Radicals co-opt 9/11 whistleblowers: Americans need to be warned about subversive groups, such as the IPS, which play at being patriotic while subverting our ideals and selling out our secrets.

Imagine a "public interest" group named Citizens Against Organized Crime headed up by convicted Mafia chief John Gotti. Or a Foundation to Protect Abused Wives run by O.J. Simpson and Scott Peterson. Or a Fund for Human Kindness sponsored by Charles Manson. Absurd? Of course, but no more so than the ongoing effort by veteran Marxists, terrorists, and hate-America activists from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) to pose as champions of national security in the war on terrorism.

Decades ago, the IPS radicals launched a front group, the Government Accountability Project (GAP), to disguise as heroic whistleblowers those traitors who divulge America's defense secrets. To make this ruse work, the IPS-GAP subversives have taken great pains to build credibility by associating themselves with bona fide whistleblowers who are fighting government corruption, cover-up, and conspiracy.

Thus, when FBI language translator Sibel Edmonds decided to put together a Washington, D.C., press conference of federal whistleblowers to challenge the assumptions, omissions, and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, GAP rushed to join the event and offer assistance. GAP had the resources and Capitol connections. One of the first necessities was a venue for the event. No problem: GAP helped arrange to hold the press conference at the Mott House, little more than a block from the Capitol. Named for Stewart Mott, the General Motors executive who poured millions of dollars into left-wing causes (including the IPS), the plush residence behind the U.S. Supreme Court has been a hub of IPS revolutionary activity for decades.

Having provided the site for the whistleblower event, GAP attempted to co-opt the occasion for its own purposes. GAP's legal director, Tom Devine, and Melvin Goodman, a senior fellow at another IPS spinoff, the Center for International Policy, were two of the seven speakers at the September 13 press conference. They were joined there by several IPS veterans who came to observe and mix with the press, including Daniel "Pentagon Papers" Ellsberg. Devine and Goodman were properly critical of the 9/11 Commission and were careful to present a moderate, rational image to the assembled reporters and news cameras. But real whistleblowers and the American public should not allow themselves to be fooled by this performance. The IPS-GAP revolutionaries are as dangerous and anti-American as the Islamic terrorist groups that now occupy our main security concerns.

Covert Network

The IPS was founded in 1963 by Richard Barnet and Marcus Raskin, two revolutionaries who have done more damage to U.S. national security than could have been accomplished by turning loose a Red Army battalion inside the Pentagon. Some idea of how seriously our national security was already compromised back then can be surmised by the fact that these two subversives, along with many kindred spirits, had enjoyed access to our nation's top secrets.

Mr. Barnet had been a high official of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and Marcus Raskin had been a staff member of President John F. Kennedy's National Security Council. Soon after launching IPS they were openly consorting with agents of the Soviet KGB and Fidel Castro's DGI, hobnobbing with terrorists and providing leadership to the "New Left" communists of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), who were fomenting violent revolution on the college campuses.

With seed money from Communist Party millionaire Samuel Rubin and the equally subversive Stern Fund, the IPS was off and running. IPS quickly established itself as the premier hub of revolutionary organization in Washington, D.C., with ties to terrorist organizations and Communist movements worldwide. No cause was too radical for the professional IPS cadres: Black Panthers, Weather Underground, East Germany's Baader-Meinhoff terror gang, Italy's deadly Red Brigades, Yasir Arafat's PLO, Libya's Col. Muammar Qaddafi, Nicaragua's Sandinistas, El Salvador's FMLN, et al. The IPS embraced them all.

In November 1969, while American POWs were being tortured in North Vietnam, IPS founder Barnet was in Hanoi as a guest of Premier Van Dong, making propaganda broadcasts for the Communists. In a despicable act of treason, Barnet encouraged the North Vietnamese to keep fighting "against the same aggressors that we will continue to fight in our country." It was but one of many trips by IPS traitors to Hanoi, Moscow, and Havana to aid America's enemies.

Barnet and his IPS comrades soon proved they meant to help our nation's enemies in more concrete ways by releasing stolen Top Secret documents from the Defense Department now known as the Pentagon Papers. They accomplished this through connivance with fellow subversives Morton Halperin and Daniel Ellsberg, respectively in the Defense Department and Rand Corporation. The illegal release of the Pentagon Papers was one of the most far-reaching security breaches in our nation's history. That one act had a dramatic global impact, greatly contributing to America's first military defeat, the resignation of a U.S. President, the radicalization of legions of students, and the demoralization of America's Armed Services.

While clearly siding with the Communists, who were not only the enemies of America, but the enemies of humanity, the IPS subversives attempted to strike a righteous pose, claiming that the release of the Pentagon Papers was part of a courageous fight for the First Amendment and the American people's "right to know."

Federal officials obtained injunctions against publication of the Pentagon Papers, but the IPS radicals successfully fought back, with indispensable legal help from National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The NLG had been identified by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (as far back as 1950) as "the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party." The ACLU's leadership, also pro-Communist, was considerably more adept at masking its revolutionary agenda.

Flushed with the exhilarating experience of their glorious victory in the Pentagon Papers case, the IPS cadres launched a series of legal attacks on the U.S. intelligence community. Very clearly, they were carrying out a coordinated plan to cripple the CIA and FBI and prevent these agencies from monitoring the activities of America's enemies, including terrorist organizations with members and support groups in the U.S.

At the same time, IPS members carried out a sustained campaign against the intelligence units of every major city police department, which resulted in the disbanding of virtually all of these important defenses against terrorism and subversion. In tact, most of the failures of our intelligence agencies that have been so painfully laid bare by the 9/11 attacks can be laid at the feet of the IPS coterie and their media al lies, who did so much to blind our country and render us vulnerable to our enemies.

Credibility GAP

To carry out its pro-Communist campaign against America's security structures, the IPS spun out a dizzying array of subsidiary groups and campaigns. The Government Accountability Project has been one of IPS's most successful programs.

Incredibly, these hard-core Bolsheviks all too often get away with fashioning themselves as patriotic Paul Reveres who are sounding the alarm against government corruption and abuse. To secure sufficient camouflage to pull off this fantastic ruse, the GAP radicals actually do provide help to some legitimate whistleblowers. The IPS-GAP agenda, however, does not envision correction and reform of America's laws and institutions within the parameters of the U.S. Constitution. Far from it; instead it calls for totally transforming America's political and economic system along socialist, internationalist lines.

One of GAP's current major projects, for instance, is adoption of the Organization of American States Model Law to implement the Inter-American Convention Against Corruption. According to the GAP activists, this would be a terrific boon to whistleblowers exposing corruption throughout the hemisphere. What it is really about is creating an international judiciary that can act in concert with activist groups (such as GAP) to override the U.S. Constitution and pierce the protective rampart of national sovereignty under the pretext of fighting corruption. This objective is consistent with the IPS-GAP long-term goal of eroding U.S. sovereignty and steadily subjecting the U.S. government and U.S. citizens to the ever-increasing jurisdiction of "international law," as defined by the United Nations and other international organizations.

The Model Law, among other things, would allow whistleblowers--real or phony--"to appeal to international tribunals with jurisdiction." The kinds of insanity that this could lead to would be difficult to exaggerate. Turncoats like Daniel Ellsberg and Philip Agee, fully aware that their treasonous activities might land them in jail should they be tried under U.S. law, need only claim that they are noble whistleblowers fighting against corruption, and--voila--their cases would be bumped up to anti-American OAS judges from Haiti, Colombia, and Venezuela. What a fiendishly brilliant way to legalize treason, while at the same time undermining the Constitution and U.S. independence!

The same could hold for U.S. Energy Department or Defense Department employees with access to sensitive documents and facilities concerning nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons development. The IPS-GAP activists have made U.S. nuclear power and nuclear weapons a top priority target for the past four decades. GAP's web site admits that its Nuclear Oversight Campaign "seeks to reduce or eliminate ... civilian nuclear power generation" in the United States. However, a careful study of their litigation, obstruction, protests, and militant propaganda leaves no doubt that they intend to eliminate U.S. nuclear power generation capability. At the same time, they also have been waging a relentless campaign against fossil fuels. It is part of their economic warfare against the great enemy: American capitalism, i.e. private enterprise.

In short, GAP has a record of more than three decades of anti-American activism. Genuine whistleblower protections definitely are needed so that conscientious government employees can expose real corruption, treason and abuses of government power without fear of retribution from those being exposed. However, the IPS-GAP subversives are definitely not the heroes to lead the fight. In fact, they are very much responsible for our current intelligence crisis and many of the grave dilemmas we now face in the global terror war.