PRESS RELEASE
Wall St. Dirty Tricks Hit LaRouche Campaign
March 1, 2002 (EIRNS)—With the 2004 Presidential campaign now starting, a Wall Street "dirty tricks' operation has been caught in attacks against Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche's campus supporters. The American Family Foundation, attempting to use a "cult" charge to intimidate campus volunteers for the LaRouche campaign, worked with the East German Communist Stasi (Secret Police) in a similar operation against LaRouche in the past.The American Family Foundation (AFF), founded and bankrolled by Wall Street banker John Irwin III—the grandson of IBM founder "Pop" Watson—has launched a thought-police campaign of intimidation against supporters of LaRouche on university campuses across the country.
The post-Sept. 11 activation of the AFF against LaRouche ends almost nine years of "lying low," after it came to light in the earlier 1990s that the AFF had been working against LaRouche with an agent of the East German secret police, the Stasi. The AFF's then-head of International Cult Education, Pastor Friedrich Haack of Germany, worked with a Stasi agent in Munich in putting out the first AFF-sponsored "cult" slander against LaRouche in Europe.
After German reunification, the German government discovered that the Stasi had pumped substantial resources into Kurt Hirsch, its "helper" agent for the AFF. At that point, AFF-affiliated operatives laid low. Marcia Rudin, head of the AFF International Cult Education Program, filled Pastor Haack's function after he died. She, along with AFF's Ronald N. Loomis, run a network into university student personnel, campus newspapers, and campus security, who have been goaded into campaigns against LaRouche supporters. This is the source of the "cult" slander against LaRouche.
Irwin is the president of the Achelis and Bodman Foundations, in New York city. Along with Richard Mellon Scaife's Scaife Family Foundation, Irwin has bankrolled the AFF from its founding up to the present.
Irwin father, John Irwin II, was Henry Kissinger's Deputy Secretary of State in 1972-73. Mellon Scaife has also financed Daniel Pipes' Foreign Policy Research Institute (FIPRI) in Philadelphia, a U.S. support center for Ariel Sharon's crimes. Daniel Pipes has added to the American Family Foundation's propaganda, calling LaRouche a "conspiracy theorist." FIPRI was founded by Robert Strausz-Hupé, one of the seminal influences on Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Samuel Huntington.
