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[David Corn has frequently served as a Neo-Con Lite version of someone who dismisses those who have investigated the crimes of the U.S. government. Corn's attacks against Greg Palast for his coverage of the very real and demonstrably criminal vote fraud in Ohio in 2004 and Florida in 2000 is a case in point. Palast relied on good old pavement-pounding to discover the fraud. The same cannot be said for Corn and his dismissal of the Palast's story. The same situation occured with Corn's attacks on the book Forbidden Truth, published by his Nation magazine's very own publisher. Never mind the fact that the United States had been negotiating with the Taliban just prior to 9/11 as highlighted in the book. Corn's unforgivable attack against the late investigative journalist Gary Webb was an all time low for someone who seems to relish launching broadsides against those who may represent some perceived competition.
Corn's contributor status with Fox News Channel and his almost constant use of that tag line is also problematic. It's certainly not in Rupert Murdoch's interest to have independent journalists running around throwing stones at his man in the White House. -WM]
A Mole in the Progressive Movement?
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
By Andres Kargar
http://mparent7777.blog-city.com/read/989074.htm
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
I've been pondering this piece since I heard the news of the death of Gary Webb. I had been following Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series with great interest, not because the US government's involvement in drugs was anything new to me, but simply because I was wondering how long it would be before the corporate media would descend upon Gary like a bunch of vultures and kill his story and his livelihood.
And it happened as I had expected. We are all aware how the corporate press isolated and dismembered Gary. By publishing the results of his painstaking research, Gary had sealed his fate and guaranteed that no mainstream outfit would ever allow him to do anything significant on their behalf.
Despite the fact that the US corporate media can deceive and tame large sectors of the population, there are many from the left, the right, and just plain old Americans who distrust them. Gary's final emaciation, however, had to come from someone with progressive credentials, and that honor was bestowed upon David Corn of The Nation magazine who stepped in to strike the final blow. Corn, who had not spent a single hour of research on the subject, attacked Gary's report and claimed that Gary Webb "had overstated the case and had not proven his more cinematic allegations." Imagine this: a scandal of this magnitude is unfolding that exposes how American citizens are falling victims to the CIA's drug-running operations, and David Corn sees his patriotic duty to pinpoint how "the case is being overstated." Personally, if I ran across such an "overstated" and "flawed" report, I would hold the CIA and Los Angeles authorities responsible and demand real investigations, rather than wasting my time, pinpointing unspecified flaws and immeasurable overstatements.
Having been a reader of his material, I knew this was not the first time Corn had been stepping in to attack any serious challenge to the status quo, but I had to search around a little to refresh my memory.
Just recently, in an article in The Nation, David Corn had tried to discredit Greg Palast's (the award-winning investigative reporter - http://www.GregPalast.com) claims of fraud in the 2004 presidential elections.
Greg Palast was accused of being a conspiracy-theory nut, and people like him were discredited as making accusations based on supposition ("Those who say yes - at this point - are relying more on supposition than evidence. They cite the exit polls to claim the vote count was falsified to benefit Bush"). And of course, Mr. Corn's interpretation of the facts presented by Greg Palast and others must be the only acceptable one to declare the elections not fraudulent, but fraught with glitches here and there.
In November 2002, at the height of the Bush administration's intrigues against Iraq and the popular antiwar demonstrations, David Corn steps in to attack and discredit the organizers of these demonstrations (in practice lining up with the Bush regime). In an article in the LA Weekly, Corn accuses the International ANSWER organization (Act Now to Stop War & Racism) of being a front for the Worker's World Party.
"Many local offices for ANSWER's protest were housed in WWP offices. Earlier this year, when ANSWER conducted a press briefing, at least five of the 13 speakers were WWP activists." David Corn presumably understands enough math to calculate that the rest could have been members of church groups, union representatives, Palestinians, Iranians, etc.
However, since in today's world, populations in their millions here and there are accused of being "terrorists," obviously David Corn should have the right to call only a few million antiwar demonstrators dupes of the Workers World Party.
That's not all. In 2001, David Corn and Marc Cooper (another Nation "liberal") sided with Pacifica Radio Network's rogue management in their attempts to clean the member radio stations of progressives, sell some stations, and basically dismantle the progressive network.
Later in 2002, David Corn steps in to discredit a fellow by the name of Michael Ruppert who claimed that the Bush administration had been warned in advance of 9/11 attacks. Despite the fact that I always marvel at the vastness of David Corn's areas of expertise (and intervention), I have to say Michael Ruppert's basic claims are common knowledge today and were also made in other ways by FBI whistleblowers and others.
David Corn's response to all these accusations: conspiracy theory-it's simpler than thinking.
Reviewing all this material might make one think of a mole in the progressive population, but unfortunately, the problem of conformism goes beyond the David Corns, Marc Coopers, and Christopher Hitchens (see http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/) as individuals. From the positions these people are, as liberals or "progressives", they can influence others and lead them down the path of conformism, passivity, or complacency.
Such complacency today is encouraging a section of America's so-called progressives to accept the Empire's brutal war against the Third World and the destruction and re-colonization of these countries. Fear and ignorance forces them to buy into this fabricated "war on terror" and the militarization of the society, our minds and consciousness. For when we buy into this crusade, we have accepted the Empire.
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Andres Kargar can be reached at galileo19@hotmail.com.
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/kargar01042004/
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