Do they talk like this?
At < www.lewrockwell.com/cummings/cummings29.html > there is a very interesting piece by Richard Cummings about the CIA and publishing; agents and operations are named. At the top of the article is this quote.
‘We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.’
So, according to Cummings, said David Rockefeller, in an address to a meeting of the Trilateral Commission in June 1991. Is this quotation genuine? Do they really talk like this? I have no doubt they think like this. But do they say it in public? This seems unlikely to me. So I went looking for the source.
On the Web, if you ask Google for ‘Rockefeller + ‘We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times’, you find the quote on hundreds of sites, left, right and simply conspiratorial. They all quote the same paragraph and same year, 1991, but they vary on the forum: some have Rockefeller addressing Bilderberg, some the Trilateral Commission. (The reference to forty years in the quote tells you that it is meant to be Bilderberg; the Trilateral Commission was formed in the 1970s.)
The more canny (i.e. the more professional) of the sites using this preface the quotation with a variation on: ‘it has been widely reported that…’. It is true: it has been widely reported. It just isn’t sourced to anything of substance and I think the quote is a fabrication.
Bilderberging
Who got invited to the May 2003 Bilderberg meeting? From New Labour came Philip Gould and Ed Balls. Balls I can understand: he’s the organ-grinder to Brown’s monkey. But why Gould? What’s he going to tell them? How to run a focus group?
Our elders and betters
Reading the long obituary of Hugo Young in the Guardian 24 September, I noticed that he had been both a Harkness Fellow in 1963 and then a congressional fellow in 1964 – a two year freebie on Uncle Sam. Ten years ago I would have been thinking: did the CIA recruit him when he was in the US? That is still possible; but now we know a little more about how all this works, why would they bother? Projects like Harkness and Kennedy Scholarships and all the others are essentially ‘soft’ recruitment schemes in which doors are opened for suitable people to walk through and see the career prospects ahead – if they follow the general line.
Grooves of academe
Here come the academics, homing in on conspiracy theories. As well as the Peter Knight book reviewed in this issue by Tony Frewin, we have had recently his collection Conspiracy Nation:the politics of paranoia in post-war America (London: New York University Press, 2002) (1) and Michael Barkun’s A Culture of Conspiracy: apocalyptic visions in contemporary America (London: University of California Press, 2003); and all three are full of references to other academic work in this field. Why are academics now attracted to this hitherto intellectually disreputable field? The answer is that it is only certain kinds of academics who are attracted, historians and social theorists who influenced by postmodernism. Loosely, postmodernists have given up on true or false because it is too difficult, or because they regard the concepts as ridiculous, unintelligible or unattainable. Conspiracy theories are appealing because the subject matter, the content of said theories, is presumed to be so absurd that the true/false question can simply be ignored and their theoretical concepts can have the field. This is more difficult to do in academic subjects in which fuddy-duddy historians interested in ‘What happened?’ are still encamped.
9-11
On 29 September the Wall Street Journal reported the success in Germany of a book on 9/11 by former German cabinet minister, Andreas von Bulow, which apparently argues that there was something fishy about it; that the US knew about it in advance; and that maybe al-Qaeda did not do the plane bombings.(2) The Journal also noted the Michael Meacher piece in the Guardian 6 September 2003arguing much the same.(3) Two former European cabinet ministers willing to raise their heads above the parapet!
The existence of the von Bulow book was news to me but not von Bulow’s view of the event. An interview with von Bulow on the subject was published in a German newspaper and posted on the Net in January 2002, only four months after 9/11.(4)
The writing on the 9/11 story has now reached the complexity of the JFK assassination – and it has only taken two years. At < http://physics911.org/net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3 > is a series of analyses of apparent anomalies in the official story. Try, for starters, the section titled ‘The missing wings’ which to me seems to show that whatever struck the Pentagon it wasn’t an airliner. Then go to < http://michaelgriffith1.tripod.com/refute.htm > in which those arguments are apparently refuted.
For a critical but non-conspiratorial look, try Seth Ackerman’s ‘Who knew? the unanswered questions of 9/11’ at the site of the Research Institute for European and American Studies. < www.rieas.gr/Article_1a.html >
Seeing and believing
The Ottawa Citizen of 15 September reported that a company is ‘starting to market a new kind of projector that can make three-dimensional images float in the air.’ But it’s not a hologram, insists the company making it. The images are projected directly into the air, with no screen. ‘Simply put, it’s a device that projects anything you can put on a TV or a computer monitor into the air. The image is displayed in the air above the projector.’
With this technology scaled-up and the Silent Sounds microwave projection of speech and sound into the brain, the psy-ops potential of this is fairly startling. And not just for states: ‘Moses’ could once again descend from the mountain; ‘Jesus’ could walk on water…….
Farewell democracy?
The story in the Independent of 14 October, ‘Fears of more US electoral chaos after flaws are discovered in ballot computers’ by Andrew Gumbel (5) was the major media tip of an enormous iceberg, most of the rest of which is on the Web. The headline story is simple: the Republicans are preparing to steal the next presidential election in the computerised voting machines that are being introduced. They won’t need all that crude gerrymandering and those partisan Supreme Court judges in future. And the Democrats are so afraid of the media that they are going to let them do it.
The British system of bits of paper collected and counted in public may be cumbersome but it makes it very hard to steal elections, as anyone with experience of elections knows.
…..but someone’s got to do it.
The US magazine Mother Jones reported on 6 October:
‘While the [75th] Exploitation Task Force [the first post-war US group to search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq] worked out of an abandoned palace and the servants’ housing quarters near Baghdad airport and remained short of vehicles, air support, computers and even electricity during the initial months of the weapons hunt, the Iraq Survey Group spent its first weeks installing air-conditioned trailers, a new dining facility, state-of-the-art software and even asprinkler system for a new lawn, according to officials and experts who worked with the group this summer.’ (emphasis added) (6)
Di’s death
From Stephen Glover’s ‘It is no longer possible to scoff at the idea that Diana was murdered’ in The Spectator 25 October 2003: Frontpage
The mysterious Fiat Uno in the underpass, which most people believe was never traced, almost certainly belonged to a royal paparazzo called James Anderson. The photographer strenuously denied that he had even been in Paris on the night in question, though the paint on the Uno matched traces on the wrecked Mercedes, which it appears to have clipped.’
From Martyn Gregory’s ‘It was a tragic accident, nothing more’ in the Sunday Telegraph 26 October:
‘It was claimed in the British press last week that a paparazzo named James Anderson was the driver of the Fiat. That claim has been thoroughly disproved ….he provided an alibi for the night of the crash. Moreover his white Fiat Uno did not match the paint scratches on Henri Paul’s Mercedes.’
French twist
In his wonderful analysis of American psy-ops in the assault on Iraq (see p. 14) Sam Gardiner identified a number of anti-French stories that were run into the media – ‘punishment’ for opposing America. These stories are continuing. There was a beauty in the Guardian from Julian Bolger on 4 November, ‘France and Russia “convinced Saddam he could survive war”‘. This was Borger recycling a Washington Post report of things former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz is supposed to have said. Borger did report:
‘The Washington Post notes that Mr Aziz might have had an incentive for telling his US interrogators what they wanted to hear about Paris and Moscow’s role in the run-up to war.’
The story is sourced to ‘officials familiar with the [Aziz] interrogation’. In other words: somebody said…. The Post (and Borger) should have said: ‘Mr Aziz may not have said any such thing at all.’ But the major media – there or here – won’t go that far yet. Bits of it may know that the Bush and Blair administrations have run full-scale disinformation campaigns around the war but they apparently cannot acknowledge it.
That was Borger on the 4th. On the 7th the wind had shifted and Borger now told us:
‘In the few weeks before its fall, Iraq’s Ba’athist regime made a series of increasingly desperate peace offers to Washington, promising to hold elections and even to allow US troops to search for banned weapons. But the advances were all rejected by the Bush administration, according to intermediaries involved in the talks.'(7)
This second has multiple, named sources and is more likely to be true. If it is true, how dumb of the Iraqis to try all this in secret! Had they gone to the United Nations and said this – who knows? And did Prime Minister Blair know of these offers? It would rather awkward for the government’s line on all this if he did.
Hinckley is hinky
At < http://www.noveltynet.org/content/paranormal/www.parascope.com/mx/articles/hinckley.htm > there is a series of still photographs taken at the time of the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan with an analysis which claims that the photographs prove that John Hinckley didn’t do the shooting. I always thought there was something fishy about that shooting: using a ‘Saturday night special’ Hinckley managed to wound an awful lot of people; and there seemed to be more rounds fired at the scene than his gun could hold. (It looked like the Sirhan Sirhan scenario re-run.) But if it was a plot, who was behind it?
Notes
1 And forthcoming, his Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia is listed on Amazon.co.uk at £136.95!
2 On this last point he is surely wrong. Al-Qaeda have acknowledged doing it on a number of occasions. See for example Yosri Fouda, ‘The Masterminds’ in The Sunday Times 8 September 2002.
3 < http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/comment/ 0,12956,1036687,00.html >
4 For example at < http://www.blackpress usa.com/News/Article_Search.asp?News ID=1932 >
5 < http://news.independent.co.uk/world/ americas/story.jsp?story=453116 >
Using Google, search for ‘Diebold + voting + computers’ for a preliminary recce. Or try, for example, < http://www.sptimes.ru/archive/times/904/opinion/o_10419.htm > and ‘A Brief History of Computerized Election Fraud in America’ at < www.truthout.org/doc_03/ 102503C.shtml >
6 Tom Engelhardt, ‘Washington Implodes’, 6 October < www.motherjones.com/ news/ daily mojo/2003/41/we_557_01a.html >
7 ‘Washington dismissed Iraq’s peace feelers, including elections and weapons pledge, put forward via diplomatic channels and US hawk Perle’, Julian Borger, Brian Whitaker and Vikram Dodd.