An Open Letter Rachel Maddow about Afghanistan
By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
It was when Dan Rather told Rachel Maddow on her January 27th show, “We are not seeking to colonize Afghanistan. The Soviets made no bones about it. They were coming in to take over the country. They wanted to run the country. They wanted to be there 100 or 1,000 years from now. That is not the case with what we‘re trying to do,..” we held our breath. There has been a controversy over the authenticity of Rather’s coverage of Afghanistan going back to 1980. Now in 2009 Rather was building on the his own Cold War disinformation campaign from the 1980’s and taking it to an absurd new level. We had hoped that Maddow was up to the challenge. Unfortunately, she allowed Rather’s disinformation to go unchallenged. We assumed that Maddow must not have known that Rather’s views of Soviet motives in Afghanistan and the American role were propaganda from another era. We assumed that Maddow, along with most Americans, must not have known that Rather’s reports on Afghanistan were tainted and have been challenged by many journalists.
So in response we sent a letter to Rachel Maddow regarding her January 27th interview with Dan Rather on Afghanistan summarized here.
