ON THE ARTICLE IN BERLINER ZEITUNG OF APRIL 4, 2007

Media Locusts Do The Dirty Work
for Cheney, Gore, and Blair

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

The Berliner Zeitung (BZ) on April 4, 2007 made itself a part of a character-assassination campaign against the LaRouche organization, a campaign which bears all the markings of a classic "Black Propaganda Operation" by the British Secret Service. This involves totally absurd slanders in the repeatedly discredited history of lies concerning the causes and circumstances of the suicide of the young Briton Jeremiah Duggan four years ago. Behind this campaign lie circles of the London Fabian Society and the American Neo-cons, who are obviously feeling the pressure of the exposure of their various shameful acts in international publications associated with LaRouche.

It is certainly astounding that Erica Duggan has meanwhile been involved with a highly impressive mixture of PR firms, legal firms, and media locusts, as well as political circles in the environment of Dick Cheney, Al Gore, and No. 10 Downing Street. Surely the cost of these methods is as grotesque as the methods of slander on the lowest level, methods of which the chairman of the board of the PR Firm Dezenhall Resources, Eric Dezenhall, is so proud.

It is part of the strategy of these PR firms to always produce more and more new "investigative results" of "experts' from the realm of fantasy, which have only one aim—to launch new waves of slanders in the media. You simply place arbitrary crazy assertions into circulation, such as that Jeremiah has not, as the official forensic report and several eyewitness reports have definitively asserted, thrown himself many times with an obviously suicidal intent against passing vehicles, but that he was already dead, and therefore murdered. In every case such "experts" again reflect the mentality of the previously expressed remarks of the "pitbull of public relations" Eric Dezenhall, as somehow being reality.

The occasion for the BZ article, which has been in other respects totally sloppily researched, was the London meeting of several "experts" on March 27, 2007, where a PR firm, whose activities lead directly into the high-level political and financial circles of the English Establishment, stepped forward with their political-institutional supporters such as House of Commons official Louise Ellman and Lord Janner. This was arranged by the London firm Luther Pendragon, the British affiliate of the Washington-based firm Dezenhall Resources. Luther Pendragon is led by David Elstein, formerly in a leading position with the media entities of Rupert Murdoch. Elstein worked at Murdoch's Sky TV and founded another TV channel, Channel 5, for the media group. Murdoch's Sky TV in March 2007 provided the logistics for Al Gore, the former U.S. Vice-President and current "climate advisor" to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to launch his new internet propaganda project in England, Current TV. The chief target group for Current TV is the young generation between 18 and 35 years of age. The cooperation between Gore and Murdoch goes back to a discussion at Murdoch's private home in 2006, where the two became close associates in the global media campaign on climate change. Murdoch directly funds the climate project run jointly by Al Gore and Britain's Prince Charles.

In Elstein's development we find a further instructive aspect in his role as founder of the firm Brook Associates in 1982. This firm later merged with Brian Lapping Production, and moved forward as Brook-Lapping; for example in 2004, with the production of a documentary film on the American warhawk Richard Perle and his leading role in the "War against Terror"—a project of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) which feeds America's Public Broadcasting System. The CPB chose and funded a whole series of movies on the theme "America at a Crossroads" (after the events of Sept. 11, 2001). This media project traces back to the initiative of Lynne Cheney, the radical neo-conservative activist and wife of the American Vice-President Richard Cheney. On the CPB project we find John Train, a years-long coordinator of operations against LaRouche, in a prominent position.

Eric Dezenhall, the head of Dezenhall Resources, has specialized in the aggressive, heavily publicized defense of companies (initially in the oil sector) and right-wing organizations against environmental groups and other public critics. Notorious as the "pitbull of public relations," Dezenhall himself described his methods in a speech which he gave in 1999 at an event by Lynne Cheney's Independent Women's Forum: "Put the attackers (critics) themslves at risk." The method, which is obviously also being employed in the ongoing "publicity campaign" in the Duggan case, calls for attacking the attacker above all through associates in the media, so that he draws in his horns from further assaults.

Curt Davies, the Director of Research for the Greenpeace Organization, briefly described the method of Dezenhall as known to him: "He infiltrates opponent groups, steals stuff from their trash, lies and does anything to bring down their opponent." The hair-raising "new facts," which were presented on March 27, 2007 in London in the Duggan case, remind one after all of the type of criminal mystery, for which Dezenhall, as an author in his avocation, is famous.

The London company Luther Pendragon itself keeps in the closest contact with the Cabinet secretariat of the British Prime Minister, for which it has arranged repeated far-ranging propaganda campaigns. Mike Granatt, one of the partners of Luther Pendragon, came out of the information office of the English government, and was promoted in 1998 onto the cabinet staff of Prime Minister Tony Blair, where he directly did the preliminary work for Cabinet Secretary Sir Richard Wilson in his efforts to improve the image of the government in public through an active media campaign. "Granatt also took a leading role," according the Internet-Encyclopedia Wikipedia, "in co-ordinating public information from government during the run up to the millennium, the nationwide fuel protests of 2000, and the hoof and mouth disease outbreak in 2001."

The service which Granatt provided in this case, got him the assignment for working out a concept for the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS), which was put in place in June 2001 and after September 11, 2001, were brought fully into action in the realm of a new regime of "anti-terrorist" measures. Within the year Granatt took over the leadership of the Government Office for Information and Communication (GICS), one of the highest positions in the government bureaucracy.

The mission of the GICS extends in the realm of home affairs to maintaining contacts with the media, as well as to the House of Commons and the police, and in the realm of foreign affairs, to advising governments. The internet site of Luther Pendragon itself puts forward Granatt as the person who, in addition to the already mentioned positions, is also paid by the Defence Academy of the U.K., through which connection he provides commentaries to BBC on questions of terrorism and emergencies, and through which he provides education on environmental themes—an extremely useful feature for the ongoing campaign by Blair and Gore on the so-called "Climate Emergency."

The Mysterious Case of the Death of Dr. David Kelly and the Duggan Case

In Granatt's environs one of course finds Phil Bassett, formerly the labor editor of Murdoch's London Times, who in 2002 advanced to the leadership of the "Research and Information" division in Tony Blair's cabinet (10 Downing Street), and together with Blair's Press Spokesman Alastair Campbell created the transatlantic propaganda alliance of Blair with Bush and Cheney for the "War against Terror" and the Iraq war back in 2002. In this phase, up to Bassett's transfer in September 2003, of course came the massive campaign to discredit the English weapons-expert Dr. David Kelly, under the controlling participation of Campbell. Dr. Kelly had in all probability called into question the infamous Blair Dossier of September 2002, in discussion with BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan, the dossier which was decisive for the manufacture of the lies which led to the Iraq war. At the high point of the Blair-driven media witch-hunt against Kelly, he was found dead in July 2003 under unclear circumstances. The official, but broadly doubted explanation is that it was "suicide."

Then at the same time, began the campaign by the British media, to reinterpret the suicide of Jeremiah Duggan in a perfidious way in a series of slanders against LaRouche. Bassett is the husband of Baroness Elizabeth Symons, who was already active in the first media campaign against LaRouche in the Duggan case in the summer of 2003.

David James Smith and Carol Midgley had already written the early slander articles against LaRouche for Bassett's previous employer Murdoch's Times, for which Smith played a special role in attempting to intimidate several members of the LaRouche mvoement in Germany and France with the Duggan campaign, and to collect "information" as material for a future slander article.

Since 2003, Bassett has been a personal expert advisor to Lord Falconer, the chairman of the Constitutional Commission, who in March 2007 was named as leader of the newly Blair-created Justice Ministry, and is taking his advisor Bassett into his new position. Bassett's wife, the abovmentioned Baroness Symons, after having various functions in the British government since 1974, is currently active as an advisor for the British-American law firm DLA Piper, which does the lobbying for the U.S. aerospace and weapons company Lockheed Martin. Lynne Cheney had a position as director there from 1994 to 2001, when her husband became Vice-President in Washington; Liz Symons herself made a military contract for Lockheed Martin with the British government.

DLA Piper belongs, next to Murdoch's Sky TV, among the seven sponsors of the "Business Summit for Climate Change," which Prince Charles will convene on May 1, 2007. There the former American Vice President Al Gore, in the meantime has become "climate advisor" to Blair, is also expected to appear. Already an appearance by Gore before 1,000 invited guests at Sheffield in the beginning of February 2007, was organized through that office of DLA Piper.

Public Relations for Locust-Capitalism

What concerns the real sponsors of the slander campaign against LaRouche, who is feared as a determined opponent of the monetarist-exploitative practices of the "Locust Funds" in the English-dominated financial circles, a look at the businesses of the mentioned PR firms Luther Pendragon and Dezenhall Interests uncovers. In a retrospective on June 2002, Business Week on April 17, 2006 reported that Dezenhall had organized for his client ExxonMobil, demonstrators who agitated with provocative slogans like "Capitalism Is Crazy!" or "Stop Global Misery!" against environmentalist groups who had criticized the oil companies. The counter-demonstrators were recruited out of the Grover Norquist's money-channelling dirty tricks organization "Americans for Tax Reform." Asked about the event, Dezenhall then said: "We routinely support think tanks and other experts whose positions are consistent with our clients' views, and will continue to do so unapologetically."

Dezenhall also stood on the side of the locusts in the case of the energy management company Enron, which, due to its rabid business methods, which acutely endangered the security of power production in California, became justifiably the butt of broad public criticism. And the oil company Halliburton, which had come under attack, among other reasons, for its robber-baron methods in 2003 in militarily occupied Iraq, recommended Dezenhall, to finish off its critics without compromise.

Luther Pendragon also handled, among other accounts, the publicity work for the Menatep-Group, the earlier majority shareholder in the Russian oil giant Yukos, which had been pulled together with mafia methods into an oil empire during the "wild reform years" of the Yeltsin era after 1991 under the leadership of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. On the sidelines of the G-8 summit in June 2006, an international media campaign was run against the Russian President and summit-host Vladimir Putin, in which he was charged to be the author of the worst alleged machinations against Khodorkovsky, the real perpetrator and a tax-evader on the level of billions. In charge of this media campaign, for the most part, was the London PR firm APCO, led since Spetember 2005 by Darren Murphy, a former political secretary in Blair's headquarters at Downing Street.

The London Times wrote on July 13, 2006: "The company is also working with fellow London firm Luther Pendragon, which does media relations for GML, formerly Group Menatep. GML owns 51% of Yukos, formerly owned by Mr. Khodorkovsky. Luther Pendragon has been advising GML over litigation against the Russian Federation about assets seized from Yukos for alleged non-tax payment."

But Luther Pendragon also runs the public relations for David and Simon Reuben, who had during the 1990s made millions in assets through the criminal takeover of parts of the Russian aluminum industry, carried out by the internationally notorious predators Marc Rich and Michael Chernoy. The Reuben brothers in doing so acted with the protection of the London Metal Exchange. Marc Rich had been convicted on account of similar business in the U.S. already in the 1980s, but he could, obviously with the help or complicity of his lawyer Lewis Libby (the 2001-2006 Chief of Staff for Cheney, recently convicted in Washington in a spectacular trial), flee abroad to Europe, and there soon make contact with the Reuben firm TransWorld Metals Group, which in the mentioned Yeltsin era completed its the increase to the majority position in the Russian aluminum sector.

As regards the developments in the post-Soviet "reform era" after 1991, the rise of a certain Yulia Tymoschenko is interesting, which took place, firstly, in the context of the brutal privatization of Ukrainian industry, and later was garnished through political activities through which she became an icon of Western geopolitics against Russia. The current publicity campaign for Tymoschenko in Washington has been run by Dezenhall.

Lawyers and Press Whores

While the interests of the Duggan campaign in Germany are being run by the legal firm of Becker, Conen and Strucke, which has a prominent history of work with the left-radical and green milieu, there is also active on the English side a law firm with matching orientation: Martyn Day of the lawfirm Leigh & Day. Up utnil a year ago, Day was the chairman of English Greenpeace and is still a trustee of the organization. It is surely an irony of history, that Day is today cooperating in the Duggan campaign exactly with the London affiliate of Dezenhall, whose people back in 2003 ran a campaign to crush Greenpeace by getting U.S. tax authorities to investigate them, on behalf of ExxonMobil.

One of the lawyers, who represents the Duggans in Germany, is Nicolas Becker, who in the 1970s and '80s defended RAF members, later Erich Honecker and the ETA terrorist Ramos Vegas. Becker comes from an interesting legal family; his father, Hellmut Becker, defended Ernst von Weizsaecker in the Nuremberg trial. The official website of the Frankfurt School reports that his grandfather, Carl Heinrich Becker, belonged to its founding members, back in 1927. Another lawyer, who wants to present a constitutional complaint in Karlsruhe for Mrs. Duggan, represents many Kurds; his most prominent client was Ocalan, the head of the extremist Kurdish organization the PKK.

The author of the slander article in the Berliner Zeitung of April 4, Frank Nordhausen, had already in April 11, 2004 reported in a similar slanderous manner on the Duggan case. Nordhausen has worked for a long time closely with Pastor Thomas Gandow, the "sect-expert" of the Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg, who was connected in his time with the infamous Father Haack, the German representative of the American Family Foundation. The AFF stems from Anglo-American secret intelligence operations of the Cold War, such as the CCF (Congress for Cultural Freedom), the Cybernetics Group, and the MK-Ultra Project, and enjoyed the best relations with Wall Street.

As relates to the Berliner Zeitung, it was swallowed up in 2005 by British Mecom group, which is a financial project of Lady Hogg — she was on the BBC Board of Governors and helped Tony Blair stage a coup against BBC leaders who had previously exposed his war lies and had broadcast Lyndon LaRouche in that connection — and by the American and London investment fund Veronis Sulher Stevenson, which specializes in media-takeovers. The editorial board resisted in vain the takeover by these "Anglo-Saxon locusts." Thus the head of Mecom, David Montgomery, as well as the new chief editor, Josef Depenbrock, are well known for their reckless profit-oriented mode of operation. They declared that their profit must increase by 20%.

This has absolutely nothing to do with honest journalism. Andrew Marr, the publisher of the British paper Independent, in which Montgomery, as head of the "Mirror-Group" has a decisive influence, compared Montgomery's methods with those of the Independent and the Berliner Zeitung: "To anyone who worked in the '90s at the Independent, it was all very well-known. David's obsession was then to get as far away as possible from the traditional reporting of a newspaper, and instead to turn it into a scandal sheet for Yuppies."

One thing is clear in any case: if you shine light on the background of the persons and interest groups which have shown their colors writing about the Duggan case, a veritable chasm opens up. The lies about the alleged circumstances of the suicide of Jeremiah obviously originate in a rich wealth of experience from their own peculiar practice.