09/11/13

The Rebuttal: Part One

NoisyRoom Note: I highly recommend Diana West’s book. I believe she gets it exactly right and it is a book that should be on every shelf of those searching for the truth in American history. The infestation of progressivism and communism goes far deeper than we ever knew.

By: Diana West
Breitbart.com

“Well-designed attacks on an opponent’s credibility can overpower well-crafted messages.”

David Horowitz

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Calumnious charges against my new book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press), originated in a review that appeared at FrontPage Magazine on August 7, 2013. The 7,000-word review by Ronald Radosh was titled “McCarthy on Steroids” (FrontPage editor David Horowitz wrote the title). The Radosh review is referenced as source material for a series of attack-pieces that followed at FrontPage Magazine, Pajamas Media, The American Thinker, National Review, and elsewhere.

In one of three follow-up pieces Radosh published, he described the original review as a “take-down.” David Horowitz, in one of two pieces written about American Betrayal, wrote, “She should not have written this book.”

Who says that and why?

I have since come to understand the “take-down” of my book and the ad hominem attacks on my person in terms of a scorched earth policy to preserve and protect the conventional narrative as promulgated by mainstream academia.

“But FrontPage is a conservative site,” I can hear people say.

This stopped me, too, at first. Then I realized that the books Radosh cites in his “take-down”–not to debate my ideas, but to impugn them–are written by academics from Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. That’s liberal academia. Another source Radosh draws heavily from is a British historian and BBC documentary-maker whose works appear on PBS. More conventional (read: liberal) consensus.

My book threatens that consensus with arguments that are densely and meticulously documented. My sources are listed in 944 endnotes that draw from a bibliography that conventional historians consistently ignore. Specifically, I draw from the vast bibliography of Soviet espionage and infiltration that conventional historians ignore when writing World War II and even Cold War history. Indeed, the books Radosh cites omit or barely reference the same bibliography American Betrayal draws upon.

The Radosh review, then, is a defense of a conventional, tightly blinkered historiography – “the court histories that continue to obscure key facts about our backstage war with Moscow,” as M. Stanton Evans wrote in his endorsement of American Betrayal. But Radosh’s is in no way not a fair defense. It is not a fair debate. Instead, the Radosh review misrepresents my work by continually attacking my credibility.

For example, Radosh calls American Betrayal “yellow journalism conspiracy theories,” all the while failing to inform readers about my book’s copious source material, which in itself is a rebuke to such charges. Such is the Radosh modus operandi, however, in defense of the conventional narrative. Indeed, a reader of the Radosh “take-down” is led to believe I made the whole thing up due to my “conspiratorial mindset.” This is a gross and destructive calumny.

But it is only the first. That makes what follows anything but a rejoinder in a traditional battle of ideas. It is instead a detailed defense set forth to disprove the smears and expose the fabrications and distortions that went into the 7,000-word “take-down” of American Betrayal.

The rebuttal begins.

PREFACE

I will open with an email from FrontPage Magazine editor David Horowitz. I received this message after I declined FrontPage’s invitation to reply at FrontPage to the August 7 Radosh review of American Betrayal. Most readers don’t realize that the Radosh review is FrontPage’s second review of my book. The first, a positive review by FrontPage writer Mark Tapson, was removed from the website by Horowitz on July 8. I declined FrontPage’s invitation to reply to the Radosh review on the principle that eliminating one opinion, as Horowitz did, and replacing it with a more “correct” opinion is no way to conduct a debate. I had and have no intention of legitimizing such an uncivil action, which, among other things, makes a mockery of FrontPage’s commitment to free speech.

David Horowitz has, to date, written two pieces attacking me and American Betrayal. In the first, he cited the first reviewer’s alleged lack of expertise as the reason for his decision to take down the positive review. In the second, Horowitz wrote: “She should not have written this book.” As an example of the first reviewer’s inexpertise, Horowitz wrote the reviewer “readily conceded he was not familiar with the sources and could not properly assess such crucial matters as her claim that Soviet agents had gotten the United States to ship fissionable uranium to Stalin via Lend-Lease.”

As an aside, the word “fissionable” doesn’t appear in American Betrayal’s discussions of uranium. I mention this to flag a consistent pattern of misrepresentation or distortion that is evident in the Radosh review and follow-up pieces in which critics overstate a fact as stated in American Betrayal and criticize their own exaggeration.

That said, uranium shipments did indeed go to Stalin during World War II under the Roosevelt administration’s Lend-Lease program. Among my sources for this shocking fact is one source “familiar” to all: the United States Congress. I cite “Hearings on the Transfer of Atomic Material to the Soviet Union During World War II.” As such, this is quite easy to “properly assess” – if one has read my book.

This is just one of dozens of false claims about American Betrayal that Radosh, Horowitz, and the echo chamber they triggered have made, some even written by people who admitted they haven’t read it. The baseless sloganeering against me now includes such falsehoods as: I called Eisenhower a Communist (false); I claimed the FDR administration was “run” by Soviet agents (false); I portrayed Churchill as a Soviet dupe (false); I argued for an “entente with Hitler’s army against Stalin” (false).

If there is a beginning to the lies, gross distortions, and outright fabrications that I now must sort through, it is the editors’ note posted (in full knowledge of its gross distortion of the facts) over the Radosh review at FrontPage:

Editors’ note: FrontPage offered Diana West equal space to reply to Professor Radosh’s points below. She refused.

I refused to reply only at FrontPage–and the editors know that I refused to reply only at FrontPage. In other words, they decided to publish a gross distortion of the truth to encourage readers of the Radosh review to believe I am either incapable or uninterested in responding to the charges therein.

Not true.

Here is the Horowitz email.

Dear Diana,

Our decision to remove the review of American Betrayal was not because it offered an incorrect opinion that we wanted to suppress. The review was removed because the reviewer was as incompetent to provide an informed assessment of your book as you were to write it.

David

My task is to disprove this intemperate and, worse, baseless charge against my competence in handling evidence and evaluating it. This is the basis of the Radosh-Horowitz critique and, therefore, the basis of the multiple copy-cat critiques that have been written since, even by people who openly admitted they had not read my book. (I repeat this fact because it is incredible to me.) This competence issue makes my rebuttal about more than score-keeping, or tit-for-tat. These widely repeated attacks on me and my book undermine my integrity as a writer, and thus my livelihood.

My challenge to readers: Determine for yourselves who is “incompetent.”

There is something else. The vitriolic intensity of the attacks against me and my book is harder to analyze, veering into a murkier realm of the psychological. Nonetheless, this vitriol remains the leading edge of the story.

In his FrontPage editorial against American Betrayal, Horowitz wrote:

Neither West nor her supporters have begun to meet that standard or attempted to answer even one factual claim that Radosh has made about her book.

Mind you, Horowitz was writing one day after the Radosh’s 7,000-word “take-down” appeared.

He continued:

I don’t have a lot of hope that this will change because West has already shown herself to be a very angry, very self-centered and very reckless partisan, with a paranoid streak and a disposition to think in extreme terms that have only a tenuous and deceptive relation to the truth.

Such vitriol fed the hysteria against American Betrayal, inspiring what I can only describe as ritual denunciations of me for exhibiting signs of so-called McCarthyism and John Bircherism.

These are buzz terms that are not being used to shed light and truth but rather to stop debate.

Like pulling a review off a website.

Stopping debate is what this Horowitz-Radosh campaign is about.

I refuse to let them.

RADOSH’S INTRODUCTION

I will now address the introductory matter in Radosh’s “McCarthy on Steroids” and identify more than twenty falsehoods.

Editors’ note: FrontPage offered Diana West equal space to reply to Professor Radosh’s points below. She refused.

1) FALSE (addressed above).

Radosh:

Many Americans at both ends of the political spectrum view history in conspiratorial terms. The late Senator Joseph McCarthy set the bar very high when he claimed to have uncovered “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.” In that famous speech to the Senate on June 14, 1951, McCarthy condemned former Chief of Staff of the Army and Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense as a traitor who made “common cause with Stalin on the strategy of the war in Europe,” who “took the strategic direction of the war out of Roosevelt’s hands and – who fought the British desire, shared by [General] Mark Clark, to advance from Italy into the eastern plains of Europe ahead of the Russians.”

Diana West, who expands the scope of this conspiracy in American Betrayal, is McCarthy’s heiress.

2) FALSE: I don’t “expand” the scope of any conspiracy.

FACT: My book, which I began writing in an effort to understand the phenomenon of Islamic influence on the policy-making chain in the post-9/11 period, examines the phenomenon of Communist influence on the policy-making chain, a secret intelligence war planned and directed from Moscow. The “scope” of conspiracy here is Stalin’s (and Lenin’s before him). It is neither McCarthy’s conspiracy for attempting to uncover it nor mine for writing about it.

Radosh:

She argues that during the New Deal the United States was an occupied power, its government controlled by Kremlin agents who had infiltrated the Roosevelt administration and subverted it.(Emphasis added.)

3) FALSE: The phrase “the United States was an occupied power” does not appear in American Betrayal. This connotes a state of military occupation that is not under consideration.

FACT: I argue at length that the strategic placement of hundreds of agents of Stalin’s influence inside the US government and other institutions amounted to a “de facto occupation” (p. 114). Later (p. 193), I write: “The vast and deep extent of Communist penetration, heretofore denied, had in fact reached a tipping point to become a de facto Communist occupation of the American center of power.”

3a) FALSE: Further, the word “controlled” appears on 16 pages in American Betrayal, but is never used to describe the relationship of Kremlin agents and the US government. Again, not in my book. Why isn’t it? The word doesn’t apply to the influence operations under discussion. By virtue of the amorphous nature of deception and disinformation, influence operations do not work in such concrete ways, as Radosh and Horowitz should, but don’t seem to, understand.

FACT: On almost 50 pages of American Betrayal, I reference and discuss Soviet, Communist, Marxist “influence” and “influence operations.” There is no discussion of this in the Radosh “take-down.” There is no explanation of the concept I define as a “de facto occupation” that permitted Kremlin agents to “influence” the US government. Radosh repeatedly mischaracterizes the “influence” I write about as “control” throughout his “take-down.”

Radosh:

Like McCarthy, whom West believes got everything correct [sic], she believes a conspiracy was at work that effectively enabled the Soviets to be the sole victors in World War II and shape American policies in the postwar world.

4) FALSE: Read the article Radosh links to as his “proof” of the categorical statement. Nowhere does my article say McCarthy “got everything correct [sic].”

FACT: I believe McCarthy was generally right, however. There was indeed massive, Kremlin-directed Communist infiltration of the US government that he and other elected officials from both parties set out to uncover in the 1940s and 1950s (and up to the 1970s). This is a fact and a factor, I argue at great length in American Betrayal, that we as a people have not integrated into the telling of our general history.

Radosh:

Writing sixty years later, she claims that the evidence that has come to light in the interim not only vindicates McCarthy’s claims but goes well beyond anything he imagined.

5) FALSE: Evidence has come to light that vindicates many, many of McCarthy’s claims, but I do not claim such evidence goes “well beyond anything he imagined.” (In other words, not in my book.) It may or may not go beyond what McCarthy imagined. I bring this up not as a matter of semantics but because in the book I do repeatedly emphasize this notion of “not knowing the half of it” – but, it so happens, not with regard to Joseph McCarthy.

FACT: I link this notion of “not knowing the half of it” two or three times to the ex-Communist witnesses Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley; later to the ex-Socialist writer Eugene Lyons; also, Gen. Mark Clark, Rep. Martin Dies, and AP executive Kent Cooper – all as they bear witness to or attempt to understand what is in fact a larger Soviet-directed infiltration than they can possibly know about. I seized on this notion from the conclusion of Spies by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, who wrote:

“It was no witch hunt that led American counterintelligence officials to investigate government employees and others with access to sensitive information for Communist ties… but a rational response to the extent to which the Communist Party had become an appendage of Soviet intelligence. And, as the documents in Vassiliev’s notebooks make plain, they only knew the half of it.”

Notice that Radosh, however, for purposes of his “take-down” mentions none of these key figures in my book. Instead, he falls back on that anti-anti-Communist failsafe, Joseph McCarthy, abusing the great patriot once more to smear a new attempt to assess the historical reality of Communist infiltration of the US government.

Radosh:

Throughout American Betrayal, West uses the terms “occupied” and “controlled” to describe the influence the Soviet Union exerted over U.S. policy through its agents and spies.

6) FALSE: As noted above (see #3a), I do not use the word “controlled” in this way.

7) FALSE: As noted above (see #3), Radosh omits my very specific explanation of and use of the term, which I introduce thus (p. 68):

“As [M. Stanton] Evans lays out in detail, much of it drawn from newly declassified FBI and Senate records, the United States wasn’t just riddled by Communist agents; we were for all intents and purposes occupied by a small army—a small army being just what this kind of war requires. Expert estimates now peg the number of Americans assisting Soviet intelligence agencies during the 1930s and 1940s as exceeding five hundred.21 Not one Aldrich Ames. Not two Rosenbergs. Not five “magnificent” Cambridgers. More than five hundred willing and variously able American traitors, many operating at the very highest levels of the federal government, with who knows how many more in support roles. This was a national security fiasco of a magnitude that has never, ever entered national comprehension.”

Radosh:

She believes she has exposed “the Communist-agent-occupation of the U.S. government” during the Roosevelt and Truman eras, and that her discoveries add up to a Soviet-controlled American government that conspired to strengthen Russia throughout World War II at the expense of American interests, marginalize anti-Communist Germans, and deliver the crucial material for the Atomic Bomb to Stalin and his henchmen. (Emphasis added.)

8) FALSE: I don’t “believe” I “exposed” anything that has been previously documented. This belief is not in my book
.

FACT: What I have done is connect some dots and also resurrect what has long been in plain sight – or, perhaps, obscured from plain sight by left-liberal convention, Soviet design, elite complicity and the like. Everything in my book is open record, and appropriately sourced. The breathlessness in this charge is Radosh’s alone.

8a) FALSE: Note the repetition of the term “Soviet-controlled American government.”

FACT: As noted above (see #3a, #6), I do not use the word “controlled” in this way, and, in fact, repeatedly describe a Soviet-influenced American government. Again, not in my book.

8b) As noted above (see #3, #7), I discuss “de facto” occupation – a concept Radosh ignores.

8c) Another FALSE phrase contained in the Radosh sentence above concerns the delivery of “the crucial material” for Stalin’s atomic bomb. The concept of “crucial” falls into the Radosh pattern of exaggeration noted above.

FACT: American Betrayal discusses the documented, three-quarters of a ton of uranium that went through to Stalin under pressure of Harry Hopkins’ Lend-Lease program – and much more. Such exaggeration by Radosh and Horowitz is inaccurate. On p. 126 of American Betrayal, historian Richard Rhodes offers a better way to think about the 23 atomic materials including uranium (and don’t forget over 13 million pounds of aluminum tubing) that Lend-Lease sent Stalin during World War II: Such ingredients, Rhodes writes, were “useful in constructing and controlling a nuclear reactor.”

Radosh:

It also conspired to cover up the betrayal. In West’s summation: “The Roosevelt administration [was] penetrated, fooled, subverted, in effect hijacked by Soviet agents… and engaged in a ‘sell-out’ to Stalin” that “conspirators of silence on the Left…would bury for as long as possible, desperately throwing mud over it and anyone who wanted the sun to shine in.”

The quotation in full:

“The Roosevelt administration, penetrated, fooled, subverted, in effect hijacked, by Soviet agents, as a matter of national policy, mixed them up [US war interests and Soviet war interests], much to the world’s deep, vast suffering. This `sell-out’ to Stalin, as critics tagged it (and they didn’t know the half of it), would become a bone of sharpest and most vociferous contention that the conspirators of silence on the Left, in the Democratic Party, and among the Washington elites would bury for as long as possible, desperately throwing mud over it and anyone who wanted to let the sun shine in. Why? As G. Bernard Noble, chief of the Division of Historical Policy Research at the State Department, wrote to Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1950, the publication of the Yalta papers, for example, would `embarrass’ too many people and, in the acid paraphrase of Bryton Barron, fired Yalta archivist and author of Inside the State Department, `lead to demands for publication of the minutes of other conferences.’36

“More exposure, and we can’t have that.”

Radosh:

According to West, it was only because Washington was “Communist-occupied” that the United States aligned itself with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany.

9) FALSE. Like so many false Radosh statements, this one is unsupported by any quotations.

FACT: The manner in which Radosh, deliberately or ineptly, mischaracterizes my thesis is a challenge to overcome throughout this rebuttal process. This particular claim does not appear in my book. It is true, of course, that pro-Soviet and Soviet influence inside our government helped foster the US-USSR military alliance. The implication Radosh seems to advance suggests, sans Communist influence, Washington might have aligned itself with Nazi Germany, and that’s not in my book.

That said, I do argue that the US relationship with the Soviet Union from recognition (1933) forward precipitated a moral decline that grew from our government’s continual need to lie to cover up Soviet crime, even against this country and its citizens, in order to continue such relations and, later, military alliance. This alliance, I argue, drew us into actual and increasing complicity with one genocidal monster to defeat another genocidal monster, a concept explained by Solzhenitsyn, whom − among other luminaries, including Conquest, Koestler, Orwell, Besancon − I discuss at great length in the book. The Radosh “take-down” never mentions any of them.

From American Betrayal, p. 196:

“The fact is, the implications of normalizing relations with the thoroughly abnormal USSR didn’t just reward and legitimize a regime of rampantly metasticizing criminality. Because the Communist regime was so openly and ideologically dedicated to our destruction, the act of recognition defied reason and the demands of self-preservation. Recognition and all that came with it, including alliance, would soon become the enemy of reason and self-preservation. In this way, as Dennis J. Dunn points out, we see a double standard in American foreign policy evolve, and, I would add, in American thinking more generally. It was here that we abandoned the lodestars of good and evil, the clarity of black and white. Closing our eyes, we dove head first into a weltering morass of exquisitely enervating and agonizing grays.”

Later, on p. 205:

“As Solzhenitsyn would later tell us, `World democracy could have defeated one totalitarian regime after another, the German, and then the Soviet. Instead it strengthened Soviet totalitarianism [and] helped bring into existence a third totalitarianism, that of China.’ ”72

Radosh:

But Ms. West writes without an understanding of historical context and lacks awareness of much of the scholarly literature on the subjects she writes about.

10) FALSE: As noted above, (see Author’s Note), Radosh obscures the extensive bibliography American Betrayal draws from, as indicated in the book’s 944 endnotes. As noted above (see Author’s Note), my true crime here is rejecting the “scholarly” (read: liberal) consensus as drastically incomplete.

Radosh:

Moreover, she disregards the findings of the sources she does rely on when they contradict her yellow journalism conspiracy theories.

11) FALSE.

FACT: I do not disregard the finding of sources when they contradict. See for example p. 147, p. 164, p. 267, p. 372.

11a) I do not write “yellow journalism conspiracy theories.” Never have, never will. “Yellow journalism” is a sensational style of journalism that is sourced thinly or not at all. American Betrayal is densely, thickly sourced with 900-plus endnotes. (I note this again, because Radosh never cites or describes my extensive, careful documentation.) My sources include congressional investigations, State Department records, memoirs, histories, biographies, military histories, diplomatic histories, intelligence histories, newspapers, magazines, the writings of Solzhenitsyn, Koestler, Conquest, Orwell, Lyons, Kravchenko, Dallin, etc.

11b) I do not write “conspiracy theories.” I write about the Soviet conspiracy – an extensively documented fact, not a theory.

Radosh:

Consequently she arrives at judgment after judgment that is not only bizarre on its face, but also unwarranted by the evidence and refuted by the very authorities she draws on.

12) FALSE: Radosh’s opinion (“bizarre”) aside: The evidence for my judgements is plentiful whether or not Radosh omits mention of its range and depth, as listed in 900-plus endnotes.

My judgments are based on my reading of the evidence.

Take it or leave it, but don’t distort it.

Radosh:

As a historian I normally would not have agreed to review a book such as this one. But I changed my mind after seeing the reckless endorsements of its unhinged theories by a number of conservative individuals and organizations.

“UNHINGED”?

Radosh:

These included the Heritage Foundation which has hosted her for book promotions at a lunchtime speech and a dinner; Breitbart.com which is serializing America Betrayed; PJ Media which has already run three favorable features on West; Amity Shlaes, who writes unnervingly that West’s book, “masterfully reminds us what history is for: to suggest action for the present”; and by conservative political scientist and media commentator Monica Crowley, who called West’s book “A monumental achievement.”

RECKLESS ENDORSEMENTS? Over to you, Monica, Amity, Heritage, PJM, Heritage, Breitbart, et al.

NOTE: “Bizarre”? Here’s bizarre: From his list of “reckless endorsements,” Radosh omits the “reckless endorsement” I received from M. Stanton Evans, author of Blacklisted by History:The Untold Story of Sen. Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, and, with the late Soviet subversion and counterintelligence expert, Herbert Romerstein, Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government. This is truly “bizarre” because Evans’ praise for American Betrayal is proudly displayed on the front cover.

For the record, Evans wrote: “This explosive book is a long-needed answer to court histories that continue to obscure key facts about our backstage war with Moscow. American Betrayal is must-reading for serious students of security issues and Cold War deceptions, both foreign and domestic.”

Could Evans’ omission in Radosh’s list of “reckless” endorsers be due to the fact that Evans authored an epic evisceration of Radosh’s sloppy and mendacious review of Blacklisted by History? Or, more to the point, could it be because Evans is the foremost authority on the McCarthy era and because Evans’ valued endorsement of my book might detract from Radosh’s attempted “take-down”?

Just wondering.

Radosh:

West has evidently seduced conservatives who are justifiably appalled by the left’s rewriting of history, its denials that Communists ever posed a threat, and its claim that Communist infiltration was a destructive myth created by witch-hunters intent on suppressing dissent.

SEDUCED?

Radosh:

For these readers, West’s credibility derives from her aggressive counter vision. For those who have not read the important works of Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, Christopher Andrew, Alexander Vassiliev, Allen Weinstein and others, what she has written may seem a revelation, as she herself claims.

13) FALSE: I do not claim as revelation the findings of other authors.

FACT: Rather, I quote and cite their work.

Radosh:

But for anyone familiar with the historical literature, the core of what she has written is well known and what is new is either overheated, or simply false and distorted—the sort of truculent recklessness that gives anti-communism a bad name.

FOUL: Ad hominem. No evidence. (The evidence Radosh does present I rebut below. I will show that the “truculent recklessness” on display is Radosh’s.)

Radosh:

One of the most unsettling aspects of West’s use of previous authorities who provide the only reliable information in her book is the way she attacks the very writers who pioneered in exposing Soviet espionage and infiltration, while also disregarding their conclusions when they don’t agree with hers.

14) FALSE: I do not “attack” any of these authorities.

Radosh:

In a typical instance, she writes: “[Christopher] Andrew and [Vasili] Mitrokhin seem fairly hip to the problem, but then soft-soap its cause.”

FOUL: That’s an “attack”?

Radosh:

Even more preposterously she writes of those of us who drew attention to the guilt of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg that we view it as a matter of personal conscience and not “an issue of national security.”

15) FALSE: I do not write about Ronald Radosh in my book. I expound on the conclusions of others.

Radosh:

This is absurd and anyone who has read The Rosenberg File or the many articles I have written since about the case would know it.

16) FALSE: I do not write about Ronald Radosh.

Radosh:

She attacks Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, among the greatest scholars of Soviet espionage, for their failure to connect “treachery with its impact,” by which she means that they failed to come to her wild-eyed conclusion that Soviet espionage was not only a clear and present danger but succeeded in making America a puppet of its Kremlin masters. As a result, she writes, “The recent confirmations of guilt often show up as mere technicalities… The reckoning eludes us.”

17) FALSE.

FACT: Here, from Amercan Betrayal, is proof I did not “attack” Weinstein and Vassiliev (et al).

Today, archival evidence, unearthed by researchers in Russia and released in the United States, proves Judge Kaufman to have been correct. “Absent an atomic bomb, Stalin would not have unleashed Pyongyang’s army to conquer the entire Korean peninsula,” Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, authors of The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors, concluded in 2000. “Confident that his possession of atomic weapons neutralized America’s strategic advantage, Stalin was emboldened to unleash war in Korea in 1950,” John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, authors of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, wrote in 2009. These latter authors further contended that Soviet espionage, which ended up crippling America’s ability to read Soviet military communications, also ensured that the invasion of South Korea was a surprise “for which American forces were unprepared.”9

I’m guessing this revelation—that Soviet possession of an atomic bomb in 1949, due to the treachery of American Communists, helped precipitate the Korean War in 1950—is new to many readers, particularly those who have long been taught to believe that Rosenberg guilt, even when ultimately if reluctantly acknowledged, was largely a matter of “personal conscience” or political conviction, and not in any way an issue of national security. This is the typical response to this day. For example, even the landmark work The Haunted Wood, the 1999 book by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev that amasses voluminous evidence of American treason on Moscow’s behalf during the New Deal (1930s) and war years (1940s), ultimately assesses this same evidence in the most personal terms: namely, the impact of this concerted and aggressive cam- paign of theft and subversion on the agents themselves. Their “enduring legacy,” the authors sum up in their final line, “remains one of inglorious constancy to a cruel and discredited cause.”10 Such minimization of the link between personal cause and global effect is typical, even among the greatest scholars of Soviet espionage. There has been scant attempt, to continue with the Rosenberg example, to connect their treachery with its impact: to connect the theft of nu- clear technology with 36,940 Americans killed, 91,134 wounded, and 8,176 still missing in action in a war that claimed at least two million civilian lives on both sides.11

Instead, we look back on an exhausting struggle over whether such Communist penetration existed in the first place. Communist penetration existed— the historical record amply and redundantly confirms this—but endless wrangling even today wards off a comprehensive reckoning of the impact of that penetration. Undoubtedly, this is the purpose of some of the wranglers. Like a magic word denoting an atavistic taboo, the term “McCarthyism,” used as an epithet, still stymies debate, while the nagging phrase “looking for a Communist under every bed” still dampens the blazing import of declassified revelations from the archives. The fact that there were hidden Communists practically everywhere, and probably under the bed, too, remains stuck in the limbo between old, discredited theories, and new, confirmed realities. Somehow, we never get around to judging the effects, the impact of Communism itself, whether that impact is something as concrete as a body count or something as vaporous as a sensibility. That’s why after seventy years of diligently chronicled crime, cataloged, sourced, witnessed, and experienced (the luminous names of Elinor Lipper, David Dallin, Victor Kravchenko, and, of course, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spring to mind, as well as Robert Conquest), the recent confirmations of guilt often show up as mere technicalities, relegated to footnotes, small type, and back pages. The reckoning eludes us.

Radosh:

Finally, throughout her book she attacks the rigorous scholarship of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, whose groundbreaking books on the Venona decrypts are unrivalled in exposing the true scale of Soviet espionage in the United States, and Soviet control of the American Communist Party.

18) FALSE: Again, I do not “attack” Haynes and Klehr “throughout” American Betrayal or at all. Radosh provides no supporting evidence for this charge.

FACT: See this link for a listing of every reference to Haynes and Klehr in American Betrayal.

Radosh:

Haynes and Klehr have also co-authored a classic study about the efforts of liberal and left historians to cover up the infiltration and its extent in a book titled In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage. Ignoring this record, West claims that Hayes and Klehr minimize the evidence they were the first to expose.

19) FALSE: I do not “[ignore] this record.”

FACT: I cite In Denial four times in American Betrayal.

Radosh:

What is really bothering her is that they do not buy her preposterous conclusion that “American statecraft was an instrument of Soviet strategy.”

19) FALSE: Nothing is bothering me but the tedious task of refuting every smear and distortion of the Radosh review.

Radosh:

Ignoring or denigrating these brave and accomplished scholars, West proceeds to construct a conspiracy thesis resting on five claims she believes establish a vast plot by Soviet agents and their American pawns to shape the outcome of the Second World War and in the process benefit the Communists at the expense of the West.

20) FALSE: I can’t imagine what Radosh means by “ignoring” after I have quoted their work, but I never “denigrate” these historians. See also #14, #17, #18 and this.

I have to wonder about Radosh’s repeated false charges that I, “unhinged,” “attack” or “denigrate” intelligence writers. He is not only slandering my credibility, he is impugning my temperament without any basis.

Is Radosh laying down the narrative of the “shrew”?

This is ugly stuff.

_________

Part Two will appear tomorrow.

Part Two

09/11/13

International Farce

Arlene from Israel

Before I look at that farce, I remember. Today is 9/11. Not only should it not be forgotten, it should serve as a warning, a lesson. Even now. Especially now.

Credit: Chabad

There is consummate evil in the world. And there are forces dedicated to taking down Western civilization — with all of its humanistic and liberal values. Radical Islam. No less a threat than naziism was, or communism.

Remember…

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And the farce? Aiii! It would be very funny, if it weren’t so pathetically sad and dangerous.

The clown in the White House has been given a reprieve. And, of all nations, by Russia — which is in constant competition with the US for power and influence, and which supports the bad guys time after time. (Obviously, we cannot count the Russians themselves amongst the good guys.)

Of course, it wasn’t saving Obama the Russians were concerned with, but rather, preserving the regime of Bashar Assad. What a strange and sudden turn of events we’ve seen in the last three days:

Obama was on a slow, reluctant path towards a “limited” punitive bombing in Syria as a warning to Assad and all others of his ilk who would use weapons of mass destruction. Obama was pushed in this direction because he had spoken about a “red line” with regard to Assad’s use of poison gas, and he couldn’t back down without looking the perfectly impotent, perfect fool.

But how he was planning the bombing! By announcing first how limited it would be. I wonder if there has ever been any other instance such as this, in which the nature of an attack is publicly announced beforehand. Of course, he wasn’t trying to reassure Assad (not as far as I know, anyway), but rather his own people, who were not really on board.

The farcical nature of this whole venture comes clear.

Credit: thesun(uk)

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Then came the announcement by the president that even though legally he had the jurisdiction to order the hit on Assad’s military infrastructure, he decided it would be more “democratic” if he sought the approval of Congress first. Many of us asked, “Say what?” Because this was being advanced by the most undemocratic of presidents. A stalling tactic, and an effort to have other parties sharing the responsibility should things go wrong.

In order to get Congress on board (it was the House that was looking most reluctant), he pressured AIPAC to get out there and lobby — something that he never should have done and which can only rebound badly on AIPAC and Israel, whose prime minister really wanted to stay out of this. Not that Obama is concerned about anything rebounding badly on Israel.

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As those who have been following my postings understand, I was not opposed in principle to that attack, even if I mock the way it was being approached. Red lines must be addressed if there is to be deterrence power — which is sorely needed, most particularly with regard to Iran. And use on innocent children of weapons that are universally forbidden by international humanitarian law should be addressed in a fashion that very seriously discourages a reprise. The attack should have been a surprise, delivered with immediacy and ferocious determination born of genuine conviction.

But how can I not mock? The secretary of state actually said (I could not make this up!) that the attack would be “unbelievably small.”

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/09/john-kerry-promises-unbelievably-small-u-s-strike-against-syria/

The lack of courage and conviction on the part of the administration cannot be overlooked. Especially on 9/11. It had become apparent that, with everything else, there were members of Congress unwilling to support Obama’s plan to hit Syria because it was so ill-conceived, so lacking in genuine planning — with specific goals.

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We know what happened next. In short order, Kerry referred rather flippantly to Assad turning his weapons of mass destruction over to the international community so that they might be destroyed, and the Russians then picked up on this as a serious proposal. Very quickly thereafter (was this scripted?), Assad indicated interest in participating.

For about one-and-a-half minutes it all looked promising. It could have been promising if done properly. But it quickly became apparent that this was not going to be pursued properly — that is, with consummate seriousness.

Britain, France and the US wanted to turn supervision of the Syrian weapons over to the UN, and moved to bring the matter to the Security Council. They were seeking a Chapter 7 resolution, which means military enforceability. Russia would have none of it. In fact, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made a statement about how this will not work if there are threats against Assad — there have to be no repercussions staring him down, if he is to cooperate.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/question-of-enforcement-casts-cloud-on-syria-plan/

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When I read what Lavrov said regarding not making threats, in order to secure Assad’s cooperation, it seemed to echo something I had heard before. It didn’t take me long to remember where: For a long time Obama was saying this with regard to Iran. No military threats, he insisted, or else Iran’s leaders won’t agree to dialogue. Remember? We see how far that got the Western world.

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Obama made the point that if not for the US preparations to hit Syria, this wouldn’t be happening. And that’s true enough. But the key now is keeping the heat on Assad, so he feels he might get hit by those American cruise missiles at any moment. And, in spite of Obama’s lip service in this regard, I have little confidence that the US threat is real.

Tomorrow Kerry will be meeting with Lavrov in Geneva, and Obama will be speaking with Putin. The Russians want to run this show, and insist that, as Assad trusts them, they are the only ones who can pull it off. There is absolutely no reason to trust the Russians. But I expect, in spite of this, that Obama will labor mightily to find a “formula” that will provide a semblance of having dealt with the issue of Assad’s weapons of mass destruction. As locating these weapons and moving them would be a gargantuan task, there would be a good stretch of time before it became clear what had or had not been accomplished.

At present, Obama has tabled a Congressional vote on the matter. Going back to secure that vote — and a positive one, at that, and then acting, some weeks or months down the road, seems an unlikely scenario. The further in time we are from the precipitating attack with gas in August, the less urgent it will seem and the more reluctant members of Congress will become to sanction the launching of missiles on Syrian installations.

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According to the Inter-fax news agency, Moscow says a plan for the chemical disarmament of Syria has already been turned over to the US. It is this that will be discussed tomorrow. While Russia is blocking a Chapter 7 resolution, which would carry severe consequences for failure to comply, it seems almost a forgone conclusion that there will be some debate on this at the UN. The US and France are eager for a mechanism to verify Syria’s disarmament. To indicate how wide is the divide, we only need consider this comment by Syrian Cabinet Minister Ali Haidar:

“There was no talk about moving and transferring control. There was talk about putting these weapons under international supervision.” (Emphasis added)

What is more, a Syrian government official indicates that his country is now prepared to sign the chemical weapons convention, but not if the move is imposed by foreign powers.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/privately-un-talks-begin-on-syria-chemical-arms/

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Shoshana Bryen, in “A Metaphor for UN Action on Syria,” examines the lessons to be learned from Iraq, and poses the questions (at the bottom of her piece) that must be applied to the current situation. It provides a window on the complexity of the situation.

She asks how it will be known when all of the stockpiles of weapons have been secured And whether both the Syrian government and the rebels will give safe passage to those involved with this work. She wants to know who would centralize the stockpiles of weapons and who would destroy them.

And lastly, she asks, “How long will we wait?”

http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/4592/while-we-wait

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Isi Liebler also has a fine piece on this issue — “American Isolationism and Its Implications for Israel.”

“In the absence of effective presidential leadership, the American people have grown weary of shouldering the burden of policing the world and sending their youngsters to battle extremists in faraway places. Obama’s policies have dramatically revived America’s dormant isolationist inclinations.” (Emphasis added)

http://wordfromjerusalem.com/?p=4802

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Lastly, a word about Iran. The opportunity for Obama to deliver a message of deterrence to Iran, via strong action in Syria, has been sadly and regrettably lost. It goes without saying that the Iranians are watching every faltering step. If they have concluded without question that Obama will never hit them, it would be difficult to make an alternate case, .

To make matters worse, there are now reports that the Russians will supply Iran with more advanced military equipment. Elsewhere I’ve seen a denial by Putin on this.

What seems to be the case is that Russia is telling Obama that if he ends up hitting Syria, then they will supply Iran with the military equipment. Great guys, these Russians — always advancing the cause of peace.

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Saturday will mark the 40th anniversary of the start of the Yom Kippur War. It is a time for soul searching here in Israel, with regard to our alertness to what is happening around us and our preparedness for all eventualities.

At a memorial service at Latrun today, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said (emphasis added):

“In the fog that is covering the Middle East, we must realize that we can count only on ourselves and build an army that will deter any enemy.”

Earlier in the day, he had delivered a message with the same theme:

“We do not know how the free world will act in response to the massacres in Syria. We are following the developments with responsibility, level-headedness and the awareness that we must trust ourselves – our strength and our deterrence capability.

“We live in a reality in which instability is the only stable thing in the stormy waters of the Middle East.”

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4428729,00.html

Credit: Eli Mandelbaum

“We must realize that we can count only on ourselves…” Never were truer words spoken.

09/11/13

Marching to War Under False Pretense (Syria)

Gulag Bound
By: as Dawn sees it

One cannot help but point out the unwavering bias this administration seems to have in regards to Syria and its support of the anti-Assad rebels.

March 19 2013 a chemical weapons attack was launched by the anti-Assad rebels outside Aleppo in Syria. A UN chemical weapons team was invited in by the Syrian government, for an inspection. The fact that the government invited them in for an inspection should say something, but in a day and age when common sense seems to be lacking, and facts are distorted by this administration and a complicit MSM, it can be hard to find the truth, unless of course you are seeking out alternative media.

One can certainly see why Diane Feinstein seems to take issue with alternative media, I think what she is saying is she would like Government controlled media. The kind of media that wants their viewers to react on emotion rather than actually facts and logic.

From “Russia: Syrian Rebels Made, Used Sarin Gas,” CBS News, July 9:

“It was established that on March 19, the rebels launched an unguided Bashar 3 projectile towards Khan al-Assal controlled by the government forces,” Churkin told reporters, adding that he intends to share the evidence with the U.S., U.K and France, who have alleged that the chemical weapons use is by the government forces.

The samples taken from the impact site of the gas-laden projectile were analyzed at a Russian laboratory certified by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Churkin said.

The ambassador said the results of the analysis indicate the Bashar 3 rocket “was not industrially manufactured and was filled with sarin.” He said the samples indicated the sarin and the projectile were produced in “cottage industry” conditions.

The absence of chemical stabilizers, which are needed for long-term storage and later use, indicated its “possibly recent production,” Churkin said.

“Therefore, there is every reason to believe that it was the armed opposition fighters who used the chemical weapons in Khan al-Assal,” Churkin said.

So let me get this straight, a red line would have to be drawn if Assad uses chemical weapons but not if anti-Assad forces used chemical weapons? From Reuters’ “UN Has Testimony that Syrian Rebels Used Sarin Gas,” May 5:

President Barack Obama last year declared that the use or deployment of chemical weapons by Assad would cross a “red line.”

He then sent arms and ammunition to the opposition on “high confidence” that it was Bashar Assad forces that used the sarin gas — when all the evidence points to the contrary. Back to the CBS report:

President Barack Obama’s government says it has “high confidence” that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces have killed up to 150 people with sarin gas. The use of a chemical weapon crosses Obama’s “red line” for escalating U.S. involvement in the conflict and prompted the decision to send arms and ammunition to the opposition, not just humanitarian aid and non-lethal material like armored vests and night goggles.

Common sense, facts, and logic should tell us which side this administration is supporting.

Reuters-story-Syrian-terrorists-used-sarin

Graphic: beginning of Reuters’ story

09/11/13

Anonymous Hackers Reveal Photo: Preparations for Obama’s Strike on Syria

By: Arlen Williams
Gulag Bound

The following classified photo has been released to GulagBound.com by “Anonymous” hackers. Ostensibly, it shows preparations for the planned U.S. strike upon Syria, apparently to be personally inflicted upon its President Bashar al-Assad.

This is believed to reconcile John Kerry’s comments regarding the “unbelievably small” size of our anticipated, ultra-surgical attack, with Barack Obama’s “[no] pinpricks” qualifier, in his Tuesday evening speech.

colossalsyringe

Note the bullhorn, intended to provide one last announcement of our impending attack

The key quotes are as follows, apparently some kind of code language intended to signal to the rest our alliance (France) the nature of our attack.

Kerry: “That is exactly what we’re talking about doing – unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.”

Obama: “The U.S. does not do pinpricks. Our military is the greatest the world has ever known. And when we take even limited strikes, it has an impact on a country like Syria.”

An unsubstantiated leak indicates this strike will be code named either, “Operation Assad Example,” or “Operation Big Stick.” Some speculate it may have actually been planned for over a year, a cryptic reference given in this peculiarly timed announcement by “Timeless Joe” Biden (rumored to yet be vice president).

(CBS video)

However, it has also been opined that Biden’s utterance referred to knowledge of Obama’s private life, also documented by investigative journalist, Wayne Madsen and by the attestations of one Larry Sinclair in his book, Barack Obama & Larry Sinclair; Cocaine, Sex, Lies & Murder?

Gulag Bound has no knowledge of the contents of this new weapon, any more than what… fully… exists in the heads of any of the aforementioned politicos; perhaps some new advancement in the administration’s weapons of mass confusion. By the same token, we have no idea of what was in these Syrian syringes, either.

To skirt the NSA’s electronic transmission tracking and decryption capabilities, the photo was printed and slipped under Gulag Media’s office door, with a note directing us to keep an eye on a nearby hotel balcony. Further news came to us there, via smoke signals issuing from the lips of someone wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, his or her communique prefaced: “Bad trip, Syria.”