USAID: US Imperialism’s Most Cynical Regime Change Tool - Analyst

Under the guise of foreign assistance the US Agency for International Development has been used to promote US foreign policy and regime change throughout the globe.

A recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request surfaced a 97-page “disinformation primer” authored by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The extensive document reveals Washington’s priorities in instituting online censorship and combating so-called “fake news” in the post-Trump, post-Brexit era.

But “much of the organization’s focus appears to be on preventing individuals from finding information online that challenges official narratives and leads to increased questioning of the system more generally,” says journalist Alan MacLeod in an analysis published by MintPress News.

Anthropologist Adrienne Pine joined Sputnik’s Political Misfits program Thursday to discuss the article and shed light on one of the United States’ most underhanded tools of global subversion.

"USAID’s focus relates to “misinformation, disinformation and mal-information,” notes host Michelle Witte, referring to terms which are employed frequently by so-called experts in the field. “Malinformation” has proven to be perhaps the most controversial among the three, referring to factually true information presented in a way to allegedly harm or manipulate.

Malinformation may lead people towards inconvenient narratives for those in power such as the conclusion that Israeli ethnic cleansing is bad or the Iraq War wasn't about "spreading democracy."

“Experts have described this phenomenon as an information disorder, a condition in which the truth and facts coexist in a milieu of misinformation and disinformation – like conspiracy theories, lies, propaganda and half-truths,” explained Witte. “Which I will stop and say describes every press briefing by a White House press secretary or John Kirby for the State Department or whoever.”

“USAID… also talks about what I consider to be the sinister tactic of ‘pre-bunking,’ which is to psychologically inoculate populations by discrediting the brand credibility and reputation of those making ‘false’ accusations,” the host added. “This is a smearing by association tactic, right? ‘You can't believe anything that this person is writing because their grandmother was Russian or they do business in China one time or whatever.’”

The tactic was recently employed by establishment mouthpiece The New York Times in an article about the anti-war group Code Pink that was widely slammed as McCarthyist in its tone. McCarthyism refers to disgraced former US Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Cold War tactic of smearing opponents by accusing them of association with communism or Soviet Russia.

Pine explained the Cold War origins of USAID as a tool of US “soft power.” The organization was created around the same time as other government agencies such as the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, “a US imperialist program aimed at preventing revolutions in Latin America,” she noted.

“You've got these three institutions that are founded by Kennedy in the wake of the Cuban Revolution and in the context of revolutionary anti-imperialist movements around the world so that the US can establish its hegemony post-World War Two,” said the analyst. “So USAID has never been a benign institution. It's never really been an aid institution.”

USAID operates by funding “civil society” groups purportedly focused on “democracy promotion,” labor rights, strengthening “independent media,” and other anodyne causes. But covert influence, as well as such groups’ desire to maintain US funding, transforms them into tools of US foreign policy.

Such non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can play a role in strengthening opposition to movements and figures perceived to work against US interests. In more extreme cases these groups promote civil unrest that creates a fertile environment for US-backed regime change. These efforts are known as “color revolutions” and have taken place in such countries as Bolivia in 2019 and Ukraine in 2004 and 2014.

Witte slammed the “hypocrisy” of the tactic given the US fixation on the conspiracy theory that Russia altered the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The host called USAID’s efforts “profoundly anti-democratic, because it's the notion that the United States can fund organizations that are against governments that the United States doesn't like, in lieu of the democratic processes that those governments and those people would like to set up.”

Pine noted the USAID document, in addition to smearing alternative news outlets like the Ron Paul Institute, Black Agenda Report and Truthout, also attempts to promote US intelligence-linked sources like the Atlantic Council and Bellingcat.

The Atlantic Council is a NATO offshoot created by the US defense department, MacLeod’s article notes, with seven former CIA chiefs on its board. Bellingcat, which presents itself as an independent “open source” intelligence operation, receives grants from the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and other Western government agencies.

“People who are going into that work [with USAID]... don't understand that they are an important part of the propaganda machine that is justifying the existence of this heinous and incredibly dangerous tool of imperialism,” concluded Pine.