Neocons Covert Action and Ukraine Watch

Speaking of conferences, links to previous “War PowWows” are interesting when the participants/sponsors are listed:

About the Orange Revolution v1 in 2004 – many of the same names today in Kiev, including U.S. envoy Victoria Nuland, Poland’s combo FM Radek Sikorski and Anne Applebaum.

Democracy and Security Conference in Prague in 2007, especially the sponsors of neocon schnitt. Talks about ME strategy and overthrow of autocratic regimes such as Syria and Egypt. Involved were Peter Ackerman of Freedom House fame, Devon Gaffmey Cross, Sharansky of One Jerusalem, and the European Foundation for Democracy, many others see list below.

Quite interesting, website of 2007 Democracy & Security is still in place with complete list of participants [pdf] including Julia Tymoshenko, Bret Stephens (WSJ), Joe Wood (asst. to VP Cheney in White House), Walid Phares (Found. for the Defense of Democracies), Richard Perle, Josef Joffe (Die Zeit), Václav Havel, von Guttenberg (CSU Bundestag), Garri Kasparov, Eli Khoury (CEO Quantum Lebanon), John K. Glenn (German Marshall Fund of US), Farid Ghadry (Reform Party of Syria – USA), Uzi Arad (IPS Israel), Anne Bayefsky (Hudson Institute) etc.

○ Report on “Rescuing Human Rights” Conference at UC San Diego
Moderated by Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal,

There is a proces in place for right-wingers to infiltrate human rights organizations and leftist/progressive groups. Judge a group on its content, not on its name. Best example is Freedom House founded by Peter Ackerman. I got in a bit of scuffle over at European Tribune and it appears the cause was change over time in a few years. The USAID funded NGOs are well known, so a new set of cleansed NGOs for “Peace and Democracy” have come to the forefront.

Freedom House, tremendous changes over the years towards a neocon agenda

From the Cold War to the War on Terror

(RightWeb) – Freedom House was founded in 1941 by Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt in an effort to support President Franklin Roosevelt’s advocacy of U.S. entrance in World War II at a time when, according to Freedom House’s in-house history, “isolationist sentiments were running high in the United States.” When the war ended, “Freedom House took up the struggle against the other 20th century totalitarian threat, Communism. …

The organization’s leadership was convinced that the spread of democracy would be the best weapon against totalitarian ideologies. Freedom House thus embraced a mission to work to expand freedom around the world and to strengthen human rights and civil liberties in the United States. Freedom House thus strongly endorsed the post-war Atlantic Alliance, as well as such key policies and institutions as the Marshall Plan and NATO.”

Leadership

As of mid-2011, Freedom House’s executive director was David Kramer, a former assistant secretary of state during the George W. Bush presidency whose experience includes working as a fellow for the Project for the New American Century and the German Marshall Fund.

Chair of the board of trustees was William H. Taft IV, a professor at Stanford Law School and deputy secretary of defense in the second Ronald Reagan administration. Freedom House touts itself as having a “bipartisan character,” and to a great extent this is reflected in its board of trustees. However, as of mid-2011, the board included a number of people who have been associated with rightist advocacy endeavors, including Ruth Wedgwood, who has also served on the board of the Geneva-based UN Watch, a group affiliated with the American Jewish Committee; Thomas A. Dine, former director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and adviser to the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq; Max Kampelman, a retired diplomat who has worked with several neoconservative groups, including the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Kenneth Adelman, a former arms control diplomat who has supported the work of groups like the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Committee on the Present Danger; Paula J. Dobriansky, the Bush administration’s under secretary of state for democracy who has work for the Hudson Institute, the Independent Women’s Forum, among other rightwing groups; Joshua Muravchik, a prominent neoconservative writer formerly based at the American Enterprise Institute; and Mark Palmer, a retired diplomat, member of the Committee on the Present Danger, and vice president of the Council for a Community of Democracies.

Past Freedom House advisers and associates have included former CIA Director James Woolsey; the late UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick; conservative Rolling Stonewriter P.J. O’Rourke; the late Samuel Huntington, the Harvard professor known for his “clash of civilizations” thesis; Arthur Waldron, a longtime foreign policy hawk who has been a leading advocate for a hardline China policy; Mark Falcoff; the late Penn Kemble; Nina Shea, and Daniel Pipes.