LaRouche Targets the DLC:
'Protection Racket for Cheney'

The burning questions in Washington and in world capitals today are: Why hasn't Vice President Dick Cheney, the leading chicken-hawk behind the suicidal perpetual-war push of the Bush Administration, been forced to resign yet—even after he has been implicated in the use of known forged documents to manipulate Presidential and Congressional support for the Iraq War? And why are the neo-conservatives still able to wield influence over the policies of the Bush Administration—as events on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq veer toward chaos and a growing body-count of American GIs, as the direct result of their fantasy forecasts about invading Americans soldiers being greeted as "liberators?"

The answer was given recently by Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche: "The only reason Dick Cheney has not been forced to resign," LaRouche said in a statement issued June 25 by his LaRouche in 2004 Presidential campaign organization, "is because those Democrats who are under control of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) gang, are more enthusiastic supporters of the neo-conservatives than the Republicans. As long as leading Democratic candidates are not willing to buck the Democratic National Committee group that's under DLC manipulation, they are not morally qualified to run for the office of the Presidency. If they can't recognize a swindle as obvious as that being pulled off by the group of which Cheney is the head, they don't have the qualifications to be President."

The evidence of Cheney's lies about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction—impeachable lies which he told to manipulate the President and the Congress into going for war—is well documented on LaRouche's website, and in a series of recent EIR exposés. Cheney was directly behind promoting the discredited Niger "yellow cake" story, about Saddam Hussein's alleged efforts to obtain uranium precursor from the African state. Investigations of Cheney's and several agencies' actions, including the Office of Special Plans inside Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's policy shop, are under way. Yet, so far, the Democrats—other than LaRouche, and a pathetically small handful of Congressional stalwarts, such as Sen. Robert Byrd (W.Va.), Sen. Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.) and Rep. Henry Waxman (Calif.)—have refused to press the issue effectively.

LaRouche observed that traditional Republicans are, in their own terms, already in a revolt against the neo-cons, as reflected in the activities of the circles of Brent Scowcroft, certain military-intelligence groupings, and some traditional conservative organizations. Former Nixon White House General Counsel John Dean, a pivotal figure in the Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon, has written a series of scathing editorial pieces in recent weeks, declaring that Vice President Cheney's performance in the Niger document hoax is far more an impeachable offense than anything Nixon did. Dean had earlier singled out Cheney as an insurrectionist against the Constitution, for his failure to disclose his corrupt collusion with his former company, Halliburton, and other oil sector firms, when he headed President Bush's energy task force at the start of the current Administration.

General Scowcroft, the former National Security Advisor to President George H.W. Bush ("Bush 41") and the current head of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), is leading a probe into how the Niger forgeries were slipped into President Bush's Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union address; the panel will also probe related issues of wild spinning of intelligence assessments.

Sources in Washington, briefed on LaRouche's assessment of the role of the Democratic Leadership Council, have confirmed, in detail, that the DLC is stacked with neo-conservative ideologues, who maintain deep personal ties to some of the leading Bush Administration war-mongers. One source singled out the Pentagon's secretive Office of Special Plans (OSP), the disinformation shop headed by Abram Shulsky, as a particular hotbed of collusion with the DLC. Shulsky's team of spinmeisters passed unvetted intelligence, largely received from the discredited Iraqi National Congress and from a parallel Israeli "OSP" inside the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, to Rumsfeld, who used the disinformation to counter assessments coming from the traditional U.S. intelligence community: CIA, DIA, NSA, and the State Department. In effect, the Shulsky team conducted "information warfare," against President Bush!

EIR can confirm the OSP-DLC links. Abram Shulsky launched his career under the tutelage of Roy Godson, son of a leading AFL-CIO International Department counterinsurgent, Joseph Godson; and he first got into the "intelligence business" as a staffer for DLC poster-boy Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan in the late 1970s, eventually becoming staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and, later, of PFIAB.

But one of the strongest DLC links to the war party inside the Bush Administration, first exposed by EIR, goes directly to the Office of the Vice President, where Cheney's chief of staff and chief national security advisor, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, served for over a dozen years as the attorney for Israeli Mafia boss Marc Rich. DLC founding financier and chairman, hedge fund operator Michael Steinhardt, is a longtime business partner and political ally of Rich, and worked closely, albeit in secret, with Libby, to get Rich pardoned, by a bamboozled President Bill Clinton, from a tax evasion and "Trading With the Enemy" conviction.

The DLC, founded in the mid-1980s, is, above all, a "Trojan Horse" penetration into the Democratic Party, on behalf of some of the leading "Synarchist"—i.e., universal fascist—banking circles on Wall Street. The DLC's Synarchist patronage is personified by Felix Rohatyn, the banker from Lazard Brothers who is also a board member of the DLC.

A virtual treasure-trove of World War II U.S. military intelligence documents and Congressional hearing records, currently being reviewed by a team of EIR historians and analysts, reveals that Lazard Brothers was at the center of the Synarchist network of pro-fascist financial institutions, along with the French Banque Worms and the J.H. Stein Bank of Cologne, Germany, owned by Nazi SS Death's-Head Gen. Kurt von Schröder. This international network of fascist bankers, centered out of the Basle, Switzerland Bank for International Settlements (BIS), assured that key American and European multinational corporations and banks, involved in raw materials and war production, maintained "business as usual" on both sides of the Allied-Axis conflict throughout the war, and evaded prosecution at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals.

If the neo-con coup within the Bush Administration is to be overthrown, the DLC must be stopped. And no one is better qualified to lead the cleanout of the Democratic Party—of what Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) called the "second Republican Party"—than LaRouche. LaRouche's unique leadership role in this fight is perhaps best reflected by the fact that, in recent weeks, he has been the subject of blistering attacks from the leading "Synarchist" financial journals of Wall Street, the City of London, and Switzerland, for his exposure of the late Leo Strauss, the German universal-fascist philosopher, as the "Godfather of the Neo-Conservatives."

Project Democracy

In diagnosing the DLC-Cheney collusion, LaRouche has traced the past 30 years' problem with both political parties back to Samuel Huntington's book Crisis of Democracy—written for the May 1975 Kyoto meeting of the Trilateral Commission, which launched the "Project Democracy" drive, to capture both the Democratic and Republican parties, from the top down, for Synarchist bankers' fascism. One prominent author, Bertram Gross, described this in his 1980 book Friendly Fascism, as "fascism with a democratic face."

In the 1970s, the neo-conservatives in the Democratic Party—including Huntington—grouped themselves into the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM). Its two leading lights in Congress were Democratic Senators Henry "Scoop" Jackson (Wash.) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (N.Y.). The late Cold Warrior and fanatically pro-Israel Jackson remains the model for the DLC crowd today. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (Conn.) declares that he is proud to be identified as a " 'Scoop' Jackson Democrat." The DLC's bimonthly magazine, Blueprint, touts Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona as another would-be Scoop Jackson. Former Al Gore campaign manager Donna Brazile recently co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled "What Would Scoop Do?" boasting her own identification with the Jackson-Moynihan roots.

Brazile, in fact, personifies the subversive operations of the DLC gang, which is an integral part of the neo-conservative network that has penetrated and perverted both the Republican "Party of Lincoln" and the Democratic "Party of FDR," to the point that any party member or elected official who invokes either of the two great American Presidents in any substantive way, is branded a dinosaur and targetted for "the LaRouche treatment" of slander and isolation. The DLC, in its mission statement by Straussians William Galston and Elaine Kamark, published several years ago in the inaugural issue of Blueprint, declared that their goal is the total elimination of the Franklin Roosevelt legacy from the Democratic Party.

During the 2000 Presidential campaign, when Brazile was Al Gore's and Joe Lieberman's campaign manager, she forged a tight, albeit behind-closed-doors alliance with George Bush's Republican rival, John McCain. The DLC lovefest with McCain has never ended, to the point that McCain's "Bull Moose" third-party campaign chief, Marshall Whitmann, frequently writes for the DLC's Blueprint; and McCain, himself, was given prominent op-ed space in the January/February 2003 Blueprint. When DLC "strategists" Al From and Bruce Reed penned a campaign memo for the same issue of Blueprint, titled, "What It Takes To Win the White House," they addressed the document to "Democratic Candidates for President," with a "CC: to John McCain."

The Lieberman-McCain collusion was widely exposed during the Summer of 2002 in a series of EIR Special Reports, revealing how the "Bull Moose" duo were the driving force behind the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, and the subsequent neo-con drive to blackmail President Bush into going to war against Iraq. The blackmail threat? That McCain and Lieberman would run a 2004 third party "Bull Moose" campaign to shatter the Bush family's dream of securing G.W. a second term. In February 2002, McCain and Lieberman had traveled to the annual Wehrkunde global security conference in Munich, Germany, with Bush Administration leading neo-cons Richard Perle and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz—the most powerful Strauss disciple in Washington today—to declare that war on Iraq was a done deal.

Many in Washington acknowledge, however, that the circulation of several hundred thousand copies of the EIR McCain-Lieberman exposés played a vital role in postponing that Iraq war into March 2003, by which time the entire neo-conservative "war party" had come under intense public scrutiny, restricting their ability to operate in secrecy within the bowels of the Bush national security bureaucracy. Had the Democratic Party not caved in to the DLC, the Iraq War would likely have been stopped altogether.

The Boys With Brazile

Beyond her role as match-maker of the Lieberman-McCain political marriage, DLC madam Brazile's most astonishing collusion with the panoply of radical right-wing Christian Zionists, wannabe imperialists, and neo-cons involves her ongoing membership on the Board of Advisors of a recently incarnated Project Democracy outfit, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), created post-9/11 to provide "bipartisan" support to the war on terrorism. The directors of the FDD are Steve Forbes, publisher of Forbes magazine and former Republican Party Presidential pre-candidate; former Congressman and Bob Dole Vice Presidential running-mate Jack Kemp; and Dr. Jeane Kirkpatrick, the Reagan Administration United Nations Ambassador and founder of Social Democrats USA. The two "Distinguished Advisors" to the group are former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and R. James Woolsey, the former CIA Director. Both Gingrich and Woolsey are on Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board, along with Richard Perle, and are unabashed advocates of a broad war against Islam—what Woolsey promotes as "World War IV," in articles prominently displayed on the FDD website.

Brazile's other Advisory Board colleagues include rabid Christian Zionist Gary Bauer, Center for Security Policy neo-con wildman Frank Gaffney, Weekly Standard editor and American Enterprise Institute Strauss-disciple William Kristol, and Richard Perle, until recently the chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board. Among the Foundation's staff are former Republican National Committee official and FDD President Clifford May; and Stephen Schwartz, author of a recent hysterical diatribe against Saudi Arabia, The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud From Tradition to Terror, and a former employee of George Soros' Open Society Institute.

Brazile's commitment to deliver the Democratic Party over to the "war and empire" faction was best demonstrated in her "What Would Scoop Do?" May 21 Wall Street Journal op-ed, co-authored with Timothy Bergreen, a former State Department functionary who recently launched a DLC front group, Democrats for National Security. The two wrote that "Democrats have yet to fully comprehend the new reality of the post-Sept. 11 world. While most Americans viewed the war in Iraq through the prism of the Twin Towers attacks, many prominent Democrats still seem not to grasp the profound sense of insecurity that so many people feel in our country.... The American people agree with us on many vital issues—but they believe that we Democrats are weak and indecisive when it comes to standing up to dictators and terrorists and when it comes to the primary responsibility of government: defending the nation.... If voters continue to see us as feckless and effete they will not listen to our message next year and they will re-elect Mr. Bush."

This summarized a speech Brazile gave on May 17 at a Washington conference of another Scoop Jackson spawn, now closely allied with the DLC: the Social Democrats USA. SDUSA, a 1972 splinter from the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas, backed Jackson's 1972 and 1976 failed Presidential bids, and many of its leading lights then led the neo-con migration into the GOP in 1980, landing top posts in the Reagan Pentagon. They were pivotal in the formal launching of Project Democracy, the global covert operation to make the world "safe for democracy and free trade," which had been first demanded in Huntington's 1975 Crisis of Democracy. While speaking of "democracy," Huntington actually called for a new authoritarianism "with a democratic face," to deal with the looming global financial and economic crises and the consequences of the drive for a "post-industrial" paradigm shift. Key to that was the co-opting of the Democratic and Republican parties as instrumentalities for a new totalitarianism at home, and imperial wars abroad.

SDUSA was fully on board with McCain, Lieberman, Wolfowitz, Perle, and Cheney, in pushing President Bush to cave in to the war party and invade Iraq. On Feb. 25, it sent a letter to the President, which began, "We write because we share the view that it is essential to bring Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq to an early end. Broad and bi-partisan support at home—not simply passive assent—must be sought for this objective." The signators stated, "We must act alone if that proves necessary, but first we must do all we can to win allies." The letter praised Bush's British war partner: "We believe that a significant body of opinion can be persuaded of the view argued by Prime Minister Tony Blair: 'Ridding the world of Saddam would be an act of humanity.' A clear statement of your plan for supporting democracy and human rights in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East will help us all reach out to those who are open to this truth."

The letter was signed by 53 prominent neo-cons, not all of them SDUSA members. Among the most significant: Charles Fairbanks, a lifetime personal friend and protégé of Paul Wolfowitz, and co-author, with Perle and Doug Feith, of the 1996 "A Clean Break" study for Benjamin Netanyahu; Hillel Fradkin, who replaced Elliott Abrams as head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and is another disciple of Leo Strauss; Bruce P. Jackson, founder and director of the liberal imperialist lobby, Project for the New American Century; Robert Kagan, alter ego to William Kristol, and a second-generation Straussian; Penn Kemble, founder of SDUSA and a central player in the Reagan era Iran-Contra fiasco, as head of the Project Democracy money conduit, Prodemca; Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the think-tank of the DLC, and the editor-at-large of the DLC's Blueprint; Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies; Constantine Menges, Hudson Institute war fanatic and former Reagan NSC staffer; Michael Novak, the resident right-wing heretical Catholic at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI); New Republic publisher and co-owner (with DLC bankroller Michael Steinhardt) Martin Peretz; Nina Shea, Freedom House activist; R. Emmett Tyrrell, editor-in-chief of the American Spectator; Ben Wattenberg, SDUSA founder and leading first-generation neo-con ideologue at AEI; and R. James Woolsey.

A May 19 article in the Conrad Black and Steinhardt-owned New York Sun quoted Penn Kemble, the SDUSA founder, at the Washington conference: "We're not committed to the Democratic Party." Sun reporter Ira Stoll wrote that in an interview after his speech, Kemble had said that he was "holding out the possibility that Republicans might embrace elements of the Social Democratic program ... pointing out that he had voted for Ronald Reagan and that other Scoop Jackson Democrats had become Republicans. He said that Bush Administration figures such as the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, were in tune with the Social Democrat agenda of promoting freedom and democracy abroad."

Show Me the Money

In short, SDUSA and the DLC are fully in bed with the Cheney-led neo-imperial gang inside the Bush Administration—guilty, as charged, by LaRouche.

As the result of this collusion, the DLC is now the proud recipient of large amounts of corporate cash, including big infusions, since "Bush 43" took office, from one of the biggest sources of funding for the Gingrich-led "Conservative Revolution." In October 2000, the DLC held a corporate fundraising event bankrolled by Koch Industries, the largest privately held oil company in America, and a big source of funding of the Cato Institute and every other New Right think-tank in Washington. The guru of the event was Richard Fink, director of political projects of Koch Industries and a board member of both the Koch family's charitable foundations and the DLC's think-tank, the Progressive Policy Institute. Joining Fink on the planning committee for the big corporate fundraiser were Robert P. Hall III, another Koch Industries exec, and Michael Lewan, a lobbyist for Enron and other mega-corporations, and the former chief of staff of Joe Lieberman, during his first term in the Senate. Lewan brought Lieberman to the attention of the DLC, shortly after the former Connecticut Attorney General beat incumbent Republican Lowell Weicher with a large infusion of cash from the William F. Buckley family of right-wing Republicans, and from even more radical right-wing Cuban exiles in Miami, Florida.