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Bilderberg
conferences
2008
BILDERBERG UPDATE
2007
BILDERBERGERS EVEN KEEPING LOCATION
SECRET THIS YEAR
WORLDNET DAILY - The super-secret Bilderberg
Group, an organization of powerful international elites, is set
to meet this week somewhere in Turkey - but even the precise
location is a mystery. The meeting begins Thursday and continues
through Sunday.
Those expected to attend include Donald
Graham, chairman and chief executive officer of the Washington
Post, Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations,
Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, John Vinocur, senior correspondent
of the International Herald Tribune, Paul Gigot, editor of the
editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, Nicholas Beytout,
editor-in-chief of Le Figaro, George David, chairman of Coca-Cola,
Martin Feldstein, president and chief executive officer of the
National Bureau of Economic Research, Timothy F. Geithner, president
and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New
York, Vernon Jordan, senior managing director of Lazard Freres
& Co., Anatole Kaletsky, editor at large of the Times of
London and General William Luti, the new "war czar."
According to reports from Turkey, Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions
and global energy issues will be on the agenda - but only invitees
know for sure.
How important are events like this weekend's
Bilderberg conference? It may not make any difference now, but
in 2004, according to the New York Times, it was the standout
"performance" of Sen. John Edwards at the super-secret
Bilderberg meeting in Italy that sealed the deal on his nomination
as John Kerry's vice presidential running mate.
Though no one knows for sure who will be
at this weekend's gathering, among those attending the 2004 meeting
in Italy, according to a list obtained by WND, were Edwards,
Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J.; Henry Kissinger; Richard Perle; Melinda
Gates (wife of Bill Gates); David Rockefeller; Timothy F. Geithner,
president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Donald Graham,
chairman and CEO of the Washington Post Company; and Ralph Reed,
former head of the Christian Coalition.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55917
2006.
. . .
PROMINENT FIGURES NO SHOWS AS BILDERBERG
ATTRACTS MORE ATTENTION
THOSE WHO WONDER whether press
coverage of the top secret Bilderberg meetings makes any difference
should check this year's guest list. Despite coverage being almost
totally blacked out in American major media, a handful of journals
- including the Progressive Review, Alex Jones and Daniel Estulin
- have steadily reported on the bizarrely concealed annual gatherings
of over a hundred of the world's most powerful people. This year
they were joined by Canadian media which treated the event as
a news story rather than - as in the case of the American media
- something to hide from their readers.
Most prominent absentee from
this year's guest list is Donald Graham of the Washington Post
who has attended a number of past sessions. Also missing this
year from the list of past attendees: anyone from the NY Times,
the LA Times, all the major networks, James Hoagland of the Post,
and names like Leslie Stahl, Bill Clinton, George Soros, Mortimer
Zuckerman and Bill Moyers.
No members of Congress showed
up to fill seats previously occupied by such as Senators Corzine,
Edwards, Dodds, and Hutchinson.
In fact, the only elected politician
we found on the list was Governor Pataki who would probably accept
any invitation that would make him seem more useful. The only
American journalist was Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal
which only cares what the 100 most powerful people think, anyway.
It may be stretching it a bit
to say that the coverage of the Bilderberg confederacy by independent
media such as the Review has scared at least some of the powerful
away from this disreputable exercise in anti-democratic power,
but we at least have the comfort that no one from Bilderberg's
can argue about this with us in public.
TOM SPEARS, OTTAWA CITIZEN -
Four days after they arrived quietly at a Kanata, Ont., hotel,
the world's rich and powerful left just as mysteriously, in limos
and SUVs with blacked-out windows. The Bilderberg Group, a secretive
organization of politicians and business leaders from around
the world, gave no public statements. With private security guards
and metal barriers keeping outsiders on the street, the Bilderbergers
met in secret and then whisked themselves away in ones and twos,
mostly to the airport.
GUEST LIST
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/june2006/110606Attendees.htm
BILDERBERG
http://prorev.com/recovered7.htm
THE MEETING OF WORLD LEADERS THE AMERICAN
MEDIA WON'T TELL YOU ABOUT
[Reports from five Canadian media]
OTTAWA CITIZEN - The world's
political elite, top thinkers and powerful business folk gathered
here for an annual, ultra-secretive Bilderberg conference as
heavy security kept conspiracy theorists [sic] and curious onlookers
at bay. Global luminaries such as former US secretary of state
Henry Kissinger, US banker David Rockefeller and Queen Beatrix
of the Netherlands were greeted at the airport by limousine drivers
holding single-letter "B" signs late Thursday, said
local reports.
They were quickly whisked away
to the Brookstreet Hotel in a serene suburb of Ottawa for three-day
talks on oil markets, security concerns tied to Iran's nuclear
ambitions, terrorism, and immigration, the Ottawa Citizen reported.
. . Richard Perle, former US defense policy advisor, upon his
arrival in Ottawa, denied allegations the group crafts public
policy behind closed doors. "It discusses public policy,"
he stressed to a Citizen reporter. A statement from the group
said the meetings were private to encourage "frank and open
discussions." . . .
Other attendees seen arriving
in Ottawa on Thursday included former Canadian ambassador to
Washington Frank McKenna, Royal Dutch Shell chairman Jorma Ollila,
former World Bank president James Wolfenson and Scandinavian
Airlines chairman Egil Myklebust, according to reports. Former
New York governor George Pataki [sic], Iraq's deputy prime minister
Ahmad Chalabi, the heads of Coca-Cola, Credit Suisse, the Royal
Bank of Canada, several media moguls, and cabinet ministers from
Spain and Greece, were also expected to attend.
CANADIAN PRESS - Those who follow
the Bilderberg group say it got Europe to adopt a common currency,
got Bill Clinton to support NAFTA, and is spending this week
deciding what to do about high oil prices and that pesky fundamentalist
president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Ottawa police officers are standing
guard outside a dozen metal gates that serve as security checkpoints
a half-kilometre from the hotel. But Ottawa's finest are clearly
not in charge here.
To approach the hotel property,
even these uniformed police officers are required to show their
credentials to the half-dozen black-suited men working for Globe
Risk, a private security firm. "This is pretty unusual,"
one Ottawa cop said.
The Bilderberg group is a half-century-old
organization comprising about 130 of the world's wealthiest and
most powerful people. The group is named after the Dutch hotel
where it held its first meeting in 1954. . .
CTV - Canadian writer Daniel
Estulin, who has been following Bilderberg for years, describes
it as a "powerful" group of politicians and business
people with one objective: "To create a one-world government
where you don't have individual nations -- you have one region,
one religion, one constitution, one church, one currency and
one country. And you're seeing it right now as you have NAFTA,
the North American Free Trade Agreement, and you have the European
Community," Estulin, author of Club Bilderberg, said Friday
on CTV's Mike Duffy Live.
The author claims he has several
"intimate friends" who are Bilderbergers, who are constantly
feeding him information about the proceedings. Journalists are
banned from the proceedings, except in special cases, and attendees
never speak about what took place inside the meetings.
"No one is allowed to talk
about it -- but you have within the conference itself the members
of the Bilderberg press," said Estulin, adding that members
of The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek magazine,
The Financial Times and Time magazine are in attendance.
Other guests at the Ottawa hotel
were asked to check-out before Thursday, cars left in the parking
lot will be towed, and members of the hotel gym were told it
would be inaccessible for four days. . .
There are no real members of
the group. Instead, a secret steering committee sends out invitations
to mainly business and political leaders each year. The group
has headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands, at a building where
phone calls are met by a recorded voice with instructions to
leave a message, and calls are reportedly never returned.
Critics such as Estulin say the
group is sinister and elitist, and that it operates entirely
through self interest. If the group's motives are legitimate,
they ask, why keep their meetings so secret?
"Now you have 125 of the
most powerful people in the world, and no one seems to want to
know what these people are talking about. If this is not a conspiracy,
I don't know what is," he said. The group, however, claims
secrecy is necessary in order to stimulate discussions.
GLOBE AND MAIL, CANADA - "Some
people say that I advocate a conspiracy theory. That's not true.
I recognize a conspiracy fact," said James P. Tucker. The
74-year-old American journalist has been following the Bilderberg
group for decades. . .
OTTAWA SUN - The Washington,
D.C.-based Tucker and his fellow Bilderberg-watchers will be
hunting for helicopters and limousines. "I've chased these
kids all over Europe and North America for over 20 years now,"
said Tucker, 71, in his southern drawl. "History has verified
everything I've ever written." . . . Even mainstream critics
say they are elitist, undemocratic and unaccountable. Others
finger Bilderbergers as building a self-serving world government,
pulling strings behind the scenes and planting their candidates
in politics and other positions of power to serve their needs.
This year, they'll again be talking
oil prices, Tucker said. "Last year we reported on plans
for oil prices to increase dramatically," he said. "At
that time, oil was as low as $40 a barrel. Then it shot up to
$70 a barrel. . . Conspiracy is fact when you have 120 of the
world's most powerful men and they conduct public business behind
closed doors with armed guards."
THE THINKER'S GUIDE TO CONSPIRACY THEORIES
Sam Smith
- A conspiracy does not have
to be illegal; it can merely be wrongful or harmful.
- The term 'conspiracy theory'
was invented by elite media and politicians to denigrate questions
or critical presumptions about events about which important facts
remain unrevealed.
- The intelligent response to
such events is to remain agnostic, skeptical, and curious. Theories
may be suggested - just as they are every day about less complex
and more open matters on news broadcasts and op ed pages - but
such theories should not stray too far from available evidence.
Conversely, as long as serious anomalies remain, dismissing questions
and doubts as a "conspiracy theory" is a highly unintelligent
response. It is also ironic as those ridiculing the questions
and doubts typically consider themselves intellectually superior
to the doubters. But they aren't because they stopped thinking
the moment someone in power told them a superficially plausible
answer. Further, to ridicule those still with doubts about such
matters is intellectually dishonest.
- There is the further irony
that many who ridicule doubts about the official version of events
were typically trained at elite colleges where, in political
science and history, theories often take precedent over facts
and in which substantive decisions affecting politics and history
are presumed to be the work of a small number of wise men (sic).
They are trained, in effect, to trust in (1) theories and (2)
benign confederacies. Most major media political coverage is
based on the great man theory of history. This pattern can be
found in everything from Skull & Bones to the Washington
Post editorial board to the Council on Foreign Relations. You
might even call them conspiracy theorists.
- Other fields - such as social
history or anthropology - posit that change for better or evil
can come as cultural change or choices and not just as the decisions
of "great men." This is why one of the biggest stories
in modern American history was never well covered: the declining
birth rate. No great men decided it should happen.
- Homicide detectives and investigative
reporters, among others, are inductive thinkers who start with
evidence rather than with theories and aren't happy when the
evidence is weak, conflicting or lacking. They keep working the
case until a solid answer appears. This is alien to the well-educated
newspaper editor who has been trained to trust official answers
and conventional theories.
- The unresolved major event
is largely a modern phenomenon that coincides with the collapse
of America's constitutional government and the decline of its
culture. Beginning with the Kennedy assassination, the number
of inadequately explained major events has been mounting steadily
and with them a steady decline in the trust between he people
and their government. The refusal of American elites to take
these doubts seriously has been a major disservice to the republic.
- You don't need a conspiracy
to lie, do something illegal or to be stupid.
WHY THE MEDIA ISN'T REPORTING THE BILDERBERG
STORY
The Bilderberg Conference is
an ideal example of how the American elite turns its back on
facts even as it denigrates those who wonder what the hell is
going on.
As of Saturday night, no major
American media had reported the meeting of 130 of the world's
most powerful and wealthiest individuals, a meeting so secret
that one reporter was arrested for merely flying into the host
city and the Ottawa police had to show credentials to private
security guards to be permitted on the premises. The invited
also include some nasty individuals such as Richard Perle and
Ahmad Chalabi. You don't invite such types to a secret meeting
if you plan to do anything worthwhile. There are no reports of
any person of known moral standing being invited.
How does one explain the utter
lack of journalistic curiosity about all this? One could come
up with a conspiratorial explanation but the answer is probably
even more troubling: no conspiracy was needed at all. Like a
well trained child, the media doesn't even want to know what
is going on.
Well, that isn't completely true
since past participants have included the likes of Don Graham
of the Washington Post and Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal.
Many city councils in America
operate under some sort of freedom of information and/or sunshine
law. Why is it so important that we know what our town council
is talking about behind our backs and so irrelevant what 130
of the most powerful individuals in the world are talking about
secretly? Sorry, the American media is not cleared to give you
an answer.
2005
THE BILDERBERG HUNTERS report
that this year's session of the over-powered and under-sensible
will be held at Rottach-Egern, Germany, about 40 miles from Munich.
According to James P Tucker Jr:
Bilderberg is gathering at the
Dorint Sofitel Seehotel Ueberfahrt, a five-star conference and
business hotel with 188 luxury rooms. It is on a lake and near
a golf course, typical Bilderberg requirements. High officials
of the U.S. government and possibly a few congressional leaders
will participate in three days of secret meetings to plan global
policy. Heads of state and other high officials from Europe and
Britain will participate, along with world financiers.
David Rockefeller and his valet,
Henry Kissinger, are longtime Bilderberg regulars. Donald Graham,
publisher of The Washington Post, and associate editor Jimmy
Lee Hoagland regularly attend, upon their promise to report nothing.
The New York Times, LA Times
and all major networks' ABC, CBS and NBC have participated. All
participants are sworn to secrecy. Bilderberg denies its existence,
and all the resorts at which they hold their meetings require
their employees to lie and deny they are present.
Three times the Dorint told AFP
they were fully booked but that Bilderberg was not there. All
but Bilderberg participants and their staffs, wives or, in some
cases, someone else's wife, will be required to leave. The hotel
staff will be warned to reveal nothing of what they see and hear.
Armed guards will patrol not only the main entrance but the perimeters.
Exposing Bilderberg meetings
has provided advance warning months ahead of the mainstream media
of U.S. wars, tax increases, and the downfall of Margaret Thatcher
as prime minister of Britain, among other exclusives.
2004
JONATHAN DUFFY, BBC - The Bilderberg
group, an elite coterie of Western thinkers and power-brokers,
has been accused of fixing the fate of the world behind closed
doors. As the organization marks its 50th anniversary, rumors
are more rife than ever. Given its reputation as perhaps the
most powerful organization in the world, the Bilderberg group
doesn't go a bundle on its switchboard operations. . .
Not a word of what is said at Bilderberg meetings can be breathed
outside. No reporters are invited in and while confidential minutes
of meetings are taken, names are not noted.
SOME OF THE ATTENDEES
- Honorary Secretary General
- Taylor, Martin - International Adviser, Goldman Sachs International
- Boot, Max - Neoconservative,
Council on foreign Relations, Features Editor, Wall Street Journal
- Corzine, Jon S. - Senator (D,
New Jersey), Chairman and CEO, Goldman Sachs
- Donilon, Thomas L - Vice-President,
Fannie Mae, Council on Foreign Relations
- Edwards, John - Senator (D.
North Carolina)
- Feith, Douglas J. - Undersecretary
for Policy, Department of Defense
- Gates, Melinda F. - Co-Founder,
Gates Foundation, wife of Bill Gates
- Geithner, Timothy F. - President,
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
- Graham, Donald E. - Chairman
and CEO, Washington Post Company
- Haas, Richard N. - President,
Council on Foreign Relations, former Director of Policy and Planning
staff, State Department
- Holbrooke, Richard C - Vice
Chairman, Perseus, former Director, Council on Foreign Relations,
former Assistant Secretary of State
- Issacson, Walter - President
and CEO, Aspen Institute
- Jordan, Vernon E. Senior Managing
Director, Lazard Freres & Co LLC
- Kagan, Robert - Senior Associate,
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Kissinger Henry A. - Chairman,
Kissinger Associates Inc.
- Kravis, Henry R. - Founding
Partner, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., acquisitions financier
- Kravis, Marie Josee - Senoir
Fellow, Hudson Institute Inc.
- Mathews, Jessica T. - President,
Carnegie Endowment for International War Peace
- McDonough, William J. - Chairman
and CEO, Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, former president,
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
- Perle, Richard N. - Resident
Fellow, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research,
former Likud policy adviser, former chair Defence Policy Board,
former co-chairman, Hollinger Digital
- Phillipe, HRH Prince
- Rockefeller, David - Member
JP Morgan International Council, Chairman, Council of the Americas
- Ross, Dennis B - Director,
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
- Thornton, John L. - Chairman,
Brookings Institution, Professor, Tsinghua University
2003
On May 21, Financial Times
published a feature article mentioning Bilderberg by Martin Wolf.
But the Wall Street Journal, which is always represented [at
Bilderberg] by Paul Gigot, editorial page editor, is standing
fast to its pledge of secrecy. AFP called Gigot at WSJ's New
York office. He was "unavailable" said his secretary,
identified only as "Marianne."
She sounded surprised
by the question but acknowledged that Gigot was at the Bilderberg
meeting in Versailles. Why does WSJ never report on Bilderberg?
"He's a participant, not a reporter," she said.
"Participants don't
report on this."
"But it is a major
story being ignored," AFP said. "Why is it a story?"
she challenged.
"When you have 120
world leaders in international finance, political leaders, including
heads of state and high officials of the U.S. government, how
can that not be a story?" AFP asked. A pause followed, then
AFP added: "Bilderberg meetings are sealed off, reporters
are not allowed in."
"That's their problem."
"And Mr. Gigot will
report nothing?"
"I told you, he is
a participant and participants don't report on these meetings."
In fact, "participants"
are ordered to give no interviews and report nothing on what
transpires.
"When your paper,
The Washington Post and all three major networks participate
and promise to not report, is this not a conspiracy?"
"I told you, you have to ask them," she said, terminating
the conversation. - AMERICAN FREE PRESS
WEEKEND EVENTS
REGIME CHANGERS OF THE WORLD HOLD ANNUAL SECRET MEETING
BBC - The Bilderberg meeting will be held in
Versailles just before the start of the Group of Seven meeting
of finance ministers in nearby Paris. Henry Kissinger is believed
to be attending this year Bilderberg, which was founded in the
1950s by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, is said to steer
international policy from behind closed doors. Its critics say
that it is a capitalist organization which operates entirely
through self interest. By anyone's standards, it is a bit of
a mystery. There are no members as such - instead, an invitation
list is comprised each year by an unknown steering committee,
but participants are mainly leading and powerful figures in the
fields of business and politics. . .The meetings are cloaked
in secrecy and participants rarely reveal their attendance, although
this year's list is rumored to include the American banker David
Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger. What the group actually does
is no clearer either, although it's known to be an extremely
influential lobbying group with a good deal of political clout
on both sides of the Atlantic. . . Critics accuse Bilderberg
of being sinister and conspiratorial - if what the delegates
are discussing is really for the good of ordinary people they
ask, then why can't they publicist it?
BILDERBERG SITE - The hotel has been cordoned off in such
a way as to be completely impossible to see. Friendly staff say
all the windows have been blacked out to stop photographers who
get inside the riot barriers from snapping secret guests inside.
The conference agenda is supposed to be secret but leaks strongly
indicate management of the Iraq and Palestine invasions as well
as a final push for a European Army are top of the list this
year. . . BBC Radio 4 are making a documentary . . . and independent
journalists from Iceland, Norway and Turkey too. Journalists
from London magazine, The Economist, are inside Bilderberg every
year but since one curious 'mistake' in the 1980's never mention
the conference in their pages. The anti-globalisation French
daily newspaper, 'Liberation', says it might cover the Bilderberg
conference in a few weeks time. Many journalists are afraid of
the power the Bilderbergers wield.
WORLDNET DAILY - The Bilderberg Group has been
described as "50 people who run the world and 20 hangers-on."
It's actually a slightly bigger conspiracy. In the words of another
observer, it is comprised of "120 or so of the most influential
men in Europe and North America." Since 1953, the Bilderberg
Group has convened government, business, academic and journalistic
representatives from the U.S., Canada and Europe. The locations
and agendas of the conferences are closely guarded secrets. Last
year, the BBC described the annual meetings this way: "It's
officially described as a private gathering, but with a guest
list including the heads of European and American corporations,
political leaders and a few intellectuals, it's one of the most
influential organizations on the planet." British journalist
Jon Ronson, who is the author of a book on Bilderberg, had this
to say: "I'm a sort of semi-conspiracy theorist when it
comes to Bilderberg because I think they wouldn't go to that
much trouble of having this incredibly expensive international
conference every year and they'd go to all this trouble to keep
themselves out of the press and be really secret and invite the
world's most powerful people if it was just a chat and a game
of golf, which is basically what they say it is. So I do think
they have some impact on world affairs."
2002
The 48th Bilderberg meeting
took place in Brussels earlier this month. The Bilderbergers
are a sort of elite version of a militia -- a covert organization
dedicated to self-defense, the self in this case being the powerful
of the world. They might also be called a hate group, since they
hate public exposure of their activities.
The Bilderbergers are more
a manifestation than a cause of our troubles. After all, you
can't destroy the economy of whole continents, poison the planet,
or dismantle democracy in just one three-day get-together. Still,
the Bilderberg globapolists -- along with their allies on the
Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations --
exercise a large, unexamined, and undemocratic influence on events
and should be regarded with a beady eye whenever they assemble
in dangerous numbers.
Here are some of the individuals present at this year's meeting.
Note particularly the prominent media figures involved:
Honorary Secretary General:
J. Martin Taylor, Chairman, WH Smith Group, Adviser, Goldman
Sachs
Allaire, Paul, USA, Chair, Xerox
Betz, Hans-Georg, Columbia & NY Unis.
Black, Conrad, CDN, Chair, Telegraph Group
Deutch, John M, MIT
Dodd, Christopher J, USA, Senator, D, Connecticut
Donilon, Thomas E, USA, FannieMae
Dyson, Esther, USA, EDventure
Frum, David, CDN, National Post
Graham, Donald E, USA, Washington Post
Hagel, Chuck, USA, Senator, R, Nebraska
Hutchison, Kay bailey, USA, Senator, R, Texas
Johnson, James A, USA, Johnson Capital
Jordan Jr, Vernon E, USA, Lazard Frères
Kissinger, Henry A, USA, Kissinger Associates
Kravis, Henry R, USA, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts
Kravis, Marie-Josée, USA, Hudson Institute
Mathews, Jessica T, USA, Carnegie Endowment
McDonough, William J, USA, Pres. Federal Reserve Bank of NY
Moore, Mike, INT, WTO
Richardson, Bill, USA, Energy Secretary
Rockefeller, David, USA, Chase Manhattan Bank
Solana Madariaga, Javier, INT, Sec Gen, Council of the EU
Soros, George, USA, Soros Fund Management
Steinberg, James B, USA, Dep Asst to the President for National
Security
ffairs
Tarullo, Daniel K, USA, Georgetowm Univ.
Thornton, John L, Goldman Sachs
Vink, Lodewijk JR de, USA, Warner Lambert
Wolfensohn, James D, World Bank
Wolfowitz, Paul, USA, John Hopkins Univ.
Mickelthwait, R. John, GB, United States Editor, Economist
Wooldridge, Adrian D, GB, Foreign Correspondent, Economist
1999
BILDERBERG
NEWS [Portugal]: A massive
security operation was launched in Sintra on Wednesday, in preparation
for the arrival of some of the world's most powerful people.
A special unit from the [Judicial Police] was reported to be
sweeping Penha Longa for listening devices late Wednesday. A
film crew from the UK's Channel 4 were being trailed by a team
of plain clothes police and security men after they attempted
to film inside the hotel on Tuesday afternoon .... In the last
four days the [News's] site has accumulated over 368,000 hits
.... The BBC Worldwide Monitoring Service this week printed a
text of a report by the Yugoslav News Agency, Tanjug, which said
the plan to bring about a Balkan Vietnam was drawn up secretly
back in 1996 and reactivated at a meeting of the Bilderberg Group
held in Scotland last year, citing the May 27 edition of the
Yugoslav newspaper "Vojska."
THE NEWS http://www.the-news.net/
Archeologists
have found the remains of a banana on a heap of soggy Tudor rubbish
that is almost a century older than any recorded banana in Britain.
According to the guardian, "It was thrown into one of the
more revolting stretches of the south bank of the Thames around
1560. The earliest recorded bananas in Britain were in a bunch
imported in 1633 from Bermuda and hung up in Thomas Johnson's
herbalist shop on Snow Hill, central London. Regular imports
only came with steam ships in the 19th century."
THE MEETING YOU WON'T HEAR ABOUT
It is unlikely that you will hear elsewhere about what possibly
could be the most important meeting of important people this
year. It is the meeting of the Bilderberg Group, gathering in
early June in Sintra Portugal. In fact, the location of the annual
gathering of the barons and baronesses of the New World Order
was secret until broken by Portugal's English language paper,
The News. Even in that country, and after the national press
agency decided to distribute the News' report, the rest of the
media kept it a secret from readers. Writes the News:
"A quick search of the internet on the single keyword
Bilderberg, will bring up some of the most extraordinary claims
regarding the objectives and activities of this powerful group
of industrialists, financiers and ex-politicians. It will also
reveal many reports of the lengths to which this organization
will go to maintain full secrecy over its meetings. Much of the
information could be seen as scurrilous, even far fetched, with
claims that these people are part of what is described as the
New World Order. An hour or so of research will be enough to
find the names of most of the members, details of their past
meetings and claims of what has been discussed. It is not for
this newspaper to become part of this speculation, yet it is
extraordinary that even in a democracy such as Portugal, the
very presence of what can only be described as one of the most
prestigious meetings of powerful men and women from around the
world, could remain unreported anywhere."
In this country, for a journalist to even mention the Bilderbergers
is considered evidence of paranoia. So far this year, once again,
none have taken the risk.
THE NEWS [PORTUGAL]: The tentative agenda for the Bilderberg
meeting scheduled for June 3 to June 6 at the Penha Longa resort
in Sintra [includes]global governance, including a review on
the progress in the formation of an Asian bloc under the leadership
of Japan; The Kosovo war, including the formation of an "independent"
Kosovo; The ultimate replacement of NATO with a Western European
Army and the appointment of a Y2K Czar (Mikhail Gorbachev could
be a front runner for this post) to oversee global passage through
the Y2K Emergency which they feel will be much worse than expected.
.... Bilderbergers are said to be extremely concerned about the
global impact of, and opportunities offered by, the Y2K problem
(which the Bilderbergers believe to be far worse than many people
have realized). The alleged presence of Bill Gates at the Sintra
meeting may substantiate this claim. .... With the meeting now
only a few days away, nothing has appeared in the Portuguese,
European or international media, though the internet is 'alive'
with speculation. One international press agency in Lisbon is
reported to have said that it has been waiting for the international
press to request stories or photos, yet so far not one single
request has been received from anywhere.
MORE FUN FACTS
ABOUT THE BILDERBERGERS
-- The Bilderberg Society last met on May
14, 1998. By its own press release, the group gathered to "discuss
the Atlantic relationship in a time of change. Among others the
Conference will discuss NATO, Asian Crisis, EMU, Growing Military
Disparity, Japan, Multilateral Organizations, Europe's social
model, Turkey, EU/US Market Place [sic]."
-- As Parascope has reported, all Bilderberg
discussions are conducted in absolute secrecy. "To guarantee
solitude, the group customarily books an entire hotel in a secluded
location. The hotel is protected by a tight security grid of
heavily armed guards from the U.S. Secret Service, various European
secret service agencies and the local police."
-- According to the Bilderberg's press
release, "Participants have agreed not to give interviews
to the press during the meeting. In contacts with the news media
after the conference it is an established rule that no attribution
should be made to individual participants of what was discussed
during the meeting."
-- Bilderberg founder Prince Bernhard of
the Netherlands himself once said, "It is difficult to re-educate
people who have been brought up on nationalism to the idea of
relinquishing part of their sovereignty to a supra-national body."
-- Writes Parascope: "Many members
of the group are also members of the Council on Foreign Relations,
the Trilateral Commission, and other secretive supra-national
planning forums. Topics on the Bilderberg's agenda have been
smoothly integrated into discussions at G-8 meetings, at the
World Economic Forum's annual conference in Davos, Switzerland,
and at other global policy venues. The seeds of consensus from
these various meetings are then carried home to national governments
and corporate boardrooms."
-- In 1975 C. Gordon Tether, long-time
London Financial Times columnist wrote in a 1975 column "If
the Bilderberg Group is not a conspiracy of some sort, it is
conducted in such a way as to give a remarkably good imitation
of one." Every subsequent word that Tether wrote about Bilderberg
was cut by his editors. Two years later he was dismissed.
-- At the 1998 conference, freelance journalist
Campbell Thomas was detained for eight hours by local Scottish
police after he began asking too many questions.
"The holding cell I was put in was in a disgusting state,
with excrement on every wall, and I was in that cell for the
best part of five hours."
-- The Bilderberg's advisory committee
includes Chase-Manhattan chairman David Rockefeller. Henry Kissinger
and Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. are listed among the Group's steering
committee. Past attendees include President Clinton (who attended
in 1991 just before entering the scene as a possible White House
contender), World Bank president James Wolfensohn, U.S. Secretary
of Defense William Perry, International Monetary Fund managing
director Stanley Fischer, and Ford Motor Company president Alexander
Trotman, to name just a few participants.
PARASCOPE http://parascope.com
THE REVIEW LIST
Media types who were guests
at the Bilderberg conference
and failed to tell their readers
or viewers what happened there.
Compiled by Parascope
Henry Grunwald
Mortimer Zuckerman
Robert L. Bartley
Peter Robert Kann
Katharine Graham
Jim Hoagland
Osborn Eliot
Peter Jennings
Lesley R. Stahl
Sharon Percy Rockefeller;
William F. Buckley
Joseph Kraft
James Reston
Joseph Harsch
George Will
Flora Lewis
Donald C. Cook
Albert J. Wohlstetter
Thomas L. Friedman
Hedley Donovan
Bill Moyers
William Kristol
PARASCOPE http://www.parascope.com/mx/articles/bilderberg.htm
THE REVIEW LIST
Some of the people who attended last year's Bilderberg Conference
~ Carrington, Peter (GB): Former chairman
of the Board, Christies International PLC; Former Secretary General,
NATO
~ Agnelli, Giovanni (I): Honorary Chairman, Fiat S.p.A.
~ Allaire, Paul A (USA): Chairman, Xerox Corporation
~ Black, Conrad (CDN): Chairman, The Telegraph plc
~ Bonino, Emma (INT): Member of the European Commission
~ Brittan, Leon (INT): Vice President of the European Commission
~ Browne, John (GB): Group Chief Executive, British Petroleum
Company plc
~ Chubais, Anatoli B. (RUS): Former First Vice Prime Minister;
Chairman RAO EES
~ Clarke, Kenneth (GB): Member of Parliament
~ Deutch, John M. (USA): Institute Professor, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Dept. of Chemistry. Former Director General, Central
Intelligence Agency; Former Deputy Secretary of Defense
~ Fischer, Stanley (INT): First Deputy Managing Director, International
Monetary Fund
~ Grossman, Marc (USA): Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department
of State
~ Guetta, Bernard (F): Editor in Chief, Le Nouvel Observateur
~ Hoagland, Jim (USA): Associate Editor, The Washington Post
~ Hoge, Jr., James F. (USA): Editor, Foreign Affairs
~ Hogg, Christopher (GB): Chairman, Reuters Group plc
~ Holbrooke, Richard C. (USA): Former Assistant Secretary for
European Affairs; Vice Chairman, CS First Boston
~ Issing, Otmar (D): Member of the Board, Deutsche Bundesbank
~ Johnson, James A. (USA): Chairman and CEO, FannieMae
~ Jordan, Jr., Vernon E. (USA): Senior Partner, Akin, Gump, Strauss,
Hauer & Feld, LLP (Attorneys-at-Law)
~ Kissinger, Henry A. (USA): Former Secretary of State; Chairman,
Kissinger Associates Inc.
~ Kravis, Henry R. (USA): Founding Partner, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts
& Co.
~ Kravis, Marie-Josee (USA): Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute
Inc.
~ Matthews, Jessica Tuchman (USA): President, Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace
~ McDonough, William J. (USA): President, Federal Reserve Bank
of New York
~ Ollila, Jorma (FIN): President and CEO, Nokia Corporation
~ Prestowitz, Clyde V. (USA): President, Economic Strategy Institute
~ Rhodes, William R. (USA): Vice Chairman, CitiBank, N.A.
~ Rockefeller, David (USA): Chairman, Chase Manhattan Bank International
Advisory Committee
~ Roll, Eric (GB): Senior Advisor, SBC Warburg Dillon Read
~ Rothschild, Evelyn de (GB): Chairman, N M Rothschild and Sons
~ Schremp, Jurgen E. (D): Chairman of the Board of Management,
Daimler Benz A.G.
~ Solana Madariaga, Javier (INT): Secretary General, NATO
~ Summers, Lawrence H. (USA): Deputy Secretary for International
Affairs, U.S. Department of the Treasury
~ Sutherland, Peter D. (IRL): Chairman, Goldman Sachs International;
Chairman, British Petroleum Company plc.
~ Thoman, G. Richard (USA): President and CEO, Xerox Corporation
~ Vink, Lodewijk J.R. de (USA): President and CEO, Warner Lambert
Company
~ Whitman, Christine Todd (USA): Governor of New Jersey
~ Wolfensohn, James D. (INT): President, the World Bank
~ Yost, Casimir A. (USA): Director, Institute for the Study of
Diplomacy, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University,
Washington
Convention
protests 2000
PROTESTERS SEEN MORE DANGEROUS
THAN BOMBS
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: The
Secret Service is checking rooftops. The FBI is monitoring the
Internet. And city police are getting ready to play cat and mouse
with protesters. Unnoticed by most Philadelphians, security preparations
for the Republican National Convention are moving into high gear
about 10 weeks before the July 31-Aug. 3 event. Thousands of
law enforcement officers will land in the city for an operation
made particularly complex by the likelihood of civil disobedience
and surprise protests. "Virtually every resource that the
FBI has available will be put into play," said Thomas J.
Harrington, the assistant special agent-in-charge in the FBI's
Philadelphia office. "After the Atlanta Olympics it was
bombings that were the main focus. . . . Now protesters have
become more of a focus." . . . Taking their cue from recent
protests in Washington, DC, and Seattle, police intend to be
ready to rush officers to potential flash points around the city
in "mobile field forces," said Deputy Commissioner
Robert Mitchell. They could travel in either marked or unmarked
vehicles, he said, but he gave no details . . . Some activists
have hinted at their plans on the Internet, where groups often
publicize and discuss their events using e-mail systems called
listservs. The FBI regularly reads the listservs, the agents
said. "E-mails are like leads," Harrington said. "We've
had a lot of experience with them, whether it's stock fraud or
child porn."
PHILADELPHIA [As of Aug
7]
ARRESTS
Total Arrests: 480 Released: 155 Still in Jail: 325 Felony cases:
36 Now on Hunger Strike: 149
MEDICAL
o 32 counts of excessive force, of which 7 are accounts of severe
hog ties.
o 2 officer's names and badge numbers come up repeatedly. One
is responsible for dragging a man in the nude, grabbing a protester's
penis, stepping on necks, jumping on a man's back with the help
of 2 other officers, slamming a face into a cell door. The other
officer's activities include saying "I'll fuck you up the
ass and make you my bitch," slamming a man against wall
repeatedly, punching a prisoner in the stomach, holding a prisoner's
face in the trash with his knee in the prisoner's neck, throwing
a prisoner against the wall.
o 4 cases of denial of access to medication: 1 person with HIV
denied for 2 days, received on third day. 1 person with migraine,
vomiting, denied all medicine including over the counter pain
meds. 1 hypoglycemic person denied access to adequate food.
o 4 counts of sexual abuse: dragging a man naked, wrenching a
man's penis, twisting a person's nipples, man subjected to random
search of genitals.
o 2 threats of rape from Commanding Officers.
A leader of the Ruckus Society
has been arrested while walking along a city street and charged
with with possession of an instrument of crime, obstruction of
justice, obstructing a highway, failure to disperse, recklessly
endangering another person and conspiracy. A judge set an extraordinary
$1 million bail for John Sellers as the mistreatment of protesters
at the GOP convention continues. The bail was later reduced to
$100,000. . NY TIMES: Protest leaders argued that the city was
bent on detaining defendants beyond the Democratic National Convention
next week in Los Angeles. But they vowed that demonstrations
planned for that convention would be stronger because of the
arrests in Philadelphia.
R2K NETWORK: Joseph Rogers,
a Quaker peace volunteer and President of the Mental Health Association
of Southeast Pennsylvania, was detained on Tuesday evening. Rogers
witnessed correctional officers tightening the handcuffs of protesters
until their hands became blue. When Rogers asked the guards to
loosen the cuffs, the guards retorted "This will teach them
a lesson, this will teach them to come to Philly." After
further protest, Rogers was removed from his cell and cuffed
from his left hand to his right ankle. "I told them I was
diabetic but they threw me to the ground so they could cuff me.
I was told to hop but my damaged knee prevented me. They dragged
me to my cell."
Malcolm Emerich, another recently released arrestee, stated,
"The arrest process was chaotic and no police could honestly
state where and when I was arrested. As a result, I had five
different officers, at five different times, falsely assert they
had seen me, and I am now facing six separate misdemeanor counts.
Because of the chaotic arrest procedure and the inability of
the police to ascertain where and why people were arrested, by
the time I left the jail, some protesters had gone up to 72 hours
without being arraigned. I met two protesters who had broken
fingers from their arrests. The jail conditions were nothing
short of Kafkaesque."
Guards, police, and administrators
continue to attack protesters in jail, seeking to demoralize
and divide. Recently released prisoners have reported eyewitness
accounts of widespread abuse that can only be described as torture.
There are numerous accounts of arrestees who have been isolated,
verbally abused, punched, kicked, thrown against walls, bloodied,
and dragged naked across floors, in one instance through a "trash
trough" containing refuse, spittle and urine.
There has been a reported sexual
assault by a female officer who pulled and twisted a prisoner's
penis. Seven witnesses saw one woman dragged naked and bleeding.
Diabetics, epileptics, and asthmatics continue to be denied medication.
Trauma and psychological stress are evident.
Paul Davis, from ACT UP Philadelphia, reports his eyewitness
accounts of brutality inside the Philadelphia jail. "I saw
a man handcuffed to his cell door in a crucifixion position.
He groaned and bellowed for 20 minutes that they were using metal
handcuffs to smash his hands. I heard women screaming and being
dragged along the floor. I saw a woman screaming in pain as a
police officer said, "You want more?! You want more?!"
Arrestees have now been held for over 60 hours without arraignment,
some without phone calls or contact with their lawyers. Detainees
report missing paperwork, and arraignments with incomplete or
slipshod records. Philadelphia continues to restrict R2K Legal
Committee lawyers, allowing only a total of three lawyers access
to all six detention sites, and hundreds of defendants.
Prosecutors have set unprecedented
high bail for non-violent civil disobedience. Most bails range
from $15,000 to $30,000, while others are much higher. Two individuals
have bail of $1,000,000, an amount typically reserved for serial
killers, not community organizers, non-violence training facilitators
artists and puppet makers charged with misdemeanors.
DAVEY D, FNV NEWSLETTER: Chuck
D, Professor Griff and Kyle James of the new group Confrontation
Camp brought some serious heat to the Republican Convention the
other night. They performed at a function outside the convention
hall that was hosted by the owners of Ben and Jerrys Ice Cream.
One of the tracks they performed was new cut called 'Son of a
Bush' which takes aim at Presidential candidate George W Bush.
I spoke to Chuck the day before the group's scheduled performance
. . . He noted that the group intended to repeat the chorus 'Son
of a Bush' a few hundred times and remind people the Texas Governor
is a 'serial killer.' . . . Chuck D also referred to this past
week's event in Philly as the Re-Pimp-lican Convention. This
had a lot to do with the part parading all these Black and Brown
faces on TV while keeping their platforms and policies in opposition
to many of our collective interests. Chuck noted that both political
parties leave a lot to be desired, but it was important for the
Hip Hop generation to stay informed and up to date.
*** ACT UP: Philadelphia demonstrators
are being held using bails as high as $450,000 -- this is unprecedented
in the history of US demonstrators. We are being held so that
we do not exercise our constitutional rights to freedom of speech
and assembly during the Republican Convention. People have been
picked off the streets while walking alone and have not been
heard from in days. Calls to their cell phones reach police officers
who try to lure the caller to meet them by posing as a Jefferson
Hospital staff member caring for the person, who has been "injured."
10:45 am Thursday--We just got reports that cops are holding
gloves soaked in pepper spray near (but not against) the eyes
of demonstrators to get them to agree to be arraigned -- they
are practicing jail solidarity to ensure the safety of all of
them . . . Some demonstrators have been held for up to 14 hours
hog-tied with handcuffs. There were screams from the area where
the men are being held of "torture! " and "medic!"
When the women called out to find out what was going on, they
were denied bathroom privileges.
*** INDEPENDENT MEDIA CENTER:
There are unconfirmed reports that two separate one million dollar
bails have been set for John Sellers, coordinator of the Ruckus
society, and a member of ACT UP . . . One man, who had stripped
naked to protect himself from being identified, was sexually
assaulted. There has been extremely limited access to one particular
cell block of men. An R2K lawyer was allowed to see them only
once, very briefly. In the brief contact, however, they indicated
that intense brutality had occurred . . . Impostors pretending
to be attorneys from R2K Legal have tried to convince detainees
to break jail solidarity . . . 150 men and women are still on
hunger strike . . . Two cars of undercover police patrolling
the area around the Friends Meeting House. Four plainclothes
cops jumped out of one car and began harassing two people who
had left the meeting house. The two fled on foot . . . The Quakers
have opened their doors for the night to anyone staying on for
jail solidarity. The police have surrounded the meeting house
and are threatening anyone in the area not in transit with arrest.
More than 60 activists are
camped outside the Roundhouse at 8th and Race streets, demanding
the release of over four hundred prisoners held there. The Roundhouse,
as the police headquarters is called, is an imperious cement
building with no corners, where protesters arrested on Tuesday
await arraignment in basement cells. At the park across the street
at 8th and Vine, protesters with tents and drums have joined
in solidarity with the prisoners inside who, in an effort to
be released together without being charged, have refused to give
their names to authorities . . . We have received reports that
police toilet-papered one of their own squad cars, photographed
it with the protesters in the background, and then moved into
the park as if to break up the campsite. However, the stunt seemed
designed simply to intimidate the group, as no arrests were made
. . .
At nightfall, spirits were high. Tents were going up and people
were grilling food while the drum circle kept a steady beat.
Jerry from Ashville, North Carolina, who has been arrested before
for protesting and was hospitalized for the beating he received
during questioning, said that "we've got work to do too.
As much fun as were having here, we've got to make sacrifices
to get our people out."
Arrested protesters have told
their legal contacts harrowing stories of beatings, solitary
confinement, refusal of bathroom privileges and denial of medication.
Prisoners suffering from problems like anxiety, asthma, hemophilia,
and injuries incurred during their arrests are not receiving
the treatment they need. Seven witnesses report seeing a woman
dragged down the hallway, naked and bleeding.
*** JAMES RIDGEWAY, VILLAGE VOICE: In a phone call at 1:30 this
morning, Rebecca Hill, a New York City graduate student, told
her stepmother, Penny Hill, that she was being held in a five-by-seven
cell with five others in Roundhouse. Hill said jailers have been
providing two cheese sandwiches and iced tea per day. Some of
her cell mates were badly hurt, Hill said, including one woman
with an open gash to the head. The woman had not received any
medical attention, Hill said. The women had allegedly been held
with no outside contact since Tuesday, when they were arrested.
They have not been arraigned, and no have charges been filed.
Hill said there is talk of bail being set at $15,000.
This morning the Philadelphia Inquirer, in two news columns,
congratulated the police for tireless restraint and vigilance,
noting that the cops had performed top-flight intelligence work
before the convention by eavesdropping on chat rooms and building
portfolios on activists. According to the Inquirer, what appeared
to out-of-town visitors as a virtual melee Tuesday in Center
City was in fact a carefully choreographed script . . . Buried
in the Inquirer story was this comment from an irate cop who
said the demonstrators were squirting liquids in the faces of
police officers: "You can't react, but it pisses you off,"
the officer said. "I hope they really nail a lot of those
guys who did that. And you know a lot of them aren't from around
here. They probably live with Mommy and Daddy in some $250,000
house in Connecticut and don't have anything better to do. I
just wish I could kick their asses."
MARTIAL LAW
DECLAN MCULLAGH, WIRED: US
Army is prepared to respond to disruptions ranging from civil
disobedience to nuclear explosions at the Republican National
Convention, a confidential government document says. The terrorism
response plan includes flying giant C-5 Galaxy cargo planes loaded
with military gear into Willow Grove Naval Air Station, about
25 miles outside the city, and assembling troops at three National
Guard armories near the downtown protest areas. "Preparedness
for nuclear, biological, chemical, and civil disturbance events,
as well as potential weather-related disaster events, must be
considered," says the Federal Emergency Management Agency
document, obtained by Wired News from a source who asked to remain
anonymous. A FEMA spokesman confirmed the authenticity of the
document, but said he did not have any information that a terrorist
attack was likely to happen during the GOP convention . . . The
document, created by FEMA to supplement its usual procedures,
says that the US First Army will, if necessary, execute Operation
Garden Plot to quell any serious civil disturbances.
Operation Garden Plot has long been an object of speculation
by conspiracy theorists, but the watchdog group Federation of
American Scientists describes it as the military's overall plan
for "support related to domestic civil disturbances"
that was last used during the Los Angeles riots in 1992. Critics
such as the American Civil Liberties Union have protested the
recent trend to use military troops for law enforcement purposes.
If a terrorist attack happens, FEMA is responsible for aiding
the FBI. But if the president declares martial law in response
to looting, vandalism, or civil unrest, FEMA works with the Defense
Department.
[NOTE: There is no basis for
martial law under the Constitution and no constitutional basis
for the role that FEMA intends to assume under such circumstances.
-- TPR]
R2K: Thousands of activists
protesting the "criminal injustice" system created
major non-violent disruptions around this city today, occupying
a dozen intersections, taking over many streets, and blocking
several buses transporting delegates to the Republican National
Convention. Throughout the day, at least 450 people were arrested
at various locations. Activists demanded abolition of the death
penalty and the prison-industrial complex, an end to police violence,
and freedom for award-winning death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal
and all political prisoners. The convention's evening session
was delayed because of the protests. Today's massive protests
were met by pepper-spraying, beatings with batons -leaving at
least one activist unconscious and hospitalized - and arrests
of people not committing civil disobedience who were perceived
by police to be "leaders." Observers noted that police
appeared to single out people of color for harsher treatment.
In addition, an hour before the protests began, police raided
the "Ministry of Puppetganda," a studio where puppets
were being assembled, trapping over 70 activists inside for about
four hours before arresting everyone.
UNITY 2000: One of the more
outrageous police actions of the day started before the actions
got underway. At 2 PM this afternoon scores of police officers
surrounded the building being used to create puppets and other
creative props. The Puppetistas call this location the home of
puppetganda and it was here that folks have been busy for weeks
creating the puppets and other items used in the demonstrations
over the past few days. Arriving with no search warrant, the
legal team forced the cops to go to court to get a warrant before
they could enter the building. While the legal process was unfolding,
the police kept a solid line of officers around, and on top of,
the building for several hours. And they took the 75 people in
the space into custody, keeping them in buses in the hot sun.
(Yes, it was yet one more very hot and humid day here.) Eventually
the police got the warrant and searched the place...supposedly
looking for weapons and for a plastic explosive called C4. According
to one of the lawyers, the last time C4 was used in Philadelphia
was when the police bombed the Move house and set a whole block
of houses on fire, killing a number of adults and children. As
you might imagine, there was no C4 and nothing else resembling
a weapon. The raid on the puppet space was pure intimidation.
FEEDBACK
|||| HIDDEN STOCK MARKET
CRASH?
A READER - The dollar
has lost up to 30% of its value over the last 6 months, as measured
against other major world currencies, especially the Euro. The
stock market has been steady to slowly rising, hovering near
8000-8500, plus or minus a few hundred points. Most Americans
look to the DJIA as a measure of prosperity, without considering
the value of the dollar. If we factor in the reduced value of
the dollar on the market, there is a very big drop in the real
value of the DJIA. Suppose an investor sold off his US stocks
today, at the same price as 6 months ago, for say $8,500. Factoring
in the reduced value of the dollar today, the $8,500 has only
about 70% of its buying power remaining, or $8,500 x .7 = $5,950.
This amounts to a silent market crash of considerable proportions:
today's DJIA market value, adjusted for inflation, is really
about 5600-5950 as compared to the value it had 6 months ago.
The plunge protection team can play this game forever, keeping
the market around 8000-8500, by intentionally devaluing the dollar
to make the market appear steady, when it is, in fact, crashing
at a considerable rate.
New
World Order
1912 President
Woodrow Wilson: "Since I entered politics, I have chiefly
had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest
men in the U. S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing,
are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that
there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful,
so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better
not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation
of it."
1921 Col Edward
House reorganizes the Institute of International Affairs into
the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
1922 Philip Kerr
in Foreign Affairs: "Obviously there is going to be no peace
or prosperity for mankind as long as [the earth] remains divided
into 50 or 60 independent states until some kind of international
system is created...The real problem today is that of the world
government."
1933 President
Franklin Roosevelt in a letter to Col. Edward Mandell House:
"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that
a financial element in the larger centers has owned the government
every since the days of Andrew Jackson..."
1945 President
Truman: "It will be just as easy for nations to get along
in a republic of the world as it is for us to get along in a
republic of the United States."
1954 Prince Bernhard
of the Netherlands establishes the Bilderberg conference at which
international politicians and bankers will meet secretly on an
annual basis.
1963 J. William
Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
"The case for government by elites is irrefutable...government
by the people is possible but highly improbable."
1973 The Trilateral
Commission is established by banke David Rockefeller. Zbigniew
Brzezinski is named director.
1979 Barry Goldwater:
"In my view The Trilateral Commission represents a skillful,
coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four
centers of power -- political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical.
All this is to be done in the interest of creating a more peaceful,
more productive world community. What the Trilateralists truly
intend is the creation of a worldwide economic power superior
to the political governments of the nation-states involved. They
believe the abundant materialism they propose to create will
overwhelm existing differences. As managers and creators of the
system they will rule the future."
1984 James McGregor
Burns : "The framers of the U.S. constitution have simply
been too shrewd for us. The have outwitted us. They designed
separate institutions that cannot be unified by mechanical linkages,
frail bridges, tinkering. If we are to 'turn the Founders upside
down' -- we must directly confront the constitutional structure
they erected."
1992 Former Citicorp
Chairman Walter Wriston : "A truly global economy will require
...compromises of national sovereignty...There is no escaping
the system."
1992 Strobe Talbott,
Time Magazine: "All countries are basically social arrangements...No
matter how permanent or even sacred they may seem at any one
time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary...Perhaps
national sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all...But
it has taken the events in our own wondrous and terrible century
to clinch the case for world government."
1993 Henry Kissinger
on NAFTA: "What Congress will have before it is not a conventional
trade agreement but the architecture of a new international system...a
first step toward a new world order."
1993, Council
on Foreign Relations president Leslie Gelb on The Charlie Rose
Show: "...you [Charlie Rose] had me on [before] to talk
about the New World Order. I talk about it all the time. It's
one world now. The Council [CFR] can find, nurture, and begin
to put people in the kinds of jobs this country needs. And that's
going to be one of the major enterprises of the Council under
me."
1993 Washington
Post ombudsman Richard Harwood does an op-ed piece about the
role of the CFR's media members: "Their membership is an
acknowledgment of their ascension into the American ruling class
[where] they do not merely analyze and interpret foreign policy
for the United States; they help make it." - Compiled by by D.L. Cuddy
Faking
evidence
AMERICA'S RECORD OF FAKING EVIDENCE
- VETERAN
INTELLIGENCE PROFESSIONALS FOR SANITY - The U.S. has a long history
of fabricating evidence to justify foreign adventures. Faked
evidence was a hallmark of post-World War II U.S. covert operations
in Latin America. In 1954, for example, it was instrumental in
overthrowing the Arbenz government in Guatemala. Arbenz, who
was suspected of having Communist leanings, had tried to make
the United Fruit Company comply with Guatemalan law. At President
Dwight D. Eisenhower s direction, the CIA organized and armed
a force of malcontent Guatemalans living in Nicaragua to invade
their home country. The invasion was explained and justified
when a cache of Soviet-made weapons planted by the CIA was discovered
on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. Washington alleged that the weapons
were intended to support an attempt by Arbenz to overthrow the
Nicaraguan government.
One of the more egregious
and embarrassing uses of fake material evidence occurred on the
eve of the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, when Alabama National
Guard B-26 bombers attacked a Cuban Air Force base in Havana.
When Cuba's UN ambassador protested, US Ambassador Adlai Stevenson
(himself misinformed by the White House) insisted that the attacking
planes were those of defecting Cuban Air Force pilots. Two of
the aircraft were shot down in Cuba, however, and others were
forced to land in Miami where they could be examined. When it
became clear that the planes were not Cuban, Washington s hand
was shown and Stevenson was in high dudgeon.
The war in Vietnam is
replete with examples of fabrication and/or misrepresentation
of intelligence to justify U.S. government policies and actions.
The best-known case, of course, is the infamous Tonkin Gulf incident
the one that did not happen but was used by President Lyndon
Johnson to strong-arm Congress into giving him carte blanche
for the war. Adding insult to injury, CIA current intelligence
analysts were forbidden to report accurately on what had happened
(and not happened) in the Tonkin Gulf in their daily publication
the next morning, on grounds that the President had already decided
to use the non-incident to justify launching the air war that
very day. The analysts were aghast when their seniors explained
that they had decided that they did not want to wear out their
welcome at the White House.
With William Casey at
the helm of the CIA during the Reagan presidency, the planting
of evidence to demonstrate that opponents of governments in Central
America were sponsored by the USSR reached new heights or depths.
The following are representative examples:
(a) In January 1981 four
dugout canoes were discovered on a Salvadoran beach. The U.S.
claimed that the boats had carried 100 armed Sandinista guerrillas
from Nicaragua to support leftist insurgents in El Salvador.
Neither weapons nor Nicaraguans traceable to the boats were ever
found, but Washington drew attention to the fact that the wood
from which the boats were made was not native to El Salvador.
(b) In February 1981,
the State Department issued a sensational white paper based on
alleged Salvadoran rebel documents. Authored by a young, eager-to-please
Foreign Service officer named John Glassman, the paper depicted
damning links between the insurgents, Nicaragua, Cuba, and the
Soviet Union. A smoking gun. Unfortunately for Glassman and the
Reagan administration, Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan
Kwitny got access to the same documents and found little resemblance
to what was contained in Glassman's paper. Glassman admitted
to Kwitny that he had made up quotes and guessed at figures for
the Soviet weapons supposedly coming to the Salvadoran insurgents.
(c) Certainly among the
most extraordinary attempts to plant evidence was the Barry Seal
affair, a complicated operation designed to incriminate the Nicaraguan
Sandinista government for international drug trafficking. The
operation began in 1982, when CIA Director Casey created the
position of National Intelligence Officer for Narcotics. Casey's
handpicked NIO wasted no time telling representatives of other
agencies that high priority was to be given to finding evidence
linking both Castro and the Sandinistas to the burgeoning cocaine
trade.
Coast Guard and Drug Enforcement
Agency officers protested that this might be counterproductive
since Cuba was the most cooperative government in the Caribbean
in the fight against drugs and there was no evidence showing
that the Nicaraguan government played any significant role. Never
mind, said the NIO, the task was to put black hats on our enemies.
In 1986 Barry Seal, a
former TWA pilot who had trained Nicaraguan Contra pilots in
the early eighties, was facing a long sentence after a federal
drug conviction in Florida. Seal made his way to the White House's
National Security Council to make the following proposition to
officials there. He would fly his own plane to Colombia and take
delivery of cocaine. He would then make an emergency landing
in Nicaragua and make it appear that Sandinista officials were
aiding him in drug trafficking. Seal made it clear that he would
expect help with his legal problems.
The Reagan White House
jumped at the offer. Seal's plane was flown to Wright-Patterson
Air Force Base, where it was fitted with secret cameras to enable
Seal to photograph Nicaraguan officials in the act of assisting
him with the boxes of cocaine.
The operation went as
planned. Seal flew to Colombia and then to Nicaragua where he
landed at a commercial airfield. There he was met by a Nicaraguan
named Federico Vaughan, who helped with the offloading and reloading
of boxes of cocaine and was duly photographed not very well,
it turned out, because the special cameras malfunctioned. Though
blurred and grainy, the photos were delivered to the White House,
and a triumphant Ronald Reagan went on national TV to show that
the Sandinistas were not only Communists but also criminals intent
on addicting America s youth.
Again, the Wall Street
Journal's Jonathan Kwitny played the role of skunk at the picnic,
pointing out substantial flaws in the concocted story. Vaughan,
who according to the script was an assistant to Nicaraguan Interior
Minister Tomas Borge, was shown not to be what he claimed. Indeed,
congressional investigators found that the telephone number called
by Seal to contact Vaughn belonged to the U.S. embassy in Managua.
It was yet another fiasco, and Seal paid for it with his life.
His Colombian drug suppliers were not amused when the Reagan
administration identified him publicly as a US undercover agent.
As he awaited trial on other narcotics charges in Louisiana,
Seal was ambushed and killed by four gunmen who left his body
riddled with 140 bullets.
Fabricated evidence also
played an important role in the first President Bush's attempt
to secure congressional and UN approval for the 1991 Gulf War.
(a) Few will forget the
heart-rending testimony before a congressional committee by the
sobbing 15 year-old Kuwaiti girl called Nayirah on October 10,
1990. No congressperson, no journalist took the trouble to probe
the identity of Nayirah, who was said to be an escapee from Kuwait
but was later revealed to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador
in Washington. With consummate skill, the story had been manufactured
out of whole cloth and the 15 year-old coached by the PR firm
Hill & Knowlton, which has a rich history of being imbedded
in Republican administrations. Similar unsubstantiated yarns
made their debut several weeks later at the UN, where a team
of seven witnesses, also coached by Hill & Knowlton, testified
about atrocities in Iraq. (It was later learned that the seven
had used false names.) And in an unprecedented move, the UN Security
Council allowed the U.S. to show a video created by Hill &
Knowlton.
All to good effect. The
PR campaign had the desired impact, and Congress voted to authorize
the use of force against Iraq on January 12, 1991. (The UN did
so on November 29, 1990.) Nayirah's true identity did not become
known until two years later.
Interestingly, the General
Manager of Hill & Knowlton's Washington, DC office at the
time was a woman named Victoria Clarke. She turned out to be
less successful in her next job, as Press Secretary for the re-election
campaign of President George Bush in 1992. But she is now back
in her element as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.
There was a corollary
fabrication that proved equally effective in garnering support
in Congress for the war resolution in 1991. The White House claimed
there were satellite photos showing Iraqi tanks and troops massing
on the borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, threatening to invade
Saudi Arabia. This fueled the campaign for war and frightened
the Saudis into agreeing to cooperate fully with U.S. military
forces.
On September 11, 1990,
President George H. W. Bush, addressing a joint session of Congress,
claimed 120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks have poured into
Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia. But an enterprising
journalist, Jean Heller, reported in the St. Petersburg Times
on January 6, 1991 (a bare ten days before the Gulf War began)
that commercial satellite photos taken on September 11, the day
the president spoke, showed no sign of a massive buildup of Iraqi
forces in Kuwait. When the Pentagon was asked to provide evidence
to support the president s claim, it refused to do so and continues
to refuse to this day.
Duke of Windsor
ROB EVANS AND DAVID HENCKE, GUARDIAN,
LONDON - President
Roosevelt personally ordered covert surveillance on the Duke
and Duchess of Windsor during the Second World War after receiving
intelligence that the duchess had been passing secrets to a top
Nazi with whom she was alleged to have had a tempestuous affair,
according to documents released to the Guardian by the FBI. The
damning dossier - released for the first time by the intelligence
agency - shows that the main reason why the Americans thought
the abdication of Edward VIII had taken place in 1936 was because
the duchess fervently supported the Nazi regime and this was
totally unacceptable to the then Conservative prime minister,
Stanley Baldwin. The official view has always been that he abdicated
to marry the person he loved but could not stay on the throne
because she was a divorcee. The papers show that the FBI was
told by a minor German royal that Wallis Simpson was having an
affair with Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was then German ambassador
to Britain, while she was seeing the Duke of Windsor. The minor
royal, Duke Charles Alexander of Wurttemberg, who later became
a Franciscan monk, said that "he knew definitely that von
Ribbentrop, while in England, sent the then Wallis Simpson 17
carnations every day. The 17 supposedly represented the number
of times they had slept together."
Saul Alinsky's
rules for radicals
From Rules for Radicals
Saul Alinsky
Always remember the first rule
of power tactics:
Power is not only what you
have but what the enemy thinks you have.
The second rule is: Never go
outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside
the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear,
and retreat.
The third rule is: Wherever
possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you
want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
The fourth rule is: Make the
enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with
this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian
church can live up to Christianity.
The fourth rule carries within
it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. It is
almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates
the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
The sixth rule is: A good tactic
is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having
a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.
The seventh rule is: A tactic
that drags on too long becomes a drag. Man can sustain militant
interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it
becomes a ritualistic commitment...
The eighth rule: Keep the pressure
on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events
of the period for your purpose.
The ninth rule: The threat
is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
The tenth rule: The major premise
for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain
a constant pressure upon the opposition.
The eleventh rule is: If you
push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into
its counter side; this is based on the principle that every positive
has its negative...
The twelfth rule: The price
of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. you cannot
risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with
your demand and saying "You're right--we don't know what
to do about this issue. Now you tell us."
The thirteenth rule: Pick the
target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Who's an
American?
1600s
Most of various tribes scattered throughout the continent didn't
know whether they were Americans as there was no one to tell
them
1774
Continental Congress leaves it to each state who shall be a voting
citizen
1776
Full citizenship to white male property owners, with six states
granting it to all white males whether they had property or not.
Some states had higher property qualifications than others and
some even required membership in a specified religion
1781-89
Articles of Confederation accept in principle that the central
government should regulate Indian affairs.
1789
Secretary of War is placed in charge of Indians
1790 Naturalization of foreign
'free white persons' permitted. Women carried the legal status
of their husbands.
1795 Naturalization denied
free whites unwilling to give up foreign titles of nobility
1812-21 Six western states
join the union with full white male suffrage. Four of the original
states abolish property requirements
1830 Indian Removal Act passes
Congress, calling for relocation of eastern Indians to a territory
west of the Mississippi River. Cherokees contest it in court,
and in 1832, the Supreme Court decides in their favor, but Andrew
Jackson ignores the decision. From 1831-39, the Five Civilized
tribes of the Southeast are relocated to the Indian Territory.
The Cherokee "Trail of Tears" takes place in 1838-39.
1853-56 United States acquires
174 million acres of Indian lands through 52 treaties, all of
which it will subsequently break
1856
North Carolina becomes the last state to abolish the property
requirement. Previous barred Catholics and non-Christians are
enfranchised and in a few states even immigrants not yet naturalized
are allowed to vote.
1857
Under Dred Scott decision, no black person can be a U.S. citizen
1858
Stephen Douglas debates Abraham Lincoln, arguing that "I
believe the government was made on the white basis. I believe
it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their
posterity for ever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship
to whit men. . . instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians,
and other inferior races." Lincoln disagrees.
1866
Civil Rights Act declares all persons born in the U.S. - except
Indians - to be natural citizens
1869
Territory of Wyoming grants women suffrage in state elections
1870
15th Amendment is passed: "The right of citizens of the
United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the
United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous
condition of servitude." South deals with the amendment
by instituting polls taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses
that limit the vote to the offspring of the formerly enfranchised.
Naturalization of black immigrants (but not Asians) is permitted
1871
Residents of the District of Columbia lose the right to vote
for mayor and city council as a territorial form of government
with appointed governor is installed
General Sheridan issues orders
forbidding western Indians to leave reservations without permission
of civilian agents.
1874
Supreme Court rules that it is not unconstitutional to deny women
the right to vote.
1875
Page Law bars entry of Chinese, Japanese, and "Mongolian"
prostitutes, felons, and contract laborers
1878
Chinese are ruled not eligible for naturalized citizenship
1882
Chinese Exclusion Law suspends immigration of laborers for ten
years
Late 19th century
Exclusion from naturalization of prostitutes, convicted felons,
lunatics, polygamists and persons likely to be a 'public charge'
Early 20th century
Exclusion from naturalization of anarchists, communists, and
the illiterate.
1902
Chinese exclusion is extended for another ten years.
1904
Chinese exclusion is made indefinite
1915
Eleven states have given women the right to vote
1918
Servicemen of Asian ancestry who served in World War I receive
right of naturalization
1919
American Indian soldiers and sailors receive citizenship.
1920
The 20th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, is ratified
1923
Asian Indians ruled not eligible for naturalized citizenship.
1924
Congress gives the right to vote to original Americans, the Indians
1940
Congress passes Nationalities Act granting citizenship to all
Native Americans without diluting tribal authority
1941
After declaring war on Japan, 10,000 Japanese-Americans along
Pacific Coast states and Hawaii are rounded up and interned in
Department of Justice camps.
1943
The Chinese Exclusion Act is repealed. The annual immigration
quota for Chinese is set at 105.
1945
The War Brides Act permits immigration of Asian spouses and children
of American servicemen in the war.
1946
Luce - Celler bill grants right of naturalization and small immigration
quotas to Asian Indians and Filipinos
1949
5000 highly educated Chinese in the U.S. granted refugee status
after China institutes a Communist government.
1952
One clause of the McCarran - Walter Act grants the right of naturalization
and a small immigration quota to Japanese.
1957
Utah becomes the last state to permit Indians to vote
1965
Immigration Law abolishes "national origins" as basis
for allocating immigration quotas to various countries - Asian
countries now on equal footing.
1974
Residents of the District of Columbia regain the right to vote
for mayor and city council lost over a century earlier but still
lack voting representation in Congress or real power over their
budget and criminal justice system.
Hoagies
Ralph Vigoda, PHILADELPHIA
- Augie DiCostanza's left hand is overflowing with Genoa salami,
which he is about to deposit on a 10-inch roll, already prostrate
on the counter in front of him, sliced open from top to bottom
and covered in sharp provolone. . . DiCostanza is the third generation
in a family that has been making the sandwich the same way in
Delaware County for nearly 80 years. That, the clan maintains,
puts it ahead of all the pretenders who say they first introduced
the world to the hoagie.
. . . But it's unlikely that
DiCostanza, or anyone else, will ever be able to prove his claim.
What about Al DePalma and the "hoggies" he first served
in his eatery at 20th and Mifflin Streets in 1931?
"If there was a way to
patent food, everything would have been OK," DiCostanza
said. "But you can't, so you're fighting that battle all
the time.
. . . "They were probably
the originators in Chester, but that's it," said Howard
Robboy. Robboy is in a position to know; he has printed two scholarly
papers on the hoagie - "The Socio-Cultural Context of an
Italian-American Dietary Item," and "The Submarine
Sandwich in America: Lexical Variations in a Cultural Context."
He also may be the only person
ever to testify in a courtroom as an expert hoagie witness. It
happened around 1973, when a sandwich man in Tucson who made
hoagies sued 7-Eleven after the corporation introduced a pre-wrapped
version. Robboy testified the word hoagie was likely first mentioned
in the 1930s and could not be copyrighted; the man lost.
Now 57 and a sociology professor
at the College of New Jersey near Trenton, Robboy was at Temple
University in the late 1960s when he turned in a term paper on
hoagie origins to his professor and eventual coauthor, Edwin
Eames. "I wondered why it had so many names," he said
recently. "Hoagie. Submarine. Hero. Grinder. Poor boy. I
mean, grilled cheese is grilled cheese wherever you go."
. . . Could an Irishman have
been behind the hoagie name? Only if you believe that a man named
Hogan asked an Italian coworker on Hog Island if his wife would
bring one of the big sandwiches for him. The Italian told his
wife to "make one for Hogan," and the name quickly
became attached to the sandwich. It's a short jump from "hogans"
to "hoagies."
Robboy gives much more credence
to the Al DePalma yarn, which goes like this: In 1928 (or 1929),
DePalma was walking down Broad Street with a friend when two
men approached holding huge sandwiches. "You have to be
a hog to eat one of those," the friend said. A few years
later, DePalma remembered the men when he opened a luncheonette.
He called his Italian specialty "hoggies," and himself
"King of the Hoggies." Soon, shops all over the city
were selling hoggies. THE
MISSING HOAGIE LINK
Marshall
Island bomb tests
MARSHALL ISLANDS EMBASSY - 1954: Despite weather reports showing
that winds are blowing in the direction of inhabited islands,
the March 1 Bravo hydrogen bomb test is detonated at Bikini.
At 15 megatons, it is 1,000 times the strength of the Hiroshima
bomb. Within hours a gritty, white ash is enveloping islanders
on Rongelap and Ailinginae Atolls . . . Those exposed experience
nausea, vomiting and itching skin and eyes. March 3 Rongelap
islanders are evacuated 48 hours later, and Utrik is evacuated
72 hours after Bravo. Both groups are taken to Kwajalein for
observation. Skin burns on the heavily exposed people begin to
develop, and later their hair falls out. The U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission issues a statement to the press calling Bravo a "routine
atomic test," and stating that some Americans and Marshallese
were "unexpectedly exposed to some radioactivity. There
were no burns. All were reported well." . . .
April - A Project 4.1 memo
recommends that the exposed Rongelap people should have "no
exposure for (the) rest of (their) natural lives." . . .
1956: A total of 17 nuclear
tests, including several hydrogen bombs, are detonated. November
U.S. officials give the Enewetak Islanders living on Ujelang
$25,000 cash and a $150,000 trust fund as compensation. Bikini
Islanders living on Kili are given $25,000 cash and a $300,000
trust fund (yielding about $15 per person annually). Throughout
the 1950s, both the Bikinians and Enewetakese face food shortages
and repeated bouts of near starvation, as their "temporary"
islands prove difficult and inhospitable . . .
1963: The first thyroid tumors
begin appearing among the Rongelap people exposed to the Bravo
test in 1954. Also, a higher than normal incidence of growth
retardation among young Rongelap Islanders is noted by U.S. doctors
. . .
1973: AEC draft report, not
publicly released, concludes that Bravo fallout may have contaminated
as many as 18 atolls and islands . . .
1975: During regular monitoring
at Bikini, radiological tests show "higher levels of radioactivity
than originally thought" and it "appears to be hotter
or questionable as to safety," states a Department of Interior
official . . . AEC surveys suggest some Bikini ground wells are
too radioactive for safe use, and that the consumption of pandanus,
breadfruit and coconut crabs needs to be prohibited.
1977: A Department of Energy
study reports: "All living patterns involving Bikini Island
exceed Federal (radiation) guidelines for 30 year population
doses." About 100 Bikinians continue living on Bikini .
. .
1978: Interior Department officials
describe the 75 percent increase in radioactive cesium found
in the Bikini people as "incredible." Plans are announced
to move the people within 90 days.
1994: U.S. Rep. George Miller
writes to President Bill Clinton: "The Committee has been
informed that even if only 50 percent of the survey results are
verified...the incidence rate is still significantly higher,
by a factor of 100, than the rate of thyroid cancer found anywhere
else in the world." . . . Miller and Ron de Lugo write to
Dr. Ruth Faden, chairperson of the Advisory Committee on Human
Radiation Experiments: "There is no doubt that the AEC intentionally
returned (Marshallese) to islands which it considered to be "by
far the most contaminated places in the world,' but which it
told the people were safe. Nor is there any doubt that the AEC,
through the Brookhaven National Laboratory, then planned and
conducted test after test on these people to study their bodies'
reaction to life in that contaminated environment." . .
.
1950s
KEN RINGLE WASHINGTON POST - Aging baby boomers have fostered the
fiction that nothing much was happening in America in the 1950s,
[Bob Newhart] says, "but I thought a lot was happening.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, comedy made an abrupt right
turn. It wasn't just me. There was Shelley [Berman], Lenny [Bruce]
and Mort [Sahl] and Mike Nichols and Elaine May . . . all pretty
far out. And way out in the stratosphere there was Jonathan Winters."
There was a growing cerebral
vein, in fact, in the entire mass culture. Dave Brubeck was wowing
college campuses with jazz influenced by Bach fugues. Dave Garroway
and Jack Paar turned the "Today" and "Tonight"
shows into thoughtful and provocative television talk shows despite
a healthy undercurrent of wackiness. The emerging campaign of
John F. Kennedy was putting the sort of glamorous and sophisticated
face on politics that Audrey Hepburn was putting on movies. .
.
With college populations exploding
in the wake of World War II, Newhart says, "I think all
that . . . had no relevance to college kids. So they would get
out their records and get some pizza and beer and play our albums.
And we became their nightclubs." "We" were what
were known at the time as the "sick comedians" -- drier
young wits who won fame for their hip irreverence and mordant
humor. . . "We were called 'sick' because of the routines.
One of mine ["Lincoln at Gettysburg"] dealt with a
revered dead president. Shelley dealt with some would-be suicides
on a ledge. Mike and Elaine did people making funeral arrangements.
. . . It was just our way of looking at life. Or maybe dealing
with it."
Lennie Bruce
PAUL KRASSNER IN LA TIMES - In December 1962, Bruce was performing
at the Gate of Horn in Chicago. He had been reading a study of
anti-Semitism by Jean-Paul Sartre, and he was intrigued by the
implications of a statement by Adolf Eichmann, orchestrator of
the Holocaust, that he would have been "not only a scoundrel,
but a despicable pig" if he hadn't carried out Hitler's
orders. Bruce wrote a piece for The Realist, "Letter From
a Soldier's Wife" -- namely, Mrs. Eichmann -- pleading for
compassion to spare her husband's life. Now, on stage, he credited
Thomas Merton's poem about the Holocaust, and requested that
all the lights go off except one dim blue spot. Then he began
what was perhaps his most audacious satire, speaking with a German
accent: "My name is Adolf Eichmann. And the Jews came every
day to what they thought would be fun in the showers. People
say I should have been hung. 'Nein.' Do you recognize the whore
in the middle of you -- that you would have done the same if
you were there yourselves? My defense: I was a soldier. I saw
the end of a conscientious day's effort. I watched through the
portholes. I saw every Jew burned and turned into soap. Do you
people think yourselves better because you burned your enemies
at long distance with missiles without ever seeing what you had
done to them? Hiroshima, 'auf Wiedersehen.' [German accent ends.]
If we would have lost the war, they would have strung [President]
Truman up by the balls ...."
Bruce was arrested on obscenity
charges that night. One of the items in the police report complained:
"Then talking about the war he stated, 'If we would have
lost the war, they would have strung Truman up by the balls."
The head of the vice squad warned the manager of the Gate of
Horn: "If this man ever uses a four-letter word in this
club again, I'm going to pinch you and everyone in here. If he
ever speaks against religion, I'm going to pinch you and everyone
in here. Do you understand? You've had good people here. But
he mocks the pope -- and I'm speaking as a Catholic -- I'm here
to tell you your license is in danger. We're going to have someone
here watching every show." Chicago had the largest number
of Roman Catholics of any archdiocese in the country. Bruce's
jury consisted entirely of Catholics. The judge was Catholic.
The prosecutor and his assistant were Catholic. On Ash Wednesday,
the judge removed the spot of ash from his forehead and ordered
the bailiff to instruct all the others to do likewise. The sight
of a judge, two prosecutors and 12 jurors, every one with a spot
of ash on their foreheads, had the surrealistic flavor of a wild
Brucean image. . .
Jimmy
Carter
WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE -
Carter announced in his January 1980 State of the Union Address
a new US policy that came to be known as the Carter Doctrine.
He warned: "An attempt by an outside force to gain control
of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on
the vital interests of the United States of America, and such
an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including
military force." He went on to explain that this policy
was necessitated by the "overwhelming dependence of Western
nations on vital oil supplies from the Middle East."
It is essentially a more aggressive
version of this same doctrine-the US right to use military force
to control Persian Gulf oil-that is now being implemented by
the Bush administration in its preparations for an unprovoked
war to conquer and occupy Iraq. Carter first established the
military means for carrying out this kind of aggression, founding
the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force and reorganizing the US
military for intervention in the Persian Gulf. By the time Reagan
took office in 1981, this intervention force had already grown
to include more than 200,000 troops.
. . . In Central America, the
Carter administration came up with a unique method for limiting
direct security assistance to right-wing dictatorships, while
assuring that they remained armed to the teeth for the purpose
of suppressing popular revolt. Israel was recruited to fill the
gap, supplying Galil assault rifles and Uzi submachine guns to
substitute for American-made M16s. Israeli military advisers
were likewise dispatched to the region, while US aid to Israel
rose dramatically.
. . . The Carter administration
steadily increased aid to the regime in El Salvador, where in
1980-Carter's last year in the White House-the death toll reached
an estimated 13,000, the vast majority peasants massacred by
the army and police.
At home, Carter responded to
a growing economic crisis with policies aimed at slashing social
services and attacking the power of the working class. The blueprint
for the Reagan administration's smashing of the air traffic controllers'
union, PATCO, and replacing striking controllers with scabs was
drawn up by the Carter administration. This action signaled a
nationwide onslaught against the working class by the employers
and the government.
Prior to Bush's invocation
of the Taft-Hartley law against the West Coast longshoremen earlier
this week, Carter was the last president to use this strike-breaking
legislation. He declared an emergency under Taft-Hartley in an
unsuccessful attempt to force coal miners back to work and break
their 1977-78 national strike.
The widening of social inequality
in the US and internationally accelerated under the Carter administration,
which tapped Chase Manhattan banker Paul Volcker to serve as
chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board in 1979. Volcker announced
that "a decline in real income" was necessary to fight
inflation, and implemented a high interest rate policy that saw
the prime rate hit 20 percent. The result was a deep recession
in which less profitable sections of industry failed and layoffs
mounted. These policies set into motion what became a vast transfer
of wealth from the working class to the financial aristocracy.
The economic crisis and the
attacks on working people eroded the Democrats' electoral support,
allowing Ronald Reagan to defeat Carter and drive both foreign
and domestic policy further along the rightward trajectory that
has continued until this day.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/oct2002/cart-o12.shtml
CIA
pschological warfare
[From a
CIA instruction manual, "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla
Warfare," written while George Bush Sr. was head of the
agency]
"In effect,
the human being should be considered the priority objective in
a political war. . . Once his mind has been reached, the 'political
animal' has been defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets."
"It is
appropriate . . . to guide the discussion of a group to cover
a number of points and to reach a correct conclusion. [The people]
should feel it was their free and own decision."
"Always
be prepared with simple slogans in order to explain to the people,
whether in intentional form or by chance, the reason for the
weapons. . . The weapons will be for winning freedom; they are
for you [or] our weapons are, in truth, the weapons of the people,
yours."
"In places
and situations wherever possible ... explain the operation of
weapons to the youths and young men."
"Established
citizens ... will be recruited initially as 'Social Crusaders'
in typically 'innocuous' movements in the area of operations.
When their 'involvement' with the clandestine organization is
revealed to them, this supplies the psychological pressure to
use them as 'inside cadres' in groups to which they already belong
or of which they can be members."
"Bring
about uprisings or shootings, which will cause the death of one
or more persons, who would become the martyrs ... in order to
create greater conflicts."
[Uncovered
by Heather
Wokusch]
Bertelsmann
& the Nazis
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER - After four
years of research, the complete findings of an independent commission
that focuses on the links of Bertelsmann, Germany's global media
giant, to Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime and the Third Reich will
be unveiled in a book that is due out in Germany. While some
of the company's ties to Hitler and the Third Reich have been
revealed previously, new revelations emerged, including that
Bertelsmann used Jewish slave laborers in at least one of its
printing plants during World War II. The findings of the Independent
Historical Commission, headed by historian Saul Friedlaender,
will be published in the book "Bertelsmann in the Third
Reich," which also reveals that Bertelsmann published propaganda
material for Hitler's Nazi regime in the 1930s and '40s, Bertlesmann
founder Heinrich Mohn was a member of an SS sponsors organization,
and the company published numerous books sympathetic to the Nazi
regime.
The book also decries as "a legend that can not be sustained"
the oft-repeated story by Bertelsmann in official reports on
its corporate history that Bertelsmann's closure by the German
government in 1944 was because of the company's opposition to
Hitler. On Monday, Bertelsmann CEO Gunter Thielen expressed his
"sincere regret" for the company's wartime activities
and the "inaccuracies ... of our previous corporate history.
Indonesia
THE NATIONAL
SECURITY ARCHIVE at George Washington University has published
previously secret archival documents confirming for the first
time that the Indonesian government launched its bloody invasion
of Portuguese East Timor in December 1975 with the concurrence
of President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Since then, the Suharto regime that sponsored the invasion has
disintegrated, and East Timor has achieved independence, but
as many as 200,000 Timorese died during the twenty-five year
occupation. Twenty-six years ago, President Gerald Ford and Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger met with Indonesian President Suharto
during a brief stopover in Jakarta while they were flying back
from Beijing. Aware that Suharto had plans to invade East Timor,
and that the invasion was legally problematic - in part because
of Indonesia's use of U.S. military equipment that Congress had
approved only for self-defense - Ford and Kissinger wanted to
ensure that Suharto acted only after they had returned to U.S.
territory. The invasion took place on December 7, 1975, the day
after their departure, resulting in the quarter-century long
violent and bloody Indonesian occupation of East Timor. Henry
Kissinger has consistently denied that any substantive discussion
of East Timor took place during the meeting with Suharto, but
a newly declassified State Department telegram from December
1975 confirms that such a discussion took place and that Ford
and Kissinger advised Suharto that "it is important that
whatever you do succeeds quickly." Two key documents released
today were declassified by the Gerald R. Ford Library at the
request of the National Security Archive; Archive staffers located
other documents at the National Archives. MORE
Gulf war
HIGHWAYS
OF DEATH
[THIS IS THE
ELEVENTH anniversary of America's launching of the Gulf War in
which only 125 American soldiers were killed, but several hundred
thousand Iraqis died - over a million if you include the embargo
years that followed. The war was - until Afghanistan - the most
censored and skillfully propagandized military operation in our
history. A whole generation of Americans would learn that wars
meant that only the other guys got killed. And killed they did.
Drastically downplayed in media coverage and missing from the
historical accounts, for example, is what happened to retreating
Iraqi soldiers on the "Highways of Death." ]
JOYCE CHEDIAC
- The "highways of death" are the two Kuwaiti roadways,
littered with remains of 2,000 mangled Iraqi military vehicles,
and the charred and dismembered bodies of tens of thousands of
Iraqi soldiers, who were withdrawing from Kuwait on February
26th and 27th 1991 in compliance with UN resolutions. U.S. planes
trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front,
and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams
for hours. "It was like shooting fish in a barrel,"
said one U.S. pilot . . . On the inland highway to Basra is mile
after mile of burned, smashed, shattered vehicles of every description
- tanks, armored cars, trucks, autos, fire trucks, according
to the March 18, 1991, Time magazine. On the sixty miles of coastal
highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched
skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the
sun, says the Los Angeles Times of March 11, 1991. While 450
people survived the inland road bombing to surrender, this was
not the case with the 60 miles of the coastal road. There for
60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield
is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with
shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. The cabs of
trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground,
and it's impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields
were melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel. "Even
in Vietnam I didn't see anything like this. It's pathetic,"
said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. This one-sided
carnage, this racist mass murder of Arab people, occurred while
White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater promised that the U.S.
and its coalition partners would not attack Iraqi forces leaving
Kuwait. This is surely one of the most heinous war crimes in
contemporary history.
SHERYL GAY STOLBERG,
NY TIMES - After years of denying any link between illness and
service in the Persian Gulf war, military officials said today
that veterans of the conflict were nearly twice as likely as
other soldiers to suffer the fatal neurological illness known
as Lou Gehrig's disease. The joint announcement by the Defense
and Veterans Affairs Departments was based on the preliminary
findings of a study of more than 2.5 million veterans. Officials
said they would immediately offer disability and survivor benefits
to affected patients and families. Forty cases have been identified
so far . . . The authors did not offer theories on why gulf war
veterans would be at increased risk. Nor did they say what the
odds were that the finding occurred by chance . . . Veterans'
groups, who have long argued that their members are afflicted
by unexplained illnesses collectively called Gulf War syndrome,
were ecstatic. So were patients' advocates, who said the study
might yield important clues about the cause of the disease. More
than 100,000 American service members sent to the region in 1990
and 1991 have reported a range of maladies including fatigue,
muscle pain, memory loss and sleep disorders. But studies have
found no definitive links, although several have suggested MORE
George Washington
George
Washington's dentures
Thanks to the
Washington history network we can toss away one of America's
first urban legends, namely that George Washington had wooden
false teeth. Here is an excerpt from FAQ on the issue from the
George Washington papers folks at UVA:
Q: Did George
Washington have wooden teeth?
A: He had several sets of false teeth over the years, but they
were not made of wood. For at least one set, Washington's dentist,
Dr. John Greenwood, used a cow's tooth, one of Washington's teeth,
hippopotamus ivory, metal and springs. The teeth fit poorly.
Q: Where are
George Washington's false teeth? A: One set is in the Baltimore
College of Dental Surgery, one set in possession of Joseph R.
Greenwood of New York, and another set at Mount Vernon.
[According
to one expert, the wooden teeth myth may have stemmed from the
discoloration of ivory teeth.]
NIXON
RECOVERED HISTORY
[The Washington Post, which
helped with the rehabilitation of Richard Nixon, is finding tapes
that reveal his deep prejudices, a bit hard to handle. The first
story it downplayed and now it has turned the matter over to
one of its resident humorists because we all know it was just
in good clean fun, right? Here are some of Nixon's comments reported
by Gene Weingarten]
RICHARD NIXON TO BOB HALDEMAN
- You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that
are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is
the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them?
I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists.
RICHARD NIXON TO RAYMOND SHAFER
[chair of a commission investigating drug policy] - You're enough
of a pro to know that for you to come out with something that
would run counter to what the Congress feels and what the country
feels, and what we're planning to do, would make your commission
just look bad as hell.
[The commission recommended
decriminalization of marijuana anyway]
RICHARD NIXON TO HALDEMAN AND
ERLICHMAN - [Northern California has gotten so "faggy"
that ] I won't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco .
. . Archie [Bunker] is sitting here with his hippie son-in-law,
married to the screwball daughter. . . . The son-in-law apparently
goes both ways . . . [Another character in the show is] obviously
queer. He wears an ascot, and so forth . . . The point that I
make is that, goddamn it, I do not think that you glorify on
public television homosexuality. You don't glorify it, John,
anymore than you glorify, uh, whores . . . I don't want to see
this country to go that way. You know what happened to the Greeks.
Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we
all know that, so was Socrates . . . Do you know what happened
to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags. . . . You
know what happened to the popes? It's all right that popes were
laying the nuns . . . That's been going on for years, centuries,
but when the popes, when the Catholic Church went to hell in,
I don't know, three or four centuries ago, it was homosexual.
. . . Now, that's what happened to Britain, it happened earlier
to France. And let's look at the strong societies. The Russians.
Goddamn it, they root them out, they don't let 'em hang around
at all. You know what I mean? I don't know what they do with
them . . . "Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope?
Hell no. Not if they can catch it, they send them up. You see,
homosexuality, dope, uh, immorality in general: These are the
enemies of strong societies. That's why the Communists and the
left-wingers are pushing it. They're trying to destroy us.
MORE
||| STRANGELY excised from the
major media reports on the latest edition of the Nixon tapes
are RMN's comments on what he alleged was Jewish control of major
media such as the New York Times and Washington Post. Having
heard the excerpts on TV, we searched for them in these papers
and elsewhere but were unable to find them.
Funny, you'd think the Times
and the Post would like the local angle. Perhaps they were nervous
about raising the topic, but more likely it was a reflection
of the media's increasingly obsequious attitude towards power
in all its forms, even that which it has previously exposed.
And it helps to remember that Nixon's key foreign policy advisor,
Henry Kissinger, was one of the major speakers at Katherine Graham's
funeral. I learned about Kissinger's special status at the Post
almost a decade ago, when my last piece ever to get into the
paper was placed, so an editor told me, in the "Kissinger
slot" in the Sunday Outlook section, i.e. column one.
It is one thing to report that
Nixon was ready to nuke the Vietnamese - that, after all, was
merely a policy option - and quite another to reveal that he
was virulently anti-Jewish, anti-black and anti-gay. After all
you don't want people to get the idea that the American establishment
puts such sorts in the White House.
Thus the coverage of the tapes
was drastically sanitized. Reuters, while not reporting Nixon's
anti-Jewish comments, did a better job than most outlets.
||| REUTERS: President Richard
Nixon sought to paint the would-be assassin of White House hopeful
George Wallace in 1972 as a backer of rival Democratic candidates,
audio tapes showed. Nixon, a Republican, was maneuvering at the
time - before the Watergate scandal broke - to beat back a Democratic
challenge in the November 1972 presidential elections.
"Look, can we play the game
a little smart for a change?" he barked at aides on May
15, 1972, hours after the assassination attempt by loner Arthur
Bremer left Wallace paralyzed below the waist. Wallace, who died
in 1998, was a long-time Alabama governor and avowed segregationist
who entered the 1972 Democratic presidential primaries . . .
In the conversation with top
aides, Nixon suggested that the Democrats had somehow smeared
U.S. conservatives by pinning on the "right wing,"
as he put it, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
A commission chaired by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren
concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine
who once defected to the Soviet Union, acted alone in killing
Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. "And it was the greatest
hoax that has ever been perpetuated," Nixon said without
making clear why he considered the Warren Commission findings
a sham.
Turning back to the wounding
of Wallace in Laurel, Maryland, he added: "And I respectfully
suggest, can we pin this on one of theirs?" Nixon was speaking
to H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, then his chief of staff, and
Charles Colson, then a special counsel to the president. "Put
that out! Just say he (the shooter) was a supporter of McGovern
and Kennedy," Nixon ordered, referring to Democrats George
McGovern of South Dakota, who lost the 1972 election in a landslide
to the incumbent, and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who went
on to make a brief White House run in 1980. "Now, just put
that out!" Nixon said, his voice rising for emphasis. "Just
say you have it on unmistakable evidence." Haldeman interrupts
Nixon to say that the suspect had been arrested previously "so
there ought to be a record on him." "Screw the record!"
Nixon shot back. "Just say he was a supporter of that nut,
and put it out." The president did not make clear whom he
meant by that "nut." "Just say we have an authenticated
report," he went on.
MORE
THOUGHTS OF RICHARD NIXON
"We're going to [place]
more of those little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls at $2,400
a family. . . . I have the greatest affection for them, but I
know they're not going to make it for 500 years."
"The Mexicans are a different
cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time, they steal;
they're dishonest. They do have a concept of family life. They
don't live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like."
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black:
"Senile old bastard."
Supreme Court Justice Thurgood
Marshall: "An old fool and a black fool."
Supreme Court Justice William
J. Brennan: "A jackass Catholic."
"I don't mind the homosexuality;
I understand it. . . . Nevertheless, goddamn, I don't think you
glorify it on public television-homosexuality -even more than
you glorify whores. We all know we have weaknesses. But goddamn
it, what do you think that does to kids?"
"You know what happened
to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags."
"Let's look at the strong
societies. The Russians, goddamn, they root 'em [homosexuals]
out. They don't let 'em around at all. I don't know what they
do with them. Look at this country. You think the Russians allow
dope? Homosexuality, dope, immorality are the enemies of strong
societies."
"You know what happened
to the popes? They [had sex with] the nuns. That's been goin'
on for years, centuries. But the Catholic Church went to hell
three or four hundred years ago. It was homosexual, and it had
to be cleaned out. That's what happened to Britain. It happened
earlier to France."
"The upper class in San
Francisco is that way. The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from
time to time . . . It is the most faggy goddamned thing you could
ever imagine with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands
with anybody from San Francisco."
"We have to screw the networks.
They've got to be screwed. They're terrible people. They're a
bunch of bastards. I don't want you [Attorney General John Mitchell]
to do anything right now. But I want you to screw them and screw
them good."
"Goddamn that Peace Corps!
Goddamn that Peace Corps! What in the hell are they doing there
[the Marianas]? I don't care where the hell they send them. Send
them to the Congo, any place, but get them the hell out of that
region. . . . They're protesters! They're against the United
States. . . . Go get them the hell out of the Marianas!"
Jews: "Generally, you can't
trust the bastards."
"I want to be sure he is
a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he's told, that
every income tax return I want to see I see, that he will go
after our enemies and not go after our friends." - Nixon
describing his ideal candidate for IRS commissioner in 1971
"You know what happened
to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle
was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates. . . . Do you know
what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were
fags. . . You know what happened to the popes? It's all right
that popes were laying the nuns. That's been going on for years-centuries."
- Nixon in May 1971
"You see: homosexuality,
dope, immorality in general - these are the enemies of strong
societies. That's why the communists and the left-wingers are
pushing the stuff; they're trying to destroy us." - Nixon
in May 1971
"You know, it's a funny
thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing
marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews,
Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most
of them are psychiatrists." - Nixon to H. R. (Bob) Haldeman
in May 1971
"I'd rather use the nuclear
bomb." - Nixon to Kissinger, a few weeks before he ordered
a major escalation of the Vietnam War in 1972
"You're so goddamned concerned
about the civilians, and I don't give a damn. I don't care."
- Nixon to Kissinger in 1972, admonishing his aide about concerns
over killing Vietnamese civilians
"Look, people get drunk
... People chase girls. And the point is, it's a hell of a lot
better for them to get drunk than to take drugs. It's better
to chase girls than boys." - Nixon on a graphic account
of Ambassador Arthur Watson's groping stewardesses while drunk
on a March 1972 flight to Washington
ROBERT
MCNAMARA
ROBERT MCNAMARA ON FILM: DESSON HOWE, WASHINGTON POST -
Morris, who attended a question-and-answer conference after the
movie today, said he was surprised when McNamara, in the first
five minutes of the first taped interview, outlined his active
participation in World War II as a war planner. As a lieutenant
colonel under Gen. Curtis LeMay, he was "part of the mechanism"
behind the firebombing of 67 Japanese cities before the atomic
bombs were dropped. McNamara declares that both men "were
behaving as war criminals" and, had the Americans lost the
war, likely would have been tried as such. McNamara's comments
are accompanied by compelling aerial footage of those devastating
bombings.
JUDGE
CRATER
WILLIAM BRYK, NY PRESS - Every Aug. 6 for more than three
decades, an attractive older woman entered a Greenwich Village
bar, a place that had been a restaurant back in the Jazz Age.
She sat alone in a booth and ordered two cocktails. She raised
one, murmured, "Good luck, Joe, wherever you are."
She drank it slowly, rose and walked out, leaving the other drink
untouched. Thus Stella Crater mourned her vanished husband, Justice
Joseph Force Crater, who became famous on Aug. 6, 1930, when
he, as the Daily News later said, "disappeared efficiently,
completely, and forever."
. . . On Tuesday, he worked in his chambers at the New York courthouse
at 60 Centre St. On the morning of Aug. 6, he spent two hours
going through the files in his chambers. He had his personal
assistant, Joseph Mara, cash two checks for him amounting to
$5150, worth roughly $50,000 in today's money. He and Mara went
by cab to the Crater apartment with locked briefcases containing
five large portfolios, which Mara left on a chair. The judge
then dismissed Mara for the day.
That evening, Crater bought
a ticket for that night's performance of a new hit comedy, Dancing
Partners, at the Belasco Theater on W. 44th St. He had dinner
nearby at Billy Haas's chophouse, with two friends, William Klein,
a lawyer specializing in entertainment law, and Klein's girlfriend,
Sally Lou Ritz, a showgirl generally considered one fine-looking
babe. Afterward, the trio stood on the sidewalk chatting and
laughing. Although the curtain had gone up on Dancing Partners,
Crater seemed unhurried. Between 9 and 9:15, he hailed a passing
cab. Klein later recalled it was tan. Crater waved his Panama
out the window to his friends.
On the record, no one saw Joe
Crater again.
Someone called for the ticket
at the Belasco's box office. No one knows if that person was
Crater.
MOTHERS
DAY
WOMEN'S HISTORY - In 1870,
Julia Ward Howe took on a new issue and a new cause. Distressed
by her experience of the realities of war, determined that peace
was one of the two most important causes of the world (the other
being equality in its many forms) and seeing war arise again
in the world in the Franco-Prussian War, she called in 1870 for
women to rise up and oppose war in all its forms. She wanted
women to come together across national lines, to recognize what
we hold in common above what divides us, and commit to finding
peaceful resolutions to conflicts. She issued a Declaration,
hoping to gather together women in a congress of action.
She failed in her attempt
to get formal recognition of a Mother's Day for Peace. Her idea
was influenced by Anna Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker
who had attempted starting in 1858 to improve sanitation through
what she called Mothers' Work Days. She organized women throughout
the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both
sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate
neighbors.
Anna Jarvis' daughter,
also named Anna Jarvis, would of course have known of her mother's
work, and the work of Julia Ward Howe. Much later, when her mother
died, this second Anna Jarvis started her own crusade to found
a memorial day for women. The first such Mother's Day was celebrated
in West Virginia in 1907 in the church where the elder Anna Jarvis
had taught Sunday School. And from there the custom caught on
- spreading eventually to 45 states. Finally the holiday was
declared officially by states beginning in 1912, and in 1914
the President, Woodrow Wilson, declared the first national Mother's
Day.
HARD START FOR MOTHER'S DAY
BILL KAUFFMAN,
LEW ROCKWELL - Mother's Day was the brainchild of Anna Jarvis,
a Philadelphia woman stricken with grief over the death of her
saintly mother in May 1905. . . In May 1908, freshman Senator
Elmer Burkett (R-Nebraska) put Miss Jarvis's proposal before
his colleagues. It was not a Hallmark moment. . .
Senator
Burkett's mawkish but sincere discourse was met by a hail of
mockery. The neophyte legislator was astonished by the ridicule
heaped upon his innocent proposal. "I did not expect that
a single objection would be offered," he averred; he was
offended to hear "light made of it" by his gray colleagues.
Senator
John Kean (R-NJ) immediately moved to amend Burkett's measure
by striking everything after "Resolved" and substituting
the Fifth Commandment: "Honor thy father and thy mother."
Senator
Henry Moore Teller (D-Colorado) scorned the resolution as "puerile,"
"absolutely absurd," and "trifling." He announced,
"Every day with me is a mother's day."
Senator
Jacob Gallinger (R-NH) judged the very idea of Mother's Day to
be an insult, as though his memory of his late mother "could
only be kept green by some outward demonstration on Sunday, May
10."
"There
are some thoughts that are so great and so sacred that they are
belittled by movements of this character," lectured Senator
Charles Fulton (R-Oregon), who went on to suggest the consecration
of "Mother-in-Law Day."
~~~ "It
is not a proper subject for legislation," declared Weldon
Heyburn (R-Idaho). "[T]he sentiment that exists between
the parent and the child" was "too sacred to be made
the subject of bandying words" and symbolic and unconstitutional
resolutions.
By a margin
of 33-14, the Senate contemptuously returned this first Mother's
Day resolution to committee. But a few constitutionalist pettifoggers
were not going to stop Anna Jarvis. She enlisted the potent support
of the World's Sunday School Association. By 1914, members of
Congress were falling all over each other in praise of a federally
sanctioned day of maternal homage. Mother's Day, celebrated on
the second Sunday of May, was here to stay.
BLIZZARD
OF '88
1888 -- "Blizzard of `88,"
ushered in by an official New York Weather Bureau forecast of
"clearing & colder preceded by light snow," killed
200 in New York state and nearly 600 in surrounding states. 21
inches of snow dumped on NY, 70 mph gusts piled up 20 foot drifts,
marooning New Yorkers in elevated trains, carriages & office
buildings. The storm stalled for a day and a half. In Connecticut
& central Massachusetts, 40-50 inches of snow fell. Winds
piled up 40 to 50 foot drifts. Houses and trains were buried.
From Chesapeake Bay to Nantucket, 200 ships were sunk or severely
damaged. Recalled one person, "I started out to school and
had with me a clothes-line about 25 feet long, with the end tied
to our doorbell in the event I could not cross the huge snow
drifts to gain the center of the road on Tremont Ave." TODAY IN
HISTORY
PYLE,
ERNIE
ERNIE PYLE, SCRIPPS HOWARD,
JUN 16, 1944 - I walked for a mile and a half along the water's
edge of our many-miled invasion beach. You wanted to walk slowly,
for the detail on that beach was infinite. The wreckage was vast
and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside
from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding
features to those who are in it. . . For a mile out from the
beach there were scores of tanks and trucks and boats that you
could no longer see, for they were at the bottom of the water--swamped
by overloading, or hit by shells, or sunk by mines. Most of their
crews were lost. . . In the water floated empty life rafts and
soldiers' packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges. On
the beach lay snarled rolls of telephone wire and big rolls of
steel matting and stacks of broken, rusting rifles. On the beach
lay, expended, sufficient men and mechanism for a small war.
They were gone forever now. And yet we could afford it. We could
afford it because we were on, we had our toehold, and behind
us there were such enormous replacements for this wreckage on
the beach that you could hardly conceive of their sum total.
Men and equipment were flowing from England in such a gigantic
stream that it made the waste on the beachhead seem like nothing
at all, really nothing at all.
CIA
RECOVERED HISTORY
THE
CIA'S MANUAL FOR BECOMING A TERRORIST
o what the free Nicaraguan
can do in order to tie down Marxist tyranny o how to be lazy
o how to be wasteful o set the cows free o screw up things at
work o wrecking lights, windows and books o phone lines, alarms,
and a nifty toilet trick o graffiti and mayhem o fun with vehicles
(part one) o fun with vehicles (part two) o fun with vehicles
(part three) o fun with vehicles (part four) o telephone lines,
truck tires o arson and the ever-popular Molotov cocktail o wasting
and burning up fuel
BIG MEDIA AND THE CIA
NORMAN SOLOMON, EXTRA
1997 - What explains these elite media outlets' shameful record
of suppressing evidence that the CIA's contra army was involved
in the drug trade--and attacking those who dared to report the
story? In the case of the New York Times and the Washington Post,
part of the explanation is that the papers had lent their editorial
prestige to the contra cause. By the late 1980s, both papers
had endorsed military aid to the contras--though sometimes grudgingly.
In February 1988, a pair of pro-contra aid Post editorials bracketed
a crucial vote in Congress. . . At all three papers, the attitudes
of owners and top management set the tone and impose the constraints
within which journalists work. Dennis McDougal, a former L.A.
Times staffer, described the paper's editor, Shelby Coffey III,
this way: "He is the dictionary definition of someone who
wants to protect the status quo. He weighs whether or not an
investigative piece will have repercussions among the ruling
elite, and if it will, the chances of seeing it in print in the
L.A. Times decrease accordingly."
The New York Times and
Washington Post have an even closer relationship to the nation's
elites, with connections to the CIA that go back nearly to the
agency's founding. In a piece on the CIA and news media written
for Rolling Stone two decades ago, Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein
wrote that "the agency's relationship with the [New York]
Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according
to CIA officials. From 1950 to 1966, about 10 CIA employees were
provided Times cover under arrangements approved by the newspaper's
late publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. The cover arrangements
were part of a general Times policy--set by Sulzberger--to provide
assistance to the CIA whenever possible."
Bernstein's former employer,
the Washington Post, was also useful to the CIA; Bernstein quoted
a CIA official as saying of the Post's late owner and publisher,
"It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could
get help from.". . .
In 1988, Post owner Katharine
Graham, Phil's widow, gave a speech at the CIA's Langley, Va.
headquarters. "We live in a dirty and dangerous world,"
Graham told agency leaders. "There are some things the general
public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy
flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep
its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what
it knows."
Skull
and Bones now has its own page |