Seems to have a communist leaning background but his affiliation with Russian TV isn’t any more a negative that an association with most American media outlets e. g., the NY Times.
Wayne Madsen: Leftist Spin Merchant and “Red Diaper Baby”
Submitted by Trevor on July 18, 2011
Wayne Madsen
Investigative “journalist” Wayne Madsen is one of the most prolific purveyors of anti-American “literature” currently operating in the US.
Madsen is one of the main promoters of the “Barack Obama is a CIA asset” theme. Madsen has promoted this theory in a number of articles and media interviews, though he has presented only the flimsiest of evidence to back up his claim.
Previously he has written anti-US books such as “Forbidden Truth – US-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Osama bin Laden,” (which “exposes” US double dealing and covert activities re the Taliban and the war in Afghanistan) and “America’s Nightmare -the Presidency of George Bush II.”
Madsen is also a regular contributor to Kremlin propaganda channel Russia Today, described by former Soviet K.G.B. officer Konstantin Preobrazhensky, as “part of the Russian industry misinformation and manipulation created recently in the USA by Putin’s KGB. It is including the utilization of some American think-tanks and political scientists, their direct work up by Putin at annual meetings in Russia, putting Russian Americans under Kremlin’s control, etc. This industry aims at creating an inadequate, adorned image of Russia, provoking American to make wrong steps in their Russian politics.”
It should come as little surprise to learn that Wayne Madsen’s paternal grandmother Victoria Madsen, was a leading official of the Danish Communist Party during WWII. After the war, Victoria Madsen immigrated to the United States but was later deported for her activism.
Wayne Madsen’s father served on a Danish merchant vessel that shipped arms and ammunition to the Republican-controlled Basque ports of Santander and San Sebastian, during the Spanish Civil War. The Republican side, which was defeated by Franco’s fascist supported loyalists, was led by the Communist parties of Spain and the Soviet Union.
In 2003 Wayne Madsen wrote an article What’s a Fifth Columnist? for the leftist website in which he revealed his own socialist sympathies and propensity for distorting the truth to suit the “party line.”
Some extracts:
After recently returning from Spain and after many discussions with Spanish, Catalonian, and Basque friends about the Spanish Civil War, I decided to do a Google search to see if there were any new revelations about the war — a war in which I’m proud to say my late father participated in on the side of the Republican and anti-Fascist Popular Front government…
My father served on a Danish merchant vessel that shipped arms and ammunition from that nasty Stalinist Russia to the Republican-controlled Basque ports of Santander and San Sebastian. That effort was organized by the Social Democratic-controlled merchants’ union in Copenhagen. Russia was one of the few countries in the world that was willing to supply the Republican side with much needed weapons and communications systems to counter the heavy influx of Nazi German and Italian Fascist support for the Franco forces….
When my father trekked into the Basque Pyrenees to help install radio stations for the Republican side, it was done with the assistance of a number of international volunteers for the Republican cause, including American, French, and British partisans. So Hitchens is flat out wrong when he states that the Spanish Republicans were hijacked by Stalin and every Republican volunteer was an unwitting tool of the Soviet Comintern. That is just pure right-wing claptrap…
When one looks at the underground movements that fought the Germans during Nazi occupation, the Communists and left-wing socialists served as the activist vanguards for the resistance movements. In Denmark, where my grandmother Victoria Madsen, an official of the Danish Communist Party and newspaper (who also fought as a resistance leader), it was the Communists who were the most willing to attack the Germans and die for the cause of liberation of their country from the Nazi yoke. It was the Communists and their left Socialist allies who largely organized the secret boatlift of Danish and other Jews to safety in Sweden.
Likewise, in Spain, it was the Communist trade unions that organized workers into militias to fight the Fascists in cities like Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia…
(Christopher) Hitchens uses a big paintbrush to tar and feather all International Brigaders as “Communists.” Of course, the Abraham Lincoln and International Brigades were full of Hitchens’ “Communist” supporters — John Dos Passos, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Paul Robeson, Archibald MacLeish, John Steinbeck, W. H. Auden, and Esmond Romilly (the nephew of Winston Churchill)…
Hitchens’ use of the term “infiltration” is also interesting. It was a favorite term of Senator Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon. But now the term can be used for people like Hitchens, who obviously has been used by the neo-cons to infiltrate progressive movements and gatherings as a “fifth columnist.” When it comes to the Spanish Civil War, and who was right and who was wrong, I’ll defer to my progressive Spanish, Catalonian, and Basque friends, as well as to the memories my father had of that grand war against the same types of imperialistic right-wingers who Hitchens now prefers to keep in his company.
This is the man that is being taken as a credible source by thousands, if not millions of Americans.
If Wayne Madsen can convince a sizable number of Americans that Barack Obama is a C.I.A. asset, he will have achieved several goals of major advantage to the left.
- He will serve to obscure Obama’s long term ties to the far left, including some to activists who had documented ties to the Soviet government .
- He will have disarmed thousands of potential Obama opponents, by giving them a false sense of security.. “Oh well, we don’t like Obama, and what he’s doing, but at least he is working for OUR side!”
- He will have sent hundreds of good researchers off chasing wild geese , who could have been actively pursuing Obama’s easily provable ties to pro-Soviet elements.
- He will be able to blame Obama’s crazy schemes on the C.I.A., further undermining American’s confidence in their security services.
- He will have helped to discredit ALL “Obama conspiracy theories,’ even those based on solid evidence.
The name of the game is dis-information. Divide and conquer. Psychological warfare.
If anyone needs to be investigated, it is Wayne Madsen and his friends at Russia Today.
