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Background on British-led
anti-LaRouche Berlin Event

October 16, 2008

The following is a translation of a statement released by the Bügerrechtsbewegung Solidarität (http://www.bueso.de/news/hintergrund-zur-britisch-inszenierten-anti-laro...)

At a time when the collapse of the global financial system has propelled American economist Lyndon H. LaRouche, once again, to the center of international politics, a propaganda campaign, organized from Great Britain, is scheduled to take place in Berlin, Germany, for the purpose of attacking Mr. LaRouche and targeting his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, chairwoman of the German political party Bürgerrechtsbewegung Solidarität (Büso) and the President of the German cultural association The Schiller Institute. The event is planned for October 17, 2008 at Berlin's Haus der Demokratie. It is being organized by circles associated with the British Fabian Society and the post-war British intelligence operation, the Congress of Cultural Freedom. These circles, which include the Baroness Liz Symons and U.S. based, but British linked, financier John Train, are friends and backers of former British P.M. Tony Blair and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

Duggan family lawyer Nicolaus Becker on a BBC TV News broadcast in April of 2007 had openly called for "putting pressure on the Germans”, not so much legal, but “political and diplomatic pressure”, which would be “enough." Now event organizers advertise the participation of prominent SPD-politician Prof. Gert Weisskirchen, who is identified as OCSE-representative against antisemitism; this indeed raises the question of intimidation and pressure on German institutions.

In order to dispel any confusion that may arise as a result of these proceedings, the following factual background concerning the circumstances and individuals behind this event is being issued to the public.

The pretextual subject of the event centers around the case of British national Jeremiah Duggan who died in a vehicular suicide in Wiesbaden, Germany in March of 2003. The German authorities who investigated the incident ruled that Duggan committed suicide by running into traffic on a busy highway. That finding, has been reviewed by the General State Attorney in Frankfurt and the Oberlandesgericht Frankfurt, the highest criminal court in the state of Hesse. It has also been reviewed by British law enforcement officials, and the Attorney General of England and Wales. All found no basis to question the determination of suicide by the original investigating authorities.

Nevertheless, the above cited British opponents of LaRouche have used the incident, beginning in July of 2003, to launch a campaign to defame Mr. and Mrs. LaRouche with the intention to counter the LaRouches' growing influence, then and now, in the United States, Germany, and internationally. Despite the facts of the case and the numerous court rulings upholding the finding of suicide, a small network of lawyers, parliamentarians and journalists, coordinated by the British political enemies of the LaRouches, have been put to work planting false stories in the media and filing groundless legal actions in order to defame the LaRouches. This British campaign has circulated the libelous accusation that the German authorities are covering up the facts and that LaRouche was somehow responsible for the Duggan suicide.

This campaign began in July 2003 at the time when Britain was engulfed in an uproar against then Prime Minister Tony Blair's launching, jointly with U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney and U.S. President George Bush, the war in Iraq, based on falsified intelligence. The opposition was fueled by the revelations of prominent British scientist Dr. David Kelly, who allegedly leaked to the BBC that Blair had "sexed up" the evidence supporting the British-U.S. invasion of Iraq. The "sexing up" of evidence was organized out of the Strategic Communications unit in Blair's office which was headed up by one Phil Basset, the husband of the above mentioned Baroness Liz Symons. It is now widely recognized that Blair and Cheney falsified the evidence to justify their war.

In the Spring of 2003, when the BBC had exposed Blair's use of falsified and exaggerated evidence to justify the war, it broadcast two interviews with Lyndon LaRouche in which LaRouche was featured as a leading opponent of the Blair-Cheney war. Shortly thereafter, Blair's friends mobilized against those exposing his lies. Dr. David Kelly was hauled before a parliamentary commission on July 15, 2003 and two days later was found dead in a wooded area near his home in what police ruled to be a suicide. BBC officials were subsequently fired for airing Kelly's accusations.

Five days before Kelly's mysterious suicide, on July 12, 2003, the London Guardian ran the first of many slander pieces against LaRouche, questioning the validity of the German investigation into the Duggan suicide and raising ominous, and false accusations against LaRouche and his wife in connection with the Duggan case. Baroness Liz Symons, a friend of U.S. V.P. Dick Cheney, was instrumental in launching the defamation campaign against LaRouche, providing her name and office in aid and encouragement of the legal and press offensive around the Duggan suicide.

Among the participants publicized to appear at the meeting are:

Chip Berlet―Berlet bills himself as senior political researcher for Political Research Associates of Cambridge, Ma., U.S.A., a Ford Foundation funded political propaganda unit. He was an early recruit to anti-LaRouche operations run by financier John Train, whose own career started at the Congress of Cultural Freedom-linked Paris Review. Train infamously organized a series of salons at his N.Y. apartment in the spring of 1983 in which he gathered journalists, government officials, and others linked to intelligence services to plot a defamation campaign against LaRouche in reaction to LaRouche's successful role in organizing then President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Berlet and his sidekick Dennis King were participants in the Train salons. Before being recruited by Train, Berlet started his career as a leader of the National Student Association, after that organization had been exposed as a C.I.A. front operation. He later wrote for the pro-drug High Times magazine. In the late 1990's Berlet was investigated by the San Francisco police department for participating in an illegal private spy ring run by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.

Matthew Feldman―a professor from Northampton University and editor of Compass magazine is a British associate of John Train's Chip Berlet and Dennis King. Along with his protege and mentor Robert Griffin, Feldman's alleged expertise on LaRouche is based on Chip Berlet, whose writings have appeared in their 'joint' book. London-based neo-con Walter Laqueur, a proponent of confronting Russia (and also well-connected with Cheney circles in Washington) wrote the foreword to a recent book of Feldman and Griffin. Along with George Mosse, the now deceased mentor of the Griffin, Feldman, Berlet "school" of fascism studies, Laqueur recruited the notorious Neo-con intelligence operative Michael Ledeen to the dirty tricks business. Ledeen is a promoter of "universal fascism." Their brand of alleged anti-fascism has been used by the much despised Antideutschen Antifa (antifascists), who are notorious for their militant support of the Bush/Cheney/Blair permanent war policy, in the streets of Germany.

Hans-Christian Ströbele - A Green party member of the Bundestag and a former Red Army Faction (RAF) lawyer, who has been a longstanding enemy of Helga Zepp-LaRouche. In May of 2007, acting in the interests of the LaRouches' British enemies, he filed a parliamentary “inquiry” against the BueSo and the Schiller-Institute based on the Duggan case, despite the rulings and findings of the German officials. His inquiry questioned the legal status of the BueSo as a political party. The German Government responded that there was no basis for that. In 2006, Ströbele was caught peddling libels among intoxicated "autonomist" youth subculture street types who physically harassed BueSo activists at an election rally in Berlin. Ströbele comes out of the late 1960s lawyer collectives that defended terrorists. He worked with Horst Mahler, whose dubious later biography as an RAF- and then an NPD- member, is known.

Eberhard Schultz- one of the lawyers for the Duggan family. Schultz counts among his most famous clients PKK leader Öcalan, and presents himself as a left-wing human rights lawyer. In the late 1960's he belonged to Kommune 2 in Berlin, along with Jan Carl Raspe, who later became a member of the RAF. In 1969 they authored an article in Kursbuch, the ostensible left-nut literary journal edited by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. The latter was connected to the circles of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), whose character as a psychological warfare operation and its CIA-financing blew up in a big scandal in 1967.

Dr. Rainer Fromm- A Journalist who had earlier publicized defamatory material against Lyndon LaRouche and Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche.