Læs også afskriftet (på engelsk) nedenunder.
Trailer:
Den 21. juni offentligjorde LaRouchePAC en 80-minutters dokumentarfilm, som opfordrer til at rense Lyndon LaRouches navn, “Hvorfor Lyndon LaRouches navn skal renses” (primært med uddrag af de uafhængige høringer fra 1995 om justitsministeriets embedsmisbrug – med Lyndon LaRouche, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, USA’s fhv. justisminister Ramsey Clark, og LaRouches sagfører Odin Anderson).
Hjælp med at få denne nye video til at gå viralt.
I samarbejde med Helga LaRouche lancerer vi en international mobilisering for at få så mange som muligt (medlemmer, tilhængere, aktivister, kontakter osv.) til at dele, promovere og sprede videoen.
Kan du gøre en særlig indsats for at nå ud til kontakter med vigtige e-mail-lister, hjemmesider, blogs, Twitter, Facebook osv. og bede dem om at cirkulere dokumentaren. (Du kan naturligvis også hjælpe ved at promovere det via dine egne lister/sociale medier/eller hjemmeside)
Med den rette koordinerede indsats kan vi få videoen til at gå viralt.
Afskrift på engelsk:
The Case of LaRouche: Robert Mueller’s First Hit Job
The Case for the Exoneration of Lyndon LaRouche
June 21, 2019
[music]
HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: The most important in history is ideas, especially those ideas which move mankind forward; which are ideas which make the life of generations to come more human.
For me, the biggest crime of what happened to my husband is not that he was innocently in jail. I’m not saying it was not a hard time, because it was. But the lack of the ability to have important ideas govern history; that is the biggest crime. Lyn, while he was incredibly courageous of producing creative work while he was in prison — I mean, he did more in prison than any of us outside, and he put us to shame.
But nevertheless, I will only give you one example. In 1989, he was already in jail for nearly one year, when the borders of Europe opened. He, from his prison cell, designed a great vision of how to integrate Eastern Europe, Western Europe, China, the whole Eurasian continent, which would have been a groundbreaking conception which would have put the entire history of the 20th century on a totally new basis. Because economically, to integrate that economic space as one would have given opportunities and freedom to the states of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the Asian countries. But because Lyn was in jail, this idea did not become as effective as if he would have been free.
Now, I’m saying this because to put a man of great ideas into jail is a crime all by itself, because of the ideas. The reason why we were able to mobilize hundreds of parliamentarians and thousands of VIPs from around the globe — why would people from Africa sign the parole request for Lyndon LaRouche? Why would people from Latin America do this? Why would people from around the world, from Russia; why would people come out of completely different cultural worlds to fight for this man? Well, because we not only said this man must be free and his innocence must be proven, but they, many of them told me and others that they understand that the kind of change in global policy my husband is standing for, the kind of just new world economic order which allows the economic development of Africa; which allows the economic development of the developing countries, of Eastern Europe, they say is the only hope for them, for their nation, as far away as it may be.
So, the reason why we must win is not because it’s a personal affair. But as my husband was saying, we are going into a period of crisis, which most people are completely unaware of. The kinds of changes have to be big, and they have to be done with the help of the United States, because the world cannot be saved against the United States.
So, it is an historical necessity. And I think in a certain sense, given the experience I have from eight years of fighting this, given the fact that more and more people around the globe are united around this and understand that mankind is sitting in one boat this time; that either we solve all our problems at once, or nobody will live. I think we can win, and I think we must have that attitude. [applause]
NARRATOR: On August 31st and September 1st, 1995, a series of extraordinary hearings were convened in Tysons Corner, Virginia, to investigate gross misconduct by the U.S. Department of Justice. The hearings were chaired by former U.S. Congressman James Mann of South Carolina and J.L. Chestnut of Alabama — the great lawyer and icon of the Civil Rights movement. The hearings focussed on abuses by the U.S. Department of Justice, highlighting the onslaughts of targetted criminal cases against black elected officials in the United States — dubbed “Operation Fruehmenschen” according to FBI whistleblowers and Congressman Merv Dymally of California; as well as the case of Lyndon LaRouche.
LYNDON LAROUCHE: My case may be, as Ramsey Clark described it, the most extensive and the highest level of these cases, in terms of the duration and scope of the operation.
NARRATOR: Witnesses included: LaRouche’s attorney, Odin Anderson; former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who had been LaRouche’s defense attorney in his appeal; Lyndon LaRouche’s wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche — from whom you just heard; and Lyndon LaRouche himself. The panel was comprised of leading national and international political figures, including the former Vice Premier of Slovakia, Jozef Miklosko; numerous state senators and other elected officials from across the United States; as well as Chor-Bishop of the Maronite Church, Monsignor Elias el-Hayek. Numerous international observers were present, including legendary Civil Rights heroine Amelia Boynton Robinson of Selma, Alabama.
As you will hear, these hearings demonstrated not just the injustice which was perpetrated against leading U.S. political officials by the Department of Justice because of their political views — exemplified by the case of Lyndon LaRouche — but the inherent danger at that time that such abuses, if left unchecked, could subsequently threaten the very existence of our Constitutional republic itself; a fight we see playing out today as we speak at the very highest level of our government, in the form of the attempted takedown of the U.S. Presidency.
[from Oct. 6, 1986]
NEWS REPORTER 1: The raid command post, about three miles from town, was busy all night. Just before dawn, Virginia State Police moved out. It was a combined strike force, including FBI, Internal Revenue Service, Secret Service, and other Federal and state agents. As FBI agents approached LaRouche’s estate in Leesburg, Virginia, 50 miles from Washington, police lined up outside.
NEWS REPORTER 2: Good evening. Federal and state agents today raided the Leesburg, Virginia headquarters of political activist Lyndon LaRouche.
NEWS REPORTER 3: Today, it was a law enforcement assault here in Leesburg that set this town buzzing.
NEWS REPORTER 4: Scores of state and local police joined Federal agents in a coordinated, nationwide raid.
NARRATOR: On October 6, 1986, four hundred FBI, state police, IRS, ATF agents, and the national news media descended on Leesburg, Virginia, to search offices associated with the LaRouche political movement. At a farm outside Leesburg, where Lyndon LaRouche and Helga Zepp-LaRouche were staying, heavily armed agents dressed in full tactical gear patrolled the perimeter as armored personnel carriers surrounded the property, and helicopters buzzed constantly overhead.
In addition the materials specified in the Federal search warrant, according to later court testimony, the FBI case agent in charge was searching for evidence by which to obtain an arrest warrant for Lyndon LaRouche himself and a search warrant to allow armed entry to the farm. A plan was in place to provoke a firefight with LaRouche’s security guards, to take out LaRouche, which was admitted years later.
During the evening of October 6th, moves to implement that plan seemed to begin with news stations broadcasting that now an assault was about to occur on the farm. A telegram was sent in LaRouche’s name to President Ronald Reagan, seeking his intervention to call off the raid. Coincidentally, at exactly the same time, President Reagan was in Reykjavik, Iceland, refusing to back down in negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev on his commitment to the so-called SDI — the Strategic Defense Initiative. The same SDI that Lyndon LaRouche had worked for years alongside top officials in the Reagan Administration to craft and support.
LAROUCHE: A first-generation of strategic ballistic missile defense …
NARRATOR: Only after this telegram to Ronald Reagan was sent did the forces surrounding the farm begin to dissipate and recede. However, this was merely the opening chapter, in a concerted campaign involving elements within the Justice Department to target and dismantle the political operation of Lyndon LaRouche. A campaign which astute observers of this case would readily compare to the operation underway, today, against none other than President Donald J. Trump. There are striking similarities between the LaRouche case and the present attempt to prosecute or impeach Donald Trump.
The first one is that both cases with a British call for prosecution and criminal investigation. In LaRouche’s case, British intelligence sent a letter to the FBI in 1982, demanding investigation because LaRouche, the British claimed, was an agent of Soviet disinformation. At the same time, Henry Kissinger and the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board triggered a counterintelligence investigation of LaRouche under Executive Order 12333. In the Trump case, the British government began demanding Trump’s head as early as 2015; and have bragged to the {Guardian} and other British newspapers that their spying was the origin of Russiagate.
Both cases shared a legal hit man in the form of prosecutor Robert Mueller. And, both cases involved the employment of the criminal law enforcement and intelligence capacities of the United States to defeat and silence a political opponent for political reasons; something which violates the very core principles of the U.S. Constitution. In LaRouche’s case, the effort was to permanently demonize him, in order to bury his ideas, precisely as Helga LaRouche stated in her testimony.
As can be seen, the failure to challenge the gross abuses of justice, perpetrated by the Justice Department in the case of Lyndon LaRouche, has now brought us to the point, where the very Constitutional system on which our republic depends is being threatened.
REP. JAMES MANN: All right, the session will come to order.
NARRATOR: Let’s hear from Lyndon LaRouche’s lawyer, Mr. Odin Anderson of Boston, Massachusetts.
MANN: As we attempt to study the broad subject of misconduct by the Department of Justice … we cannot overlook the case that is perhaps the most pervasive (and I’m stealing the words from Ramsey Clark, I think), most pervasive course of misconduct by the Department of Justice, in the history of this country: broader-based, longstanding, abuse of power beyond expression, abuse of power through the use of Federal agencies, including, even, a Bankruptcy Court.
Throughout the days of the LaRouche ordeal of criminal charges, Odin Anderson, a lawyer from Boston, has been the solid rock of criminal defense and counsel, far and above any other person. He can, therefore, speak to the subject of misconduct, or such facets of that as he may choose to discuss, better than anybody, with the possible exception of Lyndon and Helga. He has, literally, devoted a major portion of his life in the last 7 or 8 years, 8 or 9 years, to that task. And we appreciate him taking the time to be here from Boston, to make some such statement as he wishes to make, and be responsive to questions.
Thank you.
ODIN ANDERSON: Thank you, Congressman, honorable panel. It’s I who thank you for this opportunity to speak about the LaRouche case.
I’m thankful, as I looked up and counted names, there are only 11 of you. If there had been a 12th, I would have been tempted to re-try this case in front of you, assured, I think, that Mr. LaRouche would finally get a fair trial….
I have represented Lyndon LaRouche since 1984, at which time he was directly targetted by the Department of Justice, through its U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston, although there is a history of many years of harassment prior to that….
Back in the late ’60s, you probably all remember a student organization called the Students for a Democratic Society, (SDS); very active on campuses, particularly around the Vietnam War, but on many other issues of political importance to the United States; economic, social, a broad range of issues.
Mr. LaRouche, and a number of political associates of his, became involved in those very same issues. But they had a difficulty with SDS, and essentially founded their own group, which became known, originally as a faction of SDS, the Labor Committees. They ultimately became known as the National Caucus of Labor Committees, which was and remains a political association … of people who share like political views.
Probably the best way to demonstrate the government’s venal behavior, and the unconstitutional activities undertaken, directed out of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, is to show you their own documents, and read to you their own words. And, by way of history, I’d like to have No. 1 put up on the screen.
What you see before you, is an FBI memorandum from the SAC, the Special Agent-in-Charge, of the New York Field Office of the FBI, to the Director. It’s dated March 1969. And, it requests authorization of the Director to issue a false leaflet, to stir up antagonisms between these various aspects of SDS. Now, I’m sure that’s a tactic familiar to all of you, if in slightly different form. They want to disseminate this leaflet under false cover, to various of these groups, and stir up as much controversy between them, hopefully, undermining their ability to act in concert, and getting them into faction fights, which would destroy their efficiency and cohesion.
Well, if you put up No. 2, you’ll see that they got that authority from the Director of the FBI, and his blessing: “Authority is granted to anonymously mail copies of the leaflet submitted.” Now, I’m not going to bother to show you the leaflet, because it’s a piece of scurrilous garbage. It’s available for anyone who would like to see it. It was called “The Mouse Crap Revolution,” but its intent and purpose was exactly as defined in the letters. {This} is the Department of Justice, {this} is the FBI at work in the 1960s, under — if you look at the bottom — what was called “Cointelpro,” or “Counterintelligence Program.”…
So in 1969 and the 1970s, this was the kind of activity which was going on against the LaRouche political movement, and many others, including people you’re well acquainted with personally.
If we could move on to the next overlay [No. 3]. This is to the Director, again from the SAC in New York, regarding the named subject, Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr., also known as Lynn Marcus, as they suggest. This is one of the most incredible pieces of FBI material that I have ever seen….
What this suggests, is that the Communist Party has let the FBI know, that they want to eliminate Lyndon LaRouche, for their political reasons. They consider him to be a “politically dangerous person,” and the Communist Party wants to eliminate him.
If you look at the bottom, “New York proposes submitting a blind memorandum to the {Daily World},” to foster these efforts. Here’s the FBI climbing in bed with the Communist Party, in order to effect the elimination of Lyndon LaRouche from the political scene. I think we all know what that means. And they go on to say, that it’s believed, that once LaRouche is eliminated, the political effectiveness of the National Caucus of Labor Committees will, thereby, be diminished, and it will cease to be of any political significance. Here, again, is the FBI, in the ’70s, in operation.
Years went by, and the members of the National Caucus of Labor Committees continued their political efforts. Now, they are considered, Mr. LaRouche is considered, extremely controversial by many. Those he’s considered controversial by, tend to be those whose policies are inconsistent with his, or those that he has named as operating against the best interests of the society and peoples of the United States. And we all know, that those people tend to be very powerful people….
Henry Kissinger, who we all know by name, and some probably remember by reputation and actions, was a very powerful man. Mr. LaRouche took exception with his policies, which he considered to be genocidal, particularly in the context of the financial policies, and the conditionalities imposed on the Third World in order to get money from the World Bank, and got into a serious row with Mr. Kissinger.
And Mr. Kissinger writes to (on his letterhead) William Webster, the Director of the FBI [Exhibit No. 4]. They had recently had a lovely social occasion together at the place called the Grove, where these powers associate, and frolic around, in various curious ways. And after that, he [Kissinger] appreciates having seen him there, and asks for the assistance of Bill Webster in dealing with “the LaRouche menace.”…
Here is [Exhibit No. 5]– within the short period thereafter, “Buck” Revell, who was the head of counterintelligence for the FBI, at the time, is sent this memorandum by William Webster, who had been contacted by David Abshire of PFIAB, that’s the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. And these same parties, Henry Kissinger and his colleagues, are now raising before PFIAB, the question as to whether LaRouche, because he seems to have funding from sources that they don’t understand, is operating as a foreign intelligence agent, and they want them to look into this.
Now, what that does, and the words are bad enough, but the reality is terrifying. This triggers the Executive Order I referred to earlier, Executive Order 12333, which allows virtually {any form of conduct, any activity}, to be undertaken, as long as it’s under this national security cover. So, this was the beginning of a national security-covered operation against Mr. LaRouche and his colleagues….
The common denominator between all of these cases is twofold. It’s, as I said, political targetting, and it’s the Criminal Division of the Justice Department.
You probably also know, from your own experiences with colleagues who have run afoul of the situations that have been discussed, that the first place they try you, is in the press. Only {then} do they try you in the courts, once they’ve set the stage, once they’ve poisoned all the minds in the community against you, then, they haul you into court, where you can’t get a fair trial, because the jurors who are sitting there, have been told for days, months, years, or millennia, what a bad person you are, and what horrible offenses you’ve committed against the moral or social fabric of the community.
Well, that’s precisely what happened in the LaRouche case, probably more so than in any other case…. In the LaRouche case, the press began, not by accident, because we all know who owns the press: It’s not owned by individuals, and as a matter of fact, there’s an awful lot of ownership of the press which represents certain political and financial interests.
So, the fact is that beginning in the same period of the 80s, a private financier in New York City, John Train, with reach into the media community, by virtue of his social and financial circumstances, convened a group of media types in a salon that he hosted in his apartment, to plan a press campaign against LaRouche, and his political movement. Their objective was threefold: to tar and feather Lyndon LaRouche and his colleagues as best they could; to advocate and press for prosecutions of any kind, in any place; and, ultimately, to destroy and jail LaRouche, and destroy the political movement which he headed.
Among those who attended this meeting — and there were several of them, that we have evidence of, collected over a period of years, and admissions by people under oath — were members of and persons associated with the intelligence community, as well as people with political axes to grind against Mr. LaRouche, such as the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, who has, historically, done everything it could, financially and editorially, to label Mr. LaRouche as an anti-Semite, as a fascist, as a racist, as a “Hitler,” a “little Hitler,” and some of the most scurrilous names we can imagine hurling in another person’s face without basis.
All of these parties, collectively, — and unfortunately, this is the way these things operate; they don’t operate above board, they operate under the table where you can’t see them, because they don’t flourish well in the light of day, but the grow well in darkness. They get together, and in fact, this has been referred to by others as part of the “secret government”: The powers that be that operate in conjunction with official agencies but are never seen or heard of. …
I want to move on briefly and specifically to the LaRouche cases, which are, in fact, a series of cases, that began in 1984.
In 1984, Mr. LaRouche, under his name, sued NBC and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, in Federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, on libel charges, on the basis of the accusations which I’ve already told you about.
We tried that case. NBC lied through their teeth, in terms of what information we had. In fact, we had FBI documents that indicated that the NBC reporter had received proprietary and non-public information from four agencies of the federal government, with reference to Mr. LaRouche.
So they make the stories up, and then they leak them to people who want to use them against you. …
We sued NBC in Alexandria, Va. As soon as that case was over, NBC in Boston, on the very day — I had finished our presentation and was packing up to go back to Boston, published a so-called “investigative series” of theirs, alleging that certain persons associated with the LaRouche political campaign, had made false credit charges against certain contributors. And they [NBC] had a couple of contributors who got up and said, “you know, I met these people, and I gave them 35 bucks, and the next thing I knew, there was 100 bucks charged to my credit card.”
Well, I’ll say one thing. Mr. LaRouche is very controversial. And people who contributed to them, frequently came under various types of criticism for that contribution. It could be their wife who says, “what’re you giving $100 away? We need to buy new shoes for the kids.” Or, it could be a neighbor, or a child. And many times, the amounts of money were larger, so the reasons for opposing the contribution were even greater.
But, if you know anything about credit cards, the only way a person can re-capture money charged to his credit card, which has been charged to the account, is to say “it was unauthorized.” Those are the magic words. If you don’t use the magic words, you can’t collect the $100. So, in order to reverse a credit card charge, one must say, “I never authorized it.”
Therefore, what you’re alleging in that case — although the intent was probably not to make the allegation — but in fact you’re alleging that the person did it without your authority, which could be a criminal act.
Now, they started an investigation around this, which they conducted for two years. It ultimately culminated in a trial in Boston.
Of course, another thing you’ll all recognize from your personal experiences, is that when they want to charge you and they don’t have anything, they charge you with conspiracy; because then, they don’t have to prove anything! They just go around, tell a bunch of stories, and hope that the jury is poisoned against you, is going to link it all up somehow, and convict you. So “conspiracy” is the vehicle, and that’s precisely what happened in Boston: LaRouche and his colleagues were charged with conspiracy, with a few other specific charges linked on as an afterthought.
We tried the case for seven months. We weren’t even through with the government’s case, when the case mis-tried. The reason it mistried, is that the jury had been led to believe that the case would have been over long before, which it would have, had we been able to concentrate on the evidence. But, because of the hearings that the judge was forced to conduct for literally months and months, on governmental misconduct, the case dragged on, and the jury sat in the jury box.
The jury ultimately got frustrated and … wanted to go home, and the case mistried.
This is an article from the {Boston Herald} that printed that day. [Exhibit No. 6] I’m only showing it to you for one reason, not because of the highlight, “LaRouche Jury Would Have Voted `Not Guilty'” — although that’s true, and those come out of the words of the jury foreman, who was interviewed — but, in the first line of text, there are some very important words, from the foreman:
“`We would have acquitted everybody at this point, and that’s based on prosecution evidence’, said foreman Dashawetz. “There was too much question of government misconduct in what was happening to the LaRouche campaign.'”
“Government misconduct.” Very seldom do you get a jury to see it, because the government fights you {nail and tooth}. They lie, they cover up evidence, they, in fact, deny information to their own agents, so that the agent won’t be in a position to have to intentionally not disclose it. These are common tactics, and that’s what happened here. Fortunately, in our case, we were able to show enough of it to the jury, so that the jury got the smell.
However, the government wasn’t about to quit, particularly having taken what was a serious public relations beating at that point in time. So, they decided to switch forums, come down to a much more favorable forum, — {the} most favorable forum — the Eastern District of Virginia: the so-called “rocket docket,” the home of almost every government agency, and government contractor in the country, with a few other pockets here and there.
They brought the case down to there, indicted the case, and brought us to trial. New charges, new defendants. LaRouche was also indicted, so he was one of the few who was also charged the second time — and forced the case from indictment to trial in 28 days.
There’s a great book, and it’s not a novel, it’s a factual book. It is the history of the case shown by the documents of the case; it’s called {Railroad!} and I commend it to your attention. If you’re to see how that system worked in this particular case, it’s all there, and it’s not somebody else’s words, it’s the words from the court documents.
In any event, LaRouche was convicted, as were all of his co-defendants, {again}, on conspiracy charges. That was the seminal charge, the rest were just tacked on. This time it wasn’t credit cards. It was allegations of wire fraud, the allegation being that loans were taken from contributors, without intent to repay, or with reckless disregard of that fact that payment wouldn’t take place.
Now, these were political loans, made in the political context, by political people, to a political candidate, and his political candidacy. Everybody knew that….
Back in Boston, the grand jury that was investigating the case, held certain businesses associated with Mr. LaRouche in contempt of court, for not producing documents which were under subpoena, which were being fought during a period of time based on various privacy grounds.
Twenty million dollars’ worth of contempt sanctions were imposed. The government then sought to collect that $20 million, by filing an involuntary bankruptcy against these organizations in Alexandria, Virginia, just prior to — not just prior — but at some point prior to the Alexandria indictments.
They also did this, {ex parte}. The government was the {only} creditor — in violation of federal law. But, by virtue of their {ex parte} petition to the judge, they were able to effect the closing of these four businesses, all of which were engaged in First Amendment advocacy and publication. These businesses were closed. They were seized by Federal marshals. They never reopened. The publications were never reprinted.
The $20 million the government sought, was a ruse. In fact, what they intended to do, and what they did do, was close the conspiracy that they alleged in the Alexandria indictments, on the very day that they filed the bankruptcy. The point of the bankruptcy being that from the moment a bankruptcy is filed, an order issued, that no one can pay any debts without order of the court. So it was physically impossible for any debts to be repaid after that, thereby creating a pool of persons who were owed money, who couldn’t be repaid. They [the government] got five or six of these people to come forward and say, “I was promised repayment and didn’t get it,” and that was the basis of the conviction for loan fraud.
In any event, I want to say that we have fought as vigorously as anyone can through the appeals process, without success and through the {mandamus} process, 2255s in federal court. And are now at a stage, where, Ramsey Clark, former Attorney General of the United States, who has been with me on all of the appeals, — he joined the effort just after the sentencing of Mr. LaRouche and his colleagues in 1990. Recently, he wrote a letter to the Attorney General, asking for a departmental review of the LaRouche case. I’d like to read you some portions of his letter. He’ll be here tomorrow to speak to you personally. I’d like to leave you with the following words of Ramsey Clark:
“Dear Attorney General Reno,
I have been an attorney in this case since shortly after the defendants were sentenced in January 1989 and appeared as co-counsel on appeal and on the subsequent motions and appeals in proceedings under 28 U.S.C. sec. 2255 and F.R. Cr.P. Rule 33. I bring this matter to you directly, because I believe it involves a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge. Three courts have now condemned the Department’s conduct in this prosecutorial campaign. The result has been a tragic miscarriage of justice which at this time can only be corrected by an objective review and courageous action by the Department of Justice.”
MANN: The session will come to order. The session will come to order.
We are pleased and honored to have with us today, the former Attorney General of the United States Ramsey Clark, who will make such presentation as he may choose. Attorney General.
RAMSEY CLARK: Thank you very much. It’s a good feeling to be here with you again this year. I wish I could say it’s been a good year for freedom and justice under law, but I can’t say that. But at least, in this company, you know that the struggle goes on, and that we shall overcome.
I will, probably, unless my mind wanders, which it does, talk about three cases primarily. And I’ll start and end, with the case of Lyndon LaRouche and his co-defendants. not because it’s the Alpha and Omega, although it’s about as close as a case gets to the potential perfidy of justice, but because it shows how bad it can be, and yet, it has, as so very, very few of these cases ever do, a positive side that we have to consider.
I came into the case after the trial. As a person who lives in the country and pays attention to these things, I followed it carefully. I knew something about the ways of the judicial district in which the case was filed and the meaning of filing a case there. To call it the “rocket docket” is a disservice, unless you identify the rocket, because if there’s a rocket in present use that would be similar, it would be the so-called depleted uranium-tipped missile, the silver bullet used in Iraq.
In other words, it’s a lethal rocket. It’s not a rocket that sought truth or intended justice. …
I was prepared, therefore, for what might happen. I had followed the earlier case in Boston, which, by any measure, was an extremely peculiar case, both in its charges and its prosecution, and in its history. I knew the judge there as a fellow Texan. His brother, Page Keeton, had been dean of the law school where I started out, down at the University of Texas. And he’s one of the old school, that doesn’t like tricks, falsity, or injustice. He became outraged with the prosecution, and did a lot. I can’t tell you he did all that a judge could have done. I believe Odin would agree, though, he did a lot. And not many judges, who come through a political conditioning process, who have the courage to stand up to the power of the Executive Branch, to the FBI and others, and say the things that he did. And, that was almost an early end to a malicious prosecution.
But, in what was a complex and pervasive a utilization of law enforcement, prosecution, media, and non-governmental organizations focussed on destroying an enemy, this case must be number one. There are some, where the government itself may have done more and more wrongfully over a period of time. But the very networking and combination of federal, state, and local agencies, of executive and even some legislative and judicial branches, of major media and minor local media, and of influential lobbyist types — the ADL preeminently — this case takes the prize.
The purpose can only be seen as destroying–it’s more than a political movement, it’s more than a political figure. It {is} those two. But it’s a fertile engine of ideas, a common purpose of thinking and studying and analyzing to solve problems, regardless of the impact on the {status quo}, or on vested interests. It was a deliberate purpose to destroy that at any cost. …
And yet, all this law enforcement was coming down on them. We didn’t have that kind of violence, that physical violence, in the LaRouche case. But the potential from one side was entirely there. The day they went out to seize 2 million documents, as I recall (I may be off a million or 2 million), a big warehouse! These people produce a lot of paper, and it’s not trash; it’s not bureaucratic paper-keeping; you may not agree with it, but it’s all saying things. They had several times more agents, armed, than the ATF force that initially attacked the Mount Carmel Church outside Waco on Feb. 28, 1993. They just didn’t have people on the other side, who were shooters….
I guess I’m really still caught with the idea, the old idea of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, that is ingrained in a lot of Americans, in particular, young lawyers, who are kind of idealistic and believe in the idea of freedom and the power of the word and the truth. I believe the truth can set us free. I think that’s the struggle. The real struggle, is whether we can see the truth in time…. The truth can set us free.
In the LaRouche case, they’re book people. (I have to confess to an intellectual weakness: I find reading easier than thinking, so I read constantly, nearly blinded myself from too much reading. I’ve got 15,000 books at home, read most them, unfortunately. As you can tell, I haven’t learned much, but I haven’t stopped yet.) These are book people. They had publishing houses going on. Important publications. Non-profit stuff…. And the government comes in a completely — these are just some of the peripheral things, that Odin and others might not have explained to you, but these are what they were about: {ideas}, information, social change! Meeting the needs of human people all over the world, humanity all over the world.
We’re going to have a billion more people before the end of this millennium, century, decade, and the vast majority, 80% of them are going to have beautiful, darker skin. And they’re going to live short lives, {short lives} of sickness, hunger, pain, ignorance, and violence, {unless we act radically}. And these books have ideas! Some will work, some won’t work, but they’re ideas. They can be “tested in the marketplace,” as we used to say.
And they [the government] come in with a {false} bankruptcy claim, against a non-profit publishing houses, and {shut ’em down!} What’s the First Amendment worth, you know? “We’ll silence you, you’ll have no books out there.”
And not only that: then they take people who were contributing and supposed to be paid back their loans to the publisher, and try to prosecute, falsely, on it. They put on witnesses, to give false testimony. From the tens and tens of thousands of contributors, and thousands of people who gave loans, they came up with a baker’s dozen, roughly — 13, 14, 15 people — who got their feelings hurt, perhaps. And some who were mean-spirited enough to lie about it, and who didn’t get their money back, although they were being paid back. Because anybody can have financial crunch, where you can’t pay back.
Imagine what would happen to political campaigns in this country, if you enforced law strictly against those who are raising money like this, by inquiring about all the people who gave money; whether they got what they wanted, what they expected, and whether they were misled about it. Nobody could run for office.
We know in this society that we are plutocracy, that money dominates politics, absolutely dominates it: Read this new book {The Golden Rule} by Thomas Ferguson, University of Chicago Press, about the role of money in our democratic society, how it absolutely controls not just the elections, and not just the politicians, but the whole shebang! The media, the military, the industry, everything. And we call it “democracy.”
We need some ideas, we need the good words out there. And that’s why it had to be stopped, and that’s why they came after him.
I read the record — in addition to reading books, I read lots of records of trials. Absolutely no evidence to support a conviction there, if you take it all, if you exclude the parts that were false or venomous, there’s not even a shell. But they had to say that this noble enterprise, agree or not with it, was corrupt. Corrupt — have nothing to do with it! It’s corrupt! Nobody respects financial or other corruption. Destroy ’em that way.
They were put to trial, without any chance to prepare their case, and they made a valiant effort. And got consecutive sentences — unbelievable….
We’ve been trying in every way we can, others much more than I, to make the LaRouche case known. I personally have appeared at meetings in Europe and North America. There have been books and pamphlets and there’s a constant flow of literature and verbal communication.
We’ve tried, for I can’t tell you how many years right now, but several years, maybe four even, to explore the possibility of fair hearings in the Congress.
Hearings are risky in a highly political environment like that. …
There’s a continuing effort. I think it will bear fruit. We’ve asked the Department of Justice for a comprehensive review. Lyndon LaRouche has always asked for a review, not only of his case, but of all cases where there are allegations of serious misconduct, and usually names a bunch of ’em. And so, we’ve always done that. That’s his vision. It happens to be my vision, too, of how you correct things.
But the capacity of the Department of Justice for self-criticism, is of a very low order. It has two offices that are charged with the responsibility. One’s called the Office of Professional Responsibility, and one’s called the Office of the Inspector General, and neither have ever done anything very serious that I’m aware of. Maybe someone was caught stealing pencils, or something, taking home for the kids. That’s about the dimension of their address.
So our efforts to secure a review of injustice; we’ve tried in the courts. We sought {habeas corpus}, which is the grand English — it’s the Writ of Amparo; in the Dominican Republic, it’s the grand old way of reviewing injustice and wrongful conviction — and we got short shrift. We had to go back to the same judge who gave us the fast shrift the first time!
The [inaudible 54:09] rocket docket.
So, we have to find solid means. The media’s a great problem. The media’s controlled by wealth and power that prefers the {status quo}, and it’s very sophisticated in how it manages these matters. I can take a cause that they’re interested in, that’s virtually meaningless, and be on prime time evening news. And I can take on a cause of what I consider to be international importance of the highest magnitude, that they oppose, and shout from the rooftops, and you’d never know I existed. That’s the way it works.
That’s one reason that publications — the books and magazines and newspapers that spread the word — even though they’re minor compared with the huge international media conglomerates that we’re confronted with, but they reach thinking people, and they spread the word.
I think we’ll get our hearing in time, and I think it’ll be a reasonably short time, but I think to be meaningful, it’s going to take a regeneration of moral force in the American people.
I’m both an optimist and an idealist, so you have to take what I say with a grain of salt. But I believe that the civil rights movement was the noblest quest of the American people in my time. I think it was real, and vital, and passionate. And I think it consumed the energies and faith of some few millions of people. I mean, we really believed in it! We were marching and singing and doing! And then it kind of dribbled out. So that now we have this vicious fights that divide us.
We have to have a moral regeneration and energy and commitment and faith and belief, that we can overcome; that equality is desirable; that justice is essential; that a life of principle is only worth living; then we’ll get our hearings. Then we won’t need our hearings, but we’ll have to keep on.
MANN: The session will come to order.
If anyone needs an introduction to the next presenter, I suggest you see him after the meeting. [laughter] We’re delighted to have Lyndon LaRouche.
LYNDON H. LAROUCHE, JR: Just for the record, I’ll state a few facts which bear upon the circumstances in which certain events befell me.
I was born in Sept. 8, 1922, in Rochester, New Hampshire, lived there for the first 10 years of my life, lived for the next 22 years of my life in Lynn, Massachusetts, except for service overseas. I moved to New York City, where I lived until July of 1983, and, since that time, except for a period of incarceration, I have been a resident of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
I attended university a couple of times, before the war or at the beginning of the war, and after it; and then had a career in management consulting, which lasted until about 1972, tapered off, sort of.
My most notable professional achievement was developed during the years 1948-1952, in certain discoveries of a fundamental scientific nature in respect to economics, and my professional qualifications are essentially derived from that.
In the course of time, in 1964, approximately, I was persuaded that things were being done to change the United States, which, from my view, were the worst possible disaster which could befall this nation. And thus, while I had given up any hope of political improvement in this country before then, to speak of, I felt I had to do something. So I became involved part time, from 1966 through 1973, in teaching a one-semester course in economics, largely on the graduate level, at a number of campus locations, chiefly in New York City, but also in Pennsylvania.
In the course of this, a number of these students who participated in these classes, became associated with me, and, out of this association, came the birth of a nascent political organization, as much a philosophical organization as political. Our central commitment was Third World issues and related issues, that is, that economic justice for what is called the Third World is essential for a just society for all nations. I became particularly attached to this, during military service overseas in India, where I saw what colonialism does to people. And I was persuaded at the time, as I believe a majority of the people who were in service with me, was that we were coming to the end of a war, which we had not foreseen, but which we had been obliged to fight. And that if we allowed the circumstances to prevail that I saw in the Third World, we would bring upon ourselves some kind of disaster, either war or something comparable down the line.
And that was essentially our commitment as an association.
We became rather unpopular with a number of institutions, including McGeorge Bundy’s Ford Foundation. About 1969, we made a mess of a few projects he was funding, by exposing them. And we also became unpopular with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, perhaps on the behest of McGeorge Bundy.
In 1973, according to a document later issued under the Freedom of Information Act by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, acting at all times under supervision of Washington headquarters, hatched a plot to have me eliminated, or to induce the Communist Party U.S.A., that my elimination would solve a number of their problems. There actually was an abortive attempt on me during that period. I knew the FBI had been involved. I couldn’t prove it then, but I knew it, and, later, a document appeared showing that.
From that point on, during the 1970s, until the end of COINTELPRO, we were constantly beset by the FBI. Our main weapon against the FBI was jokes. We used to make some jokes about the FBI, which we would pass around, to try to persuade them to keep off our tail, but they kept coming, and all kinds of harassment.
Then, in 1982, there was a new development. I sensed it happening, but I received the documents later: The events which led to my, what I would call, a fraudulently obtained indictment and conviction and incarceration.
It started, according to the record — of which I had some sensibility this was going on at the time — of Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State (with whom no love was lost between us), went to William Webster and others, soliciting an FBI or other government operation against me and my associates. This led, as the record later showed, to a decision by Henry Kissinger’s friends on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, recommending an operation against me and my associates. This was adopted during the same month of January by Judge Webster, the Director of the FBI, who passed the implementation of this instruction along to his subordinate, Oliver “Buck” Revell, recently retired from the FBI, I believe.
The first inkling I had of this, was in about April of 1983, at which time a New York banker, John Train, who is very intelligence-witting, shall we say, of the private bank of Smith and Train in New York City, held a salon at which various government agents, private individuals, the Anti-Defamation League, for example, and also NBC-TV News, the {Reader’s Digest,} the {Wall Street Journal}, and others, were represented.
The purpose was to coordinate an array of libels, a menu of libels, which would be commonly used by the news media, in an attempt to defame me, and hopefully, from their standpoint, to lead to criminal action against me and my associates.
In January of 1984, this attack came into the open, launched by NBC-TV, which had been a participant in this salon of Train’s, which launched the pattern, which was the pattern of coverage by all U.S. news media — major news media, and many minor news media. From the period of the end of January 1984, through the end of 1988, I saw no case of any significant coverage of me or mention of me, in the U.S. print media, particularly the major print media, the Associated Press, in particular, which was an active part of the prosecution, in fact, or in the national television media, network media, especially; not a single mention of me which did not conform to the menu of libels concocted by this salon, which had been established under John Train, as part of this operation.
This salon, including the Anti-Defamation League, NBC-TV, others, the Associated Press, actively collaborated, beginning sometime in 1984, with forces inside the government, which were determined to have a criminal prosecution against me and my associates. The criminal prosecution was launched at about the time of the 1984 presidential election, in October-November 1984. And from that point on, it was a continued escalation, until a Federal case in Boston led to a mistrial, occasioned largely by government misconduct in the case, in May of 1988.
Following that, on or about October 14 in Virginia, a new prosecution was opened up, and that led to my conviction in December of 1988, and my sentencing, for 15 years, in January 1989. I believe Mr. Anderson has described the nature of the case. And that resulted in five years of service in Federal prison, from which I’m now released on parole.
The motivations of the case against us, I think, are, in part, obvious, perhaps partly not.
In 1982-83, there were two things which greatly excited my enemies. Number one, I had been involved, in 1982, in presenting a proposal which was based on my forecast in the spring of 1982, that a major debt crisis would break out in South America, Central America, and the expectation that Mexico would be the nation that would have a debt crisis. I’d been involved with many of these countries and personalities in them, in projecting alternatives to this kind of inequitable system, where the “colonial nation” had been replaced by the term “debtor nation.” And the debt of South America, Central America was largely illegitimate, that is, it was a debt which had not been incurred for value received, but had been done under special monetary conditions, under the so-called floating exchange rate system, where bankers would come to a country, the IMF in particular, would say, “We just wrote down the value of the currency; we’re now going to re-fund your financing of your foreign debt, which you can no longer pay on the same basis as before.”
So I proposed, that the debt crisis be used as the occasion for united action, by a number of governments of South and Central American countries, to force a reform in the international debt relations, and to force a reform within international monetary relations. This report was entitled {Operation Juárez}, largely because of the relationship of President Lincoln to Mexico during the time that Lincoln was President; with the idea that it was in the interest of the United States to accept and sponsor such a reform, to assist these countries in the freedom to resume development of the type which they had desired.
This report was published in August of 1982, ironically a few weeks before the eruption of the great Mexico debt crisis of ’82, and was presented also to the U.S. government and the National Security Council, for the President’s information at that time. There was some effort, on the part of the President of Mexico, to implement my proposal in the initial period of the debt crisis. He had, at that time, some support from the President of Brazil and the government of Argentina. But under pressure from the United States, the government of Brazil and Argentina capitulated, and President José López Portillo, the President of Mexico, was left, shall we say, “hanging out to dry.”
As a result, in October of 1982, he capitulated to the terms which were delivered to his government and people around him, by people such as Henry A. Kissinger, who made a trip to Mexico at that time, to attempt to intimidate the Mexicans to submitting to these new terms. This was one issue between me and Kissinger, and his friends.
The second issue was, that sometime about December of 1981, a representative of the U.S. government approached me, and had asked me if I would be willing to set up an exploratory back-channel discussion with the Soviet government, because the Soviet government wanted, according to them, an additional channel to discuss things. And I said I didn’t reject the idea, I said, but I have an idea on this question of nuclear missiles. It was becoming increasingly dangerous, forward-basing, more precise missiles, electromagnetic pulse, we’re getting toward a first strike. It would be very useful to discuss what I proposed in my 1980 election campaign, with the Soviet government, to see if they’d be interested in discussing such a proposal. This might prove a profitable exploratory discussion.
And so, from February of 1982, through February of 1983, I did conduct such back-channel discussions with representatives of the Soviet government in Washington, D.C. Those were somewhat fruitful, but ultimately abortive. Kissinger and others became aware of this discussion, during the summer of 1982, and their circles were very much opposed to that. The general view was expressed, that I was getting “too big for my britches,” and I had to be dealt with: on the question of debt, which some of these people were concerned about, and on this question of strategic missile defense, where I had this proposal, which the President adopted, at least initially, in the form of what became known as the Strategic Defense Initiative. And when the Strategic Defense Initiative was announced by the President on March 23, 1983, there were a lot of people out for my scalp.
Those are the at least contributing factors, in what happened to me. But they may not be all. There probably are others, as well….
We have, in my view, a system of injustice whose center is within the Department of Justice, especially the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. The problem lies not with one administration or another, though one administration or another may act more positively or more negatively. You have permanent civil service employees, like Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jack Keeney and Mark Richard, who are coordinators of a nest of institutions in the Criminal Division, which show up, repeatedly, as leading or key associates of every legal atrocity which I’ve seen.
This is the case with the so-called Frühmenschen operation, which is largely an FBI operation, but which cannot run without cooperation from these people. …
We have an out-of-control Justice Department, in my view, where the rot is not in the appointees, as much as it is in the permanent bureaucracy. We have a permanent sickness, in the permanent bureaucracy of part of our government.
In my case, when the time came that somebody wanted me out of the way, they were able to rely upon that permanent injustice in the permanent bureaucracy of government, to do the job. As in the Frühmenschen case, the Weaver case, the Waco case, the case of Waldheim, the case of Demjanjuk, and other cases. Always there’s that agency inside the Justice Department, which works for contract, like a hitman, when somebody with the right credentials and passwords walks in, and says, “we want to get this group of people,” or “we want to get this person.”
My case may be, as Ramsey Clark described it, the most extensive and the highest level of these cases, in terms of the duration and scope of the operation. …
So my case is important, in the sense it’s more extensive, it’s more deep-going, long-going. But when it came to getting me, it was the same apparatus, that, I find, in my opinion, was used in these other cases. And that until we remove, from our system of government, a rotten, permanent bureaucracy which acts like contract assassins, using the authority of the justice system to perpetrate assassination, this country is not free, nor is anyone in it. … That’s my view of the matter. Thank you. [applause]
MANN: Thank you.
J.L. CHESTNUT: You and I had a little chat in Selma, Alabama. … I guess you can understand, that even somebody like me, sometimes, feels {overwhelmed}, and wonders whether or not America is just a lost cause. I hate to sound that way, but after 40 years, I’ve got {serious} reservations about whether we can save this country, about whether this country even {wants} to be saved.
LAROUCHE: Well, I take an evangelical view of this. I’ve been associated with many lost causes in my life — as you have — and, once in a while, we win them. [laughter] …
The problem of people, as I see it, is people don’t trust the leadership; and I don’t blame them for not trusting their leadership. I blame them for being too pessimistic. And it’s up to us and others, to get enough people moving, to create a movement.
Like the case, just, of Martin Luther King. Now, I never personally met Martin Luther King, but I watched him closely. And I know something about Martin Luther King, from people who knew him, and his circumstances. And here was a man, he was a good man, he was a preacher, a Baptist preacher, I don’t know. They run to this way and that way.
But one day, somebody appointed him, nominated him, to be a leader of the civil rights movement; out of a crowd, so to speak. He took the job, as an appointee, like a federal appointee! Only this was a civil rights movement. He went from crisis to crisis, in a few years, from the time that he received that appointment, until he went to his death, knowing he was facing death.
And in that period of time, he made a number of public speeches of great power and pith. Each of those speeches corresponded to a point of crisis in the history of the civil rights movement. And I saw, on television, and I read in the recorded speeches, I read a man who had gone into private, into his own Gethsemane, probably inspired by reading the New Testament, and said: “I will drink of this cup.” And he came out with an {idea}, with a lot of people swarming around him. But he came out with the {idea}, and he presented a concept, which took a whole people who were looking to him and the civil rights movement; and he {ennobled} them.
He said, “You’re not fighting for African-American rights. You’re fighting for everybody’s rights! You’re fighting to make the Constitution real!” And it was a new idea, a different idea. And, as he did with his “Mountaintop” speech that he gave just before he went — again, a man who had walked into Gethsemane and said, “Yes, Lord, I will drink of this cup, as my Savior before me.” And he went out, and he drank of the cup; and he inspired people.
Now, we don’t know who among us is going to be the great leader of this period. But we know, as the civil rights people of the 1960s, who had been at the civil rights business for many centuries, in point of fact, many of them with a conscious family tradition. They assembled together. They picked people from their midst as leaders; and among these leaders, was a Martin Luther King.
And I think, if enough of us assemble today around these kinds of issues, and show the nation that there {is} something moving, something which is of concern to the average citizen, that from among those we gather, together for that purpose, we will find the leaders we need.
[closing music]
