Just when you thought you knew who not to trust, along comes another wave of bombshell revelations that make even seasoned skeptics and cranks seem like trusting pollyanas: you can never be too skeptical of the official version of events, past and present. Take the recent revelations about the legendary Civil Rights photographer Ernest Withers–turns out he was secretly working for the FBI as a paid informant all those years, snitching on Martin Luther King Jr. and his entourage. And that’s likely just the tip of the iceberg of the government’s compromised 40+year effort to bury what really happened in the MLK assassination. Another highlight of this truly marvelous year for obstructing that unfashionable concept called “truth” was the news that the late Eisenhower scholar Stephen Ambrose fabricated the nine-interviews-that-he-never-did-with-Ike. At the top of my highlight list, however, is Gerald “I’m a thieving cocksucker!” Posner, who was busted for plagiarizing all over his latest book, Miami Babylon, a scandal-babble-history of how Miami came to be. As a result, Tina Brown, one of Posner’s two major champions, had no choice but to let her Number-One investigative pet at The Daily Beast go.

Not satisfied with just slinking away into obscurity until the dust of his deeds cleared, Posner is already back sleazing in full frontal view, not even pretending to be a journalist anymore. Now that he’s been discredited, Posner’s come out of the closet doing what he’s always done: “dirty work.” Posner now acts as attorney and PR agent defending beleaguered Afghan President Karzai’s brother Mahmood, along with doing PR work for two other sleazy Karzai brothers, Ahmed Wali (who’s been on the CIA’s payroll since 2001, according to the New York Times) and Qayum. The brothers have been accused of not just opium trafficking, but also muscling their way into lucrative development projects, and selling materials for IEDs used to kill American troops. The once (much too) respected (for the public good) journalist Gerald Posner now spends his days attempting to whitewash the brothers’ slimy public image, all the while scanning around for potential libel cases against Western media outlets. (more…)