A View From the Right: The Post and Me

Something happened on May 22 that was reported in the Washington Post the next day that sums up the whole of my war against the leftist media in the U.S., including WaPo, the N.Y. Times and the Baltimore Sun, among other bird-cage liners. It is actually a very “telling” story on how the American mainstream media, especially that of the more-than-liberal, slightly less than Tass, Pravda, Peking Daily, Nham Dhan, and Granma bunch, can deliberately misreport, distort, “color” and coverup the news and usually get away with it.

This column is meant to show what has been going on since I joined the fray 40 years ago when I became active in media issues.

A small group known as America’s Survival Inc., led by longtime media analyst and personal acquaintance, Cliff Kincaid, held a press conference at the Ebenezer Coffeehouse in Downtown D.C. to announce the release of two internal security-oriented reports on people who had interesting backgrounds and connections to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) throughout his life.

[For those of you who remember one of my earlier columns, "The Betrayal of America, Part II," I also traced people who I had known throughout my life (and some of whom had varying degrees of influence on me), vis-a-vis their appearance in the legendary government internal-security study that did not officially exist, "Appendix IX."]

These two reports, “Communism in Hawaii and the Obama Connection,” and “Communism in Chicago and the Obama Connection,” were actually a combination of the work of at least the four people who were featured at the press conference, Cliff Kincaid, Herbert Romerstein, Trevor Loudon (New Zealand), and myself, but they were also culled from dozens of newspaper and journal articles, books, congressional hearings and reports, and from the Internet.

[These reports, a video of the press conference, and a transcript of it, can be found at www.usasurvival.org.]

What was found appears to be only the tip of the iceberg regarding the question of whether certain people and groups in Sen. Obama’s life had more-than-just liberal influences on his life and way of thinking.

I was accurately quoted by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, in his column “Obama as You’ve Never Known Him!” as observing that “Obama was raised and educated in a very Marxist-rich environment, which often would limit his worldview.”

I was also accurately quoted by Milbank as saying that “The more I look at this, I’m seeing there are a lot of red-diaper babies around here,” and “By putting these pieces of the puzzle together, I’m beginning to see something much bigger.”

It has been a long time since a major newspaper has accurately quoted me, and I thank Mr. Milbank, the Post’s political observer/commentator, as well as reporter, for doing this. However, Mr. Milbank had no intention of “reporting” this conference in a straightforward manner, and even as a “commentary” piece, it left a lot to be desired, but not for the usual reasons. Herein lies the story behind the story.

The two reports showed that throughout Barack Obama’s education and political career, people on the communist/marxist/socialist Left played an important role in his life, from “mentor” to employer to political advisors, something that even the liberal press has commented on, or even noted, in their articles. In fact, some of the most interesting linking of Obama to leftists came out of his own biography, Dreams of My Father, from the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune (not the Trib of old, I’m sad to say), and a well-known liberal professor who did one helluva a good job investigating and analyzing some of the same issues that we four did, but was even better in his area of interest.

Milbank’s job was discredit “The Four”, as I shall refer to Kincaid, Romerstein, Loudon and myself, to make us look like members of the vast right-wing conspiracy, like “a UFO convention”, and like senile old men who had nothing better to do than to go through old publications, interview people involved, and draw up our conclusions based, not on documents, facts, and classic investigative leg-work, but mainly on speculation, witch-hunting, red-baiting and Obama-hate. (In 40 years as an investigative reporter and journalist, I’ve never found a red-under-the-bed - dust, yes, but reds, no; nor a witch).

Now, Mr. Milbank did not use all of these words to describe us, but he did use “”implausible accusations,” “The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy … is grouping,” “finding plenty of sinister things to say about Obama”, “the ancient Herbert Romerstein who plied his trade for the Un-American Activities Committee,” “announced without a trace of irony,” “guilt by association and guilt by invention,” and “Those charges were relatively benign compared with the questions” (over which we had no control).

I got the impression from the article that Milbank did not do his homework on the subject for the hundred reasons, of which I will only list the key transgressions.

* He did not interview, nor present the backgrounds of, “The Four,” other than the short mention of Herb Romerstein’s working for HCUA.

Briefly, between the “Four” of us, we have 140 years of research, investigative and analytical experience (including a national best seller). Cliff has been in journalism, especially with Accuracy in Media, a conservative media analysis and watchdog group (which I helped found in 1969), and has a college degree in journalism and communications. He has also written or co-authored nine books.

Trevor is a baker in New Zealand and has been involved in their Libertarian-Conservative movement for 20 years. He is one of the best internet-researchers I have ever come across. How he finds little-known publications and print sources is beyond me.

My own background in the area of internal security, terrorism, law enforcement, and historical research in general includes an AA Certificate in Police Science (with work on an Organized Crime Task Force); a BA and graduate studies in Anthropology, Political Science and International Affairs; a certificate in a Chinese Studies Seminar from Chengchi University (see my recent column “Mark and Me”); 40 years of journalism including being an accredited correspondent in South Vietnam during the war; part of the research team for the bestseller Unfit for Command about John Kerry and Vietnam; and five congressional testimonies/reports, including “The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam, 1972″ (along with the late David Martin, SISS staffer). I have also authored, co-authored, contributed to and/or edited somewhere between seven and 15 books, studies, and reference works on subjects ranging from the Holocaust, Vietnam, to internal security and terrorism.

Romerstein, the “living relic” from the House Committee on Un-American Activities”, has been the youngest member of the Communist Party USA in their history at the time (1940s) - he broke with them after a few years); is a Korean War veteran; worked for the State of New York as an investigator in a number of areas; worked for HCUA and its successor, the House Internal Security Committee; worked for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the State Departments’s USIA (U.S. Information Agency) program to counter Soviet Disinformation (including the early 1980s lie that the U.S. deliberately developed the HIV virus to infect and kill Africans and Afro-Americans). Now where have we recently heard that line? Oh, let’s see. It was Obama’s minister Rev. Jeremiah Wright, wasn’t it, in one of the sermons that Obama apparently slept through or wasn’t there for.

Herb has also authored several books and studies on internal security, terrorism, and Soviet disinformation programs, as well as his work with the late Eric Breindel on the Soviet espionage operation in the US known as “Venona” (the Venona Papers).

This is the same Jeremiah Wright who is very friendly with the Libyan-friendly Rev. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam and went to Libya to support Khaddafi, along with “Calypso Louie;” went to Cuba for a “black theology” conference; went to Syria with Rev. Jesse Jackson (whose top “international affairs” official in the Rainbow Coalition, Op. Push and Op. Breadbasket, Jack O’Dell (aka Hunter Pitts O’Dell, aka John Vesey) just happened to be a top CPUSA leader in the U.S., and a possible Soviet agent-of-influence, as well as the one-time personal assistant to the late civil rights leader, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Reportedly O’Dell was on the Syria trip of Wright and Jackson to “free” U.S. Air Force POW Lt. Goodman.

Now you know why the FBI, under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had wiretaps on Dr. King. It was because his two top advisors, O’Dell and Stanley Levison, were both secret high-ranking members of the CPUSA, and Levison, by his own admission, was a KGB bagman for the CPUSA, and was responsible for getting O’Dell a job as King’s right-hand man. {One reasonably good source for this information is the book The FBI and Martin Luther King Jr. by Prof. David Garrow. He also wrote several other books on Dr. King. Another book is Operation Solo-The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin, by John Barron}.

You might say that I have just played a game of Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but the links are very valid and real, and hopefully shocking to people who care what is going on behind the scenes of American politics. Say, that was the very concept of this press conference, to show documentation about radicals and their links to Obama in the hopes that some concerned Americans might actually begin to ask, as did Rush Limbaugh, the radio talk-show host, a few weeks ago, regarding how did a political unknown and nobody have such a meteoric rise in national politics in so short a time. The Four did not have all the answers, but we had researched some of the people who helped him in his rise, and they were not the average, run-of-the-mill political hacks.

Quite the contrary, their backgrounds and affiliations and associations raise very important questions that the mainstream media has not really begun to investigate, and that is something which Romerstein strongly pointed out to Mr. Milbank when he answered his question.

Roughly, Herb said that it was really the job of the professional, mainstream media to look into these questionable associations (CPUSA member “Frank” Marshall Davis, Barack’s admitted “mentor”; Quentin Young, who refused to answer questions before HCUA about his membership in a specific CP cell of professional in Chicago; Bill Ayers, the “unrepentant” SDS (a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society-Weathermen faction/Weather Underground Organization)) and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, another SDS-WUO leader, who, together, led the WUO in an organized campaign of terrorism against the U.S. government, law-enforcement officers, and local government buildings).

Romerstein is not a “relic” but rather an 60-plus year “institutional memory” on the history of Communism in the U.S. and, in fact, around the world. He proved this when I asked a question that Mr. Milbank really didn’t understand. I asked Herb and Cliff (and Trevor) whether they knew anything about the background of David Axelrod, Obama’s top political advisor, who was a former Chicago Tribune reporter (and reportedly a very good one). It seems that, according to a Tribune article I read, “The Agony and the Agony,” June 24, 2007, by Patrick T. Reardon, Axelrod was the protege’ of Chicago “political strategist” and activist Don Rose.

“In his early years as a political consultant, Axelrod, following in the footsteps of his mentor, the political strategist Don Rose, carved out a reputation for himself as a skillful specialist working for local progressive candidates.”

Rose, as I pointed out, was one of the key leaders of a CPUSA front known as the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights. The CCDBR was part of the well-known and congressional identified CPUSA front known collectively as the National Committee to Abolish HUAC/HISC, whose national meeting I attended in March 1969 where all the CPUSA legal beagles and their sympathizers gathered to plot the destruction of HCUA/HISC, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB).

Some of this meeting can be found in my first congressional testimony, Executive Session, “The Extent of Subversion in Campus Disorders, Part II, Testimony of Max P. Friedman”, August, 1969, and a much fuller report is in the “Fifteenth Report Un-American Activities in California - 1970,” Report of the California Senate Fact-Finding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities.

Rose was also involved in the communist-united front known as the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, as was I, and he was the Chicago organizer, which put him right up there with Quentin Young, Sylvia Kushner, Ben Friedlander, and other identified or Fifth Amendment Communist Party members and supporters in the various “Mobes.”

In fact, there are names in both reports concerning people who now have ties to Sen. Obama, including Ayers and Dohrn.

While neither Trevor, Cliff, or Herb had come across Don Rose in their research up to this point in time, another name associated with Rose did bring an interesting response from my friend, the “relic” (I prefer “valuable antique”), Herb Romerstein. I asked about a political figure from Chicago named David S. (Samuel) Canter, an attorney who became an aide to the late leftist mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington, and who also published a neighborhood political paper, the Hyde Park-Kenwood Voices. Canter was the publisher and Rose was the editor. The one issue that I have from early 1969 featured several major stories about attempts in Chicago and elsewhere to abolish the above-mentioned internal-security groups as well as the history of the Chicago “Red Squad” from the leftist Columbia Journalism Review of late 1968.

Now this David S. Canter, according to his obituary in the Chicago Sun-Times of Aug. 30, 2004, “David Canter, 81, lawyer, activist,” was raised in a communist family. They wrote:

“Relatives said Mr. Canter inherited his penchant for political activism from his father, a Marxist labor leader who served a year in jail for organizing protests against the infamous trial of Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the 1920s.

“After his release, Mr. Canter’s father moved the family from Boston to Russia, where the young man developed a love for Russian literature, (Sydney) Bild said.”

And, “He also edited the Packinghouse Workers Union Champion newspaper, Hyde Park Kenwood Voices and Harold Washington’s 16-page tabloid Second Term.”

[The Packinghouse Workers Union was a longtime CPUSA-influenced, if not controlled union that later merged with the Meatcutters to form the CPUSA-run Amalgamated Meatcutters & Butcherworkmens’ Union, lead by identified CPUSA labor leader Abe Feinglass, who was also a VP of the Soviet-KGB front, the World Peace Council (and mostly like was a Soviet agent-of-influence due to his high ranking in KGB fronts). Some hearings on the Packinghouse Workers were held by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and one revealed that the future Rep. Charles Hayes (D-Ill, Chicago) was a high-ranking member of the CPUSA in the Meatcutters Union along with Feinglass.

Romerstein, calling on his institutional memory, remarked that a “David S. Canter” had been, at one time in the past, a registered Soviet agent for the importation and sale of Soviet propaganda publications. A “David Simon Canter” was a hostile witness in 1962 before HCUA and refused to provide his background to the Committee as well as taking the Fifth Amendment position when asked whether he was a member of the CPUSA. Was the David S. Canter who died in August 2004 that same man who appeared before HCUA in 1962?

I will be trying to find files for a “DSCanter” at the National Archives to see which David S. Canter we are dealing with. If they were one and the same, then, as Sherlock Holmes said to Dr. Watson, “The game’s afoot.”

What I did not know at the press conference, specifically regarding a “David S. Canter” (i.e., that a man by that name, David Simon Canter, had been a registered foreign agent for the Soviet Union), was that one of his successors in Chicago was another registered Soviet agent for the importation of Soviet propaganda/publications. This was Leroy Wolins, a well-known identified member of the CPUSA, who was an important member of the Chicago Peace Council (a CPUSA front), a leader of the CP front “Veterans for Peace”(the 1950’s thru 70’s version), the secret inspiration if not actual creator of John Kerry’s “Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Vietnam”, and more recently, the man who created the push for the Postal Administration to issue a stamp honoring Soviet agent-of-influence and secret member of the Communist Party, the actor/lawyer/singer Paul Robeson. (Again, another game of Kevin Bacon linkage).

(In my 1969 testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, I testified about Wolins activities at the founding meeting of the united communist front, the New Mobilization Committee Against the War in Vietnam).

In Chicago, politics and ideology so easily commingle that at some times, if you held a political meeting (as in the case of the Obama political introduction meeting at the Ayers’ house in 1995), you could spit blindly around the room and hit a “red.” (See “Communism in Chicago and the Obama Connection”, report, May 2008, available at www.usasurvival.org).

One of the problems we face in learning more about those around Obama now and in the past, is that Chicago politics and communism were so commingled for various reasons, that it could not escape having a “red” flavor to it. This also includes other players from the Black Left, street gangs, the Saul Alinsky groups (esp. ACORN and leftist “Voter” groups) and the National of Islam. I expect much more to come out in the near future as other researchers besides “The Four” look more deeply into the hidden history of the “Windy City,” and this appears to be what is happening with Chicago-based/living internet journalists digging so deep into Obama and Chicago politics that they have probably passed by Jimmy Hoffa’s body by now.

In summation, while Mr. Milbank tried his best to discredit “The Four” and what we had found/published, his accurately quoting us on key issues actually helped to make our case more interesting and plausible. This is known as the “unintended consequences” of trying to slant the news, and I was feeling like the spider, who was spinning her cocoon around a captured fly, said to his prey, “Gotcha!”

Obamunism. Catch it!

Coworker: I'm voting for Obama. McCain is too old.
Me: So you're an Obamunist?
Coworker: A what?
Me: An Obamunist. Someone voting for a Communist named Obama.
Coworker: He isn't a Communist.
Me: What is he then?
Coworker: He will change this country.
Me: Yes he will, into the new Soviet Union.
Coworker: You're crazy. Later......

However, exposing it might.

True. I posted in haste and out of frustration that dishonest scumbags like Milbank are published in a major metropolitan newspaper. I take solace only in the knowledge that the newspaper business is dying.

I just wish it would hurry up and be dead.

FRegards,
LH

About two months ago, a WA PO reporter, named Matthew Mosk called me about my posts regarding Barack Obama. he said that I was the first person on FreeRepublic to identify Barack Obama as a former Muslim and he wanted to know where I got my information.

I got my information from Wikipedia in 2004, on the day that Obama gave his speech. Mosk said that they were trying to track down the source of an email that had circulated about Obama and he wanted to know if I had received such an email. I told him that I never received any political emails that I didn’t sign up for, and that the information about Obama was readily available on the web in 2004. He laughed. He asked me if I still thought that it was important that Obama was a Muslim. I told him that I thought it was more important that he was lying about it.

Mosk told me that he was working on an article about the source of the rumors regarding Obama. He sounded disappointed with my answers. I’m thinking that Mosk was doing opposition research for Obama. He was looking to marginalize conservative anti-Obama people on the web.

Matthew Mosk is the reporter that was involved in that FreeRepublic issue in Maryland, where he used someone’s password to access the Freepmail and tried to draw a Republican aide into some scandal. I forget what the whole thing was about, but it was totally unscrupulous. He found me through posts that I made about my husband’s job. I was stupid. I want to warn everyone to be careful about what you sey on FreeRepublic because they are watching.

Don’t worry, Eva. Whatever is said on FR will be distorted by the Wash. Post. That’s what Milbank did to the press conference mentioned in this column. They never let the truth bother them, nor do they ask for real information. They only pretend to cover certain types of stories.

Been there!

FOR ALL: One correction: Venona was actually the term for the efforts by the US to decode Soviet electronic transmissions to their agents in the US, not the name of the Soviet operation itself. The documents that were transcripted/decoded are known as the “Venona Documents’.

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