U.S. funding Chechen Separatists

Or at least one of them anyway. This article describes how Chechen foreign minister and separatist, Ilyas Akhmadov, was given asylum in the United States. The deal was arranged by the benignly named "American Committee for Peace in Chechnya." On this committee sits such icons of peace as former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and former US secretary of state Alexander "I'm in charge now" Hague. By the way, this article is from only one month ago.

Oh, it gets better:

"The committee confirmed that not long ago Akhmadov was appointed to a post at the US non-governmental foundation National Endowment for Democracy and now plans to move to Washington for permanent residence and work."

Yep, he's being paid. And paid by the NED for that matter. Another misnomer with an attitude, the National Endowment for Democracy has been a primary tool of destroying same throughout the world. Here's an an article from the handy site, Third World Traveler. A quote, to whet your appetite:

"Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED."

I will admit that my understanding of NED is that their primary modus operandi was covertly funding political parties and compliant labor unions. However, there is so little oversight with NED it's really not easy to tell what all they might be up to.

Read the whole article on them, but here is another portion of the article:

The Endowment played an important role in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, funding key components of Oliver North's shadowy "Project Democracy" network, which privatized US foreign policy, waged war, ran arms and drugs and engaged in other equally charming activities. At one point in 1987, a White House spokesman stated that those at NED "run Project Democracy". This was an exaggeration; it would have been more correct to say that NED was the public arm of Project Democracy, while North ran the covert end of things. In any event, the statement caused much less of a stir than if-as in an earlier period-it had been revealed that it was the CIA which was behind such an unscrupulous operation.

NED also mounted a multi-level campaign to fight the leftist insurgency in the Philippines in the mid-1980s, funding a host of private organizations, including unions and the media. This was a replica of a typical CIA operation of pre-NED days.
And between 1990 and 1992, the Endowment donated a quarter-million dollars of taxpayers' money to the Cuban-American National Fund, the ultra-fanatic anti-Castro Miami group. The CANF, in turn, financed Luis Posada Carriles, one of the most prolific and pitiless terrorists of modern times, who was involved in the blowing up of a Cuban airplane in 1976, which killed 73 people. In 1997, he was involved in a series of bomb explosions in Havana hotels.

So, a summary for those of you keeping score at home. One month before the Russian 9/11, Brzezinski and Haig and the NED brought a Chechen separatist to the United States. Now, I really want to be careful, because I have, myself, been involved in working with separatists, or at least armed opposition groups. The EZLN in Mexico, for example. And I've known lots of people working with Central American resistance movements for years. So no blanket condemnation from me for working with independence movements. I would also venture to say, from my limited knowledge, that I support independence for Chechnya. This conflict has been going on for a long time...long before there even was a Soviet Union.

You'll also recall my statement below that one Russian General was complaining that the whole school takeover affair was run from "outside forces" based in the U.K. While I was worried that he was venturing into vague, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, I didn't know at the time that England also just gave asylum to a Chechen separatist, Akhmed Zakayev.

Now, if you search on Akhamadov, you'll find some very reasonable statements about getting the U.N. to help facilitate an interim government in Chechnya and so on. So, just because Russia calls these men terrorists, doesn't mean they are. I think of the U.S. characterization of the ANC in South Africa as terrorist for so many years. IN addition, his characterizations of Russia's brutal tactics in Chechnya sounds plausible.

So is the Chechen movement a legitimate movement, or has it been coopted by people who would like to kill little children? Well, see below where I have this link wherein one of the captured militants says that the order for the attack came straight from separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov, the very man who appointed Akhamadov as foreign minister.

This, too, of course, proves nothing, as this whole affair could simply be a Russian concoction to discredit the Chechen movement. Still, we can see that, as always, there are wheels within wheels within wheels.

As it stands now, either the attack was a way to discredit a legitimate movement, or a legitimate movement has been coopted and manipulated by "outside forces" such as the U.S. or even Russia itself. It wouldn't be the first time a government sponsored terrorism against its own people to serve political need. I refer you to "Operation Northwoods" for details on how such operations might work. (There are better sources of info on this, but I like that this is from the radical leftwing ABC news.)