PRESS RELEASE
Caution: Beware Frantic
Argentine Soros Hack
July 17, 2002 (EIRNS)—As a courtesy to our readers, we warn that Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky, featured columnist of the leftist Argentine daily Página/12, appears to have "lost it" over Lyndon LaRouche's growing influence in his country and its neighbors. In a column headlined "International Nutcase," printed in the July 14 edition of Página/12, Verbitsky strung together one slander after another against LaRouche—jumping off from a document doing the rounds on the internet, which purports to be written by "the French Senator Lyndon LaRouche," which is not LaRouche's.
Verbitsky's article is no original piece of journalism; he lifted most of his lies straight from Dennis King, the professional "Get LaRouche" operative on the payroll of that most right-wing of U.S. intelligence-connected outfits, the Smith Richardson Foundation.
Verbitsky is a known lunatic, and his crazy article is not to be taken too seriously. But, in these days of coups and assassinations, it is important to check into such things carefully. And so it will perhaps be useful to provide for our readers, and the curious, some highlights of the record of this Mr. Verbitsky, and accompanying insights into his funny mind. As he himself reports proudly, Horacio got his start as a leading member of the Argentine terrorist group, the Montoneros, in the 1970s. In fact, he was one of the top people in charge of intelligence for the Montoneros. "I believe it is one of the best things a person my age could have done at that time," he told a reporter in September 1992. "I do not regret having participated in the most massive revolutionary movement Argentina saw during this century." At least two attempts to assassinate Gen. Juan Peron, the 1975 massacre of Army conscripts caught bathing or napping in their beds at the Monte 29 Army Regiment in Formosa, and the 1976 car bombing of the Edificio Libertador Army headquarters in Buenos Aires (where no military were killed, but only a civilian), are said to have been among the "revolutionary" actions of the young Verbitsky.
But life moves on, and Verbitsky became a journalist. In 1987, he helped found Página/12, with which he has been associated ever since. In 1995, he and a group of other Argentine journalists formed a non-governmental organization (NGO) called Periodistas.
It was around that time that Verbitsky found a new benefactor: that most infamous of speculators, and fervent defender of the very capitalism that Verbitsky protests he abhors—George Soros. In 1998, Human Rights Watch/Americas poured money into Verbitsky's operation, awarding him one of its Hellman/Hammett Grants. Soros has been one of the most generous financial contributors to HRW from its founding in the late 1970s, and he has served for years as a member of the Advisory Board of its Americas Division.
By 1999, Verbitsky was promoted by Soros. He was named to the Advisory Board of Human Rights Watch/Americas, where he serves, to this day, alongside Soros, the Inter-American Dialogue's President Peter Hakim, the Council on Foreign Relations's Kenneth Maxwell, among other U.S. establishment lesser luminaries.
Soros, of course, is also well-known as the world's leading financier of drug legalization, hosting drug legalization projects out of his Open Society Institute.
Verbitsky did seem particularly sensitive about the issue of drugs, in his "International Nutcase" ravings, complaining that "the LaRouchites accuse the [Mexican] Zapatistas of financing themselves through the drug trade, which is patently false." Why the sensitivity? Could Verbitsky, like his boss, Soros, be involved with the stuff?
