Bellingcat did not receive direct funding by US, UK or Dutch government

When in a debate valid arguments  are not available anymore certain people and media start to smear their opponent by trying to look them foolish or by stating the opponent was funded by a (western) government. While being able to know how media gets (part of) its income is important , it is also important to know if such a claim is correct or not.

Patrick Henningsen, the owner of conspiracy website 21st Century Wire, at December 28, 2019 published an article on his website titled ‘Post-Truth World: An OPCW Cover-up, Shielded by MSM and Bellingcat‘. Earlier he published a lot of nonsense on other topics. This is just one example related to MH17.

The article is about the leaked OPCW-documents which were published by the Working Group on Syria, Media and Propaganda as well as by WikiLeaks. Some say the documents are proof the alleged chemical attack in Douma in April 2018 was a false flag and the OPCW wants to hide this. The 21st Century Wire article is about the main stream media not reporting about the leaks at all.

I like to point out a  misleading statement by Henningsen on his December 28 piece. He writes:

Frontrunning this concerted campaign to discredit the OPCW whistleblowers is the US, UK and Dutch government-funded ‘investigative group’ Bellingcat.

This suggests these governments give money to Bellingcat and as a result  have control over the content what Bellingcat publishes.

So lets factcheck this.

No direct funding by Dutch government

The statements Bellingcat is funded by UK and US-governments is rather old, but Bellingcat funded by Dutch government is a new one. The link in this remarkable statement provides some insight in the way of thinking by the author.  It redirects to a posting made around December 10 2019 on a site called ycombinator.com

A user named ‘jstewartmobile’ wrote amongst other claims: “Bellingcat also receives funding via PAX which is directly funded by Netherlands Foreign Ministry.”

At November 29, so around 11 days  before the post at ycombinator, Henningsen sent out a Tweet with the exact  text. So it seems Henningsen is the one who made this claim first.

Lets have a closer look. PAX is a Dutch NGO. PAX works with committed civilians and partners in fragile and conflict‐affected situations to protect  human security, to prevent and end armed violence, and to build peace with justice.

The annual report for 2018  of PAX shows a grant from Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a result of a program called ‘Strategic Partnership Dialogue and Dissent‘ worth Euro 12.679.000. That amount was 68% of the total income of PAX for 2018.

Pax spends their income on many projects and independently decides om which project to spent the money on. The government does not demand that part of the money is spend on Bellingcat or even on investigation on Syria. This article in Dutch VN magazine explains on what the money of PAX for peace was used for. Former Bellingcat member Christiaan Triebert, now working as a journalist for New York Times,  explains in all cases when Bellingcat recieves a grant, Bellingcat decides were to spend the money on.

An exception is the money from the Dutch peace organization Pax, which has asked whether they want to do civilian harm tracking for them: “They want us to investigate civilian casualties – civil harm – in Yemen, mainly caused by Western military intervention. But that is an ear tag that we can live with. It gives us the opportunity to focus more on Yemen. “

The founder of Bellingat, Eiliot Higgins,  told me Bellingcat recieved Euro 10.000 over two years starting in 2017 from PAX.

So the statement by Henningsen that “Bellingcat is Dutch government funded ” is nonsense. Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not instruct PAX where to spend the money one.

No funding by British government at all 

Another claim made by Henningsen is that Bellingcat is funded by the UK government. That claim is not supported by any proof in the article itself. Likely Henningsen is refering to ZINC Networks. In March 2019 certain newssites like Kremlin funded RT reported about British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Under the name Integrity Initiative the British government intended to give money to various organizations to counter Russian desinformation.

In January 2019 Eliot Higgins stated on Twitter Bellingcat has not received funding from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office

No direct funding by the US government 

A third claim repeated by many is that Bellingcat is funded by the US government. In some of these cases like reported by Russian media like RT, it is stated the  US National Endowment for Democracy  (NED) paid a grant to Bellingcat. It is true the NED gave an unknown amount of money to Bellingcat. NED is a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. Accordings its website ‘NED plays a critical, complementary role to official U.S. Government efforts to promote democracy abroad’. Each year, the NED makes more than 1,600 grants to support the projects of non-governmental groups abroad who are working for democratic goals in more than 90 countries. The average grant is about $50,000.

Around year 2016/2017 Bellingcat got a payment by NED. According Eliot Higgins: “The NED money is for training Russian language journalists in verification and open source investigation. It is not used for Bellingcat’s own investigations.

Other organizations who received a grant by the NED were by example Justice and Peace the Netherlands, the Polish Center for Propaganda and Disinformation Analysis and the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. In 2018 the US State Department funded NED with $168 million.

Was Bellingcat influenced by the grant of the NED? That does not seem to be the case. In March 2017 Bellingcat reported about the US Responsible for ‘Aleppo Mosque Bombing’. In April 2019 Bellingcat and the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) announced the release of the first round of investigations as part of a new project examining the campaign of airstrikes carried out by a Saudi-led coalition, including the United States, in Yemen since 2015. Multiple detailed investigations on Yemen can be read here.

Workshops

According Aric Toler, an employee of Bellingcat, a majority of the income comes from workshops. Another source of income are subscriptions (Patreon). Recently Bellingcat was given Euro 500.000 by the Dutch Postcode Lottery.

Majority of our $ comes from workshops we run. Also get about $3k/month from our Patreon. We have a variety of other smaller funds (none of whom give more than 10-15% of our total budget), the largest of which I think is OSF.

— Aric Toler (@AricToler) September 3, 2019