Peter, I think you are just pointing out; the in vogue diversionary western tactic. Freedom house, IMF, World Bank, western media.... They are all with the same agenda, push an American control mandate. When they are abusing, they just try to shout, look over there, there is a problem, so they can distract from their own evil deeds. The US decries human rights abuses, but tortures and rapes, it holds absolute the concept of territorial integrity, yet invades, it decries the use of nuclear weapons, but uses them, it complains about government monitoring, but monitors everything, it finds regime change unacceptable, but does it .... the list goes on and on. These NGOs are just a corporate representation of this attitude, their job is simply to run a diversion, as the US sinks lower and lower in moral values, they need work harder and harder, and their stories become obvious. as ones of baseless double standards and hypocrisy. The good part though, is that the world is waking up to the diet of lies, half truths and political agenda running throughout the western cultures and political infrastructure, and exemplified and pushed by western organisations, such as the ones above It is a good awakening for the world, to recognise the perverse agenda of these organisations. for they now have little credibility, outside the sphere of influence of the American hegmony machine.

Good timing in your commentary Peter as de-construct.net just did a good article on how western NGO’s have subverted democracy and civil society in Serbia http://de-construct.net/e-zine/?p=6253 Interesting you mentioned Freedom House which at one time its director was run by Israeli firster Neocon and ex-CIA director James Woolslay who is part of other anti-Russian organisation like ACPC and during the period he was CIA director helped Islamic militants fight the Serbs in the Bosnian war including Bin Laden who personally meet the president of Bosnia in 94/95 the he and the rest of his friends are willing to wage war across the globe to fight. I’ll post comment later citing examples of how the US and other western countries do what FH claims Russia and other countries are doing.

These NGOs are subversive. They meddle in other nations internal affairs for the benefit of western interests. They don't really care about freedom and democracy.

I think Russia should set up its own institutions, and also spend some money to trasnlate into English a lot of its movies and shows and operas and things to market here. So should China. People are so separated, its like some countries dropped off the face of the earth during the Cold War, and we all missed them, we miss you, so give us something to know you with that is easier. Not propaganda, but art, your gorgeous ballets, your incredible cottages with those windows. Can't you do this sort of thing? Set up your own OSCE! Disperse your own NGOs.

Peter dislikes Freedom House. Here is my summary of his reasons. (1) Freedom House does not exist in a societal vacuum. (2) OSCE has done stuff. (3) Freedom House has a sense of what democracy means. (4) Countries which it designates as authoritarian are not excluded within the scope of Obama’s foreign policy considerations. (5) China is “doing something” in Africa. (6) Freedom House identifies Cuba as Not Free, the US also has a problem with Cuba while the OAS, which as far as I know does not run democracy surveys, doesn’t. (7) Peter doesn’t “claim to know the condition of the Internet in China” (although if he were in China and tried to access anything that includes the words “Tiananmen Square” his screen would instantly go blank), and therefore Freedom House has a problem. (8) Freedom House is at one and the same time sponsored by the West and is allegedly opposed to Obama. (9) Freedom House, like Peter in a recent blog, condemns the distortion of history but only Freedom House is blameworthy as a result. And for all these reasons, Freedom House (like NATO in some other of Peter’s writings) should cease to exist. Such is his case, when stripped to its essentials. Yet he diplomatically fails to include mention of what is perhaps the most important reason of all why Freedom House should cease to exist. Its Freedom of the World Survey positions Russia as “not free” and to add insult to injury the country that is Russia’s favourite punching bag, Estonia, is designated “free”. It also assigns position 170 out of 195 to Russia for freedom of the press, while pesky fascist Estonia gets position 16. If Freedom House were the only institution in the world to post such results, it may indeed be suspect. But Reporters Without Frontiers gives Russia a press freedom rating of 136 out of 144 (and Estonia position 4). The Global Peace Index rates Russia 136th out of 144, (Estonia came 38th), while the Human Development Index rated Russia 73rd out of 179 (and Estonia 42nd). Do all these agencies likewise deserve not to exist? Peter admits to being confused as to what freedom and its promotion means. If he read Freedom House’s detailed explanation of the philosophy and methodology of its surveys, his confusion could be remedied. Peter never faults Freedom House for the methodology of its surveys, yet this is the grounds on which Freedom House’s credibility ultimately stands or falls.

Peter, The mere fact that my opinions (often contrary to yours) are posted on RT is excellent proof that the Internet in Russia vibrant and exciting. Gene H.

I think that everybody (apart from Marzipan obviously) who has acquired a little of knowledge about how the Western propaganda works , would not regard as true neither one single sentence of that report. Talking about Estonia or Latvia as free countries (or at least more than Russia) is quite funny. It's well known that the NGOs like the so-called Freedom house are the long hand of US government. I agree that Russia should invest more in information media in Western countries. For the Freedom House Ukraine is now a free country. Who want to bet with me that if Yanukovich will be president and turns its back to the US, next year Ukraine will be ranked as not free or partially free? If Russia was a tiny country servant of the US, they would regard it as democratic even with Stalin. (I am sure) because of its friendship with Russia, Italy was regarded less free this year. The country of racial laws and McCarthy, the country which backed regimes as Pinochet, the only country which has got the guts to drop two nuclear bombs against civilians of an already defeated Japan wants to teach us about good behavious!!!

@Lorenzo Ghilardi Yes could not agree more on the point of media information the best info I get on Russia is a handful of US and western commentators and my own research. Serbs have done a great job using the internet to get the truth and fact about Serbia and the Balkans conflict with out any government support or backing which is controlled by western aligned financial and media affiliates which Russia does not have as it has no expat community abroad. In fact they are the exact opposite they are anti-Russian. @Marzipan6 Peter is critical of Freedom house because is an intelligence front like all the other ones who are financed primarily through NED, Soros Open Society Ngo’s etc. As it promotes freedom as much as Jacob Schiff’s Friends of Russian Freedom. In fact it’s not even a NGO Government Organisation as it is financed by NED which gets yearly financial backing from US congress and his a members of its trustees senior foreign policy advisor and politicians like Brezinski who like others like ex-CIA director James Woolsey who are also members of other anti-Russian organisations like ACPC, AEI, etc advocate the dismemberment of Russia. So it is not apolitical or independent and has a political agenda. "The NED was founded by the Reagan Administration in the early 1980’s, on the recommendation of Bill Casey, Reagan’s Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), following a series of high-publicity exposures of CIA assassinations and destabilizations of unfriendly regimes. The NED was designed to pose as an independent NGO, one step removed from the CIA and Government agencies so as to be less conspicuous, presumably. The first acting President of the NED, Allen Weinstein, commented to the Washington Post that, 'A lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.' http://www.voltairenet.org/article30112.html The other organisations OSCE is filled with former diplomats from the intelligence agencies who prior to the Kosovo war helped point GPS coordinates for NATO bombers in Kosovo and was a recognised CIA front aiding the KLA. http://www.iacenter.org/bosnia/yugo_hiddenhand.htm http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/smorg012506.htm http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/smorg101805.htm And as for Reporters Without Frontiers that is also part of this nexus which is financed by NED and Soros Open Society among others. Which would explain why Kosovo is fairly high above the list 58 despite the fact it is run by the KLA mafia terrorists regime that has organised mass programs, ethnic cleansing and state terrorism against the Serbs not to mention involved in organ, drug and sex trafficking which Estonia deemed worthy of granting independence. As for human development it has improved dramatically since Putin came to power raising the middle class, has a steady economic growth (before the current economic downturn) reduced poverty by half more millions more Russians travelling abroad while he inherited a country that was falling apart looted and controlled by handful of western oligarchs that totally controlled the country media, government, etc running it into the ground conspiring with foreign intelligence, Chechen led terrorists and affiliated organised crime from dismembering and Balkanising the country. In fact they have done almost everything possible to try and replace Putin financing NGO’s http://www.workers.org/2006/world/ngos-0216/and political parties in Russia, state sponsored terrorism and organised crime, NED/Soros led coloured revolutions in neighbouring countries and even waging war through proxy third parties just like they did to Czarist Russia when they installed Communism in Russia. So maybe this is the reasons for Russia’s peace index placement. Almost forgot to mention the US is using Neo-nazi mercenaries that they used against the Serbs in the Balkans conflict to destabilise Bolivia. http://de-construct.net/e-zine/?p=5492 http://de-construct.net/e-zine/?p=5606

Johnx - excellent summary of what western government and institutionally funded NGOs are all about. Should Russia just copy, I hope not, Russia should just as Pauline said, focus on a non political angle, my prediction is that the wheels of the political chariot will come off pretty soon, as eveyone can see the western people are just being lied to, time and time again, by their governments, for the benefit of a select circle of western players. I think Russia, just needs to play it straight, offer an alternative approach, and adhere strictly to non-politicised media output in other countries, to add cultural value instead of propoganda, as practised by the western 'NGOs'

As I live in the West, it is the problems, shortcomings, contradictions as well as benefits of the West that I must negotiate and deal with every day, and I very much doubt that I am especially starry-eyed about any of it. I am also aware of no end of conspiracy theories on just about every issue imaginable, including those pertaining to Western institutions such the ones mentioned on this Forum topic. Because I am no more privy to behind-the-scenes “privileged” information regarding these institutions than are its confident Forum critics, I note what the theories purport but do not draw definitive conclusions on the basis of them. What is of much greater importance is the objective authenticity and verifiability, or otherwise, of reports like the World Freedom Index. On its website, the much maligned Freedom House provides very detailed information about the methodologies, subset charts and weightings that were used to produce overall country scores. If critics of its survey outcomes are serious, they should present detailed, credible and logical evidence detailing exactly where the flaws and failings in the methodology are. General broad brush strokes about such-and-such being financed by so-and-so are little more than excitable bluster, and objectively non-verifiable at that. Freedom House might theoretically be an organization of rogues producing verifiably accurate reports; or it might be fine organization producing woeful reports; or it might be a hopeless organization producing hopeless reports. In each case, it is the reports and their constituent data and methodologies that crucial; yet it is precisely this kind of disciplined analysis that is single-mindedly avoided by the critics here. Lorenzo Ghilardi’s post, for example, is no exception. Without the benefit of any analysis of evidence but solely on the basis of Russian propaganda, he thinks that suggestion that Estonia is as free country, indeed more free than Russia, is funny. A logical analysis of objective evidence may – and does – render Russian propaganda to be funny.

Lorenzo Ghilardi has a good comment! Peter is spot on as always.

@Marzipan6 I provided links and analysis that like the OSCE that was from the Hague tribuneral which was a creation of Soros who actively supported the KLA and anti Serbs NGO’s and media outlets so you can hardly call it bias except against the Serbs. And the links I provide are not Russian government or funded agencies or organisations unlike Freedom House so it’s not Russian propaganda at all. Plus no one is trying to over through the Estonian government sponsor terrorism or organised crime in the country. Why are we even comparing Russia with Estonia that’s not even the issue. Of course its going to be more free it’s fairly small, homogeneous, and secure borders and has no reason for MI6 or the CIA to run subversive forces in the country. In every western country including the internet the 2% minority buys and monopolises and controls the media, banking, academia, political financing etc.

I don't want to start a debate, but as "single-minded" person, I just need to reply to Marzipan6 showing what the current board of trustees of Freedom House is made of. Like all American NGOs, it seems to me the organization is not so free from the Department of State. Chairman Emeritus: Max Kampelman Head of the United States Delegation to the Negotiations with the Soviet Union on Nuclear and Space Arms in Geneva from 1985-1989 and as Counselor to the Department of State from 1987-1989. He is currently co-chair of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, a policy institute that favors larger defense budgets and arms buildups Chairman: William H. Taft IV Great-grandson of U.S. President William Howard Taft, he was in service in George W. Bush administration. Vice-Chairman: Thomas A. Dine Former foreign policy staff member in the U.S. Senate and member of (AIPAC) an American lobbying group that advocates for pro-Israel policies. Secretary: John Norton Moore Served as the counselor on international law to the Department of State

To Johnx: I have looked at your links, and not a one of them even tries to analyze the methodology underpinning Freedom House’s World Freedom Index. Rather, their stock in trade is an anally retentive straining about who financed whom, who is allegedly connected to whom, and about what the alleged financiers and others did here, there and someplace else. We have heard nothing at all from them, nor from you, about where and how Freedom House indexing methodologies are flawed. Your comment about the Estonian government and organized crime is unclear due to an apparent typing mistake (happens to everyone, and after it does there’s no way you can get back in the post to fix it!). If you wish to clarify what you meant, I will be happy to comment on it. As for why I compare Russia with Estonia at all, the answer is very simple. Russia’s leadership seems to feel a chronic political and psychological need to endlessly criticise, accuse, defame and verbally attack Estonia. This happens on almost a weekly basis in government or Duma statements within Russia, in Russian press releases, or through Russian ministerial statements at overseas diplomatic events. Perhaps you are not aware of this as you would naturally not be particularly attuned to it, and only a few of the more prominent outbursts would actually be noticed by you. Estonians notice every one, and have done for the best part of 20 years. Russia likes to assume the high moral ground for itself, and its verbal raids against Estonia have a persistent air of self-righteousness. It is therefore entirely fitting to point how very far behind Estonia Russia objectively falls in regard to the very values on which it criticises. Once Russia stops its campaigns of defamation, I for one will stop pointing out its own record of freedom, ethics and societal non-achievement, and will be content to let it either tower or languish in whatever spot on such indexes that it chooses.

Good global research article on NGO's in coloured revolutions which references Freedom House. Since early 2005 when a series of opposition protests erupted over the fairness of parliamentary elections in February and March, Kyrgystan has joined the growing list of Eurasian republics facing major threat of regime change or color revolution. The success of former Kyrgystan Prime Minister Kurmanbek Bakiev in replacing ousted President Askar Akayev in that country’s so-called ‘Tulip Revolution,’ becoming interim President until July Presidential elections, invited inevitable comparisons with the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, or the Georgian Rose Revolution. Washington’s Radio Liberty has gone to great lengths to explain that the Kyrgystan opposition is not a US operation, but a genuine spontaneous grass roots phenomenon. The facts speak a different story however. According to reports from mainstream US journalists, including Craig Smith in the New York Times and Philip Shishkin in the Wall Street Journal, the opposition in Kyrgystan has had ‘more than a little help from US friends’ to paraphrase the Beatles song. Under the Freedom Support Act of the US Congress, in 2004 the dirt poor country of Kyrgystan got a total of $12 million in US government fundsto support the building of democracy. Twelve million will buy a lot of democracy in an economically desolate, forsaken land such as Kyrgystan. Acknowledging the Washington largesse, Edil Baisolov, in a comment on the February-March anti-government protests, boasted, ‘It would have been absolutely impossible for this to have happened without that help.’ According to the New York Times’ Smith, Baisolov's organization, the Coalition for Democracy and Civil Rights, is financed by the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a Washington-based nonprofit organization in turn funded by Condi Rice’s State Department. Baisolov told Radio Liberty he had been to Ukraine to witness the tactics of their Orange Revolution, and got inspired. But that isn’t all. The whole cast of democracy characters has been busy in Bishkek and environs supporting American-style democracy and opposing ‘anti-American tyranny.’ Washington’s Freedom House has generously financed Bishkek’s independent printing press which prints the opposition paper, ‘MSN,’ according to its man on the scene, Mike Stone. Freedom House is an organization with a fine-sounding name and a long history since it was created in the late 1940’s to back the creation of NATO. The chairman of Freedom House is James Woolsey, former CIA director who calls the present series of regime changes from Baghdad to Kabul, ‘World War IV.’ Other trustees include the ubiquitous Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Clinton Commerce Secretary Stuart Eizenstat, and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake. Freedom House lists USAID, US Information Agency, Soros Foundations and the National Endowment for Democracy, among its financial backers. One more of the many NGO’s active in promoting the new democracy in Kyrgystan is the Civil Society Against Corruption, financed by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).The NED which, with Freedom House, has been at the center of all the major Color Revolutions in recent years, was created during the Reagan Administration to function as a de facto privatized CIA, privatized so as to allow more freedom of action, or what the CIA likes to call ‘plausible deniability.’ NED chairman Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman is close to neo-conservative Bill Bennett. NED President since 1984 is Carl Gershman, who had previously been a Freedom House Scholar. NATO General Wesley Clark, the man who led the US bombing of Serbia in 1999, also sits on the NED Board. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, said in 1991, ‘A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.’ Not to be forgotten, and definitely not least in Kyrgystan’s ongoing Tulip Revolution is George Soros’ Open Society Institute -- which also poured money into the Serbian, Georgian and Ukraine Color Revolutions. The head of the Civil Society Against Corruption in Kyrgystan is Tolekan Ismailova, who organized the translation and distribution of the revolutionary manual used in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia written by Gene Sharp, of a curiously-named Albert Einstein Institution in Boston. Sharp's book, a how-to manual for the color revolutions is titled ‘From Dictatorship to Democracy.’ It includes tips on nonviolent resistance -- such as ‘display of flags and symbolic colors’ -- and civil disobedience. Sharp’s book is literally the bible of the Color Revolutions, a kind of ‘regime change for dummies.’ Sharp created his Albert Einstein Institution in 1983, with backing from Harvard University. It is funded by the US Congress’ NED and the Soros Foundations, to train people in and to study the theories of ‘non-violence as a form of warfare.’ Sharp has worked with NATO and the CIA over the years training operators in Burma, Lithuania, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine to Taiwan, even Venezuela and Iraq. In short virtually every regime which has been the target of a US-backed soft coup in the past twenty years has involved Gene Sharp and usually, his associate, Col. Robert Helvey, a retired US Army intelligence specialist. Notably, Sharp was in Beijing two weeks before student demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The Pentagon and US intelligence have refined the art of such soft coups to a fine level. RAND planners call it ‘swarming,’ referring to the swarms of youth, typically linked by SMS and web blogs, who can be mobilized on command to destabilize a target regime. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=518

Isn't it an irony that the country that makes a big deal of being the leader of the democratic (I wouldn't use the word free) world, has always backed vicious dictators like Pinochet, sundry generals of poor countries, the Saudis and other Arab despots, and now the Kosovar thugs. Compare this to countries it has always been apposed to: India, the world's only true democracy and the largest; Serbia, whose citizens saved countless American pilots who were shot down by the Germans (the American pilots that landed in Croatian hands were immediately handed over to the SS to be tortured). If there's any doubt about the hypocrisy of American policy, just look at two countries in democratic India's neighborhood they were backing during the Cold War: China, the butchers of Tiananmen, and Pakistan, the butchers of Bangladeshi citizens and the creators of the Taliban. It's India's natural affinity for friendship with Russia that perhaps saved India and its democracy. Especially when such a dangerous triple alliance was arrayed against it. Democracy be dammed. Shouldn't we all learn from Singapore, which has prosperity, unparalleled security and limited freedom -- a combination that has given its citizens remarkable happiness.

To Marzipan6. You are talking about Freedom House methodology as of something based on some kind of "objective" scientific measurement. This claim won't hold water. There's no such thing as an objective instrument to measure democracy and freedom. As Freedom House admits it: "The survey findings are reached after a multi-layered process of analysis and evaluation by A TEAM OF REGIONAL EXPERTS AND SCHOLARS". That is basically by a group of "experts" selected by Freedom House itself. Of course Freedom House tries to convince us that "although there is an element of subjectivity inherent in the survey findings, the ratings process emphasizes intellectual rigor and balanced and unbiased judgments." But these words are just fig leaves concealing the fundamental subjectivity of the methodology.

America is a Constitutional Republic,not a Democracy

@Marzipan6 I meant to say that foreign intelligence supports terrorism and organised crime in Russia which are interlinked in the country. Moglevich, Berezovsky, Guisinky, Fainberg, etc. I will agree with you on relations with Estonia Russia making something out of nothing although they have rightful concerns about Ukraine and Georgia as they were brought in by foreign intelligence outfits through Soros NGO’s and Berezovsky who seek to over through the Russian government. Freedom House relies on his analysis on western and domestic NGO for analysis in the case of Russia are based on NGO’s and organisations financed and run by people who are not a political like the OSCE and Soros HRW, Transparency International etc and other civil and human rights groups that are that are financed by other institutions like the British foreign office that was revealed during the Rock spy exposé that finance Freedom House. The same NGO’s were also instrumental in the break up of Yugoslavia and the overthrough of Milosevc like Soros Optor who provided computers, training, financial backing, alternative media and tactics like attacking police to garner a response a claim police state brutality. Plus all and any political opposition are under the Other Russia coalition backed by NED and the AEI which receive logistical and financial support, alternative media, etc. There also involved in creating and financing internet websites. It’s estimated that there are 600,000 of these NGO’s operating in Russia. “Alexei Pankin, writing in the Jan. 25 issue of the magazine Russia Profile, described his relation with two NGOs. “I ran a USAID-funded three-year program supporting Russian media, with a total budget of $10.5 million, and a Soros Foundation program supporting Russian media with an annual budget of $1.8 million. The number of supervisors, bosses, inspectors and advisers who I had to deal with (or had to deal with me) defies belief. I am sure there were intelligence officers among them.” http://www.workers.org/2006/world/ngos-0216/ http://www.asiantribune.com/?q=node/13213