This article, reprinted with the consent of the author, has been banned from a wide variety of ‘progressive’ news outlets. It is, in my opinion, one of the most important pieces of information people should have absorbed. Dr Bramhall’s reporting on this subject is independently consistent with my own research on ‘color revolutions’ (my appended observations follow Dr Bramhall’s article.)
The CIA and Nonviolent Resistance
One important aspect of the “diversity of tactics” debate (i.e. the debate whether to be exclusively nonviolent) in the Occupy movement relates to mounting evidence of the role CIA and Pentagon-funded foundations and think tanks play in funding and promoting nonviolent resistance training.
The two major US foundations promoting nonviolence, both overseas and domestically, are the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) and the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). Both receive major corporate and/or government funding. The latter comes mainly through CIA “pass-through” foundations. While the ICNC is funded mainly by the private fortune of hedge fund multimillionaire (junk bond king Michael Milken’s second in command) Peter Ackerman, the AEI has received funding from the Rand Corporation and the Department of Defense, as well as various CIA-linked foundations, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the US Institute of Peace and the Ford Foundation (read here on The Ford Foundation and the CIA), which all have a long history of collaborating with the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA in destabilizing governments unfriendly to US interests.
This is a strategy Frances Stonor Saunders outlines in her pivotal Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. According to Sanders, right wing corporate-backed foundations and the CIA have been funding the non-communist left since the late sixties, in the hope of drowning out and marginalizing the voice of more militant leftists.
Gene Sharp, the Fervent Anticommunist
Much of this debate focuses around the American godfather of nonviolent resistance, Gene Sharp, the founder and director of the Albert Einstein Institution. Sharp’s handbooks on nonviolent protest were widely disseminated in the Eastern Europe color revolutions, in the Arab spring revolutions and in the Occupy movement in the US (see Nonviolence in the Service of Imperialism). Unfortunately Sharp has become a decoy in this debate, deflecting attention from the larger question of whether the US government is actively financing and promoting the work of the AEI, the ICIC and other groups that promote nonviolent resistance, to the exclusion of other militant tactics. The question is extremely important, in my view, because it possibly explains the rigid and dogmatic attitude in the US progressive movement regarding nonviolence.
Is Military-Intelligence Funding Compatible with Progressive Politics?
The institutional nonviolence clique has cleverly refocused the debate on whether Sharp, who is eighty-three, is a CIA agent and whether he actively participated in US-funded destabilization efforts in Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iran and elsewhere that resulted in so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions. The obvious answer to both questions is no. The more important question is why the alternative media and “official” progressive movement embrace Sharp unconditionally as a fellow progressive without a careful look at his past or his ideological beliefs. Sharp has never made any secret of his fervent anticommunist views. He also makes no secret of the funding he has received from the Defense Department; the Rand Corporation; CIA-linked foundations, such as NED, the IRI and the US Institute of Peace; and George Soros’s Open Society Institute. All this information is readily available from the AEI website.
Thierry Meyssan’s 2005 Expose
The current brouhaha over Gene Sharp was first triggered by an article, The Albert Einstein Institution: Nonviolence According to the CIA, Thierry Meyssan published on Voltaire Net in October 2005. Meyssan, a French intellectual and political activist, first gained international prominence in 2002 by publishing a French best seller entitled L’effroyable imposteur (English title: The Big Lie). The book claimed that the 9-11 attacks were directed by right-wingers in the U.S. government and the military industrial complex, who were seeking justification for military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. Meyssan’s 2005 article on the Albert Einstein Institutes enumerates a long list of collaborations between Sharp and opposition groups receiving covert US support in campaigns to bring down Asian and Eastern European governments unfriendly to US interests.
Iran and Venezuela’s Denunciation of Sharp
The article was widely reposted on leftist and libertarian websites. In 2008, it resulted in a formal denunciation of Sharp by the Iranian government and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, both targets of AEI destabilization activities. In June 2008, Stephen Zunes, chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Peter Ackerman’s International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC) issued a rebuttal, Sharp Attack Unwarranted, in Foreign Policy in Focus. The latter is an on-line magazine of the Institute for Policy Studies, where Zunes serves as Middle East Editor. The article was simultaneously reprinted in the Huffington Post.
Zunes subsequently persuaded Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Code Pink and other high profile progressives to help launch an on-line petition defending Sharp’s progressive credentials. However, as numerous critics point out, he never addressed Meyssan’s most important concerns: the military/intelligence backgrounds of many of the Albert Einstein Institution’s (AEI’s) directors and advisory board members; their documented collaboration, together with Sharp, with opposition groups responsible for the “color” revolutions in Eastern Europe; and their work with Venezuelan opposition groups in an effort to topple president Hugo Chavez.
AEI ties to Department of State and Military-Intelligence Complex
Australian researcher Michael Barker, Canadian activist Stephen Gowans and CIA watchers wrote detailed critiques defending Meyssan’s 2005 expose. Barker’s rebuttal is entitled Sharp Reflection Warranted. Barker’s main argument is that the problem of elite manipulation of ostensibly progressive groups isn’t at all new. He also points readers to excellent links regarding collaboration between the CIA and the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and others.
Gowans argues that Zunes, a paid adviser to the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), is hardly a neutral or objective party, given his involvement with Peter Ackerman and the ICNC. Ackerman, hardly the progressive peace activist, is a Wall Street investment banker, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and head of Freedom House. The latter, according to Noam Chomsky (in Manufacturing Consent), is “interlocked” with the CIA and a “virtual propaganda arm of the (US) government and international right wing.” According to Louis Proyect, Ackerman is also on the advisory board of the ultraconservative Cato Institute’s Project on Social Security Choice. Not surprisingly, this group strongly advocates for privatizing Social Security.
A Close Look At Sharp’s Past
There is no question that Thierry Meyssan’s 2005 article on Gene Sharp’s extensive links to the US military-intelligence complex is one of the most important exposes of the 21st century. Its only weaknesses is Meyssan’s failure to cite many of his references. What follows is the best publicly verifiable chronology of Sharp’s life I could come up with (most comes from Meyssan’s 2005 article with sources added):
1953 – conscientious objector during Korean War, imprisoned for nine months for refusing to report for alternative duty. Imprisoned for refusing to fight in Korean War (People and The Progressive).
1973 – publishes The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973) with an introduction by Thomas C. Shelling. Shelling was a well known economist and professor of foreign affairs, national security, nuclear strategy, and arms control. After working with US ambassador Averel Harriman in Paris in 1948 to implement the Marshall Plan, Shelling had a fifty year affiliation with the Rand Corporation (US military think tank) and is widely credited as the theoretician behind military escalation in Vietnam.
1983 – founds the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) in Boston, with the assistance of Major General Edward B Atkeson, who was on the first AEI advisory board. The AEI website identifies Atkeson as Senior Fellow at the Institute of Land Warfare Association of the US Army. According to the CIA website, during the 1980s Atkeson was also a National Intelligence Officer for General Purpose Forces.
1985 – publishes a book entitled Making Europe Unconquerable: the Potential of Civilian-base Deterrence and Defense. The second edition includes a preface by George Kennan, historian and State Department senior diplomat whose writings influenced Truman in the creation of the Truman Doctrine. Kennan is viewed as the father of the US foreign policy of “containment” (by force) of Soviet expansion.
1986, 1988 and 1989 – travels to Israel/Palestine to bolster support for the Palestinian Center for the History of Non-Violence, founded in 1983 by one of Sharp’s disciple. It’s a matter of public record that Sharp met with Colonel Reuvan Gal, who directed the Israel Defense Force (IDF) Psychological Action Division. Meyssan claims the two conspired to create a split in the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) by creating a dissident “nonviolent” group. Gal and Sharp claim the purpose of their meetings were to devise ways to dissuade IDF commanders from using tanks and excessive military force against Palestinian settlers (see The Jeruselem Fund, Mubarak Awad, and Nonviolence).
1987 – receives funding from the US Institute of Peace to host seminars instructing US allies on defense based on civil disobedience. By law, the US Institute of Peace integrates elements of US intelligence.
1989 – assists Colonel Robert Helvey in training anticommunist Burmese opposition groups concerned about the growing strength of the Burmese Communist Party. The AEI website refers to Helvey as a retired US military officer and ex-military attaché in Burma. He was actually a thirty year veteran of the Defense Intelligence Agency with extensive experience in overseeing clandestine and subversive operations in Southeast Asia (see Guerrillas Without Guns Col Helvey Weaponizing Nonviolence and Peace Magazine Archive). Following his retirement from the Defense Intelligence Agency, Helvey has been board member and president of the Albert Einstein Institution.
1990 – with his AEI team (according to AEI website), assists Lithuanian opposition leaders in organizing popular resistance against the Red Army. According to the website, the AEI also did trainings with anticommunist opposition groups in Tibet, Estonia, and Belarus.
1998 – travels, with Helvey, to Eastern Europe to train Otpor, a group of Serbian youth opposed to Slobodan Milosevic and Europe’s last communist government. Milosevic was immensely popular with Serbian people for standing up to NATO and for his generous social policies. The trainings were funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). (See 2000 New York Times interview with NED officer Paul B. McCarthy).
2003 – assists, with AEI staff, in the launch of the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia (see The Secrets of the Georgian Coup).
2004 – Helvey and other AEI members meet with the Ukrainian resistance in Kiev (see Mowat’s Coup d’État in Disguise).
2003-2004 – travels, with Helvey and other AEI team members to Venezuela to meet with wealthy Venezuelan opposition leaders, following the failed 2002 CIA-sponsored coup against Chavez. The AEI advises them in organizing a recall referendum against Chavez. They also train the leaders of Súmate during the August 2004 demonstrations and assist in the formulation of “Operation Guarimba”, a series of often-violent street blockades that result in several deaths. According to an analysis published by Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor), Venezuelan student leaders traveled to Belgrade in 2005 to meet with representatives of AEI-trained OTPOR/CANVAS, before traveling to Boston to consult directly with Sharp himself.
Fast Forward to the “Arab Spring”
In the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) seem to have handed the baton to his disciple Peter Ackerman. It was Ackerman who conducted nonviolence trainings in Cairo and Tunisia in 2009-2010 (see Foreign Policy Journal and New York Times).
As others have documented elsewhere, the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa were neither spontaneous nor indigenous. Many of the individuals and groups who helped organize them received training (in the US) sponsored by the State Department and CIA-linked democracy manipulating foundations (see Tony Cartalucci’s Soros Celebrates the Fall of Tunisia). The New York Times lends further credibility to these claims in their April 2011 U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings.
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About the author: Dr Bramhall is an American child and adolescent psychiatrist and political refugee in New Zealand. She has just published a free non-fiction ebook 21st Century Revolution, which can be downloaded at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/120942. Her first book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee describes the circumstances that led her to leave the US in 2002. Her website is at:
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Ronald Thomas West’s appended notes:
CIA methods of discrediting excellent work such as Dr Bramhall’s above article includes [but is not limited to] leaning hard on the better known progressive sites [alternet killed Dr Bramhalls’ article, probably faced with funding threats] not to run the pieces while providing other so-called ‘alternative’ news sites where the articles CAN be run but subjected to guilt by association and other method of discrediting the information. For instance ‘Daily Censored’ picked up and ran this article but concurrently ran an article supporting David Icke’s ‘lizard DNA’ theories [to associate Dr Bramhall’s work with nut jobs.] It then becomes the dilemma of the author whether to publish in less than optimal circumstance or not get the information a wider audience (beyond one’s personal blog.)
Since Dr Bramhalls’ article had been originally published, the classic ‘color revolution’ model based on U.S, Department of State (Siamese twin to CIA) or ‘the Sharp method’ had been employed (again) in Ukraine.
Other method of disinformation is noted in regards to alternative media’s Robert Parry has misreported events in Ukraine (myself not being the only one to notice), effectively pointing away from actions reflecting the role of ‘covert operations’ intelligence. Now, it can’t hurt (truth) to demonstrate the consequence of Gene Sharp suborning Ghandi’s model to utilitarian ‘Realpolitic’ sans morality. What Robert Parry (and his associate Ray McGovern) inexcusably fail to report in relation to Ukraine is, not only did Department of State/CIA aligned NGO’s organize and train the Maidan protesters based on Gene Sharp’s nonviolence model; the CIA operations sector subsequently organized the deaths of the same when they trained and imported the snipers who murdered them. A conservative Polish Member of European Parliament, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, states in an interview the Maidan snipers were trained in Poland in a joint operation with USA intelligence services:
Question: “[you are] a supporter of the thesis it was a CIA operation?”
Answer: “Maidan was also our operation. The snipers were trained in Poland”
The original interview transcript in Polish language HERE
A reasonable English language summary of the interview by PRAVDA:
An earlier leaked phone call between the European Union’s Cathrine Ashton and the Estonian foreign minister, indicate it was people aligned with the new USA supported Ukrainian administration were behind the snipers who killed both protestors and police during confrontation in Kiev.
Robert Parry points solely to out of control ultra-nationalists behind the snipers. A better explanation (backing up both the Polish MEP and leaked conversation) is found in rogue CIA officer Phillip Agee’s expose: ‘Terrorism and Civil Society‘
Furthermore, Robert Parry has misreported the facts on MH 17, detracting from intelligence operations in effort shifting responsibility, as well has pushed blatant American constitutional history revisions. With Ray McGovern’s former military intelligence and CIA background in close association with Robert Parry’s reporting, it is more than fair to question to what extent the American non-violence movement has been penetrated for purpose of information operation manipulations away from discovering the actual facts of the USA’s geopolitical dirty work.
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Ronald Thomas West 