Where's My MONEY? Where's it going? POOF....GONE

See GPF Report on Iraq: Corruption, Fraud and Gross Malfeasance (June 2007) Under the control or influence of US authorities, public funds in Iraq have been drained by massive corruption and stolen oil, leaving the country unable to provide basic services and incapable of rebuilding. Billions of dollars have disappeared. To avoid accountability, the US and UK undercut the UN-mandated International Advisory and Monitoring Board. Iraq has suffered from stolen cash, padded contracts, cronyism, bribes and kickbacks, waste and incompetence, as well as shoddy and inadequate contract performance. Major contractors, mostly politically-connected US firms, have made billions in profits.

Insider information..Orchestrated TERROR Connections..WOW!

Huffman Aviation


Charlie Voss, a former employee at the Huffman Aviation flight training school in Venice, Florida where some of the terrorists trained, said "two students -Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi" -- had arrived from Germany in July 2000.Source: http://taipeitimes.com/news/2001/09/14/story/0000102892
As investigative journalist Barry Hopsicker (->madcowprod.com) found out in late 2001, the official hijacker flight school, owned by Rudi Dekkers, had ties to the CIA: "The CIA's links to Dekkers surfaced when an unknown company called Britannia Aviation was mysteriously awarded a five-year contract to run a large regional maintenance facility at the Lynchburg Virginia Regional Airport. At the time of the award virtually nothing was known about Britannia except that the company worked out of a hangar at Rudi Dekkers Huffman Aviation at the Venice, Florida airport. But when Britannia was chosen over a respected and successful Lynchburg company boasting a multi-million dollar balance sheet and more than 40 employees, aviation executives there began voicing concerns to reporters at the local newspaper... " Later it was discovered that Britannia Aviation is a company with virtually no assets, employees, or corporate history. Moreover, the company did not even possess the necessary FAA license to perform the aircraft maintenance services for which it had just been contracted by the city of Lynchburg.Source: http://www.madcowprod.com
/ The report about Huffman was picked up by Online Journalhttp://www.onlinejournal/Special_Reports/Hopsicker030202/hopsicker030202.html (See Nicole Antini)
Hopsicker continued with his investigation on Huffman Aviation and Rudi Dekkers. Britannia executive Marten reassured those in attendance that at Huffman's hangar at the Venice Airport they had for some time been successfully providing aviation maintenance services for Caribe Air, a Caribbean carrier.
Today Caribe Air is controlled by an offshore bank located on the Caribbean island of Dominica, Banc Caribe, a private bank In March 2002, Rudi Dekkers changed his original story. The chief flight instructor at neighboring Jones Aviation in Sarasota, where Atta and Marwan trained for six weeks, insisted in an exclusive interview with the MadCow Morning News that Dekkers was flat out wrong when he told reporters that Mohamed Atta already had a private pilot's license when he entered the U.S. Dekkers now said, that Atta and Marwan didn't start flight training until August 30th, 2001 at the earliest, seven weeks later than he stated in the aftermath of September11th. That would mean, Atta had now only 10 days time left to learn how to crash his plane into the Twin Towers.
As Hopsicker reported: "Left out of most news accounts is is the fact Siad Al-Jarrah learned to fly next door to Dekker's operation at a second flight school, that of Arne Kruithof, like Dekker's a native of the Netherlands. Hopsicker revealed that in fact it was Dekkers assistant Nicole Antini, who filled out Attas and Marwan Al-Shehis visa requests.
Furthermore Antini was being sexually harassed by Rudi Dekkers, "according to a lawsuit for sexual harassment which Dekker's was forced to settle recently for an undisclosed sum". What speaks for Hopsicker is the fact, that he released the story on the Visas and Antini already months before it was published in some mainstream papers. Onlinejournal reported already in October 2001: "...Two weeks before the World Trade Center attack she filed suit to force him to enforce the settlement of a sexual harassment charge. Dekkers agreed to settle for $15,000.." http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Hopsicker102401/hopsicker102401.html
Hopsicker speculated, if Rudi Dekkers and Arne Kruithof worked for the CIA as well. In March 2002, INS Commissioner James Ziglar, Huffman Aviation President Rudi Dekkers, Tom Blodgett, Managing Director of Business Process Solutions at Affiliated Computer Services; and Mr. Michael Cutler, INS Special Agent testified on the visa story of Atta. (Atta, Visa ->)
In early March 2002, Huffman Aviation International received notice from the INS that the student visa applications from known 9/11 terrorists Atta,Mohammad and Marwan Al-Shehhi had been approved. This embarrassing incident raises many troubling questions about INS management and whether the INS is up to the challenge of both processing immigration applications as well as fulfilling its border security responsibilities. Hopsicker continued with his investigation. He found out, that Dekkers had a business partner named Richard Boehlke.
Hopsicker stated that Boehlke stands accused of participating in a fraud using $25 million to build a condominium project which actually cost only $12.5 million. It appeared that Boehlke is linked to a firm called Capital Consultants, which is headed by Jeff Grayson. Grayson disappeared in 2000 after $355 MILLION went missing from Capital's investment fund. Aside from Boehlke, there is another man connected to Capital Consultants: Alvin Malnik. Alvin has been called Meyer Lansky's heir in the organized crime biz.
As Hopsicker found out, Alvin's son "is married to the daughter of a leading Prince of the Middle Eastern kingdom's founding family." This was based on an report by Herb Mallard of National Press, the Palm Beach Post and picked up at http://www.sauduction.com/18issue.html "Alvin Malnik, the man once regarded as the heir apparent to mobster Meyer Lansky, ... described by federal authorities as a top associate of organized crime figures ...
Among his friends, Malnik counts Saudi royalty. His son once married a princess descended from the Middle Eastern kingdom's founding family. Malnik runs a national chain of loan stores... ...In 1962, Malnik was listed as a director of the Bank of World Commerce, a Bahamas-based institution that involved 'some of the nations' top gangsters,' ...
In 1978, a Bahamian company named Appolonia Investment Limited paid $3.35 million to buy the property just north of Malnik's Ranch. Malnik and the prince -- a son of King Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia -- once lived in neighboring condos in the Cricket Club. Malnik's son ... would later change his name from Mark to Shareef and marry into the royal Saud family. Meyer Lansky was known as the treasurer of the US Mafia. Furthermore, the Washington Post reported already years ago: "There are other signs, though, that (Bin Ladens) network (was) ...backed by tens of millions of dollars in funds from members of the Saudi elite. U.S. Treasury Department and CIA officials recently went to Dubai to investigate reports that a bank there was funneling millions of dollars to bin Laden through Arab companies in London.
Independent Paper Regena supported Hopsickers revelations on Huffman Aviation in March 2002: "Caribe Air, in turn, has a long history of association with CIA drug-running operations out of Mena, Arkansas, and is also allegedly linked to fraudulent Enron-funded offshore investment partnerships. According to reports from Newsweek, three alleged terrorist pilots trained at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida, while Knight Ridder stated that suspects Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz Alomari, and Alghamdi,Saeed had attended various other prestigious military exchange officer's training programs. These reports were never categorically denied by US government sources. Source: http://www.regena.com/flight-training.htm
Hopsickers reports later revealed more bizarre details. Hopsicker claimed, that one name on Atta's email list, for example, "apparently worked at a Canadian company called Virtual Prototypes, whose website touts the fact that the firm helped prototype the avionics instruments in the F-15 jet fighter, the F-22 Raptor, the B2 bomber and the Apache Longbow, among others". Another address on the list, paradisehasaprice@hotmail.com, appears to refer to, or perhaps even to be, a female suicide bomber in Chechnya. The discovery of Atta's emails came about when a local avionics salesman at Eastern Avionics sold a headset to Al-Shehhi,Marwan, authorities said, after which his email address was added to a list kept by the terrorist duo, apparently sharing a single email account.
The owner of the flight school in Venice, Wallace J. Hilliard , was in business with a key figure in the Whitewater scandal, Truman Arnold, a Bill Clinton crony from Arkansas who had been the finance chairman of the Democratic Party. Arnold's attorney in Whitewater was longtime Washington figure Richard Ben-Veniste, who was just named to sit on the 9-11 investigation panel. Hopsicker said, that he sat down with two Southern lawmen, a current sheriff and his immediate predecessor. These two guys looked him "dead in the eye and said that, based on what they have seen with a lot of CIA-connected covert operations in the area, the CIA was somehow involved in, if not responsible for, the World Trade Center attacks." http://www.rense.com/general33/dissc.htm
Dekkers charged in fraud case (January 2003): "According to a Venice police PCA, Dekkers, acting as president of Dekkers Aviation Group Inc., entered into a loan agreement with Kenneth Jossart on Oct. 17, 2001. The deal was brokered by a mutual business partner, Wallace Hilliard. Dekkers obtained $200,000 from Jossart and signed a promissory note indicating that this amount was due and payable on Jan. 15, 2002. To secure the loan, Dekkers, still acting as president of Dekkers Aviation Group, entered into a mortgage agreement on property at 220 E. Airport Ave., Venice. The mortgage indicated that Dekkers Aviation Group is the mortgagor and Jossart is the mortgagee.
In August 2002, Dekkers sold the building at 220 E. Airport Ave. to Triple Diamond Enterprises. As of Oct. 2, 2002, the date the PCA was signed by investigators, Dekkers had not repaid the loan to Jossart. Jossart did not received any proceeds from the sale despite having a security interest in the property under the mortgage executed by Dekkers." Source: http://www.venicegondolier.com/NewsArchive3/011803/tp1vn6.htm
Dekkers story developed in 2002-2003: Reported by the Herald Tribune: Owner of flight school where terrorists studied charged with fraud http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Date=20030122&Category=APN&ArtNo=301221139&Ref=AR State files charges against flight school owner www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Site=SH&Date=20030122&Category=NEWS&ArtNo=301220303&Ref=AR&Profile=1060
On January 24th, 2003, Rudi Dekkers survived a chopper crash http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/South/01/24/helicopter.rescue.ap/index.html
On February 5th, 2003, Hopsicker revealed in a new article, that four additional 9/11 terrorist suspects trained at the flight school owned by Rudi Dekkers. They fled the U.S. in haste just days before the attack, according to sources working at the school at the time. Three of the fleeing students were Saudi, say sources, while the fourth, 22-year old Marwan Mohammed Shemina, told school officials his father worked for the United Nations in Rome. Dekkers already mentioned a "NATO"-guy in October 2001: "... I had at the moment of a week before September 11, I had one student there with a Muslim background who broke his course a week before September 11, stated to us that he wanted to go to Boston because he was doing a cruise or something, and he just stopped his course.
He came from England when he attended the flight course in Naples, but he lives in Italy. His father works for the NATO... Then there was money wired to the flight school from an official address like it had to do with the NATO or something, we didn't understand it, so this was a weird situation, then the person left a week prior finishing his course to Boston and a week prior to September 11, all these things together is too many coincidences and we don't believe in coincidence any more, so I reported this to the FBI and the FBI is looking into it and the boy's name did not appear on the list of hijackers or the 19 or 21 suspects total, but he is not home yet, so it is kind of strange, very strange." (Australian Broadcasting Corp. 10/21/01)
The first new terrorist suspect who had trained with Dekkers, Turki M. Almasri, 22, a Saudi national, was named in a story in a January 2003 Washington Post article www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30205-2003Jan22.html In an exclusive interview with the Mad Cow Morning News, Danielle Clark, a former executive at the school, disclosed that school officials told the FBI about three more Arab student pilots, including one abruptly ceased training and disappeared under mysterious circumstances in the days immediately preceding the September 11 attack. The three include two Saudis, Kamran Hussain, traveling on a UK passport; and Ahmad Badri, who had a Swedish passport; and Marwaan Shemisi, with passports from both Italy and Libya.
In point of fact the revelation of the four additional terror suspects brings the current total of 9/11 cadre terrorists known to have been enrolled at flight schools owned by Dutch nationals Rudi Dekkers and Arne Kruithof to eight. According to Yellow Cab driver Bob Simpson and other witnesses, Mad Cow Prod found out, that Atta,Mohammad and Rudi Dekkers had a good relationship to each other.
"They were going to a nightclub in Sarasota, talking and very sociable with each other. He and Atta were friends, you could tell." Mohamed Atta was twice seen with flight school owner Rudi Dekkers in Venice, FL. during September 2001. On September 10th 2002, Rep. Richard Shelby already said about the flight school in Florida. "there is explosive information that has not been publicly released. I think there are some more bombs out there.....I know that."updates...
The Report publishes an edited version of the famous August 6, 2001 presidential intelligence briefing. Here we learn the "FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers Bin Laden-related." Seventy different investigations? Then let's hear about them. But the Report doesn't go there, let alone discuss FBI whistle-blowers who tried to investigate Bin Laden-related terrorists but were smacked down. On page 247, we meet Minneapolis terrorist-to-be Zacarias Moussaoui, but not Time Person of the Year Coleen Rowley, the FBI whistle-blower who couldn't get a warrant from headquarters on him. Terrorist financing is covered, with a guileless, "We don't know exactly where the money came from" manner.There is no mention of FBI Special Agent Robert Wright, who tracked down and seized $1.4 million of Bin Laden-related funds before 9/11. His higher-ups fought him every step of the way. After the carnage of 9/11, Wright understandably broke down and, through tears, apologized on C-SPAN to 9/11 victims' families. "The FBI allowed 9/11 to happen," he told the world. "FBI management intentionally and repeatedly thwarted and obstructed my investigations into Middle Eastern terrorist financing."Both Rowley and Wright point to the FBI's David Frasca,the FBI's Radical Fundamentalist unit chief. After 9/11,Frasca was promoted to #3 in charge of Domestic Terrorism. Frasca is not mentioned in this Report.Of the many theories about 9/11, some of the best questions involve the mysterious Mohamed Atta, subject of the research of investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker. For two years, Hopsicker tracked Atta's final moves in Florida, including his cocaine and alcohol binges with temporary girlfriend, Amanda Keller, at the time a pink-haired stripper.The flight school that Atta happened to "choose," Huffman Aviation in Venice, also enjoys a sanitized version of its history.Although flight-school president Rudi Dekkers has a long criminal history, and owner Wally Hilliardhas ties to GOP Bush family friend Myron DuBain, Reverend Jerry Falwell and Clinton financier Truman Arnold,None of this makes its way into the report. Perhaps because Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste is featured in Hopsicker's 2001 book,Barry and the Boys regarding the CIA's Iran / Contra pilot Barry Seal.SanderHicks.com 9/11 report.(76) Why did Jeb Bush, within 24 hours of the 9-11-01 hits,arrive in the early morning hours (after midnight) at the "terror flight training schools" in Florida, confiscating all the documents of Huffman Aviation and personally escorting the documents to DC? Why do this in the middle of the night?Who expects a Governor of Florida to personally remove documents after midnight anyway from this flight school?Where are these documents presently? It is rumored that they were not used in any terror investigations and that after loading them on a C-130, they were presumably flown out of the U.S.?(77) What is the drug dealer or U.S. intelligence connection to the "magic Dutch Boys"(2 Dutch nationals who ran the flight schools who were let to escape and the U.S. faciliating their exits), as revealed by the investigative journalism of Daniel Hopsicker?http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/05/317953.shtmlmore upodates..1) http://www.madcowprod.com/mc022004.htmlDeath in Venice (Florida): Flight School Owner Has Shady TiesEXCLUSIVE--Venice, Fl. Authorities are probing the European business associations of a Venice flight school owner, whose school at the Venice airport trained the nucleus of foreign national terrorist pilots, looking for possible links to international organized crime groups, reported by the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday to be laundering large sums of drug money for major terrorist organizations.Organized crime said to launder billions for terrorists.Rudi Dekkers was actively marketing his flight school in Germany at the exact same time Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cell left Hamburg and moved to Florida, where several immediately enrolled in his school. Both ringleaders, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehri, each believed to have piloted a plane into the World Trade Center Towers,learned to fly at Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice, Fla.3) http://www.madcowprod.com/mc092004.htmlMohamed Atta and the Venice Flying Circus"The FBI took all our files, everything," said one local law enforcement official, after shaking his head ruefully when we asked if Rudi had any local �priors.� He shrugs. He can�t tell. His files are now All Gone. "They loaded two Ryder trucks right outside that (police station) window, then drove them right onto a C130 military cargo plane at Sarasota airport which flew out with Jeb Bush aboard."4) http://www.madcowprod.com/mc112004.htmlSpooks and Saudi's In FloridaLet�s begin with a story in the Tampa Tribune of a twin-engine Lear jet, which took off two days after the September 11 attack,at a time when every other private plane in the nation was grounded due to safety concerns."The Phantom Flight from Florida" - Because the federal government says the flight never took place, the paper headlined it the "Phantom Flight from Florida." It carried a Saudi Arabian prince, the son of that nation's defense minister, as well as the son of a Saudi army commander, and it flew from Tampa to Lexington, Kentucky, where Saudi princes had been purchasing racehorses in Bluegrass Country. From there, they flew a private 747 out of the country.Today�no thanks to Raytheon� the MadCowMorningNews has learned from a knowledgeable aviation source that the Lear jet in question very likely came from a Naples, Florida charter service."Wally Hilliard owns the only charter Lear service in Southwest Florida," said this source. "If a Lear was flying that day, it would have been his." If Hilliard�s Lear jets were extricating Saudis out of Raytheon in a CIA operation at the same time that Hilliard is also the boss of Magic Dutch Boy Rudi Dekkers, whose operation trained Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cadre to fly... well anyone can connect those dots. Is the CIA responsible for the fact that Rudi Dekkers Huffman Aviation was the terrorists Omaha Beach ?6) http://www.madcowprod.com/mc172004.html Venice Flight School Linked To CIANew evidence linking the owner of the Venice Florida flight school which trained Mohamed Atta to the Central Intelligence Agency surfaced earlier this month.The new evidence adds to existing indications that Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cadre's flight training in this country was part of a so-far unacknowledged U.S. government intelligence operation which had ultimately tragic consequences for thousands of civilians on September 11th.9) http://www.madcowprod.com/mc322004.htmlTerror Flight School Owner's Plane Seized for Heroin TraffickingA Learjet belonging to the true owner of the Venice flight school that trained both terrorist pilots who flew into the World Trade Center was seized with more than 30 pounds of heroin onboard by Federal Agents in July of 2000 at the Orlando Executive Airport.The seized plane belonged to 70-year old Wallace J. Hilliard of Naples, FL. While Rudi Dekkers busied himself training thousands of young Arab men to fly, from his base in Naples, just a short helicopter ride south of Venice, his partner Wally Hilliard was running a charter jet service called Plane 1 Leasing which provided the jet carrying 30 pounds of heroin. At the same time their planes were flying back and forth from Venezuela with illegal cargo Hilliard's charter service was also, unbelievably, being utilized at virtually no cost��despite the fact that rentals for Lear jets can run as high as $1,800 an hour��by Florida Governor Jeb Bush.Even stranger, both Governor Jeb Bush and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris were providing celebrity endorsements to Hilliard's operation well after the company's Lear (N351WB) had been busted by DEA agents armed with machine guns.10) http://www.madcowprod.com/mc332004.htmlTerror Flight School Owner Implicated in 'Protected' Drug Trafficking RingMounting evidence in the investigation into the terror flight schools in Venice FL is raising questions of whether an officially-sanctioned drug trafficking operation there discouraged the FBI from taking action against the terrorists that might have averted the World Trade Center disaster. The new revelations heighten concern that the true reason for the FBI�s failure to take action against terrorists which the Bureau has acknowledged knowing were training in Venice may have been their historical reluctance to meddle on another Federal Agency's turf. Nor was the FBI the only Federal Agency protecting the drug trafficking operation, court documents reveal.Though the Justice Department, through the U.S. Attorney�s Office in Orlando, declined to prosecute, the affidavits filed by DEA agents after the heroin trafficking arrests make clear their belief that the pilot of the plane, who worked directly for the Lear's owner Wally Hilliard, was also involved and should have been charged along with the five Venezuelan and Colombian nationals who eventually pled guilty in the case, called "the largest-ever seizure of heroin in Central Florida" by the Orlando Sentinel. The new information adds to long-standing suspicions of drug trafficking held by aviation observers at the Venice Airport, who more than six months ago told us the Hilliard/Dekkers operation had a 'green light' from the DEA at the Venice Airport. "The local Venice Police Department (which mounted round-the-clock patrols at the Airport after September11) were warned to leave them alone," said one aviation executive.11) http://www.madcowprod.com/mc342004.htmlI.N.S. Deporting 'Magic Dutch Boy' Rudi DekkersAt the instigation of Bush Administration officials the Immigration and Naturalization Service is preparing to deport the man whose Venice, FL. flight school served as a magnet for Mohamed Atta's terrorist cadre, effectively placing him beyond the reach of the upcoming 9/11 investigation, the Mad Cow Morning News has learned.12) http://www.madcowprod.com/mc352004.htmlTerror Flight School Owner in Business with Whitewater Scandal'Key Figure'- Truman Arnold's name has surfaced in connection with the investigation into the Venice FL flight schools made infamous by the September 11 terrorist attack. In a curious aircraft transaction discovered while probing the tangled business affairs of Wallace J. Hilliard, 70, of Naples, FL, Truman Arnold appears to have 'loaned' Hilliard for only a dollar a Beechcraft King Air 200 worth over $2 million. In another bizarre twist, Truman Arnolds lawyer during the Whitewater Investigation turns out to have been Democratic power-broker Richard Ben-Veniste, just nominated to serve on the 9/11 probe.13) http://www.madcowprod.com/mc422004.htmlMOHAMED ATTA WORKED FOR ELITE U.S.� GERMAN GOVERNMENT EXCHANGE PROGRAMFor at least four years while living in Hamburg during the 1990�s terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta was part of a 'joint venture' between the U.S. and German Government. The Mad Cow Morning News has learned, an elite international �exchange� program run by a little-known private organization with close ties to powerful American political figures like David Rockefeller and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.14) http://www.madcowprod.com/mc4412004.htmlIntimidated by FBI, Witnesses Claim 9/11 'cover-up in progress' in FloridaThe FBI didn�t confine their menacing visits just to people who had lived with the terrorist ringleader. Some got in trouble just for having lived next-door, like Stephanie Frederickson, a pleasant 50-year old housewife who made the grave mistake of living in an apartment beside the apartment that Mohamed Atta moved into with Amanda Keller.�At first, right after the attack, they (the FBI) told me I must have been mistaken in my identification," Frederickson stated. �Then they would insinuate that I was lying. Finally they stopped trying to get me to change my story. After that they just stopped by once a week to make sure I hadn�t been talking to anyone.The Sandpiper Apartments manager, Charlie Grapentine, is a grizzled Korean vet in his early 60�s. The FBI did not welcome his recollections any more warmly than they had those of Stephanie Frederickson. "They called me a liar, and told me to keep my mouth shut," stated the ex-marine through clenched teeth. �Nobody likes to hear that: that they didn't see something they know they saw.�15) http://www.madcowprod.com/mc4512004.htmlFBI SHUT DOWN INVESTIGATION INTO SAUDI TERROR CELL IN BOSTONA software company called Ptech, founded by a Saudi financier placed on America�s Terrorist List in October 2001, had access to the FAA�s entire computer system for two years before the 9/11 attack. But it�s the unreported story that has the potential to lead to the explosive charge that the FBI�s role in the 9/11 investigation itself needs investigation. In October of 2001, a handful of ex-Ptech employees alerted the FBI to evidence indicating that the firm had Saudi terror connections. Almost a year later the Boston FBI had still done nothing about it. They had, in fact, shut down their cursory investigation and taken no action.20) http://www.madcowprod.com/reviews/reviews.htmlReviews of Daniel Hopsickers book "Welcome To Terrorland"�Welcome to Terrorland� is the story of Mohamed Atta, a black-hearted psychopath, in Florida, a pirate�s paradise. Fearless investigative journalist and documentary film producer Daniel Hopsicker journeyed to Venice, FL., the biggest September 11 crime scene that wasn�t reduced to rubble, and spent over a year in the sleepy retirement community where authorities say three of the four terrorist pilots learned to fly. Based on hundreds of interviews with eyewitnesses and participants, �Welcome to TerrorLand� details the shocking results of Hopsicker�s yearlong investigation, and names more than a half-dozen individuals Atta went to meetings with while in Florida.21) http://www.madcowprod.com/vfcwmv.htmlPreview of the video "Mohamed Atta & The Venice Flying Circus"Three of the four terrorist pilots learned to fly in tiny Venice, Florida, a sleepy retirement community with the second oldest population of any city in the entire United States. They attended flight schools owned by two Dutch nationals, one of whom has Mob ties. Were they being trained here in a still-secret covert intelligence operation?24) http://www.madcowprod.com/01122004.htmlDid Bush's New Homeland Security Chief Shield Terror Ring?Michael Chertoff, appointed by President Bush to head the Homeland Security Department, may have shielded from criminal prosecution a former client suspected by law enforcement of having funneled millions of dollars directly to Osama Bin Laden while in charge of the U.S. Government�s 911 investigation.25) http://www.madcowprod.com/01312005.htmlRudi Dekkers has been regularly entering the U.S. illegally through the Bahamas, the Mad Cow Morning News has learned.In an effort to evade U.S. Customs scrutiny, the infamous Dutch national running the Venice, FL. flight school which both terrorist pilots who crashed into the World Trade Center used as �cover� is "slipping" into the U.S. from the Bahamas after exchanging clothes with one of the pilots on the charter flight which flew to pick him up. Dekker�s efforts to elude inspection may be partly the result of his notoriety after the 911 attack. Officials looked on uneasily while his international jaunts continued without let-up, to destinations which include at least several recent trips to that narco-traffickers destination of choice, Colombia.Daniel Hopsicker says Yeslam bin Laden (Osama's brother) has admitted funneling an unknown number of Arab pilots to Huffman Aviation in Venice, supposedly for pilot training.http://www.thelibertyclub.net/user/rbn2/911.htmmore on Hopsicker
Compare: (See Tracking All Hijackers) (See Informants) Team 8 + : Article / San Antonio Connection # Crossing the RubiconChapter 19Phoenix-Memo - 9/11EncyclopediaOperation Able Danger 9/11 review
Rebuttal to the IG's Able Danger ReportCia Visas For Patsies - 9-11ReviewMossad - The Israeli Connection To 9/11 IS DEFENSE CONTRACTOR MITRE CORP THE TROJAN HORSE OF 9/11?Catania, mystery 11 september 2001 Mohamed atta Articles By Alex Constantine - NSA CIA links to terrorGrounded Planes on 9/11 -Former "20th Hijacker" was on AA43Flight Schools - 9/11EncyclopediaMore on ACS, 9/11, Atta, Torture, CIA, Dekkers, Bribery, etc.Mohamed Atta page1Mohamed Atta page2Mohamed Atta page3Flight 175 - 9-11 ReviewWitnesses in Terror Trial Threatened HAMBURG, Germany 911Hijackers as Patsies 9-11 reviewKaram LLC and Atta ? Meridien - Hassan Erroudani 9/11

RECORD PROFITS at your EXPENSE..again..wake up!

Gas prices getting you down?Information that the big oil companies don't want you to know. 2007 UPDATES and Tyson Slocum's May 2007 Testimony before the House.

Since George Bush became President in 2001, the top five oil companies in the United States have recorded profits of $664 billion through the first quarter of 2007:
ExxonMobil: $278.5 billionShell: $149.5 billionBP: $99.2 billionChevronTexaco: $90.9 billionConocoPhillips: $86.9 billion
With Americans were hurting at the pump, Big Oil took in $190 billion in combined profits last year, over a third of that going to ExxonMobil alone. Yet the Bush administration and the Bush Congress still sees fit to reward Big Oil with billions in unnecessary tax breaks - $6.5 billion just last year.

in order for Oil companies to DRILL..they must sign a lease with The Dept of Interior....after all cost are made up..a portion of the profits are to go back to the American Taxpayer...Somehow Oil Companies are keeping ALL profits...which violates the inital lease agreement...The intentional error in the 1998-99 lease contracts for deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, cost the American Taxpayer over $20 billion in lost royalty payments given the current price of crude oil and natural gas, according to an analysis by the Government Accountability Office, Congress' auditing agency.
WASHINGTON -- Several major oil companies said Wednesday they are willing to discuss with the Interior Department changes in offshore drilling leases that contain a government error which could give the industry a $10 billion windfall.
Exxon is giving Lee Raymond one of the most generous retirement packages in history, nearly $500 million, including pension, stock options and other perks, such as a $1.6 million consulting deal, two years of home security, personal security, a car and driver, and use of a corporate jet for professional purposes.
Many industry analysts claim that rising demand in China and India are the big reasons why the price of oil exceeds $60 a barrel. However, they neglect to mention the role U.S. demand plays in setting global crude oil prices. Americans consume 25% of the world's oil every day (see chart comparing global oil consumption). China, the next biggest consumer, uses less than 7% of the world's oil each day. America's huge appetite for oil combined with the fact that the United States is the world's third largest producer of it (only Saudi Arabia and Russia produce more than we do) creates a strong argument that the United States holds a lot of sway over world oil prices.
The energy bill that President Bush signed in 2005 does nothing to address the U.S. factors that are driving oil and gas prices to record highs. Congress and the White House explicitly rejected efforts to improve fuel economy standards for our cars and trucks (which account for 60% of our oil consumption) or adequately fund fossil fuel alternatives.
The oil companies don't mind. Since Bush became President, the largest five oil companies operating in the US - ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, BP and Shell - have enjoyed profits of $464 billion, with ExxonMobil leading the way with profits of $158.5 billion.
Meanwhile, gas prices continue to go up up up - and no oil company is reinvesting their profits into the things that will benefit motorists. For example, in 2006 ExxonMobil spent $37.2 buying back its stock and paying dividends - at the same time, the company spent only $3.3 billion on capital investment in the U.S. So there is a direct correlation between record prices paid by consumers and record profits enjoyed by oil companies. As Americans shell out more dollars at the pump, the profit margin by U.S. oil refiners has shot up 158% since 1999 (the year Exxon and Mobil merged).
A MUST READ BELOW........EDUCATE YOURSELF!!!!!!!!

http://www.citizen.org/documents/USdereg.pdf

http://www.citizen.org/documents/House07.pdf


Corporate oil giants led by American firms extracted unbelievable profits from their investments after the Second World War. In Iran, between 1954 and 1964, Western companies earned a compounded interest rate of profit of 70 percent per year!" And in the Middle East as a whole, at the height of the oil companies' power in 1970, net assets of petroleum industries valued by the U.S. Commerce Department at $1.5 billion yielded $1.2 billion in profits-a return of 79 percent. It was no wonder that in the 1970s, 40 percent of all U.S. investments in developing countries, and 60 percent of all U.S. profits from developing countries, were oil related.
The great wealth extracted from Middle East countries helped oil corporations become massive edifices that dominated the world economic terrain. By 1973, seven of the world's 12 largest companies were oil corporations.' Known as the "Seven Sisters," these oil giants-Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, Gulf, Shell, and BP-have dominated the world oil industry ever since.
Surrogates
By the mid 1960s, the U.S. had control of Middle East oil, and U.S. corporations had cornered the world market and were raking in immense profits. With what turned out to be two-thirds of the world's oil under its control, what strategy did the U.S. use to protect its prize?
The U.S. strategy, known as the Nixon Doctrine relied on building surrogate states in the area, which would be the executors of U.S. policy and guardians of Middle East oil. U.S. policy had three pillars in the Middle East: 1) Saudi Arabia, home to the world's largest oil reserves; 2) Iran, where the CIA had organized a coup in 1953 to install a U.S. ally, the Shah, to power; and 3) Israel, formed in 1948 and built as a colonial settler state based on the expulsion and brutal oppression of the native Palestinian population. Israel became the biggest recipient of U.S. aid, and wholly dependent on the U.S. for its existence. Each state was to perform a different role in the region.
The Saudi state was by and large the creation of the U.S. oil companies and the United States government. In the 1920s, Saudi Arabia was a feudal society with different families ruling various regions. It was forged into a nation in 1932 when Ibn Saud and his clan defeated the other families and unified the country, naming it after themselves.
Texaco and Standard Oil of California (SOCAL-later renamed Chevron) won a concession to drill for oil in Saudi Arabia in 1936-a mere four years after the country had been formed. To share the exploration, and marketing of their new Saudi oil concession, a new company named ARAMCO (Arab American Oil Company) was formed, which over the next two decades would become the largest oil producer in the world.
Saudi Arabia at the time had no government to speak of. There was no state structure, no ministries, no state budget, or army. Much of what became the Saudi state, in fact, was created by the United States and ARAMCO. Ghassane Salameh explains that:
In return for royalties, the government had nothing to give ARAMCO, but the signature on the bottom of the contract-no armed forces to defend the [oil] installations, no administration, no skilled labor, no educated personnel, no real infrastructure of any sort, much less a government capable of regulating the corporate giant at the heart of kingdom. As a result ARAMCO engaged in not only all aspects of Saudi oil production but also built housing, airports, schools, dug for water, and above all invited the U.S. military to install a base near the oil fields to protect [them].'S
In fact, it was the installation of this American base in Dharan in 1944, which prompted the Saudi king to form a ministry of defense.
Whatever may have changed since then, Saudi Arabia retains certain defining features. With 25 percent of the world's reserves and the largest oil production facilities in the world, oil defines the state, and Saudi Arabia is the Mecca of world oil. The Saudi state functions as a family business-in effect an extended family endeavor, ruled by the Ibn Saud family. Oil is the main source of state funding and the majority of the population is either directly or indirectly dependent on the state for employment for its livelihood. Finally, the survival of the state continues to depend on U.S. support, which, paradoxically, is also a major source of its internal instability.
Saudi Arabia was the economic prize. But Israel became the main security asset, the watchdog of the region. Its role was to challenge, check, and if necessary destroy any challenge to the U.S.-mostly threats from Arab nationalist regimes which
had taken power in 1950s and 1960s in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. Israel was supported to the tune of $4 to $5 billion in U.S. aid and armed with U.S. weapons. Washington Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson summarized the U.S. strategy:
[S]tability as now obtains in the Middle East is, in my view, largely the result of the strength and Western orientation of Israel on the Mediterranean and Iran on the Persian Gulf. These two countries, reliable friends of the United States, together with Saudi Arabia, have served to inhibit and contain those irresponsible and radical elements in certain Arab states-such as Syria, Libya, Lebanon, and Iran, who, were they free to do so, would pose a grave threat indeed to our principal sources of petroleum in the Persian Gulf.
Iran, the third pillar of the U.S. strategy, acted as the policeman of the Gulf. Iran had the population, state structure, and infrastructure that Saudi Arabia lacked, and the Shah of Iran, using Iran's oil income, built a formidable military with one of the world's most up-to-date air forces. Between 1970 and 1978, the U.S. exported over $20 billion worth of arms to Iran, amounting to what U.S. Representative Gerry Stud of Massachusetts called, "the most rapid buildup of military power under peacetime conditions in the history of the world." The Shah himself was arrogantly blunt about his role stating in 1974: "Without Iran to defend them the Arab states in the Gulf would be dead."
OPEC's rise
The 1970s also saw the rise of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). OPEC was founded in Baghdad in 1960 by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, and was later joined by Qatar, Indonesia, Libya, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, and Nigeria. It was originally formed as a way for these countries to try to negotiate a better share than the 10 to 15 cents on every dollar of immense profits the giant oil multinationals were making from the marketing and sale of their oil.
But soon, its member countries realized that they could coordinate the amount of oil exported, not only to get a larger share of their own oil revenue, but as a means to control the supply, and therefore the price, of oil. Each country received a quota, negotiated within OPEC, of how much oil it could produce. If they would stick to these production quotas, OPEC countries could manipulate prices. Holding 40 percent of world's production and a 50 percent share of oil available for export, OPEC has had a great leverage on oil supplies worldwide.
Moreover, OPEC also controls 90 percent of the world's excess oil production capacity-with Saudi Arabia holding more than half of that. While most other producers are nearly at the maximum of their production capacity, OPEC, limiting production through its system of quotas, is producing at about 80 percent of its full capacity. OPEC can easily ramp up production, to make up for shortages, in cases of emergency such as serious military conflicts.
Though the U.S. gets less than a quarter of its oil from OPEC, OPEC still has great influence on all oil importers worldwide. Its excess production capacity makes OPEC (and especially Saudi Arabia) of great strategic importance to the U.S.
OPEC's presence was especially felt with the 1973 oil embargo, organized by OPEC's Arab countries as a protest of Israel's war against Egypt and Syria. The embargo was organized against Israel, but also against the United States which was funneling arms and aid to Israel, ensuring an Israeli victory. During the embargo the price of oil tripled in a matter of weeks, increasing from $4 a barrel to $ 12 a barrel. However, more importantly than the increase itself, was the realization by OPEC of its power over oil markets.
1979: A blow to U.S. imperialism
The United States faced serious problems in the region by the end of 1970s. It had to contend with OPEC's control of oil supplies. Real disaster struck, however, when the Iranian revolution of 1979 overthrew the Shah. The "Policeman of the Gulf" was gone, replaced by an Islamic regime hostile to the United States. If the defeat in Vietnam had been a disaster for America's sense of invincibility and military might, seriously limiting its ability to commit troops abroad, the 1979 Iranian revolution struck a blow to U.S. policy in the most strategically prized region for the United States-the oil producing Persian Gulf.
The Iranian Revolution toppled the Shah, one of the three pillars of U.S. policy, a blow from which the U.S. has yet to fully recover. And in December 1979, the USSR invaded Afghanistan, adding to Washington's concerns in the region. Saudi Arabia was also shaken at roughly the same time. A military coup attempt took place in September 1979, followed in November by an armed takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam's holiest site, by those opposed to Saudi family rule, and riots by the Shiite minority in the oil rich Eastern Province in December.
A glance at two factors underlines the importance of the loss of Iran and the turbulence in Saudi Arabia. U.S. aid to Israel doubled in 1980, bolstering Israel after the loss of the Shah in Iran, and the price of oil tripled-rising from $12 per barrel to its highest price ever, $35 per barrel (equal to over $65 per barrel in 2002 dollars). The U.S. sent massive amounts of arms to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and urged the formation of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as a way to coordinate the efforts of Saudi Arabia with the Gulf's weaker states- Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates-to build a common front against Iran.
With the loss of the Shah, the U.S. no longer could rely on surrogates to police the Gulf. So in 1980, President Jimmy Carter, announced Washington's intention and willingness to interfere directly in the area under the new Carter Doctrine. The United States formed its new Rapid Deployment Force (RDF) with a mission ostensibly to guard against "any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region [which] will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States."
The outbreak of war between Iran and Iraq in 1980 provided the perfect opportunity for the U.S. to not only contain Iran and cement its ties to the Gulf States, but to reinsert its military more fully in the Gulf. The U.S. now set up a string of bases and command centers in the Gulf states, stationing the U.S. Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. By 1983, the RDF had been expanded into Central Command (CENTCOM), now a permanent military presence in the region, with 17 ships under its command and the authority to requisition 35,000 troops.
Moreover, with the GCC's help-and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia footing the bill-Iraq's army under Saddam Hussein was built up to force a retreat of Iranian forces, which by 1985 looked to be winning the war. Tilting towards Saddam Hussein against Iran, the U.S. approved and even oversaw the transfer of some of the chemical and biological weapons and missile technologies which Bush today is accusing Iraq of having secretly developed. With U.S. backing, Iran lost the war, and the Iranian threat was contained. But with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the U.S. now turned on its erstwhile ally. In a brief and completely one-sided bombardment and invasion, the U.S. killed at least 200,000 Iraqis-there is nothing close to an accurate count-many while they were retreating after the war was lost.
By 1992, the situation in the Gulf had been stabilized. The Iranian Revolution had been contained, and Iraq was left decimated and hampered with economic sanctions which were to kill more than a half million Iraqi children in the next decade. But regimes hostile to the U.S. were still in power in Iran and Iraq. Saddam Hussein had been left in power by the U.S., which feared an uprising from below would be more damaging and destabilizing than leaving the Iraqi regime intact, but caged and weakened. And the Iranian regime, although weakened and now more accommodating to the West, was still a source of concern for the U.S. The U.S. now moved from a policy of containment (of Iran) to that of dual containment (of Iran and Iraq).
Furthermore, Saudi Arabia was facing internal problems, both economic and political. The Saudi economy, wholly dependent on oil revenues, was facing serious challenges. Lower oil prices brought falling revenues and increasing government debt through the 1990s, and the U.S. military presence and bases in Saudi Arabia, used to launch the invasion of Iraq, were becoming a source of public resentment towards the U.S. and Saudi regimes. The Gulf region may have been temporarily stabilized for U.S. interests, but it was not by any means permanent.
Diversification
The U.S. quickly set out to strengthen its web of security arrangements in the region. The U.S. encouraged cooperation between Israel and Turkey, who signed military pacts and engaged in joint military training exercises. In the early 1990s, Turkey become the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid (behind Israel and Egypt), receiving as much as $700 million a year, using much of it to buy $2.3 billion worth of arms from the U.S. in just two years. Turkey's Incirlik air base was modernized and became home to the U.S. F-16 jets used to bomb Iraqi forces under the excuse of protecting Iraq's Kurdish minority in Iraq's northern "no-fly zone." Yet the U.S. has turned a blind eye when Turkey's F-16 jets, sitting on the same tarmac at Incirlik, have bombed the bases of the Kurdish minority in Turkey.
"Diversification of oil resources" became the motto for the United States. Sources other than the Persian Gulf; from Africa, to the North Sea to Canada, were tapped to diversify the source of U.S. oil imports. By U.S. calculations, this would not only cushion the U.S. (albeit temporarily) from any possible disruption from the Gulf, but just as importantly it would reduce the market share of OPEC, and therefore weaken its influence on oil supplies and prices.
OPEC had already lost market share during the 1973 oil boycott. While the boycott had established OPEC as the force that had effective control of world oil supplies and therefore oil prices, it had sent oil consumers to look for sources of oil other than OPEC's, such as Norway's North Sea, as they came on line. Under these pressures, OPEC's share, which had been about 50 percent of total world oil production in 1970, plummeted to a low of 31 percent by 1985. Since then, OPEC has managed to recoup some of losses, and raise its share to about 40 percent in 2000.24 But the push for diversification continues. For example, after over a decade of letting Africa rot in poverty, there is again interest and investments in Angola, Chad, and even Sudan to explore and develop oil resources, while in the Western Hemisphere, Mexico and Canada are chipping away at OPEC's share.
The Caspian's black gold
The Caspian Sea's oil riches, opened to Western markets only after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, have shown the greatest promise as a potential alternative to Persian Gulf oil.
The oil and natural gas reserves in the former Soviet Union republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, are estimated to hold about 70 billion barrels of oil, or three times the reserves of the United States. Some estimates put the reserves of oil as high as 200 billion barrels, making this potentially the second largest oil and gas reserves in the world after the Gulf. The American Petroleum Institute has called the Caspian region "the area of greatest resource potential outside of the Middle East." And Vice President Dick Cheney, while he was the CEO of Halliburton, stated that "I can't think of a time while we had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically as significant as the Caspian"
With its oil and gas riches potentially worth as much as $4 trillion, there has been a frenzied scramble to get a piece of the Caspian by all major oil companies. Chevron, Texaco, ExxonMobil, BP-Amoco, Shell, and Unocal have all made bids for development of Caspian oil. But the competition is not limited to the oil majors. Japanese and Chinese companies have taken stakes in the oil consortiums, trying to secure oil shares, and Iran and Russia have been competing to become the main transport route for Caspian oil out of the area.
There are however, problems facing the development of Caspian oil and gas. There has been tension among the five countries bordering the Caspian over how to divide the sea. But the biggest problem is transporting its oil and gas to the world markets. Because the Caspian is actually a lake, pipelines have to carry its oil and gas to ports or through any number of nations to reach consumers. These transport routes have been the source of competition, since these pipelines are not only a source of revenue, but the transportation routes are of strategic importance.
A number of pipelines have been proposed, with the cheapest and the most viable passing through Iran or using Russia's existing pipeline system. The U.S. considers it strategically imperative to prevent most of the oil from running through Russian and Iranian pipelines. It has officially announced its desire to build multiple routes, but in practice the U.S. has thrown its weight behind the Baku-Ceyhan and Trans-Caspian pipelines, which will cross the Caspian under the sea and carry oil and gas to the 'Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. Given the huge costs involved, major oil companies have balked at this proposal, questioning whether they can recoup investment and operation costs.
Only a few years ago, BP-Amoco, the major player in Azerbaijan, and other oil executives had expressed skepticism at the economic viability of this pipeline, despite U.S. and Turkish promises of subsidies. And analysts were suggesting that "the U.S. policy is built on a false promise to...torpedo major Russian and Iranian influence in the region-implying a much stronger commitment to the Caspian states than the U.S. really intends or even is able to keep."
But the September 11 attacks, and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, have completely changed this. The U.S. is now firmly planted on both sides of the Caspian. Not only has the U.S. government signed security pacts with Azerbaijan and placed troops in Georgia, but it now has bases and troops on the Eastern Caspian shores, in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. With U.S. troops well in place, the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline's construction started officially in October, 2002.
The concerns of economic viability however, are real. If oil prices drop, the Caspian's oil will become less attractive. And, even though the Caspian may easily contain the estimated 200 billion barrels of oil, during the past three years the estimates of proven reserves have actually been reduced from 45 to 10 billion barrels. No doubt, with more exploration, much more than 10 billion barrels of oil will be found. However, at the end of the day, there may not be too little oil but too many pipelines to carry the volume of oil and gas eventually produced in the Caspian.
Growth
The world's energy consumption has increased by 84 percent since 1970 (from 207 to 382 quadrillion BTUs) and it is expected to increase by another 60 percent over the next twenty years. The industrially advanced countries have been using the lion's share of this energy: The U.S. uses 25 percent of all the energy consumed in the world, Japan 5 percent, and Western Europe 18 percent. Today, the U.S. is the biggest consumer of oil in the world, using 19 million barrels of the 77 million barrels used in the world daily.
But the rate of increase in energy consumption has not been uniform across the world. Industrialization and integration into the new global economy has meant an increase in energy usage in developing countries at a pace three times that of the U.S., Japan, and Western Europe. While the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan have seen their oil consumption increase by an average of 12 percent, Central and South America have seen an increase of 40 percent since 1990. Developing Asia has seen a 44 percent increase in energy consumption over the same period, led by South Korea and India, which have seen their energy grow by an astounding 84 percent and 59 percent, respectively. Energy demand in Latin America and developing Asian nations is expected to more than double by 2020. This growth will account for half of the total growth in energy demand in the world.
The biggest increases are expected to come from Asia. Asian economies are expected to overtake the United States as the biggest consumers of energy in the next twenty years. By 2020, these economies are expected to account for 27 percent of world energy consumption, while the U.S. is expected to consume 25 percent; Western Europe, 18 percent; Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, 13 percent; and Latin America, 5 percent of the world totals.
The biggest gains in Asia are expected to be in China, whose economy doubled in size the 1990s. Over the next 20 years, energy consumption in China is expected to grow at a rate four times the rate of the growth in Europe and the U.S. In less than 10 years China is expected to become the largest oil consumer in Asia, surpassing Japan as the world's second largest consumer of oil after the United States. Oil consumption is expected to increase by 150 percent by 2020, and China's natural gas usage is estimated to increase by 1,100 percent.
Russia: The new silk road?
The anticipated growth in energy demand has fueled the entry of new producers into the energy market. But the biggest entry in the oil markets, after a long hiatus following the collapse of the USSR, has been Russia. Before the 1991 collapse, the Soviet Union was the largest producer and the third largest exporter of petroleum in the world. While production is not at the pre-1989 levels, there is now enough excess production to resume oil and gas exports.
Two factors have allowed Russia's bounceback: The stabilization of oil prices (up from $9 per barrel in 1998, to $28 per barrel today) has made oil exports much more lucrative. And ironically, Russia's economic collapse has not only reduced internal demand, but with the devaluation of its currency, has made investment costs and Russian oil much cheaper.
Russia does not have huge oil reserves-no more than 45-50 billion barrels. But it is the world's second largest producer, and has made a serious bid to gain market share. With oil prices back above OPEC's target of $20 per barrel, the Russian economy has shown strong growth in the past few years. Russian gross domestic product has grown by 8.3 percent in 2000 and 5.1 percent in 2001.
The Russian economy is extremely sensitive to oil prices. With energy accounting for 40 percent of its exports, fully 90 percent of Russia's GDP growth has been due to oil and gas. Given Russia's reliance on oil income, it has had an interest in working with OPEC to stabilize oil prices by limiting production along with OPEC's production quotas. But, since oil prices had stabilized at $25 per barrel in early 2002, Russia has refused to continue any coordinated cuts with OPEC.
Hard up for foreign currency, and weighing its relations with the U.S. in the aftermath of September 11, Russia has tried to maximize its profits by winning market share from OPEC-a plan which fits well with the desire of the U.S. to diversify its sources of oil and reduce OPEC's control on oil markets.
Despite the show of cooperation between the U.S. and Russia, however, the September 11 attacks and U.S. invasion of Afghanistan have seriously undermined Russia's position and plans in the Caspian region and Central Asia.
But Russia's plans go beyond the Caspian. Although Russia is a major player in oil, it is natural gas which is Russia's strong suit. World natural gas reserves are even more geographically concentrated than oil, with Russia and Iran accounting for half of the world's reserves. Holding 32 percent of the world's reserves, Russia is to natural gas what Saudi Arabia is to oil.
While oil is expected to remain the dominant energy source in the world, natural gas consumption, however, is expected to grow at a faster rate. In fact, Jeroen van der Veer, president of Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum, stated that "Increasingly, the 21st century will be seen as the century of gas." Demand for natural gas in Korea, Taiwan, China, and India is expected to triple over the next decade.
And Europe's natural gas needs will rise rapidly as well, as Europe switches over from oil. Europe already uses natural gas for 22 percent of its energy needs. Yet, this share may rise to as much as 60 percent, over the next decade. Russia is planning to secure its position as an oil and gas supplier to Europe and East Asia. Russia's largest oil companies, Lukoil and Yukos, and the state-owned gas giant Gazprom which already supplies Europe with 25 percent of its natural gas, have been busy building the infrastructure to ensure their domination of European markets.
Russia's biggest investments however, are in he East. The largest single foreign investment n Russia has been Exxon-Mobil's $4 billion commitment to develop oil and gas at Sakhalin Island. Philip Watts, chairman of Shell, the biggest foreign investor in Russia, has called Sakhalin "the most ambitious green field project undertaken during my 30 years at Shell" 40 l Sakhalin, located between Russia and Japan, holds 10 billion barrels of oil and even bigger gas reserves. Yet this modest amount alone cannot justify the interest. Sakhalin does provide an easily accessible source of oil and gas for the markets of China, Korea and Japan. It can serve as the eastern transportation hub for Russia's oil and vast gas reserves elsewhere, and is an important part in Russia's bid to become a player as an energy supplier to the growing markets of developing Asia.
Russian companies have been joined by such regulars as Shell, Exxon-Mobil, BP, Texaco, Marathon Oil, Arco, and Halliburton, committing as much as $50 billion to the Sakhalin project. The proximity of Sakhalin to Eastern markets has also attracted interest from Japanese and Asian oil companies. Japan's Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and SODECO own about a 25 percent share in Sakhalin's projects. And India's ONGC has made major investments, to meet India's gas needs which are expected to quadruple in the next 50 years.
For any of these projects to come to fruition, major investments are needed. Russia's future may be in its natural gas but it needs oil income now to finance any future plans. Russia has to balance two contradictory factors: It needs market share and therefore is willing to increase production to take markets away from OPEC countries, but it needs oil prices to be high enough to make its oil exports be profitable.
One solution for Russian oil companies has been to look for cheap sources of oil-and Iraq has provided that. With the U.S. sanctions against Iraq in full force, Russian companies (and French companies to a smaller extent), have made inroads in Iraq. Russian companies have been a major outlet for Iraqi oil sold under the United Nation's oil-for-food program-buying Iraqi oil and then reselling it on the world markets.
But more importantly, while the American and British oil corporations have been kept out by the U.S. sanctions, Russian oil companies have signed multi-billion dollar agreements with the Iraqi government to develop Iraq's vast oil fields.
Lukoil, Russia's largest oil company, has signed a $20 billion deal to develop the West Qurna field with a potential 15 billion barrels oil, and Zarubezhneft is closing on a $90 billion of concession for Bin Umra fields. And the giant Majnoon field with a potential 30 billion barrels of oil (bigger than the total proven reserves in the U.S.) is still up for grabs. Russian President Putin's resistance to a UN-supported resolution effectively authorizing U.S. military action in Iraq is mainly to ensure that, with or without Saddam Hussein, Russian oil interests (as well as Iraqi debts to Russia) will be recognized.
Not quite dead yet
Since the 1991 Gulf War, diversification of oil resources and containment of threats to U.S. hegemony in the Middle East have served their purpose, but they have also created serious tensions and problems-for U.S. allies and foes alike-which are destabilizing the region. The presence of U.S. troops and dwindling oil income have undermined key U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, and isolation and economic pressures have unleashed a reform movement in Iran which could spin out of the control of the reformers themselves. In addition, the growing unpopularity of the sanctions, and the continued survival of the Iraqi regime, remain a thorn in U.S. Middle East policy.
Lower oil prices and decreasing oil income-coupled with a rising population-have had serious consequences for Saudi Arabia. This has put enormous strain on the Saudi state/families ability to maintain the standard of living that most Saudi's have been used to for years. According to World Bank estimates, Saudi Arabia's oil dependent Gross Domestic Product (GDP) dropped from $156.5 billion in 1980 to $125.5 in 1995, a drop of 25 percent. In the same period, Saudi Arabia's population more than doubled, growing from 9 million to over 19 million. This translates to a per capita GDP drop of 62 percent. Per capita income has dropped by about 60 percent since 1970s oil boom.
These problems are not limited to Saudi Arabia. Even though a number of Gulf economies have rebounded since 1990, the same pattern of declining income has been the rule in much of the Gulf. The Gulf economies have actually shrunk at a rate of 2.5 percent per year over the 1980s, shrinking twice as fast as the crisis-ridden African economies.
Saudi's economic difficulties, combined with the presence of the U.S. military, are fertile ground for opposition to the Saudi regime. They are also behind the Saudi cooling of relations with the U.S. and increased cooperation with Iran's reformers.
Iran, OPEC's second largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia, relies on oil for 70 percent of it foreign exchange income. Yet its production has dropped by 45 percent since the 1979 revolution. Lack of investment has continued to take a toll on production numbers, aging wells and field are producing less, and new discoveries cannot be brought on line. Iran needs to invest $90 billion just to maintain production volume at current levels. Unable to internally finance these investments, Iran has been opening its oil industry to foreign investments for the first time since 1979.
Just as damaging to Iran's oil income is the rise in internal energy consumption. Over the past 20 years, Iran's population has doubled, increasing energy consumption rapidly. If present trends continue, Iran, today the world's fourth largest oil exporter will be a net importer of oil in 15 years. This would be disastrous to the Iranian economy and regime. In spite of U.S. economic sanctions, Iran has been fairly successful in attracting major oil companies to develop new oil and gas fields. Today, Shell, BP, France's TotalFina, Italy's AGIP and ENI, Russian Gazprom, Malaysia's Petronas, and Japan's Mitsui are involved in various projects in Iran.
Just as Russia's oil firms have been more than happy to exploit the vacuum left behind in Iraq's oil production, U.S. "allies" in Japan and Western Europe have been keen to use the U.S. absence to form their own independent relations with Iran and secure their own oil and gas deals, outside of U.S. control.
Ironically, Saudi Arabia, the product of American imperial might in the Gulf, and the Iranian regime, the product of a revolution against that imperial might, are facing similar problems. Their cooperation is a product of economic necessity, to stabilize their blood line, and secure income for oil.
Back to the Gulf
New players may have weakened OPEC, but Persian Gulf producers-and by extension OPEC-still hold all the advantages in oil production. Gulf oil is the cheapest to produce, the Gulf's reserves are the biggest in the world, and the Gulf contains the world's greatest excess production capacity, allowing it to control oil supplies and prices better.
New discoveries in the Caspian Sea, Africa, and South America have increased the amount of oil outside of OPEC's quota system, providing alternative sources for the gargantuan American oil market as well as other growing markets. But even bigger discoveries in the Persian Gulf have actually increased both the Middle East's and OPEC's share of world reserves. In 1980, the Middle East held 55 percent of the world's proven reserves and OPEC, 66 percent. Today, the Middle East's share has increased to 69 percent, while OPEC countries
now hold 80 percent of the world's reserves. And since non-OPEC countries' smaller reserves are being depleted much faster, their reserves will be depleted in, on average, 15 years; while OPEC's oil is forecast to last for another 80 years.
Gulf oil is also much cheaper to produce, making it much more profitable. Production costs for Persian Gulf OPEC nations are about $1.5 per barrel compared to about $4.5 in the U.S., $5.5 in Canada, $7 in the Caspian Sea, and as high as $10 a barrel in Russia. With worldwide imports from the Gulf expected to double in the next two decades, there is no way around the Gulf's domination of oil markets. The Persian Gulf is still the world's strategic prize.
Iraq: Too many birds with one stone?
The events of September 11 have provided the Bush gang with the unique opportunity to move from containing the tensions in the Persian Gulf to resolving them once and for all in its favor. It now wants to settle its "Iraqi and Iranian problems," bring Saudi Arabia back into orbit, and roll back OPEC to its pre-1970s irrelevance. In the words of one recent Pentagon presentation, Iraq is seen by the U.S. as "the tactical pivot" for re-molding the Middle East on Israeli-American lines.
In the event of a U.S. invasion, Iraq would become a vast source of cheap oil under U.S. control which could be used to undermine OPEC, provide the battering ram to deal with Iran and Saudi Arabia, and be a lever against Washington's potential political or economic rivals.
At some 112 billion barrels, Iraq now has the second largest proven reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia's 265 billion barrels. And like all other Middle East oil, Iraqi oil is cheap to produce. Iraq's oil, just like the Saudi's, is geographically concentrated, with fields containing as much as 10 to 30 billion barrels in one location. This translates into low production and exploration costs.
In addition to giving the U.S. Ieverage over the price of oil, control of Iraqi oil will also be an economic boon to U.S. oil giants. After the last Gulf war in 1991, there was a bonanza for American oil companies such as Dick Cheney's Halliburton, to rebuild Kuwaiti and Saudi oil infrastructure damaged in the war. The same will be repeated in Iraq. The only question is how many of the contracts will go to American companies, and which crumbs will be thrown to the Russian and French companies to win their acquiescence.
Lower oil prices will tighten the noose around Iran's ailing oil-dependent economy. Why not let economics soften up Iran, and make of the job of regime change in evil number two on Bush's "axis of evil" list easier? The same economic pressures, combined with enough "diplomatic" persuasion, could also force Saudi Arabia back under U.S. control.
Iraqi oil could also be a lever against stronger opponents of the U.S., providing a useful tool to undermine competitors such as Russia and China, and hampering Russia's bid to expand its oil development plans. The U.S. can also keep France, Germany, and Japan, who could pose a threat to its undisputed dominance, in check. As Asia Times writer Pepe Escobar put it: "Oil and gas are not the U.S.'s ultimate aim. It's about control.... If the U.S. controls the sources of energy of its rivals-Europe, Japan, China, and other nations aspiring to be more independent-they win."

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The super-elite watched all this with great interest. They saw, in government schools, a path to a controlled population—a population of “sheeple.”

Members of the super-elite that controls this power system were never elected to anything, but elected officials in national elites answer to them. Those without the tacit approval of the super-elite have no chance of coming within a thousand miles of the Oval Office. The masses of people, meanwhile, will have been “educated” to adjust to society, which in this context means following the crowd and automatically withholding support from anyone who “can’t get elected.” Combine these two, and you have a reason why no Libertarian Party or Constitution Party candidate has a chance of becoming President of the United States or even reaching high office at the state level as long as this power system remains in place. The media elites continue to promote a system which plays Democrats against Republicans although both parties are controlled at the top. There exists, in other words, a strict gatekeeping system. Only those with certain values and attributes, and a certain mindset, need apply.
Let’s now go beyond the thought-experiment stage. Does this super-elite really exist, or is this just more armchair “conspiracy theory”? It is not a theory. It is now quite well documented. The information is available to anyone willing to seek it out. To paraphrase what Trinity told Neo in their initial conversation, the answers are out there, and will find you if you want them to.
This state of affairs did not develop overnight. This much should be clear. What is behind it?
Within any society, there appears to be a minority that thinks in terms of power and measures the worth of all actions in terms of whether they increase the personal reach of the actors and increase their capacity for control. This is why practically every society of any size is hierarchical, and why hierarchy is never eliminated, only replaced by a different hierarchy—the same wine in a new bottle.
Where to begin the story is a tough question. Some would cite the Bavarian Illuminati, started by a renegade Jesuit priest named Adam Weishaupt in 1776, the same year our Declaration of Independence was written. Weishaupt, however, found financial support through the Rothschild banking empire. The European bankers had discovered fractional reserve banking and the fine art of creating “wealth” out of thin air. They had learned they could exercise control over governments by loaning them money at interest and then extending the loans—attaching conditions to the extensions. The Rothschilds were the first internationalists of the incipient industrial era. They had established banks in five centers of influence: London (England), Paris (France), Frankfurt (Germany), Vienna (Austria) and Naples (Italy). These banks cooperated closely with one another, and they doubtless wielded enormous influence on the course European history took during the 1800s. J.P. Morgan became the American equivalent, eventually followed by the Rockefeller clan. John D. Rockefeller Sr. had made a fortune running Standard Oil. His children soon learned that there were even larger fortunes to be made in banking, and in socking as much money as possible into tax-exempt foundations created in the wake of the founding of the Internal Revenue Service in 1913. But alas, I get ahead of myself.

There are people who believe that the group Weishaupt founded still exists, and is still orchestrating all the more recent secret or semi-secret organizations from behind the scenes. Others would hold out for the Freemasons, with which Weishaupt had been involved. I have not been able to produce any original documentation supporting such theses (Weishaupt’s group was in fact outlawed in his own country in 1785). But secrecy was around in the form of the Skull & Bones organization founded at Yale in 1832. Numerous members of this group became prominent bankers, businessmen, ambassadors, other government officials, and so on, down through the ages. Antony Sutton argues in America’s Secret Establishment that Skull & Bones has been at the center of it all since its being brought to this country from Europe (specifically and interestingly: Germany). Skull & Bones still exists, of course. Both George W. Bush and John Kerry are members.
We know that a man named John Ruskin came to Oxford University to teach fine arts in 1870, and that he had a social philosophy of reform that took English upper-class youth by storm. Ruskin taught that English upper-class values needed to be extended to the masses and spread worldwide. The English upper classes would need to redistribute at least some of their wealth, or face the overwhelming of English civilization by an uncontrollable “rabble.” Karl Marx had preached that the violent overthrowing of capitalism was historically inevitable. Ruskin’s response: Marxian upheavals were preventable, but only by undertaking the immense project of extending English upper-class wealth and values as a means of remaining in control. In other words, create a global empire with Great Britain at its helm.
Ruskin’s most famous pupil was Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes kept the notes he’d taken on certain of Ruskin’s lectures with him the rest of his life. Other students of Ruskin’s were Alfred Milner and Arnold Toynbee. Rhodes became a multibillionaire mining gold and diamonds in South Africa (he received support, interestingly, from Lord Rothschild and later from Alfred Beit, an immensely wealthy German-born financier who became his partner in De Beers Consolidated Mines). We know that prior to his death, Rhodes willed a substantial portion of his fortune to the creation of the Rhodes Scholarship program mentioned above. Less well known is that in five previous wills he wrote of setting up a secret society the long-term goal of which was to create world government: “the extension of British rule throughout the world” including “the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire …”
Rhodes’s secret society was in fact organized in 1891 (Lord Rothschild was one of its members, as were Milner and Toynbee). Rhodes and those he recruited for his project believed that furthering this kind of plan was the only means of putting an end to war and extending the British Empire worldwide. Thus were the Round Table Groups Carroll Quigley mentioned begun. Milner took over following Rhodes’s death in 1902. According to Quigley (Tragedy and Hope, p. 132), these groups “still function in eight countries.” Quigley pursues in vivid detail the careers of the major players in The Anglo-American Establishment. With the reputations made possible by Oxford educations and enormous financial resources at their disposal, the men running the Round Table Groups literally became “the establishment”—despite the fact that except for Rhodes and Toynbee their names remained almost unknown. The anonymity did not bother them. They did not want fame. They wanted power.

after all, knew the truth. The real agenda was not run out of Moscow but from banking empires long established in New York City, London, and elsewhere. These empires had actually bankrolled communism. They had maneuvered nations into wars by secretly financing both sides and then setting them against one another. Quigley’s 1,300-plus page tome Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time mocks the conspiracy theory of the anticommunists as a “myth” but then suddenly offers one of the most extraordinary revelations ever penned by someone of Quigley’s stature:
This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies…but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known. (p. 950, emphasis mine)
Professor Quigley was openly telling us of a hidden power system—a super-elite—operating behind the scenes. He identified it as “the Round Table Groups.” These controllers “wish to remain unknown” as they work out their plans for the world. What are their plans for the world? Quigley elaborated:
[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups. (p. 324)
In other words, the super-elite wanted both wealth and power, and this meant placing the rest of us at a systemic disadvantage in our own pursuits. Later, Quigley outlined the truth about the two-party system in America:

The chief problem of American political life for a long time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy… [E]ither party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of those things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies. (pp. 1247-48)
Quigley identified shadowy organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations based in New York and the Royal Institute of International Affairs based in London as front organizations for the Round Table Groups he mentioned—sometimes specific individuals such as J.P. Morgan, the banking titan. He claimed to have studied the super-elite’s secret records for twenty years, and to identify with its goals and most of its policies. His only major disagreement was with its desire to “remain unknown.” This disagreement got Tragedy and Hope into trouble. Its publisher, Macmillan, allowed the book to disappear despite thousands of back orders. Inquirers were told it had gone out of print. In addition to the disappearance of nearly every copy, the original plates were destroyed, making new printings impossible given the technology of the time. There can be no doubt of an attempt to suppress the book. Quigley lost control of his own work, as pirated editions began to appear. He wrote near the end of his life that the book “has brought me many headaches as it apparently says something that powerful people don’t want known.” A smaller companion volume, The Anglo-American Establishment, failed to find a publisher during his lifetime.
Quigley’s account of these organizations and their development, both in Tragedy and Hope and in The Anglo-American Establishment is authoritative and definitive. Under no circumstances can we dismiss Quigley as a “conspiracy nut.” Quigley was established, with a solid reputation as a macrohistorian: a historian specializing in the larger, long-term tendencies governing the rise and development of entire civilizations. Earlier, he had written an important and very well-received work of macrohistory, The Evolution of Civilizations. Carroll Quigley would not have deliberately sabotaged an ideal career, one with enormous perks, privileges, and access to the centers of influence. There can be no reasonable doubt that he knew what he was talking about.
Quigley became mentor to one William Jefferson Clinton, and helped Clinton get the Rhodes Scholarship that sent him to Oxford. (We will say more about Cecil Rhodes and Rhodes Scholarships below.) Quigley was the one person Clinton would thank by name after assuming the presidency in 1993. That was the year our nation took a quantum leap towards globalism: beginning with so-called “free trade” agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, and the President’s Council on Sustainable Development put in place in response to a United Nations “soft law” document called Agenda 21.
What results from taking Quigley seriously is a quite different picture of American and Western political history from what we get from history and political science textbooks—and of the political process from what we get from the mainstream media. It suggests that the conventional picture, in which the history of the past hundred years just a series of series of unfortunate accidents and blunders, is a masquerade—and partly the result of the hijacking of academic disciplines such as history. We come to realize that most Americans are indeed plugged into a “matrix”—created not by a malevolent sci-fi machine, of course, but by controls over their education and the information that reaches them. They are “plugged in” as children, attending first public schools and then colleges and universities. They “learn” to trust government information, the academic-bureaucratic complex, and the mainstream news media. This creates the “real matrix.” A few, like Neo in The Matrix, may suspect that something is wrong. But fear of being branded paranoid usually ensures their silence. If they write down their suspicions and publish them, they are ignored. There is, after all, enormous loyalty to the fabricated world. Those “plugged in” have their own gatekeeping systems. Certain ideas—e.g., those having to do with “conspiracy theories”—are automatically screened out. The super-elite then need not work so hard, or even remain entirely secret. If the schools do their job right, its members need not micromanage every institution to make sure everyone follows the rules. The power system r banking and industrial elite had already established itself in America (it is likely that Rothchild money had helped out here as well). Starting with banking titan J.P. Morgan, then the Rockefellers, and finally steel magnate turned philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (among the first to float the idea of a “league of nations”), a globalist mindset with enormous resources to back it up also developed here. G. Edward Griffin, in his classic The Creature From Jekyll Island, recounts the creation of the Federal Reserve system in 1913. This gave them control over essentially the entire banking apparatus of the country—driving smaller, independent banks out of business. That same year, of course, saw the rise of the Internal Revenue Service. For the first time in U.S. history, every working individual’s personal income was taxed, and every individual would soon have to report his earnings to the federal government. It is fair to say that by the time these efforts were complete, wealth and power were flowing to the center. The ordinary citizen was losing control, and he didn’t even know it!
The super-elite was able to gain control of what became the mainstream media. In another of those rare moments of total candor and lucidity by a professional politician, U.S. Congressman Oscar Calloway, stated in 1917:
In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press….They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers.
An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.
G. Edward Griffin describes the equivalent hijacking of academic history, alluded to above:
They selected twenty candidates at the university level who were seeking doctorates in American History. Then they went to the Guggenheim Foundation and said, “Would you grant fellowships to candidates selected by us, who are of the right frame of mind, those who see the value of collectivism as we do? Would you help them obtain their doctorates so we can then propel them into positions of prominence and leadership in the academic world?” And the answer was “Yes.”

So they gathered a list of young men who were seeking their doctoral degrees. They interviewed them, analyzed their attitudes, and chose the twenty they thought were best suited for their purpose. They sent them to London for a briefing….At this meeting, they were told what would be expected if and when they won the doctorates they were seeking. They were told they would have to view history, write history, and teach history from the perspective that collectivism was a positive force in the world, and was the wave of the future.
Now let’s go to the words of Mr. Dodd himself [then principal investigator for the Congressional Committee to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations] as he described this event before our cameras in 1982. He said:
This group of twenty historians eventually formed the nucleus of the American Historical Association. Then toward the end of the 1920s the Endowment grants to the American Historical Association $400,000 [a huge amount of money in those days] for a study of history in a manner that points to what this country can look forward to in the future….
With the media and academic disciplines undergoing transformation by these monied interests, and infiltrated by the Round Table Groups, organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie financial empire began to pursue the globalist agenda (see The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 183). The Carnegie Endowment for Peace, in true Orwellian fashion three decades before Orwell would pen 1984, would maneuver the U.S. into the latest European war—on the side of the British, of course. The super-elite’s man in the Wilson Administration was “Colonel” Edward Mandell House. Some would later say that House was the real president during those years. Wilson himself referred to House as his “second personality.” House had anonymously published a book entitled Philip Dru: Administrator, a blueprint for the adoption of totalitarian socialism in America thinly disguised as fiction. Staying by Wilson’s side, he convinced Wilson to abandon a 1916 campaign pledge and enter the conflict going on in Europe. What ensued became known first as the Great War and later as World War I.
The super-elite had created the conditions for world war. It followed a pattern familiar to students of the highly influential German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Create conditions for a major disruption (thesis); allow the disruption to provoke a distraught reaction (antithesis); then, with a major crisis at hand, step in with the solution (synthesis). The super-elite’s solutions to the crises it engineered invariably involved a power grab. Its members have always liked wars. Wars destabilize nations. They leave behind ruined lives and economies, as well as frightened populations who will turn to anyone who promises to put an end to their suffering.
The super-elite’s promise was an end to the threat of world war through an incipient world government, to be called the League of Nations. became a strong proponent of the League of Nations. European nations began joining. Efforts to pull the U.S. into its orbit were torpedoed in the Senate. Lack of U.S. support would sink the League of Nations. Such an entity could not survive without U.S. participation. It would be noticed, nevertheless, that the whole tenor of U.S. foreign policy had changed. Our first president, George Washington, had warned famously in his Farewell Address against the “foreign entanglements” that would become inevitable under an interventionist foreign policy. Until the Wilsonian era, the U.S. had stayed out of foreign conflicts and refrained from interfering in the internal affairs of other nations. No more. The goal of the new interventionism, in a phrase current during the time, was “to make the world safe for democracy.”
Their first attempt at an incipient world government scuttled, the super-elite regrouped, and in 1921, founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in England and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) here, as front organizations for the promotion of globalism and world government. Quigley tells us:
Through Lord Milner’s influence, these men were able to win influential posts in government, in international finance, and become the dominant influence in British imperial affairs and foreign affairs up to 1939. In 1909 through 1913, they organized semi-secret groups known as Round Table Groups, in the chief British dependencies and the United States. These still function in eight countries….
Once again the task was given to Lionel Curtis who established, in England and each dominion, a front organization for the local Round Table Group. This front organization, called the Royal Institute of International Affairs, had as its nucleus in each area the existing, submerged Round Table Group. In New York it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a front for J.P. Morgan and Company (Tragedy and Hope, p. 132, pp. 951-52).
One cannot overstress the CFR’s importance in directing the course of American policy, domestic as well as foreign. It went almost unnoticed for decades, even as its leading members (financed by Rockefeller dollars) created their next attempt at a world government: the United Nations. This time the U.S. signed on board. That was the early 1940s. We had fought and won a second world war, even more destructive than the first, and created the basic infrastructure of the welfare state. The Cold War had started. What is variously called the “military-industrial complex” or the “welfare-warfare state” became the dominant force in this hemisphere.
In 1961, a man named Dan Smoot would write a book about the CFR entitled The Invisible Government. The book was ignored. Smoot was an outsider—a radio broadcaster with a strong independent streak. Then Quigley came along. He was one of the insiders.
Here (courtesy of G. Edward Griffin’s exhaustive research for Freedom Force International) is a list of past presidents who have been members of the CFR: Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Here is a list of Secretaries of State who were CFR members: Dean Rusk, Robert Lansing, Frank Kellogg, Henry Stimpson, Cordell Hull, E.R. Stittinius, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles, Christian Herter, William Rogers, Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, Edmund Muskie, Alexander Haig, George Schulz, James Baker, Lawrence Eagelberger, Warren Christopher, William Richardson, Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and now Condoleezza Rice (President Bush’s new replacement for the recently departed Powell). Here is a list of Secretaries of Defense who were CFR members: James Forrestal, George Marshall, Charles Wilson, Neil McElroy, Robert McNamara, Melvin Laird, Elliot Richardson, James Schlesinger, Harold Brown, Casper Weinberger, Frank Carlucci, Richard Cheney, Les Aspin, William Perry, William Cohen and Donald Rumsfeld. Here is a list of Central Intelligence Agency directors who were CFR members: Walter Smith, William Colby, Richard Helms, Allen Dulles, John McCone, James Schlesinger, George H.W. Bush, Stansfield Turner, William Casey, William Webster, Robert Gates, James Woolsey, John Deutch, William Studeman and George Tenet.
CFR influence permeates the mainstream media. Leading media personalities who are or were CFR members include David Brinkley, Tom Brokaw, William Buckley, Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters. Members of the CFR hold controlling management positions at major newspapers, leading news services, publications, and publishing houses. A sampling: The Army Times, American Publishers, American Spectator, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Associated Press, Association of American Publishers, Boston Globe, BusinessWeek, Christian Science Monitor, Dallas Morning News, Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, Forbes, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Dow Jones News Service, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, New York Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, Times Mirror, Random House, W.W. Norton & Co., Warner Books, Atlantic, Harper’s, Industry Week, Naval War College Review, Farm Journal, Financial World, Insight, Washington Times, Medical Tribune, National Geographic, National Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Newsday, NewsMax, Newsweek, Political Science Quarterly, The Progressive, Public Interest, Reader’s Digest, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, Time-Warner, Time, U.S. News & World Report, Washington Post, The Washingtonian, Weekly Standard, World Policy Journal, Worldwatch, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, NBC, PBS, RCA, and Walt Disney.
Tax-exempt foundations and think tanks with CFR members in controlling positions include: The Sloan and Kettering Foundations, Aspen Institute, Atlantic Council, Bilderburg Group, Brookings Institute, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Foundation, Ford Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, Hudson Institute, John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, RAND Corp., Rhodes Scholarship Selection Committee, Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Trust Fund, the Trilateral Commission, and the UN Association.
The number of past or present university presidents, administrators, professors and departmental chairs, or members of boards of trustees who are or were CFR members is around 563. This is greater than the number of CFR members in financial institutions including banks, the Federal Reserve system, stock exchanges and brokerage houses: around 284. Many corporations, finally, have been controlled by past or present CFR members: Atlantic Richfield, AT&T, Avon, Bechtel, Boeing, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Chevron, Coca Cola, Consolidated Edison, Exxon, Dow Chemical, du Pont, Eastman Kodak, Enron, Estee Lauder, Ford Motor, General Electric, General Foods, Hewlett-Packard, Hughes Aircraft, IBM, International Paper, Johnson & Johnson, Levi Strauss & Co., Lockheed, Lucent Technologies, Mobil Oil, Monsanto, Northrup, Pacific Gas & Electric, Phillips Petroleum, Proctor & Gamble, Quaker Oats, Yahoo, Shell Oil, Smith Kline Beecham (a pharmaceutical giant), Sprint, Texaco, Santa Fe Southern Pacific Railroad, Teledyne, TRW, Southern California Edison, Unocal, United Technologies, Verizon Communications, Warner-Lambert, Weyerhauser, Xerox.
Labor unions have also been had CFR members in dominant roles: the AFL-CIO, United Steel Workers of America, United Auto Workers, American Federation of Teachers, Bricklayers and Allied Craft, Communications Workers of America, Union of Needletrades, and Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers.
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan is a CFR member. So were 14 of his predecessors.
This is just a sampling. What it shows is that something like 80 percent of the power centers in American political and economic life have people in controlling positions who are members of the same organization—an organization with around 4,000 members total. Isn’t this curious in and of itself? And shouldn’t one be even more curious that most of the rest of the population of this country has never heard of the organization? Many of those who have, would respond that the CFR is no more than a job-finding service for the well-connected. While it is very dubious that all 4,000 of its members are involved in directing the machinations discussed here, there is doubtless an inner circle, the Round Table Group at its center, and here we will find the “secret government” Smoot wrote about, and which Quigley documented in detail.
James Madison warned in the Federalist Paper #47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” As a society we desperately need to “take the red pill” and unplug before it is too late! But how did we get so complacent?uns on a kind of autopilot.
The super-elite had two long-term goals. One we have covered at some length: that of gradually taking the West toward a socialist world government, whether by creating an Anglo-American empire or through the UN.
The other, a necessary flipside of the first goal, was social engineering, to create a population that would accept world government—either because they embraced or had even learned to love the idea or because they didn’t care. We saw strong hints of this in our account of the hijacking of the mainstream media and academic disciplines like history. But now our focus must be broadened to middle America generally—the ordinary people working at ordinary jobs and attempting to raise ordinary families. For the social engineering project to work, its targets must learn as little as possible about the principles guiding our original Constitutional republic. They must have been educated—or, rather, trained—not to think, just to follow orders. They must be conditioned for an existence permeated by dependency of various sorts. And they must be continually distracted, so as never to be motivated to put two and two together and get four.
In other words, a “real matrix” had to be constructed around middle America, quietly, quietly. Or as the idea was expressed openly at Carnegie Endowment facilities: “We must control education in the United States.” Centralization, of course, makes control easier. It is far easier to impose policy or a single line of thought on a centralized, top-down educational system than it is to impose it on hundreds of privately owned, independent schools and autonomous districts. The government school system was perfect for what the super-elite wanted.
The Founding Fathers simply assumed that education would not be a function of the federal government. The Constitution does not mention education. The Founding Fathers themselves were privately educated. It is clear, also, from such events as the publication of the Federalist Papers in the major New York newspaper of the time, or from the literature that was published and sold well at the time (e.g., James Fenimore Cooper’s difficult, philosophically dense novels) that early generations of Americans had a command of language and intellect that is superior to today’s masses.
Government schools got their start in the 1840s, when Horace Mann returned from Prussia bearing news of an amazing school system. The Prussian system was also rooted in Hegelian thought. Hegel had believed we lived in a universe of Absolute Reason that would be expressed politically as the Absolute State—the exact opposite of the limited government the Founding Fathers had established. In the Prussian system children were educated not for intellectual accomplishment but for obedience to the state. The word kindergarten is, in fact, Prussian. It suggests growing children, as in a garden (which may recall that disturbing scene in The Matrix where, under the malevolent supervision of AI machines, humans “are no longer born, we are grown”).
Massachusetts, Mann’s home state, bought into the idea, and became the first state (in 1852) to enact a compulsory attendance law. Government schools did not catch on right away. A number of theologians (R.L. Dabney is an example) warned of their dangers. But very slowly, the American population began to accept them. Compulsory education laws were passed in one state after another. Numerous state constitutions (including my own state of South Carolina) adopted planks committing state governments to financing government school systems. The consolidation and centralization of education had begun.

The super-elite watched all this with great interest. They saw, in government schools, a path to a controlled population—a population of “sheeple.” The earliest incarnation of what would become the Rockefeller Foundation, before the turn of the century, began with the meeting between John D. Rockefeller Sr. and one Frederick Taylor Gates. Rockefeller Sr. had begun giving money to a variety of causes, many of them very worthwhile. He had bankrolled the University of Chicago, for example. Gates had ideas of his own about how to use Rockefeller money. He would lead Rockefeller’s eldest son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., into an interest in education that would lead to the founding of the General Education Board in 1902. In his Occasional Letter No. 1, a publication of the General Education Board, Gates penned the following chilling two paragraphs:
In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply.
The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops on the farm.
Concealed within these words is a goal of social control—via a system of education that stresses vocationalism at the expense of challenging students cognitively or intellectually. This system would eventually transform government schools into laboratories of social engineering in order to produce “sheeple” who would neither know nor care about, much less challenge, the goal of socialist world government.
John Dewey was the lynchpin figure here. Dewey had doubtless come to the attention of the Round Table Groups very early. A youthful psychology professor at the University of Chicago, he had studied the new “experimental psychology” under G. Stanley Hall, who in turn had been the first American student of the German philosopher-psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, who had begun the “experimental psychology” movement at the University of Leipzig in the 1870s. Wundt’s school promoted a militant empiricism: nothing counted for science except what could be directly observed in the laboratory. Since thoughts, free will, the soul, etc., could not be observed, it was pointless to theorize about them. “Experimental psychology”—the parent of behaviorism—eliminated them in favor of ideas bound to interest would-be social engineers. Children were organic stimulus-response machines. Human beings, in this materialist view, are exclusively products of their environment. Change the environment and you produce a new human being. A whole new way of “educating” seemed about to open up.
Dewey’s progressive education picked up where “experimental psychology” left off. For Dewey—schooled in both Hegelian and Marxist thought as well as Wundtian psychology—the purpose of education is not to communicate knowledge and the accumulated wisdom of our civilization, or to offer children intellectual challenges, but to adjust them to a “changing” society. To the progressive educators, even basic literacy was a mere option and not a necessity. Dewey wrote that “it is one of the great mistakes of education to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of the school work for the first two years.”
Essentially, under progressive educators government schools mounted a systematic attack on children’s minds as those of unique individuals. Dewey also wrote:
The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.
So education became socialization, the adjustment of the individual to the group and the adoption of the idea that truth equals consensus—which invariably bows to the authority of the strongest personality in the group (or operating behind the scenes).
What developed was an educational system where what mattered was the group, which takes priority over the individual. We encountered the term in passing above: collectivism, the philosophy at the heart of every form of socialism (and, in fairness, much of “capitalism” as it currently exists). Whether the individual learns anything beyond what is needed to adjust to the group and serve the interests of the state and the corporations is, in this view, irrelevant. Funded by Rockefeller dollars via the General Education Board, Dewey took up residence at the newly created Columbia State Teacher’s College at Columbia University in New York City, where he was able to surround himself with the “best and the brightest” of progressive educators.
The trajectory American education pursued after this has been well charted. The story is far too long and involved to tell here. Suffice it to say, even if government education was a bad idea to start with, the super-elites (via their control over tax-exempt foundations, major universities and professional education groups ranging from textbook publishers to the National Education Association) proceeded to destroy whatever might have been left of genuine education in this country—all the while increasing its price tag. I recommend the following three books: Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s the deliberate dumbing down of america, John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education, and B.K. Eakman’s The Cloning of the American Mind. The first two are large books, and fairly expensive (over $40 each). Get them anyway! These will be the best investments you will make this year toward understanding the “real matrix” and “unplugging” from it. The dumbing down of this country was not an accident. It was deliberate. It was the second component in preparing the West for the advent of world government. The following quotation from Iserbyt’s volume should clinch the argument (as well as demonstrate super-elite involvement via the CFR):
Mr. O.A. Nelson, retired educator, has supplied the vitally important documentation needed to support the link-up between the textbooks and the Council on Foreign Relations. His letter was first printed in ‘Young Parents Alert’ (St. Elmo, Minnesota). His story is self-explanatory.
“I know from personal experience what I am talking about. In December 1928, I was asked to talk to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. On December 27th, naïve and inexperienced, I agreed. I had done some special work in teaching functional physics in high school. That was to be my topic. The next day, the 28th, a Dr. Ziegler asked me if I would attend a special educational meeting in his room after the AAAS meeting. We met from 10 p.m. until after 2:30 a.m.
“We were 13 at the meeting. Two things caused Dr. Ziegler, who was Chairman of the Educational Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations, to ask me to attend… my talk on the teaching of functional physics in high school, and the fact that I was a member of Progressive Educators of America, which was nothing but a Communist front. I thought the word ‘progressive’ meant progress for better schools. Eleven of those attending the meeting were leaders in education. Drs. John Dewey and Edward Thorndike, from Columbia University, were there, and the others were of equal rank. I checked later and found that all were paid members of the Community Party of Russia. I was classified as a member of the Party, but I did not know it at the time.
“The sole work of the group was to destroy our schools! we spent one hour and forty-five minutes discussing the so-called ‘Modern Math.’ At one point I objected because there was too much memory work, and math is reasoning; not memory. Dr. Ziegler turned to me and said, ‘Nelson, wake up! That is what we want… a math that the pupils cannot apply to life situations when they get out of school!’ That math was not introduced until much later, as those present thought it was too radical a change. A milder course by Dr. Brechner was substituted but it was also worthless, as far as understanding math was concerned. The radical change was introduced in 1952. It was the one we are using now. So, if pupils come out of high school now, not knowing any math, don’t blame them. The results are supposed to be worthless. (the deliberate dumbing down of america, pp. 14-15)
This, of course, was the origin of the “new math” which left a generation of high school students unable to multiply and divide, understand fractions, or do other simple arithmetic operations without calculators! The “new math” was just one species of the more general attack on the individual’s basic reasoning ability. Frustrated by bad teaching methods, many students doubtless decided they were “no good at math” and gave up. Others, schooled with destructive, whole-language approaches to reading, never became good readers. They gave up on subjects like history and civics, which require an ability to read and process information. Students would receive less and less, with each passing generation, about the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Finally we reached the point where it became possible to focus on the fact that many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves, among the worst of sins in these politically correct times. Such matters would loom far larger in the academic portrayal of those who original built our Constitutional republic than any ideas they might have had, especially about limited government. Such students, conditioned not to think but to respond emotionally, became perfect cannon fodder for the School-To-Work and Workforce Investment programs of the 1990s—programs sometimes beginning as early as elementary school, designed to adjust them for a “global workforce”—under the watchful eye of emerging “global governance.”
In this environment, it indeed became possible for two major presidential candidates—George W. Bush and John Kerry—to be members of the same supersecret organization, Skull & Bones, and it not be news! In the “real matrix,” such an election becomes one of the most important in history because of the vast differences in philosophies between the two. Democratic and Republican “sheeple” were practically at each other’s throats prior to Decision 2004. In the real world—the “desert of the real”—Bush’s and Kerry’s agendas were more alike than they were different. Both were pledged to an internationalist foreign policy and to the UN. Both planned to continue, and even expand, the Iraq War. Both accepted intrusive domestic policies such as the USA Patriot Act. Both would increase federal spending and expand entitlements, in a financial environment guaranteed to continue and even accelerate our nation’s growing debt. And none of this was news!