I was trying to look up some NED fundings the other day and also noticed the database had been taken down. Now there's only a very vague page listing their some of the stuff they do in regions that inexplicably only contains data for 2021.
Their website also runs on Wordpress if you can believe that however, noticeable because their media content is hosted in the wp-content folder (e.g. https://www.ned.org/wp-content/themes/ned/images/logo.png), which is the Wordpress media content folder. I'm not sure if this information helps because Wordpress is easy to secure, BUT if the database was provided by a plugin there's still a chance it's out there somewhere on the website, just not (easily) publicly accessible.
I have the URL to the search grant database here: https://www.ned.org/wp-content/themes/ned/search/grant-search.php?organizationName=world+uyghur+Congress, and we can see it's also for some reason hosted in wp-content/themes which makes no sense. However for the time being, we can still access the page from the Wayback Machine with full autocomplete in the organization name, thankfully. While removing a lot of the information that used to be accessible, it is still possible with this page to see if an organization had received some kind of funding from the NED prior to 2025.
Very interesting. I didn't note for reasons of space, but the database was getting purged of individual problematic entries before this mass defenestration happened. For example, when unrest erupted in Georgia earlier this year, records of grants provided to NED-created, Tbilisi-based Shame Network (including $90,000 to monitor Georgian Dream's legislative activities) suddenly vanished.
Shame Network were at the forefront of the protests (and aggressively pushed the false claim GD is a Russian proxy) in local and international media. Not sure if the deletion was intended to insulate the group, obscure the central US role in the unrest, or both and more. But it's a striking feature nonetheless. NED has been well-aware citizens and governments are unhappy about their activities for some time. The total purge of their database is a major escalation in terms of trying to cover their tracks. It may not be a total coincidence it followed my exposé with Max Blumenthal on how The Grayzone caused NED's "biggest PR fiasco" in the organisation's history.
Watch as the Wayback Machine pages suddenly disappear too.
You're absolutely correct that the NED was created to openly do what the CIA did covertly, and now that they've taken down the database they're back to doing things covertly. I wonder the ramifications this will have, especially in the press. Will we keep hearing so much about freedom and democracy when it comes to regime change?
Wayback has over 12,000 captures since 1995.. reminder see something save something has real life impact.. specific reports within those take some poking around.. comes down to what folks saved the Uyghur Congress link wasn't captured, sigh.
Brian Berletic who is a former marine, and an investigative journalist who lives in Bangkok, often cites NED and their actions in Southeast Asia, India and China. He focuses especially on Thailand.
Here is a 2023 article of his posted in Global Research:
Thailand and a number of other SEA countries have recently been invited to join BRICS. NED is banned in Russia, and it is possible that Thailand, which has had many problems with NED over the years, could finally kick them out.
Here is a very interesting interview between Jackson Hinkle from Legitimate Targets, and Vut Siamwalla about Thailand keeping neutral relations with China, Russia and the US. A great deal of SEAsian politics is discussed.:
Thanks for those links, and here is another very interesting one from the PRC sharing their opinion. It seems to be more accurate and informative than the US version?
The SparkNotes version would be to say NED and USAID are in certain aspects extremely similar, have some overlapping responsibilities, and both work on 'democratisation' and civil society projects in service of regime change. For example, there are WikiLeaks cables in which it's discussed how USAID is funding disability rights groups in Venezuela in order to undermine Hugo Chavez.
However, USAID is focused on "aid" and "development" in ways NED isn't at all. This means in practice USAID seeks to create fully-fledged alternative/parallel/replacement governance structures in target countries, in order to cement US hegemony. To give you an example from my neck of the woods, in many Balkan countries USAID will run/support healthcare programs, police training, building projects, recycling systems, schools, sport clubs, and other more practical and administrative components. Look at what USAID is up to in Kosovo, to all intents and purposes a US colony - https://www.usaid.gov/kosovo/fact-sheets. None of that is NED's beat.
USAID is used as cover to insert spies and information collectors into locations and situations where the local people dont expect them at all. These people take notes on who is doing what, who the opposition to the USA could be, where are XYZ facilities, who lives where, who is friends with who, etc. And they build local language fluency there.
The Peace Corps was also used for the same many decades ago.
Anecdotal: the child of my colleague back in the 2010's left a senior congressional staff position to work for USAID. They lasted about a year and then resigned telling their parent, USAID doesn't do what it says it does.
Immediately before the Sudan civil War, right after the de facto president of Sudan agreed to host a Russian naval base, Victoria newland ran down to USAID in South Sudan with $288 million. The war started almost immediately thereafter.
According to this forum, NED is an NGO, whereas USAID is a government agency.
That is probably the only or main difference between them, since they both do the same things. They just do the same things in different ways, and both are probably related to the CIA.
Bingo.. though tax dollars fund both big difference are Federal record keeping and FOIA risk an agency has by law while third party actors use business confidential.
Now that USAID is being dismantled by Trump, NED will also likely be dismantled since they got their money from USAID. Along with who knows how many other terrible NGOs.
Getting rid of all of them in one fell swoop is great!
In fact, I've been translating on my blog - a sort of press review - since its start (and before on other platforms), on Julian Assange and Wikileaks, and then gradually, thanks to the journalists I've read or met along Julian's never-ending story, like Craig Murray, Joe Lauria, you, Ben Norton, Richard Medhurst, Matt Kennard, Chris Hedges and many others, on Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, and more simply anti-empire and anti-war in general. Thanks again for your precious analysis :)
I was always surprised that NED made this information public. I couldn't understand why they would expose their own political influence operations across the world. However, many countries are considering and/or enacting laws to protect against foreign influence, and perhaps going covert is a way for NED to temporarily dodge these measures.
Of course such activities cause targeted governments to circle wagons and impose more protections to prevent meddling, actions which the NED & Co then utilize to brand those governments as "anti-democratic" (we often hear then use words like autocrat, dictator, authoritarian, totalitarian, etc.). However, a truly autonomous country has a right to protect itself from foreign meddling, one that is perhaps even more important that the right to self-defense in a military sense.
Meanwhile we are “entertained” by the flagrant hypocrisy of high dudgeon in western corporate media organs about “foreign interference” in their own domestic elections.
Whenever the US airs an accusation, we can interpret it as a confession with 99% confidence. As Goebbels famously noted in a 1936 speech, this is a behavior that goes back more than a century: "The cleverest trick used in propaganda against Germany during the war was to accuse Germany of what our enemies themselves were doing." A fun recent example: US hyping "Putin's ghost fleets" while the US operates its own ghost fleets to supply Israel.
There is nothing new about this really. The U.S. CIA has been actively involved in destabilizing the world outside of the G7 bloc and NATO since the end of WWII. We all know this, or any of us who study history knows this anyway. Now, the American empire is fading quickly so they are pulling back their overt operations and reverting back to covert once again. The goal being to hang on to their empire for as long as possible rather than expand anymore.
It's just more last gasps from these neocons like Biden, who thought they could rule the world. The world is changing, and they don't like that. These predatory American corporations are being pushed back, and they don't like that. For those of us on the front lines of these failing empires, life is going to become extremely difficult in the next few years as global geopolitics reshapes itself against the western, U.S. led, dominance. Especially the average American and British citizens. The EU will probably see the light sooner than their Anglo-Saxon partners as their economies continue to crumble quickly from backing the U.S. and Britain. Things are already starting to dramatically change there now. I give things about two years and the world as we knew it will not be the same anymore.
As long as Yankee dollars are accepted worldwide, the NED will do just fine..What on earth makes you think that the people who matter desire transparency?
Thanks for the outstanding heads-up, Kit -- as to all the damning info, the other sad part nowadays is that even IF the crucial bombshells were that blatantly public, a bulk of the brainwashed populace wouldn't truly care anyways because they've been conditioned by the fascist Rockefeller-controlled education system into abandonment of critical thinking skills.
and the excellent book "Family Ties..." by Peter McFarlane giving details of former Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland's grandfather's Ukrainian Nazi past.
Following the NED's creation, I don't believe the CIA curtailed its covert operations in target countries. All of that likely continued, but with an added veneer of public activity in the domestic politics of the foreign nation. Why that public activity has been tolerated by those countries is a mystery, but perhaps those days are coming to an end.
Now that the "mainstream media" is simply a government mouthpiece, the NED has nothing to fear from exposure of its covert machinations, because what the MSM doesn't cover, doesn't exist.
I was trying to look up some NED fundings the other day and also noticed the database had been taken down. Now there's only a very vague page listing their some of the stuff they do in regions that inexplicably only contains data for 2021.
Their website also runs on Wordpress if you can believe that however, noticeable because their media content is hosted in the wp-content folder (e.g. https://www.ned.org/wp-content/themes/ned/images/logo.png), which is the Wordpress media content folder. I'm not sure if this information helps because Wordpress is easy to secure, BUT if the database was provided by a plugin there's still a chance it's out there somewhere on the website, just not (easily) publicly accessible.
I have the URL to the search grant database here: https://www.ned.org/wp-content/themes/ned/search/grant-search.php?organizationName=world+uyghur+Congress, and we can see it's also for some reason hosted in wp-content/themes which makes no sense. However for the time being, we can still access the page from the Wayback Machine with full autocomplete in the organization name, thankfully. While removing a lot of the information that used to be accessible, it is still possible with this page to see if an organization had received some kind of funding from the NED prior to 2025.
Very interesting. I didn't note for reasons of space, but the database was getting purged of individual problematic entries before this mass defenestration happened. For example, when unrest erupted in Georgia earlier this year, records of grants provided to NED-created, Tbilisi-based Shame Network (including $90,000 to monitor Georgian Dream's legislative activities) suddenly vanished.
Shame Network were at the forefront of the protests (and aggressively pushed the false claim GD is a Russian proxy) in local and international media. Not sure if the deletion was intended to insulate the group, obscure the central US role in the unrest, or both and more. But it's a striking feature nonetheless. NED has been well-aware citizens and governments are unhappy about their activities for some time. The total purge of their database is a major escalation in terms of trying to cover their tracks. It may not be a total coincidence it followed my exposé with Max Blumenthal on how The Grayzone caused NED's "biggest PR fiasco" in the organisation's history.
Watch as the Wayback Machine pages suddenly disappear too.
You're absolutely correct that the NED was created to openly do what the CIA did covertly, and now that they've taken down the database they're back to doing things covertly. I wonder the ramifications this will have, especially in the press. Will we keep hearing so much about freedom and democracy when it comes to regime change?
Wayback has over 12,000 captures since 1995.. reminder see something save something has real life impact.. specific reports within those take some poking around.. comes down to what folks saved the Uyghur Congress link wasn't captured, sigh.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.ned.org
https://blog.archive.org/2017/01/25/see-something-save-something/
Brian Berletic who is a former marine, and an investigative journalist who lives in Bangkok, often cites NED and their actions in Southeast Asia, India and China. He focuses especially on Thailand.
Here is a 2023 article of his posted in Global Research:
https://www.asia-pacificresearch.com/why-west-whitewashing-terrorism-vietnam-myanmar/5631804.
And his X page:
https://x.com/BrianJBerletic
Thailand and a number of other SEA countries have recently been invited to join BRICS. NED is banned in Russia, and it is possible that Thailand, which has had many problems with NED over the years, could finally kick them out.
Here is a very interesting interview between Jackson Hinkle from Legitimate Targets, and Vut Siamwalla about Thailand keeping neutral relations with China, Russia and the US. A great deal of SEAsian politics is discussed.:
https://x.com/LegitTargets/status/1874168649071943835
Thanks for those links, and here is another very interesting one from the PRC sharing their opinion. It seems to be more accurate and informative than the US version?
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xw/wjbxw/202408/t20240809_11468618.html
Thanks, Justin, for the link.
Can you explain the relationship between NED and USAID? You mention it, but it’s unexplained. Is USAID also a CIA cutout? If so, in what way?
The SparkNotes version would be to say NED and USAID are in certain aspects extremely similar, have some overlapping responsibilities, and both work on 'democratisation' and civil society projects in service of regime change. For example, there are WikiLeaks cables in which it's discussed how USAID is funding disability rights groups in Venezuela in order to undermine Hugo Chavez.
However, USAID is focused on "aid" and "development" in ways NED isn't at all. This means in practice USAID seeks to create fully-fledged alternative/parallel/replacement governance structures in target countries, in order to cement US hegemony. To give you an example from my neck of the woods, in many Balkan countries USAID will run/support healthcare programs, police training, building projects, recycling systems, schools, sport clubs, and other more practical and administrative components. Look at what USAID is up to in Kosovo, to all intents and purposes a US colony - https://www.usaid.gov/kosovo/fact-sheets. None of that is NED's beat.
Also, for lulz, here's a 135-page USAID report from 2017 produced by "parking consultants" and transport and "urban development" specialists over a span of three months on how to 'reform' parking in Kiev: https://web.archive.org/web/20170622041754/https://www.usaid.gov/documents/1863/final-report-technical-assistance-parking-management-initiative-kyiv
USAID is used as cover to insert spies and information collectors into locations and situations where the local people dont expect them at all. These people take notes on who is doing what, who the opposition to the USA could be, where are XYZ facilities, who lives where, who is friends with who, etc. And they build local language fluency there.
The Peace Corps was also used for the same many decades ago.
USAID sounds perfect for Ukraine. Is it active there?
Anecdotal: the child of my colleague back in the 2010's left a senior congressional staff position to work for USAID. They lasted about a year and then resigned telling their parent, USAID doesn't do what it says it does.
"USAID doesn't do what it says it does"
Depressing history of individuals who make such realisations while working for British/American intelligence cutouts ending up dead
Yes. USAID has long been known to be CIA.
Like since the 1970s this was open secret in the developing world. Its western newspapers that pretend otherwise for their own people.
Immediately before the Sudan civil War, right after the de facto president of Sudan agreed to host a Russian naval base, Victoria newland ran down to USAID in South Sudan with $288 million. The war started almost immediately thereafter.
According to this forum, NED is an NGO, whereas USAID is a government agency.
That is probably the only or main difference between them, since they both do the same things. They just do the same things in different ways, and both are probably related to the CIA.
https://www.quora.com/How-do-NGOs-like-USAID-or-NED-intervene-in-the-political-affairs-of-foreign-countries
Bingo.. though tax dollars fund both big difference are Federal record keeping and FOIA risk an agency has by law while third party actors use business confidential.
Now that USAID is being dismantled by Trump, NED will also likely be dismantled since they got their money from USAID. Along with who knows how many other terrible NGOs.
Getting rid of all of them in one fell swoop is great!
It looks like NED gets it dollars from USAID, and is under it.
That's how they hide their money laundering.
You may like this PRC view of it that I stumbled on, since it is so interesting.
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xw/wjbxw/202408/t20240809_11468618.html
Always nice to have an opposing viewpoint?
Good question. I would like to know too.
Thank you for this article. You can read a French translation here :
https://open.substack.com/pub/ssofidelis/p/un-empire-en-deroute-ou-la-fin-des?r=egm99&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
In fact, I've been translating on my blog - a sort of press review - since its start (and before on other platforms), on Julian Assange and Wikileaks, and then gradually, thanks to the journalists I've read or met along Julian's never-ending story, like Craig Murray, Joe Lauria, you, Ben Norton, Richard Medhurst, Matt Kennard, Chris Hedges and many others, on Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, and more simply anti-empire and anti-war in general. Thanks again for your precious analysis :)
I was always surprised that NED made this information public. I couldn't understand why they would expose their own political influence operations across the world. However, many countries are considering and/or enacting laws to protect against foreign influence, and perhaps going covert is a way for NED to temporarily dodge these measures.
Of course such activities cause targeted governments to circle wagons and impose more protections to prevent meddling, actions which the NED & Co then utilize to brand those governments as "anti-democratic" (we often hear then use words like autocrat, dictator, authoritarian, totalitarian, etc.). However, a truly autonomous country has a right to protect itself from foreign meddling, one that is perhaps even more important that the right to self-defense in a military sense.
Meanwhile we are “entertained” by the flagrant hypocrisy of high dudgeon in western corporate media organs about “foreign interference” in their own domestic elections.
Whenever the US airs an accusation, we can interpret it as a confession with 99% confidence. As Goebbels famously noted in a 1936 speech, this is a behavior that goes back more than a century: "The cleverest trick used in propaganda against Germany during the war was to accuse Germany of what our enemies themselves were doing." A fun recent example: US hyping "Putin's ghost fleets" while the US operates its own ghost fleets to supply Israel.
Invaluable - thank you !!!
Thanks again Kit-your work is crucial.
There is nothing new about this really. The U.S. CIA has been actively involved in destabilizing the world outside of the G7 bloc and NATO since the end of WWII. We all know this, or any of us who study history knows this anyway. Now, the American empire is fading quickly so they are pulling back their overt operations and reverting back to covert once again. The goal being to hang on to their empire for as long as possible rather than expand anymore.
It's just more last gasps from these neocons like Biden, who thought they could rule the world. The world is changing, and they don't like that. These predatory American corporations are being pushed back, and they don't like that. For those of us on the front lines of these failing empires, life is going to become extremely difficult in the next few years as global geopolitics reshapes itself against the western, U.S. led, dominance. Especially the average American and British citizens. The EU will probably see the light sooner than their Anglo-Saxon partners as their economies continue to crumble quickly from backing the U.S. and Britain. Things are already starting to dramatically change there now. I give things about two years and the world as we knew it will not be the same anymore.
Coinciding with Nuland joining the board?
Thanks Kit for this new excellent article as usual, translated in French here https://zanzibar.substack.com/p/leffondrement-de-lempire-les-operations
It is so flattering that you keep doing this! God bless you!
It’s always a huge pleasure for me. My French followers appreciate your investigations
As long as Yankee dollars are accepted worldwide, the NED will do just fine..What on earth makes you think that the people who matter desire transparency?
Thanks for the outstanding heads-up, Kit -- as to all the damning info, the other sad part nowadays is that even IF the crucial bombshells were that blatantly public, a bulk of the brainwashed populace wouldn't truly care anyways because they've been conditioned by the fascist Rockefeller-controlled education system into abandonment of critical thinking skills.
A couple of interesting items on Canada's involvement in Ukraine:
https://youtu.be/HfLNolAuS4Q?si=v4Jun4jL1Se4ufjA
and the excellent book "Family Ties..." by Peter McFarlane giving details of former Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland's grandfather's Ukrainian Nazi past.
Following the NED's creation, I don't believe the CIA curtailed its covert operations in target countries. All of that likely continued, but with an added veneer of public activity in the domestic politics of the foreign nation. Why that public activity has been tolerated by those countries is a mystery, but perhaps those days are coming to an end.
Thanks for this vital information!
Now that the "mainstream media" is simply a government mouthpiece, the NED has nothing to fear from exposure of its covert machinations, because what the MSM doesn't cover, doesn't exist.