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xchrom

(108,903 posts)
Fri Sep 7, 2012, 07:27 AM Sep 2012

Carl Bernstein's Folly: Muckraking Journalist Caught Giving Paid Speeches to Iranian 'Terrorist'

http://www.alternet.org/world/carl-bernsteins-folly-muckraking-journalist-caught-giving-paid-speeches-iranian-terrorist


Carl Bernstein's Folly: Muckraking Journalist Caught Giving Paid Speeches to Iranian 'Terrorist' Group

On a Saturday afternoon last February, journalist Carl Bernstein got up on stage at the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan and delivered a speech questioning the listing of an obscure Iranian group called the Mujahadin-e Khalq (MEK) on the U.S. government list of officially designated foreign terrorist organizations.

The speech, before a crowd an organizer put at 1,500, made Bernstein one of the few journalists who has appeared at events in a years-long campaign by MEK supporters to free the group from the official terrorist label and the legal sanctions that come with it. He told ProPublica that he was paid $12,000 for the appearance but that, “I was not there as an advocate.”

Bernstein told the crowd that, "I come here as an advocate of the best obtainable version of the truth" and as "someone who believes in basic human rights and their inalienable status." He also challenged the State Department, saying that if the agency “has evidence that the MEK is a terrorist organization, have a show-cause hearing in court, let them prove it.”
Joining him on stage at the Park Avenue hotel was a decorated group including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former congressman Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.

Bernstein's speech , reprinted on the website of another pro-MEK group under the title "The Kafkaesque Nature of Things," compared the presence of the MEK on the terrorist list to his parents' experience belonging to a group that was on a U.S. government list of subversive organizations during the McCarthy era.

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Carl Bernstein's Folly: Muckraking Journalist Caught Giving Paid Speeches to Iranian 'Terrorist' (Original Post) xchrom Sep 2012 OP
MEK will be delisted on Oct 1st 2012 alisadeq Sep 2012 #1
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