Index on Censorship was a CIA front operation funded through a conduit called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, who also published the right-wing / anti-Communist intellectual magazine Encounter. Index and Encounter commissioned contributions from many high-brow liberal and leftist intellectuals (Q: How to get liberals behind a Fascist program? A: Pay them!) but if anyone doubts the political agenda this sponsorship ultimately served, the CIA funded Index and Encounter at the same time that the CIA-sponsored Junta was rounding-up and torturing political dissidents in Greece, and at the same time the CIA was helping General Franco's Fascist regime (and Spanish people are still trying to get permission to dig up the mass graves).

Don't get me wrong, alot of the actual content in Index is OK, it's hard to say how much of it is deliberate misinformation, but I know genuinely great liberal writers whose credibility has been completely compromised in the authoritarian countries they were writing about (eg - Cuba) because no-one from Index had the integrity to mention to them that the publication they'd been writing for has a reputation for being a CIA front. After the CIA link was blown the CCF stopped funding Index but last time I looked the Ford Foundation - another CIA front - were still funding Index. Ironically you won't find ANYTHING about the Congress for Cultural Freedom or the CIA on Index's Wikipedia page - maybe someone from Index censored it?

My advice to Indymedia would definitely be to tell Index to FUCK OFF, but please keep this thread at least because Indymedia readers need to see it (and of course this issue has nothing to do with Wikileaks)

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_for_Cultural_Freedom
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_colonels
 http://www.voltairenet.org/article30039.html

Frances Stonor Saunders "Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War" (UK) 1999 and "The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters" New Press (US) 2000

... and pile in a bunch of allegations your links don't actually, you know, support in any fashion.

"In 1964, the CCF created the London-based magazine, Censorship, which (Frances Stonor) Saunders suggests “was the model for Index on Censorship, [which was] founded in 1972 by Stephen Spender, with a substantial grant from the Ford Foundation.” The CCF’s funding of International PEN was also controversial, as “the CIA made every effort to turn PEN into a vehicle for American government interests”. The article also describes The Ford Foundation as "The Intelligence Communities Foundation of Choice", and says that "during the 1950s the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations' activities were highly entwined with those of the CIA’s, and both were considered to be “conscious instruments of covert US foreign policy, with directors and officers who were closely connected to, or even members of American intelligence” - -

 http://www.commarts.uws.edu.au/gmjau/iss1_2008/barker.html

And, a typical act of self-justificatory misdirection from Index's OWN website (misdirection because it fails to mention that both Encounter AND Index were sponsored by the CIA) - -

"The Congress for Cultural Freedom soon turned itself into a permanent organisation of the same name and, a few years later, launched literary and political magazines in Britain, France, Germany and Italy. The British magazine, started in 1953, was called Encounter, and Stephen (Spender, later editor of Index) was an obvious choice as an English literary editor... In 1966, however, its reputation was seriously tarnished (along with the reputation of its editors) when it was revealed that it had been funded from its very beginning by the CIA, and Stephen resigned with a sense of having been exploited and betrayed" That didn't stop him accepting CIA money to found Index however! "We regarded other aspects of American and British foreign policy as short-sighted and counterproductive, namely the tendency to go easy on, or even support, authoritarian right-wing regimes such as those run by Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, or the Shah of Iran, simply because these regimes were anti-communist. Encounter’s sin had consisted not in supporting those regimes, but rather in remaining silent about them."

 http://ioc.sagepub.com/content/39/1/155.full.pdf

This is a conspiracy site, and therefore being able to quote some unknown guy somewhere who said that something was "modeled on" something else is sufficient to declare the former unmistakably and indubitably CIA.

By that line of reasoning, Indymedia's CIA.

Person above forgot to quote the rest of the text and just focussed-in on the perceived ambiguity of just one word - "modelled". An example of the other bits he / she forgot include "Index on Censorship (was) founded in 1972 by Stephen Spender, with a substantial grant from the Ford Foundation” - the Ford Foundation being a CIA front. Of course Index on Censorship rely on people to forget ;)

As for the accusation of conspiracy theories, much of the above is published on Index's OWN website