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A prominent leftist blogger has proudly accepted an award named for Soviet agent of influence I.F. Stone and has denounced Accuracy in Media and Commentary magazine for drawing public attention to Stone's communist connections.

But this controversy has been compounded by the subsequent decision by Glenn Greenwald and his fellow award winner, Amy Goodman, to go on the April 3 edition of a public television show hosted by Bill Moyers, just weeks after new disclosures of how Moyers used his position as a top official of the Democratic Lyndon Johnson Administration to gather political dirt and potential blackmail material on American citizens. One of Greenwald's big complaints about the Bush Administration has been that it illegally monitored telephone calls as part of the war on terrorism.

In addition to the despicable practice of obtaining and disseminating information of a sexual nature about civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., which has been documented and is a matter of public record, (web site) the Washington Post has revealed that Moyers, as LBJ's press secretary, was described in recently released White House records (web site) from that period "as seeking information on the sexual preferences of White House staff members," including Jack Valenti, later the president of the Motion Picture Association of America. The FBI was authorized to pursue erroneous information that Valenti was a homosexual and sent a memo directly to Moyers.

In one case, the Post reported, an FBI official and President Johnson "discussed a request from Moyers, then a special assistant to Johnson, that the FBI investigate two other administration figures who were 'suspected as having homosexual tendencies.'"

The revelations prompted the Wall Street Journal to run an editorial (web site) headlined, "J. Edgar Moyers," a reference to then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. The paper said that "the historical record suggests that when Mr. Moyers was in a position of actual power, he was complicit in FBI dirt-digging against U.S. citizens solely for political purposes."

First-class Hypocrite

Greenwald's decision to go on the Moyers show, after these lurid revelations, demonstrates that he has a blatant double standard on the matter of presidential administrations invading privacy.

Greenwald, who writes for Salon.com and specializes in articles protesting tough treatment of terrorists bent on destroying the U.S. and Israel, accepted the award with Goodman on March 31 from the Ithaca College Park Center for Independent Media.

Greenwald said that Soviet agent Stone "pioneered what modern journalism ought to be."

In addition to his published criticism of the war on terrorism, which has been emulated by some in the mainstream media, Greenwald has written a recent Cato Institute report (web site) on the virtues of decriminalizing dangerous drugs, including cocaine and heroin. This has made him popular on a website associated with Reason magazine, whose editor-in-chief, Nick Gillespie, is quoted in a bio on his own website as saying that he believes that drugs from marijuana to heroin should not only be legalized, but that using them occasionally is just fine.

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