In recent months, a remarkable development in the Empire’s decline has gone almost entirely unnoticed. The National Endowment for Democracy’s grant database has been removed from the web. Until recently, a searchable interface allowed visitors to view detailed records of Washington-funded NGOs, civil society, and media projects in particular countries - covering most of the world - the sums involved, and entities responsible for delivering them. This resource has now inexplicably vanished, and with it, enormous amounts of incontrovertible, self-incriminating evidence of destructive US skullduggery abroad.

Take for example NED grant records for Georgia, the site of recent repeated colour revolution efforts, at the forefront of which were Endowment-bankrolled organizations. While still accessible via internet archives, they were deleted during the summer. Today, visitors to associated URLs are redirected to a brief entry simply titled “Eurasia”. The accompanying text describes in very broad terms the Endowment’s aims regionally and the total being spent, but the crucial questions of where and on what aren’t clarified. In a comic hypocrisy too, the blurb boldly states:

“The heart of NED’s work in the region is the need to maintain access to objective information for local populations. Across the region, government actors are attempting to limit the space for citizens to distribute information and communicate freely online.”

Resultantly, independent academics, activists, researchers, and journalists have been deprived of an invaluable resource for tracking and exposing the Empire’s machinations. Yet, the Endowment incinerating its public paper trail can only be considered a significant victory for these same actors. NED’s explicit and avowed raison d’être was to do publicly what US intelligence did - and in many cases still does - covertly. Now, after 40 years of wreaking havoc worldwide in service of the Empire, the CIA front has been forced underground, defeating its entire purpose.

This mass [Western media] omertà, which has intensified since, may be attributable to ever-rising hostility towards NED by foreign governments and populations, and associated efforts to restrict or outright proscribe the organization. The reality of the Endowment’s raison d’être and modus operandi has thus not only become unsayable but must be vehemently denied by Western journalists. Representatively, a July 2015 Guardian report on Russia banning NED quite unbelievably relied on a brief quote from the organization’s own website to describe its operations.

While the mainstream media may have remained silent on the NED’s mephitic influence overseas over the past decade, the same is not true of independent academics, activists, researchers, and journalists. The Endowment grant database served as an invaluable tool for keeping a close eye on Washington’s international intrigues and mapping the personal and organizational connections of agents and entities of influence. Meanwhile, NED’s status as a CIA front could be simply proven, via multiple public admissions of its own leaders.

Of course, despite NED brazenly purging evidence of its vast operations from the web, that conniving continues apace regardless, covertly. One might even argue the Endowment’s chicanery is all the more dangerous now, given individuals and organizations can conceal their funding sources. But the move amply shows NED today cannot withstand the slightest public scrutiny, which its existence was intended to exemplify. It also demonstrates that “overt operations” with open US funding are now the very “kiss of death” the Endowment was meant to replace. The Empire is on the run.