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The War Party Goes to War on The Nation Magazine

Aug. 16, 2017 (EIRNS)—The Washington Post, the voice of the Empire in the nation’s capital, unleashed its guns today on the preeminent liberal-progressive magazine The Nation for breaching the controlled media on the Empire’s demand for war on Russia.

While the immediate cause of the war to destroy The Nation and its editor, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, is ostensibly their decision to publish the powerful article by Patrick Lawrence on the VIPS exposure of the fraud underlying Russia-gate, they do not hide their pent-up rage that The Nation has refused to fully accept the lies about Russia all along. Although the Post doesn’t mention that Vanden Heuvel’s husband, Steven Cohen, is one of the leading Russian experts who has fought the lying hysteria against Russia and warned that it could lead to nuclear war, he is clearly an unnamed target. Cohen is a member of the American Committee for East West Accord (as is Vanden Heuvel’s father, William Vanden Heuvel), composed of former leading U.S. ambassadors to Russia and other nations, and scholars), which has campaigned to end Russia-gate.

The Post reports that they, and a group of The Nation contributors, have forced Vanden Heuvel to review the Lawrence article.

"Katrina Vanden Heuvel," they write,

"the Nation’s editor and publisher (and the writer of a weekly online column for The Post), tells the Erik Wemple Blog that Lawrence’s piece is undergoing a post-publication editorial review. ‘We’re doing the review as we speak, and I don’t want to rush to say anything,’ said Vanden Heuvel. Part of that review is an assessment of the technical feasibility of the points in Lawrence’s article."

She said the review should conclude by week’s end.

This follows by one day a piece in The Hill which interviewed several Wall Street-funded tech firms which question the scientific assessment in the VIPS report, that the stolen data could not have been hacked, but could only have been downloaded internally at the DNC.

The primary target is The Nation’s refusal to back Russia-gate. On this Vanden Heuvel defended her work:

"I am proud of the work we’ve done in spurring debates about U.S.-Russia. The coverage of Russia has been, I think, in the spirit of The Nation—and I want to maintain that spirit and not let one article change that.... I’ve seen the danger for progressives when Cold War comes."

The Post reports that in June, a group of Nation writers wrote to Vanden Heuvel challenging her refusal to join in Russia-gate and Trump-gate (although they have opposed many of Trump’s policies). The letter repeats the "big lie" assumptions about Trump colluding with Russians, firing Comey to stop the investigation, etc., adding that this "raises serious questions about his competence."

Then they write:

"We understand that anxiety about foreign—especially Russian—influence is a familiar trope in American politics, and has been used in the past to suppress internal dissent. But to emphasize this particular angle in Nation coverage over the conduct of the Trump administration is a dereliction of our responsibility as progressive journalists. Last week, for example, the magazine ran a piece casting doubt on the motivation of the officials behind the White House leaks, one of several it has published in recent months that have implied the real threat to national security is not Trump’s conduct but rather the attacks on him. As longtime associates of The Nation, we are deeply concerned that by making these editorial emphases and by likening calls for investigations into the Russia connection to red baiting, the magazine is not only playing into the hands of the Trump administration, but doing a dishonor to its best traditions.... We believe The Nation occupies a unique position in the ecology of American journalism, and precisely because of this position, it’s all the more important that the magazine get on the right side [!] of this story as it develops."

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