Markos served in the U.S. Army from 1989 to 1992, where he was a staunch Reagan Republican, campaigning for George H.W. Bush. It was the "near miss" of being sent to Gulf War I that sparked his political conversion, he says. He hails from a wealthy El Salvadorian family, one of whose members was Minister of Education with the notorious junta during the civil war.
In a speech to the Commonwealth Club in 2006, Kos admitted to interviewing with the CIA for a 6-month period after a time of "underemployment." His statements there betray either a stunning ignorance, or sneaking sympathy with the CIA's long history of democratic subversion and support of rightist dictatorships abroad, including the one that sponsored death squads in his former homeland:
"This is a very liberal institution. And in a lot of ways, it really does attract people who want to make a better, you know, want to make the world a better place . . . Of course, they've got their Dirty Ops and this and that, right but as an institution itself the CIA is really interested in stable world. That's what they're interested in. And stable worlds aren't created by destabilizing regimes and creating wars. Their done so by other means. Assassination labor leaders . . . I'm kidding!... And even if you're protecting American interests, I mean that can get ugly at times, but generally speaking I think their hearts in the right place. As an organization their heart is in the right place. I've never had any problem with the CIA. I'd have no problem working for them . ."
Links to the Commonwealth Club audio, and other biographical documents on Moulitsasa can be found here.
Moulitsas began working for the Howard Dean campaign, and simultaneously launching Daily Kos, in 2002, shortly after his romance with the CIA. One may speculate that perhaps the romance never fully ended—and wonder if the CIA's IT venture capital subsidiary, In-Q-Tel, may have provided development and/or funding assistance to spark the meteoric rise of Daily Kos, now a virtual kingmaker in the Democratic party. The site endorses and directly raises funds for certain Democratic candidates and PACs, amassing over $2 million in the last two election cycles. Markos and his business partner, Jerome Armstrong, have also hired themselves out as political consultants to certain candidates—a stark conflict of interest for journalists. Markos answers that he is not so much a journalist, but an "activist."
The CIA has also been accused of providing seed money for both Facebook, and Google, according to former CIA clandestine officer Robert David Steele. As one critic has noted: "The CIA does not merely look into social media—they appear to own it."
If Moulitsas is a digital-age Mockingbird (the CIA's Cold War program of infiltrating and co-opting the American media; ), perhaps he is exercising a role similar to that of Rahm Emmanuel, who as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 2006 elections, steered party funds to pro-war Democrats while starving anti-war candidates. If that is the agenda of Daily Kos—to maintain the Democratic party's inertia as co-dependent enablers of the military-industrial complex and it's boondoggle War on Terror—it seems to be succeeding wildly. Suppressing any alternative narrative of 9/11, the foundational keystone of this war, would be a crucial element of such a strategy.
9/11 Commissioners' statements:
"Those who knew about those videotapes [of al-Qaeda operative interrogations] — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation."
— Chairman Thomas Kean and Vice-chairmain Lee Hamilton
"We to this day don't know why NORAD told us what they told us. It was just so far from the truth. . . . It's one of those loose ends that never got tied."
— Chairman Thomas Kean
"At some level of the government, at some point in time...there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened…I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described .... The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years.... This is not spin. This is not true."
—Senior Counsel John Farmer
"There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version."
—Commissioner Bob Kerrey
"It is a national scandal...This investigation is now compromised...One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9/11 issue is so important to Amercia."
— former Sen. Max Cleland, who resigned from the Commission
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