When the White House press corps finally grilled White House press secretary Robert Gibbs about "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones last Friday, a reporter asked how the administration could reject "conspiracy theories" about his birth certificate while employing someone who previously charged the U.S. government with masterminding Sept. 11.

I found that to be an interesting juxtaposition.

Could the answer be as simple as the White House has no respect for truth? Will reporters and even some clamoring to position themselves as respectable "conservatives" and critics of Barack Obama figure out that deception and deceit are at the very core of this regime?

Do you expect those so ferociously attacking WND as a "conspiracy site" to recognize it was this news agency that first broke the Van Jones story in April and relentlessly pursued it for five months to the bitter end?

That's right.

It was the dogged reporting of WND's Jerusalem bureau chief who brought down the first high-ranking member of the Obama administration. And despite all the chatter you've seen and heard about this story, not one major competing news outlet has even bothered to invite Klein on to discuss the Jones story.

In April, Aaron Klein, Jerusalem bureau chief for WND.com, broke the first major story on Jones who was identified as a self-described radical communist and "rowdy black nationalist" who said his environmental activism was actually a means to fight for racial and class "justice." That was followed by many other revelations from WND about Jones:

• Jones previously served on the board of an environmental activist group at which a founder of the Weather Underground terrorist organization is a top director.

• Jones was co-founder of a black activist organization that has led a campaign prompting major advertisers to withdraw from Glenn Beck's top-rated Fox News Channel program. The revelation followed Beck's reports on WND's story about Jones' communist background.

• Jones and other White House appointees may have been screened by an ACORN associate.

• One day after the 9/11 attacks, Jones led a vigil that expressed solidarity with Arab and Muslim Americans as well as what he called the victims of "U.S. imperialism" around the world.

• Just days before his White House appointment, Jones used a forum at a major youth convention to push for a radical agenda that included spreading the wealth and "changing the whole system."

• Jones' Maoist manifesto while leading the group Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM, was scrubbed from the Internet after being revealed by WND.

• Jones was the main speaker at an anti-war rally that urged "resistance" against the U.S. government – a demonstration sponsored by an organization associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party.

• In a 2005 conference, Jones characterized the U.S. as an "apartheid regime" that civil rights workers helped turn into a "struggling, fledgling democracy."

• Jones signed a petition calling for nationwide "resistance" against police, accusing them of using the 9/11 attacks to carry out policies of torture.

While talk radio and cable television picked up WND's reporting and increased the pressure on the administration to cut Jones loose, there was no significant coverage of the scandal by the major U.S. news media until last week!

It wasn't necessary for the New York Times to cover this story for a top administration official to be ousted. The Jones story is bigger than a mere political development. It's also a giant media story – illustrating just how profoundly our media landscape has changed as a result of the Internet.

Once there was a story of a blue dress. Now there's the story of a red czar.

That's the power of a truly independent press.

I strongly suspect that the recent fusillade of attacks on WND – from the left and the right – over our unrelenting coverage of the missing birth certificate and other Obama papers was actually orchestrated as much by those who saw us closing in on Van Jones as over our pursuit of the eligibility story.

Of course, if you know me and WND, the relentless pursuit of the truth and our focus on all government waste, fraud, abuse and corruption won't end here. This is what we do. This is what we have always done. This is what we will continue to do no matter from which direction the brickbats fly.

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