Robert Dreyfuss

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/drey-j22.shtml

In its coverage of the recent political upheavals in Iran, the position of the Nation magazine, the self-styled voice of progressive politics, has become increasingly indistinguishable from that of the US political establishment.

Robert Dreyfuss, the magazine’s principal correspondent on the Iranian events—and on “politics and national security” generally—has parroted the unverified charge of a stolen election and characterized the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as his supporters, as a “virtual fascist movement.”

In a June 17 column entitled: “Battle Lines in Iran,” Dreyfuss, who had just returned from covering the election in Tehran, speculated on the trajectory of the Iranian “showdown.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/prop-j24.shtml

At the time, Dreyfuss was a member of the fascistic organization led by Lyndon LaRouche, serving as “Middle East intelligence director” for its magazine Executive Intelligence Review.

This is the man that the Nation relies upon as its chief commentator on “politics and national security” and who it sent to Iran to cover the election. He has echoed the line promoted by the New York Times, declaring himself in favor of a “color revolution” in Iran.

A comparison of what he wrote then and what he writes today only makes it all the more urgent that the Nation explain why such an individual is one of its editors.

This arises particularly in relation to one of Dreyfuss’s principal sources during his recent trip to Iran, Ibrahim Yazdi, Iran’s former foreign minister and a so-called “dissident.” An article published by the Nation on June 13 entitled “Iran’s Ex-Foreign Minister Yazdi: It’s A Coup,” consisted largely of an interview with this man, who said the election was rigged and illegitimate.

In his book Hostage to Khomeini, however Dreyfuss said that Yazdi was part of a “coterie of experienced, Western-trained intelligence agents.”

He claimed that Yazdi’s “directions from Washington and London came via the ‘professors,’ men such as Professor Richard Cottam of the University of Pittsburgh,” whom he described as a former “field officer for the CIA attached to the US embassy in Tehran.”

Dreyfuss wrote: “Yazdi’s wife once described Cottam as ‘a very close friend of my husband, the one person who knows more about him than even I do.’”

Elsewhere in the book, Dreyfuss refers to Yazdi as “Mossad-tainted.”

The question is: which Dreyfuss are we to believe—the one who exposed Yazdi as an intelligence agent for the US, Britain and Israel, or the one who now quotes him at length as an advocate of “democracy” and “reform”?

Dreyfuss has never publicly repudiated what he wrote in 1981. Was he lying then, or is he lying now? The Nation is obliged to answer. Its readership deserves to know what Dreyfuss is doing at the magazine.