> FWIW, The Washington Times is a "moonie" front. KCIA.
THE REVEREND, THE DICTATOR, & THE NEWSPAPER Dear Leader's Paper Moon The Washington Times considers North Korea a "gulag state." But funny thing: The paper's owner considers it a great place to do business. By John Gorenfeld http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?name=Current+Issue§ion=root http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=9868 An American Prospect investigation reveals that The Washington Times offices, housed in an imposing building on a northeast Washington strip otherwise known for tire shops and fast-food joints, serve as the base of operations for Moon's diplomatic missions to his homeland. Moreover, the paper itself has served as an instrument of Moon's partnership with the communist regime. Throughout the 1990s, as Western observers predicted that the Kim dynasty that rules North Korea would collapse for lack of hard currency reserves, the Moon organization invested tens of millions of dollars, which apparently included payments made before U.S. sanctions eased in 1999.
The Japanese press has accused Moon of involvement in an arms deal that appears to have enhanced North Korean missile-tube research -- a serious charge, considering recent fears about the advancement of North Korea's missile-range capabilities. Indeed, Moon's connections with the Kim regime have long been a matter of active concern for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Yet Moon remains a Washington political powerhouse in his own right, a generous friend of the Bush family, and a patron of religious-right and other conservative causes. Now 85 years old, he oversees a secretive international empire of media, religious, real-estate, commercial, and industrial entities, as well as a shifting maze of front groups with far more names than leaders. Notable among these organizations is the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace (IIFWP), which has an office in The Washington Times building -- and has been repeatedly publicized in the newspaper's pages.
The Washington Times has played an essential role in Moon's relations with the Kim dynasty, although the tone of its coverage alternates between promotional and hostile. Ironically, while Times editorial-page editor (and TV personality) Tony Blankley has published recent op-ed columns attacking the Clinton administration's "perverse policy of appeasement" for giving "enticements and sweetheart deals" to North Korea, a secretive organization housed just one floor above the very office where he writes his editorials serves as the headquarters for Moon's emissaries. However harshly The Washington Times may denounce North Korea, those emissaries and Moon himself have been providing attractive "enticements" and "deals" to Pyongyang for almost 15 years.
Indeed, Moon's relationship with the North Korean regime continues to expand today. He maintains a deluxe hotel in Pyongyang and is pursuing other ventures. Although he lost a long and costly bidding war with Hyundai to develop tourism in North Korea, the South Korea–based car company ceded to Moon's people the right to build an automobile factory in Nampo, a city outside the capital where he has invested $55 million so far. He has also mounted an advertising campaign that has placed the first commercial billboards on North Korean soil.
So the Moon empire is providing substantial assistance to what may well be the most dangerous and unstable regime in President Bush's "axis of evil" -- and a government that many on the right consider an irreconcilable enemy of the United States -- while simultaneously attacking elected officials (almost exclusively Democrats) who question the president's policies as weak and unpatriotic.
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Moon's growing constellation of financial and political connections with North Korea -- an arrangement that would be impossible to imagine for any other newspaper publisher in America -- lend credence to critics who have long insisted that The Washington Times should register with the U.S. Justice Department as a political organ funded by foreign sources.
Yet if American conservatives are troubled, they have remained strangely silent, perhaps because they realize that they have only themselves to blame. None of this would have been possible had they not embraced their beaming occult benefactor decades ago. Having endorsed Moon, they enabled the creation of his newspaper. The Washington Times proved to be the essential vehicle for Moon's courtship of the North Korean dictatorship, which commenced in earnest in 1992 with a celebration of the dictator's birthday.
That strange story begins with the arrival of Times Editor-in-Chief Wesley Pruden and a team of journalists in Pyongyang in April 1992, where they set to work on a special edition of the newspaper emphasizing the warmth and friendliness of communist North Korea, back in the days of "Great Leader" Kim Il-Sung.
Before exploring the reasons why Pruden went to Pyongyang, however, it is useful to review how Moon was welcomed into the bosom of Washington conservatism. For while the casual observer might regard Moon's post-1991 alliance with North Korea as a sharp reversal for the old Cold Warrior, upon closer scrutiny, his professed goals have never really changed. He has consistently tried to enter the political vacuums in unstable communist countries, calling for them to be filled with a new form of post-democratic government that he calls "Godism."
After South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond helped Moon enter the United States in 1971, conservatives welcomed the reverend as an ally with ties to the World Anti-Communist League, a far-right international group with connections to Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, South Korea, and the CIA. His sermons called communism "satanic." His official biography told of how Moon, a cleric tortured in one of Kim Il-Sung's prison camps, had been rescued at the brink of death by the American-led invasion at Inchon. He would be forever in America's debt.
Such public pronouncements charmed his conservative American sponsors. But to his disciples, Moon preached that America's constitutional system of government should and will collapse. "[W]e must have an automatic theocracy to rule the world," he explained in a 1973 tract titled Master Speaks. "So we cannot separate the political field from the religious."
Moon's Republican friends, however, seemed unwilling to look beyond the master's slavish displays of patriotism, including "God Loves Richard Nixon" demonstrations on the Capitol steps during the Watergate hearings and a "Bicentennial God Bless America" stadium rally, in which his disciples marched in Revolutionary War costumes. The leadership conferences sponsored by his CAUSA organization sought to unite Latin American fascists -- including the junta that came to power in Bolivia's 1980 "cocaine coup" -- behind a single platform, calling for a new, faith-driven form of government as a sword against communism.
He was scarcely slowed by his 1982 federal conviction on charges of tax fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice, which led to his imprisonment for 13 months. His loyal allies, including Moral Majority founder Tim LaHaye, who later co-authored the Left Behind series, decried his prison sentence as religious and racial persecution.
By the late '80s, Moon's front groups and activists were too deeply intertwined with The Heritage Foundation and Washington's other leading right-wing groups to be dislodged. Having cemented relations with the likes of Jerry Falwell, funded promotion of the "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative program, and footed part of the bill for the Contra death squads, he had also carved out a new niche as the VIP behind the Reagan and Bush administrations' favorite daily newspaper -- an identity that has long outlasted memories of his criminal rap.
To Moon, his daily newspaper serves as a crucial instrument of propaganda and intelligence. "With The Washington Times at the core, we are establishing preeminence in the American print media," he once said. "By doing so, we can include all fields of intelligence. Today we [are] continually gaining important confidential information, not only from America but also from other governments all over the world."
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-- Michael Pugliese