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Dialogue of Cultures

The Washington Post's and
KKK-Katie Graham's 25-Year
War Against LaRouche

by Jeffrey Steinberg

On Aug. 31, 1995, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark testified before an independent commission of inquiry, probing criminal abuse of power by top officials of the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI. Clark spoke of the frameup of leading American political economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche as the single most grievous case of prosecutorial abuse he had ever encountered. Clark told the panel of elected officials and civil rights leaders:

”In what was a complex and pervasive utilization of law enforcement, prosecution, media, and non-governmental organizations focussed on destroying an enemy, this case must be number one. There are some, where the government itself may have done more and more wrongfully over a period of time; but the very networking and combination of Federal, state, and local agencies, of Executive and even some Legislative and Judicial branches, of major media and minor local media, and of influential lobbyist types, the ADL [Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith] preeminently; this case takes the prize.

”The purpose can only be seen as destroying--it's more than a political movement, it's more than a political figure. It is those two. But it's a fertile engine of ideas, a common purpose of thinking and studying and analyzing to solve problems, regardless of the impact on the status quo, or on vested interests. It was a deliberate purpose to destroy that at any cost.”

Wall Street and The Washington Post
Declare War
on LaRouche

Key to the decade-long Wall Street-ordered assault against LaRouche and his political movement was the U.S. Establishment media--particularly KKKatharine Graham's Washington Post. Evidence presented at LaRouche's Federal trial, in appellate briefs, and before an independent commission of inquiry, revealed that a “Get LaRouche” task force, involving government agents and representatives of major media organizations, had been assembled to conduct a campaign of vilification, in order to create the propaganda conditions for the judicial railroading of LaRouche and the effort to silence his political movement and his ideas.

The media assault was launched long before the Justice Department opened a string of bogus grand jury actions against LaRouche and his political movement in 1984 and, two years later, staged a military assault on LaRouche's publishing offices and residence in Leesburg, Va., aimed at provoking a “Waco-style” armed confrontation, to murder the three-time Presidential candidate under the pretext of a law enforcement action. More than 400 Federal, state, and local police--backed up by Pentagon counter-terror units, armed personnel carriers, and fixed-wing aircraft--participated in the Leesburg raid of Oct. 6-7, 1986.

The first public admission that the Wall Street Establishment and their allies in the international financial oligarchy had declared war on Lyndon LaRouche, not surprisingly, appeared in the editorial pages of KKKatharine Graham's Washington Post. On Sept. 24, 1976, almost a decade, to the day, before the Leesburg raid, editorial writer and leading neo-conservative Stephen Rosenfeld, speaking for Graham and the Lazard Freres-centered financial interests, wrote a signed editorial titled “NCLC: A Domestic Political Menace,” demanding that the entire U.S. media adopt a uniform policy of blacking LaRouche's name out of the media, or of publishing slanders, aimed at blunting his growing political support. (NCLC referred to the National Caucus of Labor Committees, the philosophical association founded by LaRouche in the late 1960s.)

“What shall be done about these dangerous people?” Rosenfeld asked. “We of the press should be chary about offering them print or air time. There is no reason to be too delicate about it. Every day we decide whose voice to relay. A duplicitous, violent prone group with fascistic proclivities should not be presented to the public unless presented in those terms.”

The Rosenfeld declaration of war against LaRouche, on behalf of Katharine Graham, went one step further. Rosenfeld demanded that “We should look more closely at its activities and its lavish and secret funding.... The government should be encouraged to take all the legal steps to keep the NCLC from violating the political rights of other Americans. Police power ought now to be used to protect the left, and, of course, the center and right, as needed against violence and terror. The FBI must vigorously apply the law to the NCLC, whose activities plainly fall within the ambit of Department of Justice guidelines for domestic intelligence gathering.”

Rosenfeld concluded, “Can anyone recall an instance in which the FBI and the left agreed so precisely on a domestic political menace?”

FBI- Communist Party Dirty Tricks

KKKatharine Graham's public targetting of LaRouche occurred as the FBI was coming under intense scrutiny for illegal spying and dirty tricks against the civil rights movement and other political activists, under Cointelpro (“Counterintelligence Program”). Among the documents later released exposing FBI criminality, was a 1973 FBI headquarters Cointelpro memorandum on LaRouche and the NCLC, showing that the FBI was considering supporting an assassination attempt against LaRouche by the Communist Party USA. In that context, Rosenfeld's comment that the FBI and the left “agreed so precisely” about the LaRouche “menace,” was particularly noteworthy. Graham demanded that, in the case of LaRouche and the NCLC, the Constitution be scrapped, and the FBI given a political shoot-to-kill order.

What had provoked the Establishment's fear and anger at LaRouche, prompting such a declaration of war? Rosenfeld was clearly lying when he argued that LaRouche was “violent.” In fact, the Ford Foundation, under the Eastern Establishment's unofficial “chairman,” McGeorge Bundy, had provided the funds for the launching of the terrorist Weatherunderground movement, to ensure that the student protests of the 1960s would be steered in a violent, but politically harmless direction.

Henry A. Kissinger Steps In

Far from being “violence-prone and fascistic,” LaRouche had exposed McGeorge Bundy's hand behind the New Left terror, branding it a modern form of Mussolini fascism. More to the point in causing a fury on the part of the Wall Street-London Establishment, in 1975, LaRouche had issued a call for the creation of an International Development Bank, to replace the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and establish a new, just world economic order. LaRouche had called for a global debt moratorium, as one crucial measure to break the power grip of the private financial oligarchy.

In response, then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger had gone on a personal crusade to block governments in the Arab world and throughout the Non-Aligned Movement, from having anything to do with LaRouche. In more than one instance, Kissinger threatened to bring the entire force of the United States government to bear against any nation that showed even the slightest sign of interest in LaRouche's IDB and debt moratorium proposals. Despite these Kissinger threats and worse, the Non-Aligned Movement, meeting in 1976 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, adopted resolutions based on LaRouche's call for a debt moratorium and the creation of a new, just economic order. This occurred just prior to the Rosenfeld editorial attack.

One additional factor that prompted the KKKatie Graham/Rosenfeld diatribe was Lyndon LaRouche's first campaign for the U.S. Presidency. Rosenfeld complained, bitterly, that “Recently the Washington Star and the New York Times published straight interviews with Lyndon LaRouche ... letting him talk about his Presidential campaign as though he were a kooky but acceptable member of the political community.”

LaRouche and The SDI

By 1980, LaRouche was involved in his second Presidential campaign, this time seeking the Democratic Party nomination against the widely discredited incumbent, Jimmy Carter. One hallmark of LaRouche's 1980 effort was his call for the United States to develop a global ballistic missile defense system, based on new physical principles, in concert with Europe and the Soviet Union, to bring to an end the thermonuclear nightmare of Mutually Assured Destruction. Carter was defeated, and the incoming President, Ronald Reagan, voiced interest in LaRouche's NMD proposal, which he eventually endorsed, on March 23, 1983, in a nationwide television address.

Even the earlier suggestions of LaRouche's ideas being studied by the Reagan Administration drove Graham and Kissinger apoplectic. In a now-infamous August 1982 letter to FBI Director William Webster, Kissinger repeated the Rosenfeld demand that the DOJ/FBI dispose of the LaRouche “menace.”

Webster ordered FBI Deputy Director Oliver “Buck” Revell to take up the Kissinger demand and, in a Jan. 12, 1993 memo, Webster reported that several members of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, including KKKatharine Graham's personal attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, had demanded action against LaRouche. Mirroring the lies and smears in the 1976 Rosenfeld editorial, the Webster-to-Revell memo cited Williams raising “the question of the sources of funding for these U.S. Labor Party activities. In view of the large amounts obviously being expended worldwide, the question was raised whether the U.S. Labor Party might be funded by hostile intelligence agencies.”

The raising of this bogus question of hostile foreign funding was calculated to trigger an illegal covert intelligence operation against LaRouche and his political movement, under Executive Order 12333, intelligence guidelines approved by the President in December 1981.

"Get LaRouche"

Within weeks of President Reagan's March 23, 1983 public embrace of LaRouche's missile defense proposal as the Strategic Defense Initiative, Wall Street banker John Train convened a meeting of government agents and representatives of key media organs, to coordinate the black-propaganda component of the Justice Department and FBI's “Get LaRouche” strike force. The government's operation were scripted from the original Rosenfeld call. By October 1984, a string of Federal grand juries had been empanelled, targetting the LaRouche organization. The Train salon had already generated vile slanders against LaRouche, aired on NBC-TV and in an autumn 1984 cover story in The New Republic.

On Jan. 14-16, 1985, the Washington Post published an 11,000-word, three-part series of front-page slanders against LaRouche, by reporter John Mintz. Among the sources for the Mintz series were a number of former LaRouche associates who had been drawn in as government informants before several of the grand juries that had been convened, in pursuit of manufactured charges of financial fraud.

However, the combined media/Justice Department onslaught against LaRouche had by February 1986 run aground--for the simple reason that the bogus case against LaRouche was entirely without merit. But in late February, a new political motive for a renewed frameup drive occurred, with the dramatic victory of two LaRouche Democrats in the Illinois Democratic Party primaries for Lt. Governor and Secretary of State. Again, the Washington Post of KKKatharine Graham sounded the Establishment clarion call for a government assault, this time in a lead editorial headlined “The LaRouche Probes.”

”Lyndon LaRouche's followers have won unexpected victories in primaries this year,” the editorial began, “and may win more; their candidates won the Democratic nominations for Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State in Illinois, and a LaRouche follower is the only Democrat running for the party's nomination in the 40th District of California.”

In a flagrant violation of grand jury secrecy, the Post editorial advertised details of the Boston Federal grand jury probe, and also touted other Justice Department attacks against the LaRouche movement. Even the failure of Federal prosecutors to make a case against LaRouche was acknowledged--and explained away: “None of these investigations has been completed, and none has resulted in criminal charges,” the editorial admitted. “You might reasonably ask why investigations of charges made about activities that took place in 1984 or earlier have reached no conclusion. One answer appears to be that the targets of these investigations have used every legal opportunity to slow them down.”

"RAILROAD"

The Post editorialists then issued another absolute demand to Federal prosecutors, which betrayed the wholly political nature of the Get LaRouche scheme: “These cases ought to be resolved before the 1988 campaign, in which Mr. LaRouche says he will again be a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination.... The prosecutors and the FEC have more hard work and abuse ahead of them but they must continue all the investigations--despite the tactics they face--with a view to bringing prosecutions wherever the evidence warrants.”

Over the course of the next two years, the Federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars pursuing the prosecutorial vendetta against LaRouche, and the national news media--led by Katharine Graham's Washington Post--more than matched that amount, churning out a steady stream of grand jury leaks and other forms of propaganda, aimed at abetting the government political railroad efforts. The combined effort led to the 1987-88 trial of LaRouche and many of his associates in Boston Federal court; the April 1987 illegal Federal bankruptcy action imposed on four LaRouche publishing organizations, including one tax-exempt research foundation; and the 1988 trial in Federal court in Alexandria, Va. that led to the railroad conviction of LaRouche and six associates; as well as the derivative state prosecutions of LaRouche associates in Virginia and New York.

One particularly revealing Washington Post article appeared as a front-page news story on April 22, 1987, one day after U.S. Marshals illegally seized LaRouche publishing and distribution offices in a half-dozen cities, as a result of a Chapter 7 involuntary bankruptcy action brought by U.S. Attorney Henry Hudson of the Eastern District of Virginia, in a court action at which no LaRouche representatives were present (the bankruptcy court judge would later reverse his own decision, finding that government prosecutors and FBI agents had committed “fraud upon the court” in making false claims about LaRouche organization finances).

The John Mintz story gloated, “Federal Raids Effectively Shut LaRouche Organization.” Mintz asserted, in an excess of wishful thinking, “Federal agents effectively shut down the organization of political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. yesterday.” He continued, “The action, Federal officials said, may emerge as the most damaging blow to the embattled group.” He later quoted U.S. Attorney Henry Hudson, defending the government's flagrantly illegal move to shut down LaRouche's publications, as a “somewhat extraordinary remedy.”

LaRouche Movement Grows Exponentially
As Corrupt Media Discredits Itself

Fifteen years later, the LaRouche political movement is anything but dead, but that is no thanks to Katharine Graham and her Washington Post, which violated every principle of constitutionally protected free speech in an obsessive, hysterical effort to silence one man whose ideas impelled the financial oligarchy into fits of flight-forward rage.

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How The Bankruptcy Shutdown Rigged The LaRouche Trial

Judges in LaRouche Cases Cite Gov't Misconduct

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Meet Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

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