John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ALEXANDER RUBINSTEIN IN MPM NEWS
“Amnesty International’s Troubling Collaboration with UK & US Intelligence
“Some troubling connections contradict Amnesty’s image as a benevolent defender of human rights and reveal key figures at the organization during its early years to be less concerned with human dignity and more concerned with the dignity of the US and UK’s image in the world”
https://www.mintpressnews.com/amnesty-international-troubling-collaboration-with-uk-us-intelligence/253939/
Good piece.
Unfortunately, NGOs represent an irresistible target for security services and those who would influence the direction of events.
NGOs provide such great camouflage with their seeming benevolence. A bit like a drug gang using a nun as a drug mule.
That is why NGOs are targets of security-service penetration, and it is why some percentage of them are out-and-out frauds from the beginning, tools to be used for manipulation and propaganda, created just for the purpose. As an example of that last, the White Helmets in Syria come immediately to mind.
The United States has used so many of them. Some of its fomented coups and insurrections in other countries are assisted by such undercover NGO operatives. Some of the NGOs of George Soros have this reputation.
CIA has branched out over the years, too, beyond NGOs and into organizations as diverse as the Nobel Prize administration and the UN. How often do we see, for example, a Peace Prize winner worth talking about?
There are only a couple of exceptions in many decades to what appears to be the rule of picking relatively unimportant, politically innocuous organizations or minor individual achievements or no achievements at all, Obama having been the best recent example of the last.
And more important than the inappropriate people regularly receiving Peace Prizes are the truly deserving ones ignored, year after year, the ones whose work should be publicized and celebrated. You will never see the award going to the likes of Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning, truly deserving candidates and inspirations for others.
Obviously, the actual selections do not represent the kinds of individuals which a group of insightful, genuinely peace-loving, and politically independent committee members would choose.
None of this should surprise. The CIA for many decades has used and abused the press in the same way.
It has used big friendly press companies as a cover for agents penetrating other countries as well as for “getting stories out there.” Time-Life, for example, was pretty well known as a friend of CIA in this way. Reuters had a similar reputation.
It has penetrated some American publishers themselves, perhaps without the owner's knowledge, as in the case of The New York Times. In other cases, it has secretly contributed to publishers to keep them afloat so they are available for a variety of purposes.
There are so many ways publications can be useful apart from just “getting the story out there.” A left-wing publication, for example, gives you, with its subscribers and contributors, a detailed and regularly updated list of people in your society sympathetic to a cause. Even their addresses and other information. The old Saturday Review magazine was reputedly used this way by CIA during the Cold War.
We do live in a highly synthetic world in which so much is not what it seems, a reality shaped by the needs and drives of power. The cause of world empire and the use of dark operations go hand-in-hand with the regular abuse of international organizations. Even the seemingly good are bent, one way or another, to serve the needs of abusive power.
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Response to a comment about the difficulty of finding sound human-rights organizations to which to contribute:
In a world run by scoundrels, there is very little room left for the well-intentioned. By design.
