not fathom why it being invaded should be top news in Colorado or Illinois. That Russia would attack America out of the blue seemed to them more plausible, at first glance, at least.
That being the case, Georgians are almost certainly better off choosing the proper course forward for their country with that in mind. Because chances are that if worse comes to worst, no one over here is coming to intervene over there.
Long live Georgia and its independence, good luck.
And may liberty always remain your highest political goal.
Thank you.
Is It Foreign Aid or Covert Action?
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • February 21, 2025
There has been considerable controversy surrounding the Trump administration decision to cutback on government agencies that are ostensibly committed to charitable, educational and other nation building activities both overseas and in the United States. This spending, amounting to scores of billions of dollars, has helped produce budget deficits that ballooned in the twenty-first century, largely due to the surge in overseas activity that occurred after the trauma of 9/11 when the United States decided that it had to serve as policeman for the rest of the world to make itself safe. As the US is now verging on bankruptcy due to its unsustainable debts, the second incarnation of the Trump Administration has focused on cutting budgets in areas that it considers to be enemy occupied, often meaning “woke” or institutionally allied to the Democrats. Social programs as well as the bloated defense department spending were considered to be suitable targets so starting during the first week in February, the White House brought down the hammer when it went after a number of government agencies, inter alia calling for huge cuts in Pentagon spending and the complete elimination of the Education Department.
The White House also shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), firing nearly all of its 10,000 employees, reportedly leaving only little more than 600 employees in place to assist in the shutting down or downsizing of facilities in the US and in foreign countries. Also, about 800 awards and contracts that are administered through USAID were reportedly being canceled. There have reportedly been some judicial delays in the firings due to the complexity of removing thousands of employees and families from overseas offices and housing, though the pause is likely to be only temporary.
Tax dollars are traditionally used corruptly to fund projects and policies dear to the hearts of politicians, which is why Ron Paul and others have called for sweeping audits, including of the Federal Reserve system and the Pentagon in particular. This hidden spending is particularly difficult to identify if the program is somehow linked to foreign policy and/or national security, which have traditionally been protected from scrutiny by denying nearly all public access to sensitive information based on the “need to know” principle to safeguard sources and vulnerable activities.
USAID was founded in 1961 during the John F. Kennedy administration to unite several foreign assistance organizations and programs under one agency. At first it was seriously intended to be a mechanism for the US to aid in health, disaster relief, socioeconomic development, environmental protection, democratic governance and education. Its focus, however, eventually became to guide development in parts of the world that suffered from what were considered to be dysfunctional governments and institutions in terms of American interests. USAID has always been funded by the federal government and its upper management has worked closely with the Department of State, to which it is technically accountable, and the intelligence agencies in particular. Its budget in 2023 was $43 billion. Trump’s reduction in force (RIF) of USAID has been accompanied by a shake-up in its management, its remaining responsibilities now being in the hands of the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has considerable experience in special agency management after having served on the Board of the National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Republican subsidiary component, the International Republican Institute (IRI). NED, which operates extensively overseas, has also been stripped of funding by Trump.
The dismantling of USAID does not necessarily mean the organization will completely go away, it will just be much reduced and under new management. It will likely have a new mission, though no one is at this point sure what that will mean. And USAID and NED are not alone as the presidential memo has called for a halt to the funding of all the government components that are dependent on taxpayer generated funds to provide what is perhaps euphemistically referred to as “foreign aid.” USAID and NED do have humanitarian projects, i.e. feeding the hungry, but they are primarily politically driven. The NED component IRI puts it this way on its website “Our mission at IRI—advancing democracy worldwide—is a battle with many fronts. I am proud to say that IRI is supportive of every endeavor that will bring freedom to more people. We have made progress in our mission by giving hope to those who wish to protest on a city street, run for office, or cast a ballot.”
So the aid organizations overtly have a political role, but how does it translate in practice and does it extend to playing favorites with the US media and political parties? Trump has put it another way, declaring that USAID leaders were “radical left lunatics.” This is what he claims on his website Truth Social:
“LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLEN AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS. THE LEFT WING ‘RAG,’ KNOWN AS ‘POLITICO,’ SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000. Did the New York Times receive money??? Who else did??? THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY! THE DEMOCRATS CAN’T HIDE FROM THIS ONE. TOO BIG, TOO DIRTY!”
There are, in fact, credible reports that the 2019 impeachment of Trump was driven by the actions and disinformation coming from CIA, FBI and USAID operatives, so it is plausible to assume that Trump is now settling scores. Beyond that, USAID and NED are both notorious for their roles in the business of covertly supporting opposition political parties worldwide and assisting in regime change. Billionaire philanthropist George Soros, through his network of organizations, received $260 milllion from USAID for funneling funds to non-governmental-organizations (NGOs) connected with Soros’ Open Society Foundations, which are known for advocating for radical policies and regime changes globally. Soros is also a Democratic Party favorite and major fund raiser, having recently received at a White House ceremony the honor of the Presidential Medal of Freedom presented in absentia to his son Alex from outgoing President Joe Biden.
As a result, both USAID and NED have been banned from foreign countries, including Russia, due to their meddling in local politics. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who was often a target of USAID activity, immediately thanked Trump for his decision to cancel USAID. Both USAID and NED were deeply involved in Eastern Europe. Former Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland has revealed that the aid agencies were deeply engaged in the multiple source $5 billion dollar multiyear US “investment” in Ukraine that culminated in regime change in 2013 and led to the current war with Russia. In government circles it has frequently been asserted that USAID and NED and other such organizations now do what the CIA used to do routinely in terms of regime change between its founding and the 1990s.
One might suggest that recent US governments, operating through their various subsidiaries like USAID and NED have been funding just about everything to control a world community in line with American interests. Mainstream media worldwide that is directly or indirectly funded reportedly includes journalists, news outlets, and activist NGOs and sites – and that’s just through USAID. That would appear to include Reuters, Associated Press, BBC, The Guardian, NBC, CNN, NPR, NYT, Politico, PBS, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Daily Telegraph, as well as much more media in the developing world. The anti-China hysteria media “ecosystem” currently depends on US government funding, and is already complaining about the impending shutdown of USAID support. To cite only one example of how it is packaged, Reuters news service has received millions in funding from the US government specifically for “active social engineering.”
Labor unions are also funded by USAID which is also behind the recent political unrest in Slovakia. It has also paid for multiple coup attempts in Venezuela, funded high profile trips for Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to improve his image and popularity, and funded al-Qaeda linked groups in Syria to successfully overthrow the government in Damascus. Going back to Trump’s first term of office, it is interesting to observe that most of the “aid” to opposition parties to overthrow Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela was delivered during 2019, so Trump, guided by hardliners John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, was not at that time shy about regime change. In fact, Voice Of America (VOA), which often served as a CIA mouthpiece, even reported that Trump had tripled aid to opposition figure Juan Guaido to $56 million. Those asking themselves why Trump has now decided to “oppose” the very semi-covert agency that he’s also been using for regime change have a point, but it might be appropriate to see the shakeup as a warning against government information, law enforcement and intelligence agencies again becoming tools of the Democratic Party politicians.
Defenders of USAID are arguing that the agency is being maligned, that in addition to its political profile it is heavily engaged in promoting health and wellness worldwide. The head of USAID under Joe Biden was the highly controversial and very much “woke” Samantha Power, who claims somewhat disingenuously that the agency budget of $38 billion in 2023 included something like $20 billion in spending that should appropriately be described as humanitarian. Those who are the recipients of the programs, mostly in the third world, will consequently suffer from the defunding of aid. If that is actually so, it perhaps would make sense to roll such programs into a mechanism that would not be tied to regime change and corruption of local governments and media.
There is some question even in Congress concerning whether there will be a new centralized aid agency and what it will be called or do now that it has been reduced in size and will likely have a tiny budget relative to what it once enjoyed. It is early days and the answer to that question will likely emerge before too long, but it should be pointed out that at no point has Rubio or anyone else in the Trump administration actually condemned aggressive US engagement abroad or claimed they will bring it to an end. The State Department has even officially said the only goal is to ensure the good things that USAID did will continue by “advancing American interests abroad.” Given some of the recent aggressive positions taken by the Trump Administration over Gaza, Panama, Canada, Mexico, Iran and Greenland as well as the tendency on the part of its top officials to increase pressure on perceived adversaries, it may be that the US isn’t changing course at all. It quite plausibly might be doubling down, and organizations like USAID and NED, even if their names, roles and leadership change, will likely be integral to that process.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Featured Video
The Board For Peace – Whitewashing Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Inside Job? Inside What?
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | July 28, 2016
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Sixth part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
In his chapter on “Left Gatekeepers” and the “Shame of Noam Chomsky,” Barrie Zwicker refers to the the “New World Order” as the “diaboligarchy’s” directing agency. Less compelling is Zwicker’s reference to the “New World Order” as the “diaboligarchy’s” directing agency. To me this unfortunate choice of words is much too closely associated with the often crude and chauvinistic populism of Alex Jones and his Infowars media network. Many have come to see Jones’ lucrative media operation as a limited hangout set in place by handlers trying to hold the activities of the 9/11 Truth Movement within manageable constraints.
Due to the important findings over fifteen years of the citizens’ investigation into 9/11, the culprits most deeply implicated in the crime can be identified with much more specificity than an entity vaguely described as a “New World Order.” As Kevin Barrett and many others insist, the time has come to name the names of the probable culprits, Noam Chomsky prominent among them.
While Alex Jones ultimately serves the same masters as Chomsky, the former’s media product is often much closer to the mark of what is really going on than the content of Noam Chomsky’s more magisterial pronouncements. Jones goes at least part of the way into realities of the deep state politics of the twenty-first century. Chomsky, however, sacrificed his capacity to contribute cogently to sensible discourse on contemporary geopolitics by making himself a primary instrument of the most consequential deep state deception of recent times. As a leading agent of disinformation in the psychological trenches of the ongoing Global War of False Flag Terrorism, Chomsky has reduced himself to the level of skeptic pretender Michael Shermer. In the style of Shermer, the elder Chomsky has become an establishment TV professor readily available on Netflix. … continue
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
loongtip on Trump wanted to play peacemake… Coronistan on EU member to sue bloc over ‘su… loongtip on Vicious loongtip on EU turns to India for defense… Coronistan on Donald Trump Is No Peace … seversonebcfb985d9 on French court jails pro-Palesti… eddieb on Fourteen Incredible Facts Abou… Bill Francis on European leaders’ shift in the… seversonebcfb985d9 on Villains of Judea: Philip Esfo… loongtip on Report warns that ‘Jewish terr… Craig Nelms on New study shows that toxic gas… loongtip on A Funny Thing Happened on the…
Aletho News- Conspiracy Denial
- Ukraine expects to join EU next year – Zelensky
- Here’s what’s behind the US shift on EU allies
- UN experts alarmed by prosecution of students protesting ETH Zurich’s Israel-linked research ties
- Exposed – How the UAE Became Central to Gaza’s Concentration Camp Plot
- How South Korea’s gas ambitions sustain the occupation of Gaza
- “Leaked document” exposes US blueprint for total control over Gaza
- Trump wanted to play peacemaker, Netanyahu made sure he failed
- Idea of limited, fast strike on Iran misjudges our capabilities: IRGC
- US Military Buildup on Land, Air, and Sea Raises Fears of Imminent Attack on Iran – Expert
- If Americans Knew
- Israel to seek new security deal from US, official says
- Leaked “Board of Peace” Resolution Outlines U.S.-Led Plan to Rule Over Gaza
- Jonathan Greenblatt Rolls Out Plan to Activate Hispanic Evangelical Golems
- Violence against hundreds of Gazan remains to find one Israeli – Not a ceasefire Day 109
- Greenpeace Demonstrator Exposes Folly of Protest Restrictions
- From CBS to TikTok, Pro-Israel Ellison is now in the driver’s seat
- Israel pays for UK advertisements attacking Doctors Without Borders
- Israel accused of extracting billions from Gazan people to pay for their own genocide
- ‘Deliberate Assassination’: 3 Journalists Among 11 Killed by Israeli Forces in Gaza
- In Gaza, We’re Struggling to Reintroduce Foods to Bodies Adjusted to Starvation
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study Affirms Rising CO2’s Greening Impact Across India – A Region With No Net Warming In 75 Years
- Germany’s Natural Gas Crisis Escalates … One Storage Site Near Empty …Government Silent
- Polar Colding…Antarctica Saw Its Coldest October In 44 Years!
- New Study: Sea Levels Rose 20 Times The Modern Rate During The Roman Warm Period
- As German Gas Storage Dips Dangerously Low…Shortage Hardly Avoidable
- New Study: Brazil’s Relative Sea Level Was 2+ Meters Higher And SSTs 3-4°C Warmer 6000 Years Ago
- Philosopher Schopenhauer: Climate Science Certainty Stems From Stupidity, Ignorance
- New Study: Species Extinction Rates Declining Since 1980 – ‘Climate Change Is Not An Important Threat’
- Denmark Places Climate Protection Above Animal Welfare, Poisoning And Culling Cows
- New Study: Greenland Was 3-7°C Warmer And Far Less Glaciated Than Today 6000-8000 Years Ago
Aletho News 