rigorousintuition.ca

[American Dream]

http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2007/09/91110.html

Is former LaRouchie Webster Tarpley continuing his master's ways within the antiwar movement?

By Mitchel Cohen

There is something that continues to disturb me about Webster Tarpley's increasing prominence in the 9-11Truth and antiwar movements; I'll try to put some of it into words here. As a member of the 9-11 Truth movement, I am concerned about the direction in which some folks are pulling it. It is so very important that we prevent the movement from degenerating into cult-like groups or being used as a recruiting ground for outright Nazis. My concern is not only over the quality of the information being put out there, it's about what's done with that information and how it is used.

Keywords: National, War & Peace, Political Theory, Sexuality, Activism, Women,

Webster Tarpley left the LaRouche fold 10 years ago, as he says (see article below), but he argues exactly like LaRouche. Everything he says -- and particularly the way he says it - needs to be sifted through a fine toothed comb, and then sifted again.

In his letter attacking the Ford Foundation and Chip Berlet, Tarpley avers that "four signers [of the Philadelphia and Kennebunkport resolutions] who claimed they did not sign, and then deplorably covered their retreat with a barrage of wild charges of forgery, most probably did so because they feared that their foundation funding might be terminated."

As these four alleged signers include Cindy Sheehan, I strongly doubt Tarpley's asserted rationale. I also doubt that Cindy Sheehan fears that her "foundation funding" -- if indeed she has any (she says she doesn't) -- "might be terminated." I plan to ask Cindy about this directly when she comes to NYC on Tuesday.

I watched Tarpley's presentation a few weeks ago in NYC at a 9-11Truth event at Cooper Union, and found myself squirming. Not because Tarpley does not present a powerhouse of information, but for the way he does it. As someone who once took classes in dialectics with LaRouche in 1972, sat in numerous meetings with that person, and who attended SUNY Stony Brook which served as the "home base" for LaRouche's recruitment efforts (then calling himself Lyn Marcus), I knew many people in the various LaRouche organizations. I saw how a fairly large number of U.S. leftists helped to build what became, ultimately, a fascist organization. I know, because I almost became part of it myself at one point. At its core, these organizations were built around a hatred of women and fear of homosexuality at its foundation. I saw all of that residue come pouring out of Tarpley during his aggressive speech about the danger of the U.S. attacking Iran with nuclear weapons.

The cheap attacks Tarpley made on Hillary Clinton and Pelosi -- ruling class exponents who deserve our scorn and anger, but not for the reasons Tarpley offered -- were despicable. Using projected photos, Tarpley mocked their physical female features, and not so much their politics. Although he did not ridicule Cindy Sheehan's female features, his charges against her and three other women over whether they signed the Kennebunkport document and then withdrew their names came on the heels of that misogynist ridicule of Clinton and Pelosi, in that context.

So too with Tarpley's "critique" of Giuliani -- I call the former NYC Mayor "the fascist gun in the West". Tarpley displayed photos of Giuliani in drag, and got his cheap laughs and some applause -- as though there's something wrong with dressing in drag, while pretty much neglecting Giuliani's horrendous politics. (I understand that Tarpley has elsewhere savaged Giuliani's _politically_, which is the way these sort of things need to be done, but that's not what occurred at this 9-11 Truth event.)

This is exactly the way LaRouche did things, revelling in misogynist schoolboy "humor" and ridicule -- for all the wrong reasons. I pointed this out at the time to some members of the audience who were impressed by Tarpley's performance, his command of "facts" -- invented or otherwise -- and asked why they thought the percentage of women attending 9-11 Truth events in NYC has dropped precipitously over the last three years, and why it the movement here has become so male-dominated. What is driving away so many women?

Let's look at some of the way Tarpley argues even in his current article. I concentrate on him because, like LaRouche, Tarpley puts forth a powerful all-encompassing systemic critique that few others are doing -- containing lots of good information and analysis -- but draws people around him by mocking people and making prediction after prediction -- so what if only one or two come true sometime down the road? By then, all the self-aggrandizement, all the wrong predictions, will be forgotten amid the one lucky guess ....

Tarpley writes: "This article represents a strategic decision on the part of Berlet's Ford Foundation paymasters that the Philadelphia and Kennebunkport documents represent a threat to the political hegemony of the financier elite who are betting on synthetic terrorism, new false flag operations, and a nuclear attack on Iran to clear the way for totalitarian rule in the US."

Yes, Chip Berlet is playing what I view to be a despicable role -- maybe Tarpley is correct that the Ford Foundation is pulling his strings, maybe not. But note the elevated importance that Tarpley gives to the documents that he co-authored: the Philadelphia and Kennebunkport resolutions. These DOCUMENTS, he writes, are seen as a threat by the leading arm of one faction of the ruling class. His DOCUMENTS must be gotten out of the way in order for the U.S. to launch a nuclear attack on Iran and clear the way for totalitarian rule in the U.S. Gimme a break. That's how LaRouche always argued: Look how important we are! What WE say is all-important; the U.S. (or KGB) are taking specific measures to "send us a message." Our STATEMENTS are the only thing that stands in the way of nuclear war. And so on, delivered in extremely high-pressured, personalized guilt-trips. "If you don't join us, the U.S. will nuke Iran."

Now, this might indeed happen, the U.S. may indeed nuke Iran, and we need to do all we can to prevent that from happening. But again, note the pitch here, what draws people in: If the US nukes Iran, it will be because Cindy Sheehan (and you, and me) didn't sign Tarpley's documents. If the US does NOT nuke Iran, it will be because Tarpley and company's words were so powerful that they were able to affect world history, so don't you want to join something like that and be powerful too? (Wilhelm Reich's "Listen, Little Man" speaks directly to this perversion, as does Maurice Brinton's "The Irrational in Politics".)

Tarpley writes: "The Philadelphia Platform seeks to unite the antiwar, impeachment, anti-globalization, labor, civil rights, civil liberties, fair elections, and related movements into a single united front outside of the Republican and Democratic Parties. It calls for the immediate impeachment of Bush and Cheney, and end to all US aggression everywhere, the rollback of the police state, and rule by people, not bankers, with the entire effort energized by 9/11 truth." Yes, this intent is great! It's what we all want. It's also what ANSWER organizes around -- via huge demonstrations -- and what World Can't Wait is organizing too -- and the Greens, also, at least in NY. (UFPJ, in my view, is too tied to the Democratic Party to serve this function nationally.) But to give anyone else credit not only would diminish the Tarpley resolutions' lustre, it would remove the one venue Tarpley has created for his self-important platform outside of 9-11 Truth.

Tarpley writes: "Activists of the 9/11 truth movement will recall Berlet as the gutter thug brought in by the foundation-backed Amy Goodman on her deeply compromised Democracy Now program to harass David Ray Griffin a couple of years ago." Now, I fully agree that Amy bamboozled Griffin and set him up unfairly. (Even so, Griffin did a very good job of stating his case amidst Berlet's continuous harassment that Amy Goodman allowed.) But does that shortcoming, that error on her part, mean that her Democracy Now program is "deeply compromised"? I don't agree with that in the slightest, though Tarpley says outright that Amy Godman is funded by the Ford Foundation and that's who is pulling her strings. But he offers no evidence of this.

When Webster Tarpley made these statements against Democracy Now at Cooper Union, someone in the audience felt empowered enough to join the attack: "That's because Amy Goodman is CIA." The audience was silent, and Tarpley looked approvingly out onto the audience. So I shouted back across the room from my seat, "Just because you disagree with someone, that doesn't make them CIA. Maybe YOU'RE CIA, part of COINTELPRO ... " The tension in the room eased notably. For the moment, rationality prevailed.

Tarpley writes that "Berlet worked for the National Student Association, which was exposed as a CIA front." Yes, back in the late 1950s, Gloria Steinem (who was going out around that time with Henry Kissinger) carried money from the US government to anti-communist organizations during student conferences in Eastern Europe. The radical feminist group Redstockings exposed all of this -- but far be it from Tarpley to credit another group, let alone a FEMINIST group, for having risked so much to make that exposé. He also doesn't tell us which years Chip Berlet "worked for" (and what does he mean by "worked for"?) the National Student Association, which was the largest student organization in the U.S. -- a mainstream group with many different political tendencies within it, containing MILLIONS of student members. Did he "work" for it in the late 50s and early 60s when the CIA was manipulating some of the key leaders like Steinem and Allard Lowenstein? Nope. But Tarpley just perseveres and throws the mud that Berlet was a CIA agent because he worked for "a CIA front." Like a slimey prosecutor, he withholds information. He knows his information is tainted, but won't tell us.

There's a lot more to unravel, if you want to spend time doing so. Again, with Tarpley, just as with LaRouche, you have to examine every word, every nuance, as true statements are mixed with loaded and unproven assertions, and done so in such an all-encompassing way as to attract those who WANT TO change history but feel powerless to actually do so.

If you remember nothing else about this letter after you read it, remember this question: Why did it take Tarpley until 1997 to leave the LaRouche organization? After all, he was one of the national leaders for decades, helping to organize the "Woman as Vampire" period in 1972-4, their physical attacks on the aging members of the Communist Party USA shortly thereafter (known as "Operation Mop Up"), LaRouche's fantasmagoric tales and attacks upon his own members whom he (and Tarpley) claimed were being brainwashed and turned into Manchurian Candidates by the KGB, and then claimed it was the CIA pretending to be the KGB -- all based on sexual repression, by the way, on their fear of homosexuality, of "eating shit," and the hatred of women. (It all started when LaRouche's wife ran off to Europe with another member, Chris White -- whom LaRouche then claimed was brainwashed, sought to "deprogram" him, and bent all the apparatus of the organization to do so, kidnapping folks I knew along the way .... but that's another sordid story.)

I certainly do not begrudge anyone who has left an organization, even after so many years, the opportunity to be recognized in their own right and not be forever saddled with the organization they left behind -- IF indeed they have left it behind in reality, and not just only their formal membership. In other words, Tarpley needs to challenge the way his whole manner of being was shaped and continues to be shaped by those experiences and which he himself helped to orchestrate; but he has clearly not yet come to grips with them. The furthest he has gone is to say that some members of LaRouche's shrinking cult have badmouthed him and have been following a few wrong policies. This clearly is not sufficient, and all of that crap is sadly beginning to affect the 9-11 Truth Movement.

None of this makes Chip Berlet's role any more agreeable. Chip has his own accounting to do for his actions. As do we all.

I am curious if any of this played into Cindy Sheehan's decision to remove her name from Tarpley's resolutions. We'll find out soon enough.

Mitchel Cohen

Brooklyn Greens / Green Party

******************************

http://www.rense.com/general78/kenn.htm

The Ford Foundation Attacks The Kennebunkport Warning

By Webster Tarpley 9-20-7

The following scurrilous attack constitutes a declaration of war
by the Ford Foundation, the flagship foundation of the US ruling
elite and the foundation most engaged in the suppression of domestic
political opposition, against the Philadelphia Platform of July 4,
2007, and the Kennebunkport Warning, published on August 26, 2007.
These documents can be viewed at actindependent.org. The author of
the following screed is the slimy character assassin Chip Berlet,
the leading figure of Political Research Associates of Massachusetts,
an entity which, according to published accounts, received some
$325,000 in funding from the Ford Foundation between 2002 and 2006.

This article represents a strategic decision on the part of Berlet's
Ford Foundation paymasters that the Philadelphia and Kennebunkport
documents represent a threat to the political hegemony of the
financier elite who are betting on synthetic terrorism, new false
flag operations, and a nuclear attack on Iran to clear the way for
totalitarian rule in the US. The Ford Foundation is now committing
considerable resources, not just to maintain the US peace, impeachment,
and anti-globalization movements in their current fragmented and
ineffective form, but also specifically to sabotage the Philadelphia
and Kennebunkport initiatives.

From now on, as a rule of thumb, it will be fair to say that those
seeking to tear down the Philadelphia and Kennebunkport convergence
clearly represent the running dogs of the Ford Foundation, operating
as stooges, pawns, foot soldiers and water carriers for the infamous
Berlet, and deserving to be exposed as such. Whether they are
conscious, paid agents or merely dupes can be determined later on.
We must also recall that, under Reagan's Executive Order 12333, the
classic functions of the cold war CIA and FBI have been privatized
into various fronts, and especially into foundations. These days,
to be foundation funded often implies a close but surreptitious
link to the intelligence community.

The Philadelphia Platform seeks to unite the antiwar, impeachment,
anti-globalization, labor, civil rights, civil liberties, fair
elections, and related movements into a single united front outside
of the Republican and Democratic Parties. It calls for the immediate
impeachment of Bush and Cheney, and end to all US aggression
everywhere, the rollback of the police state, and rule by people,
not bankers, with the entire effort energized by 9/11 truth.

It urges people to engage in mass political education, to take back
the airwaves, and to run for Congress. The Kennebunkport Warning
calls for action to head off the present war emergency, marked by
daily reports of the Cheney faction pressing for a nuclear attack
on Iran, to be covered in turn by a new 9/11 and/or a new Gulf of
Tonkin incident. This danger has been underlined by the recent
Israeli bombing of Syria, and by the August 30 rogue nuclear-armed
B-52 affair, with the mysterious deaths of personnel associated
with that incident.

Activists of the 9/11 truth movement will recall Berlet as the
gutter thug brought in by the foundation-backed Amy Goodman on her
deeply compromised Democracy Now program to harass David Ray Griffin
a couple of years ago.

Berlet worked for the National Student Association, which was exposed
as a CIA front. His true expertise is in narcotics, which he acquired
during a stint as Washington DC bureau chief for High Times Magazine.
More recently, Berlet appeared on the History Channel's 9/11
Conspiracies broadcast to slander of the entire 9/11 truth movement
as mentally unbalanced individuals who have a pathological need to
believe in conspiracies. Berlet has been slandering 9/11 truth
activists for many years. After these interventions, Berlet's status
as a raving enemy of 9/11 truth is beyond dispute. His credentials
as a sincere antiwar activist are equally lacking. Notice below
that Berlet, in all his inveighing against Kennebunkport, never
mentions the main themes, which are a new false flag terror op
coming out of Cheney's faction, a nuclear attack on Iran, and a new
world war. These are issues Berlet does not want to publicize.

Instead, Berlet suggests that I am a sock-puppet for LaRouche.

LaRouche drove me out of his organization in 1997, more than ten
years ago. I have nothing in common with LaRouche, whose supporters
have repeatedly slandered me, albeit in terms slightly different
from those used by Berlet.

LaRouche is a border guard for the sinister Hillary Clinton-Rahm
Emanuel neocon warmonger machine in the Democratic Party. He is
currently trying to combine that with the notion that Bush is a
force for peace with Putin's Russia - a manifest absurdity, since
Bush is promoting aggression against Russia in the form of a nuclear
first-strike capability. Contrary to what Berlet writes, LaRouche
has no commitment to 9/11 truth and has contributed nothing to the
9/11 truth movement. LaRouche has rather sponsored a personality
cult complete with a youth movement which is a parody of Chairman
Mao's Red Guards of the mid-1960s.

From the beginning, supporters of Kennebunkport have argued that
the four signers who claimed they did not sign, and then deplorably
covered their retreat with a barrage of wild charges of forgery,
most probably did so because they feared that their foundation
funding might be terminated. Now, with Berlet's broadside, the role
of the Ford Foundation in the entire matter becomes evident. The
Ford Foundation is the mother ship of a whole array of lesser
foundations of both left and right political coloration who work
to perpetuate the dominant power of the financier oligarchy. Thanks
to Berlet, all foundation operatives in the domestic cointelpro
apparatus now know who their immediate enemy is. Everyone who is
foundation funded knows where their bread is buttered, and they are
expected to earn their pay by reacting accordingly. Watch them as
they come forward. Persons of good will can also use the Berlet
slander as a reliable moral guide to what is actually going on here,
and join the growing and distinguished list of supporters of the
Kennebunkport warning at actindependent.org.

In short, those who slander and sabotage the Philadelphia-Kennebunkport
convergence strategy are marching together with Chip Berlet under
the banner of the Ford Foundation. Draw your own conclusions
carefully. The great question of a new general war may depend on
it.

Webster G. Tarpley Berlet slander at:

http://www.publiceye.org/feeds/public/berlet/2007
/09/webster-g-tarpleys-toxic-waste-is.html

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Answer to the op headline....NO.

No, Tarpley is not misogynist or a Larouchian stooge.

Yes, Chip Berlet is a CIA shill infiltrating the Left to steer it away from CIA whistleblowers.

No, Amy Goodman is not CIA...

BUT she has been co-opted/threatened by them with SUCCESS (NPR stations/Voice of America- carry her show and she gets a Hearst Syndicated print column) and probably she's had her family threatened to keep her off the 'electric fence' topics of
CIA's Biggest Crimes - JFK, MLK, RKF, 9/11,
and Operation Mockingbird, that is, CIA media.

Frikkin' John Prados came on her show to LIE about Operation Mockingbird last year when the 'Family Jewels' were "dumped" for the second time since 1975 loaded with disinformation. Amy Goodman had written about Operation Mockingbird in her last book yet let Prados lie his damn head off about this single most sensitive topic for spooks, the media.

So there's some serious leverage on our Amy to shush her at these moments. And I don't think she likes it anymore than we do.
_________________
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!

[mentalgongfu2]

I have, or rather had, a small fondness for Tarpley at one point, for the same reasons the author of this piece mentions. But since the whole Kennebunkport thing he seems to have picked up a lot of right wing talking points ie Muslims = scary! gays=scary! immigrants = scary! etc etc.

It's like he bakes a beautiful cake with enough pieces for all the conspiracy crowd to enjoy, and then throws razorblades in the icing. Yummy.
_________________
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."

[FreeLancer]

BUT she has been co-opted/threatened by them with SUCCESS (NPR stations/Voice of America- carry her show and she gets a Hearst Syndicated print column) and probably she's had her family threatened to keep her off the 'electric fence' topics of
CIA's Biggest Crimes - JFK, MLK, RKF, 9/11,
and Operation Mockingbird, that is, CIA media.

This statement is based on what specifically?

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

[American Dream]

Hugh, I appreciate your deep knowledge of covert operations. Sometimes I feel that you take speculation too far and insist upon it as being fact. This is one of those times.



Hugh Manatee Wins wrote:

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

on edit: Don't take this personally AD, unless it resonates with you.
Fascism 101 is effort to control media and tame whistleblowers.
This is SO basic that I refuse to spend my bandwith "proving it" when Pacifica is the biggest threat to CIA media next to the internet.
I'm not writing the book here at RI anymore. The situation has evolved. Just pointing where I've been. hint
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/shadow_dancing.htm


Have it your way, AD. Must be a free and uncoerced press without "proof."
Why drag history and precedent into the picture without "proof!"
All these indicators of inconsistency and stress are just meaningless...without "proof."

Even though Democracy Now is on over 700 stations around the world you imply there is NO CIA concern or effort at damage control, AD?
That's absurd.

Alex Constantine has been documenting the CIA perps in Pacifica's KPFA station in LA.

Naive people at KPFA-Berkeley unwittingly abet CIA bullshitters like Vincent Bugliosi and Jane Mayer regularly. Containing the Left is a CIA specialty.

I've been listening to Goodman give a few key bullshitters like John Prados a free pass and wondering why.
She's better than that and I know she's on 'our side.'
Only coercion can explain this. And inter-personal indicators suggest this typical fascist suppression device is in play.

Study all the big cover-ups and you'll find people killed, threatened, fired, given alternatives, etc. It is standard operating procedure.

If YOU have "proof" that no coercion has been applied to key people at Democracy Now, I'd like to see it.
_________________
CIA runs mainstream media since WWII:
news rooms, movies/TV, publishing
...
Disney is CIA for kidz!

[American Dream]

Hugh Manatee wins wrote:

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

[American Dream]

Hugh Manatee Wins wrote: