The View from the Bridge: Blair. IMF. Bilderberg, etc

The funding of Blair

Sometimes chronology implies causality and sometimes not. Consider the following sequence of events: in January 1994 Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary and career-long member of the Labour Friends of Israel, took a four day freebie trip to Israel, with his wife, at the expense of the Israeli government. Two months later Tony Blair was introduced to Michael Levy at a dinner party by Gideon Meir, the no. 2 in the Israeli embassy in London. According to the Sunday Times of 2 July 2000, Levy was ‘dazzled by Blair’s drive and religious commitment’. Two months later, the leader of the Labour Party, John Smith, died, Blair won the election contest with Gordon Brown; and Michael Levy set about raising money – the figure of £7 million is widely quoted – for Tony Blair’s personal use. The big early contributors to the ‘blind trust’ which handled the Blair money named in the media are Jewish businessmen in Britain. And this means what?

IMF-wise

Who is the most important radical journalist currently published in the British mainstream media? Greg Palast, the American journalist who broke the so-called ‘Lobbygate’ story, must now be a contender. As well as his fortnightly column in The Observer (consigned to the Business section for some reason) he had 6 pages on the Blair project and its connections to American business in The Ecologist (April 2000), and in his Observer column of October 8 he revealed the content of the current IMF programme for Ecuador. This included the following:

‘…..its government is ordered to raise the price of cooking gas by 80 per cent. It must eliminate 26,000 jobs and halve real wages for the remaining workers by 50 per cent in four steps in months specified by the IMF. It must begin to transfer ownership of its biggest water system to foreign operators by July and grant BP’s Arco subsidiary the right to build and own an oil pipeline over the Andes. That’s for starters. In all, the IMF’s 167 loan conditions look less like an assistance plan and more like a blueprint for a financial coup d’état.’

To my albeit limited knowledge of the literature on the IMF this is the first time the details of such a programme has been revealed while the programme is being implemented. Naked imperialism hardly does it justice, does it?

Ecuador, Palast informs, us, got into financial mire after deregulating its financial sector – as per ‘Washington consensus’ – and borrowing a lot of money. It’s just like the mafia loan-sharks in the movies, most recently in The Sopranos on Channel 4. Can’t pay the vig? They beat you up and take over the business. In fact the loan-sharking analogy works right down the line. Money is lent; failure to pay the vig produces threats, expropriation and, eventually, violence. The only meaningful difference between the American international loan-sharking operation run by the IMF and the US armed forces and the street level gangster version is this: the gangsters don’t go round preaching to their victims that the beating and expropriation is going to be good for them!

Bilderberg news

The Sunday Times of 13 January 2000 ran a piece, ‘Stop the New World Order, they want to get off’, attacking those who oppose the globalisation process. The authors, John Mickle thwait and Adrian Woolridge, ‘work for the Economist‘, said the Times. Which is true but trivial: more importantly, the authors are the so-called rapporteurs for the Bilderberg meetings.

Former director of Friends of the Earth, Jonathan Porrit, has become an environmental adviser to Tony Blair, and will chair the Sustainable Development Commission. (And you can imagine how high up the Whitehall pecking order that is going to be!) This position would have nothing to do with Porrit’s presence at the 1999 Bilderberg meeting would it?

An amazing amount of information on the Bilderberg group, meetings, personnel, history and ideology is at http://marsbard.com/www.bilderberg.org/ and www.bilderberg.org/bilder.htm. Serious congratulations are due to Grattan Healey and Tony Gosling in particular for digging out so much information.

NATO and Kosovo

The most surprising comments on the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia came from that staunchest of Atlanticists the former MP John Gilbert, now Lord Gilbert, junior minister at of the Ministry of Defence. In evidence to the Defence Select Committee Gilbert was reported in the Guardian on 21 July as saying:

‘I think certain people were spoiling for a fight in NATO at that time. I think the terms put to Milosevic at Rambouillet were absolutely intolerable: how could he possibly accept them? It was quite deliberate.’

John Pilger would not change a comma in that.

What Gilbert actually said was this:

‘I think certain people were spoiling for a fight in NATO at that time, ****. If you ask my personal view, I think the terms put to Milosevic at Rambouillet were absolutely intolerable; how could he possibly accept them? It was quite deliberate. That does not excuse an awful lot of other things, but we were at a point when some people felt that something had to be done, so you just provoked a fight.’

Which is not only stronger than the published quote which omits ‘provoked a fight’, it also includes the asterisks indicating that something has been deleted from his oral statement. The whole of Gilbert’s indiscreet account of the war behind the scenes is worth your attention.

Round Table sightings

Although Carroll Quigley’s two books on the Round Table network remain almost entirely unknown to the academic history world – and are now probably irredeemably contaminated by their association with the American Right – every once in a while another fragment of Quigley’s thesis is unwittingly stood up by a historian. The latest example is Quigley’s assertion that the so-called ‘Cliveden Set’ of 1930s appeasement infamy was merely the Round Table at one of its regular ‘moots’. The lead review in the Sunday Telegraph books section on August 13 was of Norman Rose’s The Cliveden Set (Jonathan Cape). In the course of the review virtually the entire Quigley thesis is expounded – with the exception of the Round Table network itself. In its absence we get ‘a group of friends who shared a common background as members of a small elite know as Lord Milner’s Kindergarten’.

At the heart of the original Round Table’s world view was the idea of a British-American union – or reunion. The American Clarence Streit was one of that view’s leading propagators and in two books, published just before and during WW2, Union Now and Union Now With Britain, he argued the case. Mr Streit’s name duly arrived via e-mail in August this year from the Atlantic Union Movement advertising its new Website which, among other things, ‘documents the history of the Atlantic Union Movement in the United States Congress and beyond’ . Go to www.atlantica2000.org,

 

Did the French government rig the referendum on Maastricht?

John Major’s autobiography, John Major (HarperCollins 1999) contains this startling passage on p. 338 about the French referendum on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992:

‘The result looked knife-edged all evening, but our contacts in Paris seemed sublimely confident of the outcome. French predictions of the result were relayed to us hours before the count was over – which raised eyebrows on this side of the Channel. How could they know?…….

“They found Cook County”, was the jaundiced comment of one observer, recalling the infamous result that gave Kennedy his victory over Nixon in the 1960 Presidential race.’

Another dumb Clinton

On the Fortean Times Website (1) there is the content of two articles from the Fortean Times, conversations between some of the US’s leading purveyors and students of conspiracy theories.

Mark Pilkington of FT introduces the conversation with the comment that ‘Adrift amongst seas of information and disinformation, claim and counter-claim, a detached, more fortean approach to conspiracy research appears increasingly relevant‘ (emphasis added).
For which, apparently, read: give up worrying if it’s true or not. How else to interpret Robert Sterling, who runs the e-zine The Konformist, saying this of William Cooper, author of Behold a Pale Horse.

‘I like Bill Cooper a lot, and beyond admiration for his work, consider him a friend. I consider him a performance artist on the order of Andy Kaufman, and I do mean that to be complimentary. …..But hate him or think he’s crazy as many do, they do look, and along the way, they start seeing the cracks in the picture of official reality. George Clinton of Parliament stated in the Millennium issue of Rolling Stone that reading Cooper’s book Behold A Pale Horse was his most important personal event of the 20th century…..’

Well, gee, if George Clinton thought it so important…….

Finding this a little difficult to swallow I contacted Sterling and checked if this really was his opinion of Cooper. Yes, indeed it is. Well I just have to disagree: any way you cut it, Cooper’s ravings are just more mud in the pool; and we got more than enough mud already.(2)

Knightsbridge news

Mohamed Al-Fayed’s law suit – all 40 pages of it – against the CIA, DIA, NSA et al for denying him documents under the Freedom of Information Act which he believes they possess was posted on the Net on 1 September 2000.(3) This is worth a look for two reasons. First, the various legal claims show that Al-Fayed is not entirely bonkers in pursuing this: there is a fair bit of smoke and there may be a fire; and second, in the document is the most detailed account yet of the curious role and career of the purported former CIA disinformationist Oswald Le Winter.

The suit was rejected in October by a Washington federal appeals court panel. (4) To the sound of a small army of lawyers cheering in the background, Mr Fayed vowed to carry on.

Notes

1. http://www.forteantimes.com/artic/134/conspiracy.html
2. A section of Cooper’s book, with a stupid conspiracy theory about AIDS, is being circulated among ministers in the government of South Africa See ‘Conspiracy theories fuel row over AIDS crisis in South Africa’, Independent 4 September 2000. Sterling’s high opinion of Cooper didn’t prevent him distributing in The Konformist of 27 October an assault on Cooper which originated in another Webzine.
3. http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/00-2092.pdf
4. The text of the judgement is at http://cryptome.org/fayed-v-cia-la.htm

Electronic and electromagnetic warfare

One of the indicators of the reality of these weapons is their appearance in the US military trade magazines. Two such sightings have been sent to me by Harlan Girard. In one, Aviation Week and Space Technology of 9 March 1998, USAF General John Jumper referred to ‘tools that… make potential enemies see, hear and believe things that don’t exist’. In the second, Defense News of 14 December 1998, Shmuel Gordon, a consultant to the Israeli Air Force referred to ‘non-lethal… crowd control and urban warfare devices that temporarily paralyze an entire village…’ (emphasis added).