[R-G] bill van auken, wsw.

[Gregory Meyerson]

stuff on dreyfuss, the nation correspondent is interesting, as is  
rest of article.  From Global Research.






The US media, led by the New York Times , is continuing its concerted  
propaganda campaign against Iran over charges that the government  
stole the June 12 presidential election. There is not even a  
semblance of objectivity in the media coverage, which parrots the  
charges of the opposition headed by defeated presidential candidate  
Mir-Hossein Mousavi as fact and dismisses the government’s claims as  
lies.

The opposition is lauded as democratic and reformist, while incumbent  
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters are portrayed as  
virtual fascists. One would scarcely imagine that the two men  
represent rival factions within the same ruling establishment.

Responsibility for the violence in the streets of Tehran is  
attributed entirely to the government and its security forces.

No connection is drawn between these events and the broader situation  
in the region, where the US is waging two wars, on Iran’s eastern and  
western borders, both aimed at establishing American hegemony over  
the oil-rich territory.

Suggestions that the US and its intelligence agencies are involved in  
the turmoil in Iran are dismissed as ludicrous, fabrications by an  
Iranian government trying to divert public opinion. This, in a  
country where Washington overthrew a democratically elected  
government in 1953, propped up a brutal dictator, the Shah, for more  
than a quarter of a century, and has carried out covert CIA  
operations in the recent period involving the use of special  
operations troops on Iranian soil.

The New York Times and Venezuela
If all of this sounds familiar, it should. Little more than seven  
years ago, a very similar media campaign, once again spearheaded by  
the New York Times, was carried out against the government of  
President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.

Then, as now, standards of journalistic objectivity were thrown out  
the window. Chávez was vilified and his opponents, drawn largely from  
Venezuela’s oligarchy and privileged layers of the middle class, were  
portrayed as crusaders for democracy. Statements by the opposition  
were reported as fact or treated with the utmost respect, while the  
government’s contentions were subjected to derision.

A few quotations from the New York Times of March and April 2002 give  
the flavor of this campaign. On March 26, the newspaper published a  
story entitled “Venezuela’s President vs. Military: Is Breach  
Widening?” The content of the piece made it clear that the answer  
was, hopefully, yes.

“The rebellious officers helped energize a disjointed but growing  
opposition movement that is using regular street protests to try to  
weaken Mr. Chávez, whose autocratic style and left-wing policies have  
alienated a growing number of people.”

It continued, “Although he promised a ‘revolution’ to improve the  
lives of the poor, Mr. Chávez has instead managed to rankle nearly  
every sector—from the church to the press to the middle class—with  
his combative style, populist speeches and dalliances with Fidel  
Castro...”

In the Times’ coverage of Venezuela—as in Iran—the phrase “nearly  
every sector” was used to exclude the overwhelming majority of the  
population, the urban and rural poor, which had twice given Chávez  
the widest electoral victories in the country’s history.

Subsequent articles described Chávez as a “left-wing autocrat” and “a  
mercurial left-leaning leader whose policies had antagonized much of  
Venezuelan society.”

The newspaper favorably presented a speech by a former energy  
minister to a group of “striking” managers at the state-run oil  
company, who declared, “This can only end with the president  
resigning... This is about him or us. It is a choice between  
democracy and dictatorship.”

There was the question of violence. When unidentified gunmen opened  
fire during a mass opposition march on the Miraflores presidential  
palace—a throng comparable in both its size and class composition to  
those that have taken to the streets of Iran—the 19 deaths that  
resulted were all attributed to government security forces or  
Chavez’s armed supporters.

It subsequently emerged that a number of the dead were among the  
crowd that had gathered to defend Chávez and that much of the fire  
had come from the Caracas metropolitan police force, loyal to the  
city’s mayor, Alfredo Peña, a fierce opponent of the president who  
enjoyed US support.

In its coverage of the clash, the Times sought out Peña, who,  
unsurprisingly, blamed all of the carnage on Chávez.

The purpose of all of this became clear in the wake of the  
demonstration, when a section of the military, together with  
Venezuela’s big business association and the US-sponsored bureaucracy  
of the right-wing union federation, joined in a coup that briefly  
overthrew Chávez.

In the immediate aftermath of the coup, the Times showed its hand in  
an editorial entitled “Hugo Chávez Departs.”

“Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be  
dictator,” the Times crowed. “Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue,  
stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a  
respected business leader...”

The newspaper insisted that Washington had no role in the overthrow,  
“denying him [Chávez] the role of nationalist martyr. Rightly, his  
removal was a purely Venezuelan affair.”

Nothing could more clearly express the conception of “democracy”  
shared by the Times and the US ruling establishment. A regime created  
through the military overthrow of an elected government was  
“democratic” so long as it was more amenable to US interests. In  
Venezuela, which supplies 15 percent of US imported oil, these  
interests are clear.

As for the claim that the coup was “purely Venezuelan,” this was a  
cover-up of a concerted and protracted US destabilization operation,  
in which the Times played an indispensable role.

The “democratic” coup, however, lasted just two days. Chávez was  
restored to power as a result of masses of urban poor taking to the  
streets against the new regime and sections of the military turning  
against it. The Times backpedaled slightly, admitting that it had  
greeted Chávez’s overthrow with “applause,” while regretting that it  
had “overlooked the undemocratic manner in which he was removed.”

In Iran, the New York Times is following essentially the same script,  
albeit it on a grander scale.

Once again: Who is the Nation’s Iran correspondent, Robert Dreyfuss?
The Nation has not provided any answer to the question posed by the  
World Socialist Web Site on Monday: “Who is Robert Dreyfuss?”

As we explained, Dreyfuss is a contributing editor of the magazine,  
which presents itself as the voice of “progressive” politics in  
America. He wrote a book—Hostage to Khomeini—in 1981, calling for the  
Reagan administration to organize the overthrow of the Islamic  
Republic of Iran and denouncing President Jimmy Carter for having  
betrayed the Shah.

At the time, Dreyfuss was a member of the fascistic organization led  
by Lyndon LaRouche, serving as “Middle East intelligence director”  
for its magazine Executive Intelligence Review.

This is the man that the Nation relies upon as its chief commentator  
on “politics and national security” and who it sent to Iran to cover  
the election. He has echoed the line promoted by the New York Times,  
declaring himself in favor of a “color revolution” in Iran.

A comparison of what he wrote then and what he writes today only  
makes it all the more urgent that the Nation explain why such an  
individual is one of its editors.

This arises particularly in relation to one of Dreyfuss’s principal  
sources during his recent trip to Iran, Ibrahim Yazdi, Iran’s former  
foreign minister and a so-called “dissident.” An article published by  
the Nation on June 13 entitled “Iran’s Ex-Foreign Minister Yazdi:  
It’s A Coup,” consisted largely of an interview with this man, who  
said the election was rigged and illegitimate.

In his book Hostage to Khomeini, however Dreyfuss said that Yazdi was  
part of a “coterie of experienced, Western-trained intelligence agents.”

He claimed that Yazdi’s “directions from Washington and London came  
via the ‘professors,’ men such as Professor Richard Cottam of the  
University of Pittsburgh,” whom he described as a former “field  
officer for the CIA attached to the US embassy in Tehran.”

Dreyfuss wrote: “Yazdi’s wife once described Cottam as ‘a very close  
friend of my husband, the one person who knows more about him than  
even I do.’”

Elsewhere in the book, Dreyfuss refers to Yazdi as “Mossad-tainted.”

The question is: which Dreyfuss are we to believe—the one who exposed  
Yazdi as an intelligence agent for the US, Britain and Israel, or the  
one who now quotes him at length as an advocate of “democracy” and  
“reform”?

Dreyfuss has never publicly repudiated what he wrote in 1981. Was he  
lying then, or is he lying now? The Nation is obliged to answer. Its  
readership deserves to know what Dreyfuss is doing at the magazine.