The lone vote in the House of Representatives opposing military action in response to the terrorist attacks on the U.S. has a long history of associations with Communist Party and extremist groups and individuals, WorldNetDaily investigations show.
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., is a long-time friend of Communist Party militant Angela Davis who succeeded another radical from the city of Oakland, Rep. Ron “Red” Dellums.
The votes in the House and Senate Friday authorized military action by the executive branch and provided $40 billion to help cover the costs of retaliation and rebuilding from the devastation of Tuesday suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Lee paid her establishment political dues – first as an aide to Dellums and later as a California assemblywoman and state senator. However, less known is Lee’s service on the national coordinating committee of the “Committees of Correspondence,” an organization that splintered from the Communist Party USA in 1991. Davis, the three-time Communist Party candidate for vice president of the United States, served by her side.
Earlier, while working with Dellums, she joined the U.S.-Grenada Friendship Society, a front group supporting the Communist dictatorship of Maurice Bishop, a close ally of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Just months before the U.S. invasion that toppled Bishop in 1983, Lee and Dellums visited the island on official business of the House Armed Services Committee to gauge the military threat posed to the United States by an international airport being built there by Cubans. According to documents captured by U.S. military forces in Grenada, Lee personally presented Bishop’s Politburo with a draft of Dellums’ report before it was presented to his congressional committee.
Despite revelations about this in 1993, Dellums went on to become chairman of the committee so vital to national security. Lee went on to become a member of the California Legislature. She threatened Joseph Farah, now the editor of WorldNetDaily, with a defamation lawsuit for publishing this information during her first term as a California assemblywoman. She dropped the threat after being challenged to provide any evidence that the charges were not true.
The minutes of a Politburo meeting held in 1982 say Lee actually encouraged the Communist government to make a revision in the report to minimize the military significance of the Grenada airport.
Less than a year later, the captured documents reveal, Lee helped coordinate a tour of the West Coast for Ian Jacobs, Grenada’s deputy U.N. ambassador, as part of a propaganda offensive “to counterattack President Reagan’s verbal attack on Grenada.” Once again, Angela Davis was by her side.
President Reagan later ordered an invasion of the island when U.S. medical students were taken hostage by the Cuban-backed regime. When U.S. Marines landed, they were met with armed resistance, not from local forces, but from Cuban infantry regulars.
Lee’s friendly relations with Cuba date back even further. In 1979, while on Dellums’ staff, she traveled to Havana to attend a conference of “non-aligned nations,” a Cold War euphemism for countries aligned with the Soviet Union. She attended the conference not as an employee of the federal government, which she was, but rather claiming to be a journalist for the left-wing alternative San Francisco paper, the Sun-Reporter.
The San Francisco paper Lee represented in Cuba was edited at the time by the late Carlton Goodlett. On April 22, 1970, Goodlett received the Lenin Peace Prize in Moscow. It was quite an affair – attended by Leonid Brezhnev and other party notables. The date marked Lenin’s 100th birthday.
Until 1956, the Lenin Prize was called the Stalin Stipend. The name was changed only after Nikita Khruschev denounced mass murderer Josef Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in Moscow. It was not just an honorary award for promoting the cause of world Communism and Soviet hegemony. The prize was established in 1928 as the socialist rival to the Nobel Prize and paid its recipients amounts ranging from 50,000 to 100,000 rubles.
When Goodlett returned with his cash, he proceeded to file as a candidate for governor of California in that year’s election. He also bankrolled the first big election bids of former California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and Dellums.
In October 1997, a Freedom of Information Act request was filed with the FBI. It sought information about Goodlett, particularly with respect to the Lenin Prize and about his backing of Dellums. A few weeks later, Dellums surprised virtually everyone on Capitol Hill, throughout his district and across the nation by resigning in the middle of his two-year term.
Nevertheless, Lee was sworn into the House of Representatives by a smiling Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1998. She glibly took her oath to defend and uphold the Constitution, and she faced only token opposition in her successful bids for her first two full terms in the House.
The votes in the House and Senate were remarkable for their gravity, urgency and absence of opposition or even debate. Discussions took a mere five hours and the final vote was 420 to 1.
“There must be some of us who say, let’s step back for a moment and think through the implications of our actions today – let us more fully understand its consequences,” Lee said. “Far too many innocent people have already died.”
The Senate version of the resolution passed 98-0. Sens. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and Jesse Helms, R-N.C., did not vote.
