For Iran Casualty Counts, Western Media Leaned Heavily on U.S.-Funded Iranian Rights Groups
During the 12-day war between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, Western media relied heavily upon a U.S.-based “human rights organization” when it came to counting the dead from Israeli strikes, and classifying them as either civilian or military casualties. That organization, according to a disclosure published on its own website, is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which was created by Congress and is funded annually to be an arm of American foreign policy. (NED itself is now suing the Trump administration, which is attempting to block funds Congress appropriated for the organization.)
The organization is called Human Rights Activists in Iran but is based in suburban Virginia. During the conflict, the group published civilian-to-military casualty ratios that consistently suggested impressive precision by Israeli forces, a precision called into question by emerging videos of Israeli strikes on civilian areas.
Yet Drop Site could not find a single Western news outlet that disclosed the source of funding. In contrast, of course, those same outlets routinely refer to the “Hamas-run Ministry of Health” in Gaza, a transparent attempt to cast doubt on the death toll. The effort is all the more egregious given that it is incorrect: the Ministry of Health is a civilian agency jointly run by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, but including that in the description could lend weight to the ministry’s numbers, given the PA’s collaboration with the Israeli government.
The AP referred to the group simply as “the Washington-based group Human Rights Activists,” while the BBC called them “a Washington-based human rights organisation that has long tracked Iran.” Time, France 24, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, the Washington Post, and dozens of other outlets relied on HRAI without disclosing its link to the US government.
On July 4, the New York Times ran on op-ed calling for new sanctions on Iran authored by Karen Kramer, whom the Times described simply as “the deputy director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran.” The center is not in Iran, but rather in New York, and is also funded by the NED, a detail the Times did not disclose.
On its website, HRAI contextualizes the U.S. funding as “non-governmental” because NED is a private nonprofit organization, a legal designation that obscures the reality that it was established by and is almost exclusively funded by the U.S. government. “Because the organization seeks to remain independent, it doesn’t accept financial aid from either political groups nor governments,” reads the disclosure on HRAI’s site. “These limitations are essential to maintaining our autonomy. Before March 2011, the organization received donations only from members and partners. But since then, HRAI has also been accepting donations from National Endowment for Democracy, a non-profit, non-governmental organization in the United States of America.”
NED was created by a Cold-War Act of Congress in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy Act, after being proposed by President Ronald Reagan. The intelligence community had some cleaning up to do. The late 1970s were a brutal period for the CIA in particular, which, after Watergate, saw investigative journalists and both chambers of Congress kicking over the logs of its clandestine activity. The Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House dug into assassinations, coups, and a previously unknown level of intervention in the internal affairs of both allies and adversaries. The purpose of NED was to move those covert propaganda activities into an arms-length private organization, though one still overseen by the U.S. government.
John Richardson was named the first full-time chair of the organization; he had previously run the CIA-backed Radio Free Europe and other intel-linked groups such as Freedom House.
“In some respects, the program resembles the aid given by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950's, 60's and 70's to bolster pro-American political groups,” reported the New York Times in 1986 in an article headlined “Missionaries For Democracy.”
“But that aid was clandestine and, subsequent Congressional investigations found, often used planted newspaper articles and other forms of intentionally misleading information.”
Carl Gershman, an aide to neoconservative Jeane Kirkpatrick who served on Reagan’s national security council, was tapped to run the organization as president. “We should not have to do this kind of work covertly,” Gershman told the Times. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60’s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.”
In a subsequent paragraph attempting to draw a line between the CIA and NED, the Times confirmed that the CIA was meanwhile continuing to covertly fund similar organizations, and that potential grantees are vetted by the CIA: “Mr. Gershman says that there is no contact between the C.I.A. and the endowment and that before grants are made, a list of the potential recipients is sent by the endowment through the State Department to the C.I.A. to be sure none of them are getting covert funds. No such case has been reported, Mr. Gershman said.”
Gershman’s admission is one that NED no doubt wishes had never been printed, but there are plenty of others to source. “The sugar daddy of overt operations has been the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-private group headed by Carl Gershman that is funded by the U.S. Congress. Through the late 1980s, it did openly what had once been unspeakably covert,” wrote David Ignatius in the Washington Post in 1991. “The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection.”
He quoted longtime intel operative Allen Weinstein as telling him, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
The media’s approach to the U.S.-based Iranian organization shows how little downside there is to such openness, especially now, as HRAI can include the disclosure publicly on its website and yet the reading public will still be left in the dark. As Ignatius observed in the same remarkable column, covert action was becoming obsolete:
That's especially true in the realm of what used to be called "propaganda" and can now simply be called information. The CIA worked hard in the old days to draw foreign newspapers and magazines into its web, so as to counter Soviet disinformation. Frank Wisner, the head of CIA covert operations during the mid-1950s, once remarked that he could play his media assets like a "mighty Wurlitzer."
Today the mighty Wurlitzer actually exists. It's called CNN. But it doesn't need playing by anybody but the independent journalists who work there. CNN's objective, omnipresent, real-time coverage of the news helps America's interests more than all the besotted Third World "media assets" of old could ever have imagined. And the bar bills are less.
HRAI played a public role in the Green Movement in 2009, which unsuccessfully contested the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but generated a wave of protests and the government’s subsequent crackdown. It was after those protests that NED began funding HRAI.
NED has also been a major funder of overseas news organizations that describe themselves as independent.
HRAI’s latest assessment has found casualties higher than those reported by the Iranian government, which reported just 610 deaths and 4,746 injuries. HRAI suggested the government was undercounting the toll, having identified 1,190 killed and 4,475 wounded.
Of those killed, HRAI claimed that 436 were civilians, 435 were military, and 319 remain to be identified. HRAI’s listed phone number is invalid and other attempts to reach the group were unsuccessful.
Glad someone is writing about NED and other soft power propaganda arms- pretty sure they’re also tied to the U.S. trying to destabilize Xinjiang and push the Uygher conspiracy narrative.
Great article!