Air America Network in Turmoil
By Cliff Kincaid | August 31, 2006
Indeed, the controversial Malloy interview with Tarpley may have jeopardized the Air America financial rescue plan. 
Liberal Air America radio host Mike Malloy had his show abruptly "terminated" on Wednesday, allegedly for financial reasons. The network is failing but there could be another factor behind the Malloy debacle. There is still fallout from Malloy's recent decision to turn over two-and-a-half hours of his three hour show to a former associate of ex-con Lyndon LaRouche, a perennial candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination who campaigns against what he views as British and Zionist control of the U.S. political system. The LaRouche organization is frequently labeled as a cult.
The former high-level LaRouche associate, Webster Griffin Tarpley, was on the Malloy show to promote his view that unnamed U.S. officials carried out the attacks on 9/11 and blamed Muslims for the terrorist acts. But Tarpley went beyond this to suggest that leftist Noam Chomsky, a supporter of the Hezbollah terrorist group that attacked Israel, is a rich puppet of the U.S. military industrial complex and a tool of the Zionists. The hapless Malloy seemed to gobble it all up.
It appears that, in this case, the looney left became too looney, even for Air America's backers. And those backers, according to a July 17 article in the Washington Post, were going to include the so-called Democracy Alliance, a group of rich liberals led by convicted inside-trader and billionaire George Soros. It turns out that Tarpley, who wrote the book, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, thinks Soros has been one of those behind-the-scenes money manipulators telling Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve what to do. You can read all about it on page 116 of the Tarpley book. It probably didn't look good for Air America to be featuring someone who has been critical of the network's hoped-for financial savior.
Indeed, the controversial Malloy interview with Tarpley may have jeopardized the Air America financial rescue plan.
"Web" as Malloy called him, declared his belief that an "invisible government" was behind 9/11 and the hijackers were "patsies." He declared, "You're dealing first of all with a military coup by an invisible government or rogue network faction inside the U.S. command structure. It is a U.S. operation from beginning to end with some help perhaps from the British." Malloy, who described himself as a friend of the recently defeated and erratic Rep. Cynthia McKinney, did not disagree.
Tarpley also told Malloy, without any rebuttal, that former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was a "destroyer of the crime scene" at ground zero and a "functionary of the invisible government."
All of this might be tossed aside as the rhetoric of a political extremist were it not for the fact that Tarpley, described by Malloy as "probably the premier spokesman" for the "9/11 Truth Movement," is not the only former LaRouche associate who has achieved a place of prominence on the political left. Robert Dreyfuss, another former LaRouche collaborator, is a contributor to TomPaine.com, The Nation, Mother Jones, and Rolling Stone. Dreyfuss recently spoke at the New America Foundation on the topic of the "phony clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West. When he worked for LaRouche, Dreyfuss exposed various "Zionist" plots.
That Air America would air an interview with Tarpley at a time when it is angling for major cash from Soros was strange indeed. One has to conclude that it was a factor in Malloy's ouster. Ironically, his show with Tarpley aired one day after the Soros-funded Media Matters website ran an article calling LaRouche a "political extremist" who had influenced the book The Shadow Party by conservatives David Horowitz and Richard Poe. The book, based on independent investigative reporting, is strongly critical of Soros' financial takeover, through contributions, grants and subsidies, of much of the political left and even the Democratic Party. Accuracy in Media published a major article showing how the billionaire, convicted of inside trading in France, has been funding not only the political left but various "media reform" and journalism organizations.
While LaRouche (and many others) have been critical of Soros in the past, conservatives had come to their own conclusions about Soros―and LaRouche―years ago. During the 1980s, as I noted in a Human Events article, "Who and What is Lyndon LaRouche?," members of the group showed up at airports and other events promoting nuclear power and attacking Ralph Nader, hoping to make inroads into the conservative movement. This was during a time when LaRouche was pursuing a pro-Soviet line on foreign policy issues. I warned conservatives to stay away from him and his movement. Lately, however, various Soros-funded pro-drug legalization groups have been showing up as sponsors of the Conservative Political Action Conference.
While most conservatives have come to the realization that LaRouche and his associates are political opportunists and extremists, the ouster of Malloy from Air America does not suggest that the left as a whole has come to that awareness. Malloy said that Tarpley, whose previous association with LaRouche was never mentioned on the air, was appearing in response to listener demands. Indeed, no callers expressed any disagreement with anything Tarpley said.
The Tarpley book is worth examining, if only to understood his peculiar brand of "investigative reporting." On the one hand, on page 157, he noted that the Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera had "the best reporting from inside Afghanistan," but later dismissed Al-Jazeera reporter Yosri Fouda's book, Masterminds of Terror, which documents the al-Qaeda role in 9/11. It turns out, of course, that Al-Jazeera had "the best reporting from inside Afghanistan" because its Kabul, Afghanistan, bureau chief, Tyseer Alouni, was an al-Qaeda agent. He is now serving seven years in prison in Spain for carrying money for al-Qaeda, and he was linked to the 9/11 plot.
LaRouche and his associates, who openly supported Saddam Hussein before the first Gulf War, were interviewed on Al-Jazeera in 2002 and compared the Israelis to the Nazis.
More recently, Al-Jazeera has been promoting Tarpley's "9/11 Truth Movement," knowing it deflects attention away from the real perpetrators of these terrorist acts and inspires even more hatred of America. Even our own C-SPAN public affairs channel recently devoted precious air-time to Tarpley and his collaborators.
The damage that is done is reflected in the enthusiastic reaction to Tarpley on Air America. Near the end of the interview, Malloy read an email from a listener who wanted to know why "left gatekeepers" like Amy Goodman of the "Democracy Now" program did not want his "truth" about 9/11 to be more widely disseminated. Tarpley essentially dismissed Goodman as an agent of the Ford Foundation, which he implied was doing the work of the U.S. intelligence community. Malloy did not dispute any of this.
Tarpley also brought up Noam Chomsky, saying he will not expose the truth about 9/11 because he is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and it "receives massive contracts from the federal government." Some of that money, Tarpley said, may go to Chomsky, who has become "a wealthy man" and "I believe some people in his family have also become wealthy." There was no mention of the fact that LaRouche had served time in prison on financial fraud charges. Tarpley also alleged that Chomsky had too casually dismissed the significance of a recent academic paper "on the power of the Zionist lobby." There was no dissent from Malloy on that one.
"I don't think I've ever had one person on for two and one-half hours," Malloy said as he thanked Tarpley and urged him to "watch your back," as if his life was in danger for spouting this nonsense. Apparently aware that some of the charges that were made on his show were too impossible to believe, Malloy told his audience, "Just make your own decision." It looks like the rich liberals running Air America have made theirs.
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