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Jon Schwarz
Jon Schwarz is editor of MichaelMoore.com and was research producer for 'Capitalism: A Love Story.' He's also contributed to the New Yorker, New York Times, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Slate, Saturday Night Live and NPR.
January 3rd, 2014 10:00 PM
Snowden Accuser Gordon G. Chang Works for Think Tank Run by Notorious Liars
Gordon G. Chang, currently seen in the Daily Beast claiming Edward Snowden had "high-level contact" with Chinese officials while in Hong Kong, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
That's notable because the main people who run Gatestone are John Bolton (chairman) and Amir Taheri (chairman, Gatestone Europe), two of the most flagrant liars in high level politics.
Bolton lied under oath during his confirmation hearings to be U.S. Ambassador to the UN in 2005, claiming he'd "made no effort to have discipline imposed" on a State Department analyst who refused to sign off on statements that Cuba had a biological weapons program. Bolton's denial that he'd tried to punish the analyst was contradicted by other Department staffers and documentary evidence. (Bolton also led the 2002 charge to force out José Bustani from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Bustani was making plans to send inspectors to Iraq, which Bolton opposed because it would complicate the push for war.)
Amir Taheri made international news in 2006 by reporting that the Iranian parliament had passed a law that would require Jews to wear badges in public. This led to a gigantic, embarrassing public retraction by Canada's National Post (see below), which had pushed the story on its front page. Taheri's PR agent Eleana Benador then explainedthat accuracy is "a luxury"—because while Taheri may have written "one or two details that are not accurate" what mattered most was "to side with what's right."
And in terms of what's right, John Bolton says that Edward Snowden has committed treason and "should hang from an old oak tree." It's impossible to know whether Chang has simply made his entire story up, but he's certainly part of a milieu that encourages and celebrates lying to get the desired results.
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Here's a screenshot of the National Post's retraction of the Taheri story. The Daily Beast might want to study it as a model for the future.
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