Politico.com brings Bilderberger group out of the shadows and into the disinfectant of daylight...
Ask Sean Hannity, or Rush Limbaugh about the Bilderbergs...
Limbaugh has repeatedly said it doesn't exist, and cut off callers who inquire about it. Sean Hannity always says... "I have no idea what you're talking about"...
Well conspiracy theory has now morphed into "Reality Theory"
politico.com
Bilderbergers excite conspiracists.
By: Kenneth P. Vogel
March 15, 2009 06:53 AM EST
The highest levels of the Obama administration are infested with members of a shadowy, elitist cabal intent on installing a one-world government that subverts the will of the American people....
It sounds crazy, but that’s what a group of very persistent conspiracy theorists insists, and they point to President Obama’s nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, as the latest piece of evidence supporting their claims.
It turns out that Sebelius – like top administration economists Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers and Paul Volcker, as well as leading Obama diplomats Richard Holbrooke and Dennis Ross – is a Bilderberger. That is, she is someone who has participated in the annual invitation-only conference held by an elite international organization known as the Bilderberg group.
The group, which takes its name from the Dutch hotel where it held its first meeting in 1954, exists solely to bring together between 100 and 150 titans of politics, finance, military, industry, academia and media from North America and Western Europe once a year to discuss world affairs. It doesn’t issue policy statements or resolutions, nor does it hold any events other than an annual meeting.
Past participants have included Margaret Thatcher, who attended the 1975 meeting at Turkey’s Golden Dolphin Hotel, former media mogul Conrad Black, who has been to more than a dozen conferences, and Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, King Juan Carlos of Spain and top officials of BP, IBM, Barclays and the Bank of England.
It is precisely that exclusive roster of globally influential figures that has captured the interest of an international network of conspiracists, who for decades have viewed the Bilderberg conference as a devious corporate-globalist scheme.
The fulminating is aggravated by Obama's preference for surrounding himself with well-credentialed, well-connected, and well-traveled elites. His personnel choices have touched a populist, even paranoid nerve among those who are convinced powerful elites and secret societies are moving the planet toward a new world order.
Their worldview, characterized by a deep and angry suspicion of the ruling class rather than any prevailing partisan or ideological affiliation, is widely articulated on overnight AM radio shows and a collection of Internet websites.
The video sharing website YouTube alone is home to thousands of Bilderberg-related videos.
“I don’t laugh at the people who claim that they understand the connections, but I’ve never really spent much time tracing that through,” said Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), a former presidential candidate whose libertarian sensibilities have made him a darling of the Bilderberg conspiracists.
“The one thing that concerns me is that the people who surround Obama or Bush generally come from the same philosophic viewpoint and they have their organizations – they have the Trilateral Commission, the CFR [Council on Foreign Relations] and the Bilderbergers, and they’ve been around a long time. And my biggest concern is what they preach: Keynesian economics and interventionism and world planning,” he said.
While it's easy to dismiss the Bilder-busters as cranks, these voices have a way of making themselves heard on the margins of the debate in ways that can prove to be a real, if minor, distraction to Obama’s political team. Bill Clinton had trouble shaking rumors that he was behind a shady criminal syndicate operating out of the Mena airport. George W. Bush was sometimes portrayed as the puppet of clandestine Middle Eastern oil interests.
Obama’s selection of numerous Bilderbergers for key posts “certainly would verify their suspicions,” said Paul, referring to fears of the group’s influence.
“And I don’t think it’s just Obama. Whether it’s the Republicans or the Democrats – Goldman Sachs generally has somebody in treasury. And the big banks generally have somebody in the Federal Reserve. And they’re international people, too. And they’re probably working very hard this weekend, with the G20. And they get involved in the IMF. But that is their stated goal. They do believe in a powerful centralized government and we believe in the opposite.”
One popular website, “Prison Planet,” greeted Sebelius’ nomination with the headline “Obama Picks Bilderberger for Health Secretary.”
It’s obvious why Bilderberg is a frequent target of conspiracy theorists, who’ve credited it with anointing aspiring presidents, selecting their running mates, creating the European Union and instigating the war in Iraq and the bombing of Serbia, among other coups.
Bilderberg meetings are closed to the press, participants are asked not to publicly discuss the proceedings and the attendee list is only occasionally released. As a result, the group has come to be viewed as a more publicity-shy cousin to the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations – other influential international think tanks that are staples of fringe group conversation.
Unlike Bilderberg, though, those organizations have opened their proceedings to public scrutiny, maintain websites and have long listed their members.
The Bilderberg group, in a rare press release last year, laid out a benign if vague mission: creating “a better understanding of the complex forces and major trends affecting Western nations.”
“Bilderberg is a small, flexible, informal and off-the-record international forum in which different viewpoints can be expressed and mutual understanding enhanced,” read the press release, which noted that a list of participants would be available by phone request between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM on the second and third days of the conference.
The Bilderberg conspiracists first pounced on the Obama connection during the 2008 campaign, when news leaked in May that the candidate, who at the time was closing in on the Democratic presidential nomination, had initially tapped former Fannie Mae chairman Jim Johnson, a top Bilderberger, to help him select a running mate.
IRS filings show that Johnson as recently as 2006 was the treasurer of a non-profit group called American Friends of Bilderberg. The group has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years to pay for meetings--including $125,000 in total contributions from Bilderberg stalwarts Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller in 2005 and 2006 plus $25,000 in 2005 from the Washington Post, whose chairman Don Graham has attended in the past.
Johnson did not return a message inquiring about his role at Bilderberg.
“The news further puts to rest any delusions that Bilderberg is a mere talking shop where no decisions are made,” reported Prison Planet. “It also ridicules once again any notion that an Obama presidency would bring ‘change’ to the status quo of America being ruled by an unelected corporate and military-industrial complex elite.”
One month later, in June, Johnson was joined at the 2008 Bilderberg meeting by Geithner, Holbrooke, Summers and Ross, as well as Obama’s first choice for HHS secretary, Tom Daschle, and Sebelius, who at the time was included on some short lists of prospective Obama running mates and who also attended the 2007 meeting in Istanbul, Turkey.
According to the Bilderberg press release, the meeting was designed to “deal mainly with a nuclear free world, cyber terrorism, Africa, Russia, finance, protectionism, US-EU relations, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Islam and Iran.” Approximately two-thirds of the 140 expected attendees came from Europe, according to the release, and the rest from North America.
Had the meeting been held outside the United States, that might have been the end of the Obama angle. But the conference, which took place from June 5 through 8, was held at a heavily guarded hotel in Chantilly, Va. in suburban Washington—coincidentally overlapping with an Obama campaign event in the area.
While Obama’s schedule indicated he was to fly home to Chicago for the weekend—and journalists were herded on a campaign plane under the impression they were headed there along with Obama—the future president slipped away for a private meetings and never actually boarded the flight.
As it turned out, Obama secretly met that evening with Hillary Rodham Clinton in Washington, D.C., but not before raising alarms among the Bilder-busters, who were convinced something was rotten in Chantilly.
Prison Planet connected the dots and concluded Obama and Clinton met at the Bilderberg meeting, declaring that “the complete failure of the mainstream media to report on the fact, once again betrays the super-secretive nature and influential reputation that the 54-year-old organization still maintains.”
“It is now seems increasingly likely that the secret meetings with Bilderberg this weekend will herald the decision to name Hillary Clinton as Obama's VP candidate,” predicted a sister site, Infowars.net.
Even the snarky D.C.-based Wonkette blog weighed in, half-seriously positing that “really, it sounds like” Obama and Clinton rendezvoused “at that creepy Bilderberg Group meeting, which is happening now, and which is so secret that nobody will admit they’re going, even though everybody who is anybody goes to Bilderberg.”
Curiously, though, the episode wasn’t the first time a Bilderberg meeting intersected with vice presidential selection machinations.
In 2004, both Time magazine and the New York Times noted that then-Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C) had impressed Bilderbergers at that year’s conference in Stresa, Italy—roughly one month prior to his selection as Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) running mate-- when Edwards debated Republican Ralph Reed. Then, as in 2008, Jim Johnson led the vice presidential vetting.
Time reported that then-Sen. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) and Holbrooke attended and called Kerry “with rave reviews” about Edwards' debate skills.
In its tick-tock of the vice-presidential selection process, the New York Times also noted the Bilderberg effect.
'His performance at Bilderberg was important,' a friend of Kerry told the Times. 'He reported back directly to Kerry. There were other reports on his performance. Whether they reported directly or indirectly, I have no doubt the word got back to Mr. Kerry about how well he did.'
An attendee of the 2004 meeting dismissed the notion that Edwards’ Bilderberg performance helped land him on the Democratic ticket.
“It wasn’t because of his performance at the meeting – he was at the meeting because he was going to get picked” said the attendee, who did not want to be identified breaching Bilderberg’s off-the-record rule. “He was there as a surrogate for Kerry” and to boost his foreign policy bona fides, said the attendee.
Either way, the attendee contended, the Bilderberg conspiracy theories don’t make sense on their face, if only because the wide array of ideologies represented would make it difficult to reach consensus.
“There were so many different people there with so many different viewpoints that it belied the opportunity to really conspire, because obviously a Kissinger and a [prominent neoconservative Richard] Perle are going to come down in a very different place than say a Holbrooke or a Johnson,” the attendee said.
Besides, the attendee observed, it’s almost impossible to name a Bilderberger-free Cabinet.
“You’d be hard pressed to find an administration that hasn’t reached into those ranks into the last 20, 30, 40 years. “
*************************************************************************
I would suggest that people also check out "The Logan Act"...
The Logan Act (18 U.S.C.A. § 953 [1948]) is a single federal statute making it a crime for a citizen to confer with foreign governments against the interests of the United States.
en.wikipedia.org
Specifically, it prohibits citizens from negotiating with other nations on behalf of the United States without authorization.
Fwiw, both Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama violated the
Logan Act in attending this years Bilderberger meeting, as
have many past Presidents and cabinet officials.
But, I'd be willing to forgive all that if...
Obama would repeal the Patriot Act, Bush's Executive Orders,
and stop redentions and warrantless NSA spying on Americans.
Or, he could really prove that he isn't a puppet to the same
puppeteers than handled Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz,
Perle and Company... by indicting Cheney on War Crimes...
Will Obama support this?
(don't hold your hope & change breath)
SOTB
PS:... And for all of you Obama zombies who are filling my
in box with hate mail... it ain't about Obama, or Dem's
vs. Republicans, or right vs. left.
It's about good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, and saving
American sovereignty...
Kucinich Calls For Congressional Investigation Into Cheney “Assassination Unit”
Congressman says Hersh claims should be subject of formal probe
infowars.net
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, March 16, 2009
Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has called for a formal Congressional probe into allegations by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that former Vice-President Dick Cheney had his own SS-style political assassination unit.
Kucinich made the call Friday in a letter to Chairman Edolphus Towns of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee which has been published on the Congressman's website.
Kucinich explains in the letter that, “Mr. Hersh made the allegation before an audience at the University of Minnesota on Tuesday, March 10, 2009. He stated, ‘Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving… It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. . .Congress has no oversight of it.’”
“If true, these operations violate longstanding U.S. policy regarding covert actions and illegally bypass Congressional oversight," Kucinich adds. "Hersh is within a year or more of releasing a book that is said to include evidence of this allegation. However, we cannot wait a year or more to establish the truth.”
The claims were made by the Award-winning New Yorker writer last Tuesday when he told a University of Minnesota audience “After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet.”
Hersh then went on to describe how the Joint Special Operations Command was an executive assassination unit that carried out political`assassinations abroad. . “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”
In our exclusive story last weekend we detailed how the assassination unit was not a creation of the Bush administration or Dick Cheney. The Joint Special Operations Command, has in fact been active for decades, has been deployed domestically in the U.S., has killed U.S. citizens, and continues as an integral part of Barack Obama’s expanded wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Kucinich has previously targeted the former Vice President, when in April 2007, he filed an impeachment resolution against Cheney charging manipulation of evidence regarding Iraq's weapons capabilities prior to the invasion of 2003.
The measure was blocked by the Democratic leadership, as were articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush in June 2008.
The full text of Kucinich's letter follows:
March 13, 2009
The Honorable Edolphus Towns
Chairman
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
U.S. House of Representatives
2157 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Chairman Towns:
As you may already be aware, recent media reports indicate that investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, while answering questions before a public audience at the University of Minnesota divulged information about what he calls an “executive assassination ring” operating under the George W. Bush Administration.
If substantiated, the allegation would have far reaching implications for the United States. Such an assertion from someone of Hersh’s credibility that has a long and proven track record of dependability on these issues merits attention. Mr. Hersh is within a year or more of releasing a book that is said to include evidence of this allegation. However, we cannot wait a year or more to establish the truth. As such, I request that the Full Committee immediately begin an investigation to determine the facts in this matter.
Mr. Hersh made the allegation before an audience at the University of Minnesota on Tuesday, March 10, 2009. He stated, “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.”
Mr. Hersh continued, “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently," he explained. "They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. . .Congress has no oversight of it.”
If true, these operations violate longstanding U.S. policy regarding covert actions and illegally bypass Congressional oversight. Current statute governing covert action (50 U.S.C. 413b) requires a presidential finding and notification to the appropriate congressional committees. Additionally, Executive Order 12333 clearly states that “[n]o person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in or conspire to engage in assassination.”
I urge the Committee to explore Mr. Hersh’s allegation. Please do not hesitate to call on me or my staff if we can be of assistance.
Sincerely,
Dennis J. Kucinich
Member of Congress
**************************************************************
minnpost.com
Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh describes Cheney 'executive assassination ring'
By Eric Black | Published Wed, Mar 11 2009 11:17 am
Seymour Hersh
REUTERS/Fadi Al-AssaadJournalist Seymour Hersh speaking in Doha at an Al Jazeera forum on the media in 2007.
At a “Great Conversations” event (MP3) at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”
Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn’t written about yet.
In an email exchange afterward, Hersh said that his statements were “an honest response to a question” from the event’s moderator, U of M Political Scientist Larry Jacobs and “not something I wanted to dwell about in public.”
Hersh didn’t take back the statements, which he said arise from reporting he is doing for a book, but that it might be a year or two before he has what he needs on the topic to be “effective...that is, empirical, for even the most skeptical.”
The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government official who had experience with many of the crises.
And it was mostly historical, and a great conversation, in which Hersh and Mondale talked about the patterns by which presidents seem to get intoxicated by executive power, frustrated by the limitations on that power from Congress and the public, drawn into improper covert actions that exceed their constitutional powers, in the belief that they can get results and will never be found out. Despite a few references to the Founding Fathers, the history was mostly recent, starting with the Vietnam War with much of it arising from the George W. Bush administration, which both men roundly denounced.
At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”
Replied Hersh:
“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.
"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...
"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.
"It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.
"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.
"I’ve had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’
"But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”
Hersh, the best-known investigative reporter of his generation, writes about these kinds of issues for The New Yorker. He has written often about JSOC, including, last July that:
“Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference.”
(“Finding” refers to a special document that a president must issue, although not make public, to authorize covert CIA actions.)
Here is a tape of the full Mondale-Hersh-Jacobs colloquy, a little over an hour, without the audience Q and A. If you want to look for the Hersh statement quoted above, it’s about at the 7:30 mark.
The rest of the evening was, as expected, full of worry and wisdom and quite a bit of Bush-bashing.
Jacobs walked the two elder statesmen through their experiences of:
* The My Lai massacre, which Hersh first revealed publicly and which he last night called “the end of innocence about us and war.”
* The Pentagon Papers case, which Mondale called the best example of the “government’s potential for vast public deception.”
* Henry Kissinger’s secret dealings, mostly relating to the Vietnam War. (Hersh, who has written volumes about Kissinger, said that he will always believe that whereas ordinary people count sheep to fall asleep, Kissinger “has to count burned and maimed Cambodian babies.”)
* The Church Committee investigation of CIA and FBI abuses, in which Mondale played a major role. (He talked about the fact that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover not only spied on Martin Luther King but literally tried to drive him to suicide.)
* The Iran Contra scandal. (Hersh said the Reagan administration came to office with a clear goal of finding a way to finance covert actions, such as the funding of the Nicaraguan Contras, without appropriations so that Congress wouldn't know about them. Mondale noted that Reagan had signed a law barring further aid to the Contras, then participated in a scheme to keep the aid flowing. Hersh said that two key veterans of Iran-Contra, Dick Cheney and national security official Elliot Abrams, were reunited in the George W. Bush White House and decided that the key lesson from Iran-Contra was that too many people in the administration knew about it.)
* And the Bush-Cheney years. (Said Hersh: “The contempt for Congress in the Bush-Cheney White House was extaordinary.” Said Mondale of his successor, Cheney, and his inner circle: “they ran a government within the government.”
Hersh added: “Eight or nine neoconservatives took over our country.”
Mondale said that the precedents of abuse of vice presidential power by Cheney would remain "like a loaded pistol that you leave on the dining room table.")
Jacobs pressed both men on the question of whether the frequent abuses of power show that the Constitution fails, because these things keep happening, or whether it works, because these things keep coming to light.
Mondale stuck with the happy answer. “The system has come through again and again,” he said. Presidents always think they will get away with it, but eventually reporters like Hersh bring things to light, the public “starts smelling this stuff,” the courts and the Congress get involved. Presidents “always, in the long run, find out that the system is stronger than they are.”
Hersh seemed more troubled by the repetitions of the pattern. The “beautiful thing about our system” is that eventually we get new leaders, he said. “The evil twosome, Cheney and Bush, left,” Hersh said. But he also said “it’s really amazing to me that we manage to get such bad leadership, so consistently.”
And he added that both the press and the public let down their guard in the aftermath of 9/11.
“The major newspapers joined the [Bush] team,” Hersh said. Top editors passed the message to investigative reporters not to “pick holes” in what Bush was doing. Violations of the Bill of Rights happened in the plain sight of the public. It was not only tolerated, but Bush was re-elected.
And even Mondale admitted that one of his greatest successes, laws reforming the FBI and CIA in the aftermath of the Church Committee, were supposed to fix the problem so that “we would never have these problems again in the lifetime of anyone alive at the time, but of course we did.” |
