March 4, 2000
March 11, 2000
March 18, 2000
A recent lawsuit is exposing a risky scheme in which the federal government and some of the world's biggest banks are conspiring to keep the price of gold low in order to boost profits and prop up the United States dollar.
A lawsuit has been filed in federal court alleging that the U.S. government, with Wall Street's biggest banks, has been conspiring in a scheme to keep the price of gold low in order to boost profits for the world's biggest bankers while artificially keeping the U.S. dollar strong internationally.
Reginald H. Howe of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) has filed a lawsuit (Case No. 00-CV-12485-RCL) in U.S. District Court in Boston against the bigwigs of the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and several banks for "damages arising out of manipulative activities in the gold market."
The suit alleges that since 1994 the government has been collaborating with the world's top banks to keep the price of gold stable. The banks do this for profit, and the government does this to fool the world by making the dollar look much stronger than it is.
Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and William McDonough of the Treasury Department, and banks such as Chase Manhattan and J.P. Morgan are among the alleged conspirators.
"This manipulative scheme," plaintiffs said, "appears directed at three objectives:
• To prevent rising gold prices from sounding a warning on U.S. inflation;
• To prevent rising gold prices from signaling weaknesses in the international value of the dollar; and
• To prevent banks and others financial institutions, which have funded themselves by borrowing gold at low interest rates and are thus short of physical gold, from suffering huge losses as a consequence of rising gold prices."
Since Roman times gold has been an international monetary unit. It is a commodity that cannot be grown or reproduced. Because of this, much of the world looks to gold as a yardstick for the value of different currencies—even the U.S. dollar—until recently.
In the United States paper money was backed by gold until 1934 when President Roosevelt ended the domestic coinage of paper money. Until 1934 you could trade your paper money in for gold coins—even at your local bank. Gold backed the U.S. dollar in international monetary dealings until 1971, and was therefore the ultimate measure of the American dollar as well as other world currencies.
In 1971 the United States ceased redeeming dollars for gold. Since then, the international payments system has "moved to floating exchange rates with no currency convertible into gold at fixed parities," said Howe. Paper money, which once was anchored concretely to the value of gold, was now set adrift.
Even though paper money was no longer formally measured by its gold backing, gold was consistently used as a barometer for inflation here and abroad. There fore, if the government could control the value of gold, it could falsely control the value of the dollar.
Right now the International Monetary Fund has shoe-horned the world into using the dollar as the international monetary unit; therefore the world has interest in the dollar's stability.
UNDERWRITING THE BANKERS
According to Howe, the Exchange Stabilization Fund and the Federal Reserve System have not been open in their dealings in the gold trading market. He said that the government is underwriting the gold loans of the big banks, and the big banks are trading to keep the price of gold stable.
The government is helping the banks manipulate markets to their mutual benefit. But the goods economy is based on manipulation of the gold price, not the true value of the dollar, he said.
"At least half of the Senate is aware of this but are doing nothing about it," said Bill Murphy, researcher and founder of GATA.
In dealing with public officials, Murphy said, "I've gotten the distinct impression that this is a national security issue."
BANKERS' IRRESPONSIBLE
The complicated scheme, Howe said, goes something like this: The big banks borrow gold on paper at very low interest rates and then sell it on the open market. The bankers then use that money to purchase stocks or even high-risk derivatives which yield higher returns. The banks then make a killing on the deal if their stocks or options appreciate.
According to Wall Street analysts, many of the world's biggest banks hold trillions of dollars in derivatives. For example, J.P. Morgan's derivatives holdings now stand at $29 trillion—nearly three times the United States' annual gross domestic product.*
The risk for the banks comes in the fact that they can only pay back the original loans so long as the yields on their purchased stocks are greater than the cost of the borrowed gold. If the price of gold were to go up even slightly, analysts note, financial companies like J.P. Morgan, which holds about 30 billion dollars in gold, could go belly up.
If gold increased in value from just $300 to $400, big banks like J.P. Morgan would then have to pay a great deal more to buy their gold back to pay off their debts.
So, in order to prevent the total collapse of the world's largest financial institutions, says GATA, big banks and the government have collaborated to artificially fix the price of gold.
The group alleges in its court complaint:
"Annual new mine production of gold in 1999 was approximately 2,500 metric tons, about the same as in 1998 and as estimated for 2000. At the same time annual gold demand is running at over 4,000 tons. Notwithstanding the annual excess of demand over supply . . . the deficit between new mine supply and demand, which has been growing steadily during the period covered by this complaint, has been met by scrap recovery, by some sales of official gold, and most importantly, by leased gold mostly from central banks."
Under the basic market principle of supply and demand, if the supply is the same as the demand, the price of a commodity will stay the same. What GATA and other people are arguing is that the supply is much smaller than the demand, so the price of gold should skyrocket. They say gold should be worth about $600 an ounce. But because the big banks and government are interfering, the price of gold has not changed. The government and big banks are creating a false gold market for their own profit.
If this is true, what happens when the bankers run out of real gold and paper to satisfy the market demand?
The price of gold will skyrocket, inflation will be back with a vengeance and big banks will have to pay the piper, says GATA.
One byproduct of this scheming has been the devastation of economies of the developing world. Sub-Saharan Africa, dependent on its commodity income, is being cheated out of the true value of its gold and consequently out of other natural resources.
Defendants in the GATA suit are the Bank for International Settlements, Alan Greenspan, William J. McDonough, J.P. Morgan; Co. Inc., Chase Manhattan Corp., Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group, Deutsche Bank AG and Lawrence H. Summers, secretary of the treasury under former President Bill Clinton and the current president of Harvard University.
More information about this risky speculative scheme can be found at GATA's web site, www.gata.org.
*For more on the complicated subject of what is money, order
Billions for the Bankers: Debts for the People (One copy is $2;
six copies are $4.40 or more are 30 cents each) from AFP, 1433
Pennsylvania Ave. SE, Washington, D.C. 20003. Call 1 (888) 699-NEWS
(6397).
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The Pentagon has opened a new propaganda office that plans to blend fact with fiction and plant "disinformation" in media outlets in order to sell the "war Against terrorism" to foreign audiences.
As part of a global effort to influence public opinion and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries, the Pentagon is developing plans for a new information agency, the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), to plant false news items in foreign media organizations.
Secretary of Defense Donald Runsfeld reportedly loves to cite the celebrated dictum of the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: "In wartime truth is so precious she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."
Claiming that foreign critics of the U.S. - led war on terrorism have been misinformed, Runsfeld said that "we need to do a better job to make sure that people are not confused as to what this is about."
The Pentagon's OSI office, which was established shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was a response by the Bush administration to the widely acknowledged fact that the United states was losing public support overseas for its war on terrorism, particularly in Islamic countries.
Headed by Brigadier General Simon P. Worden of the Air Force, the OSI is circulating classified proposals calling for aggressive propaganda campaigns that use not only the foreign media and the Internet, but also covert operations. The OSI will reportedly employ disinformation techniques, used widely during World War II by Britain and the United States to spread false information within otherwise accurate news releases.
Worden envisions a broad mission ranging from "black" campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to "white" public affairs that rely on truthful news releases, Pentagon officials said.
One proposal reportedly involves sending journalists, civic leaders and foreign leaders e-mail messages that promote the administration's views or attack unfriendly governments. The messages would be distributed through outside Internet sources to conceal their origin. A senior Pentagon official told The New York Times: "the return address will probably be a dot-com, not a dot-mil," a reference to the military's Internet designation.
TARGET EUROPE
The OSI's main target for propaganda will be Islamic countries in the Middle East and Asia, the campaign may also be directed at Western Europe, where the Bush administration's strategy to fight terrorism has been widely criticized. Although the military regularly engages in propaganda warfare against hostile nations during war, the OSI will expand the military's propaganda mission into allied nations in the Middle East, Asia and even Western Europe.
Although the Pentagon and the CIA are barred by law from propaganda activities in the United States, disinformation planted in foreign media organizations, could end up being published or broadcast by American news organizations.
The new office "rolls up all the instruments within the Department of Defense (DOD) to influence foreign audiences," its assistant for operations, Thomas A. Times, a former Army colonel and psychological operations officer, said at a conference. "DOD has not traditionally done these things."
There are misgivings within the Pentagon of venturing into an area traditionally the domain of the CIA and the State Department. The main fear is that by feeding slanted and possibly false information to foreign government officials and the international media, the OSI might undermine the credibility of the Pentagon's official press department. Several senior officials at the Pentagon have questioned whether the OSI's mission is too broad and possibly even illegal, according to the Times article.
One Defense Department official said: "We shouldn't be in that business. Leave the propaganda leads to the CIA, the spooks. If we get the reputation for spreading false information, then what is anyone to believe and not believe that comes out of this building?"
Other officials fear the initiative, once revealed might weaken support for the U.S. among its allies.
One of the military units assigned to carry out the policies
of the OSI is the Army's Psychological Operations Command. The
command was involved in dropping millions of flyers and broadcasting
scores of radio programs into Afghanistan encouraging Taliban
and al Qaeda soldiers to surrender.
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The "war crimes trial" at the Hague took a dramatic turn when the accused became the accuser.
Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia who is on trial for war crimes, told the tribunal at The Hague he would call former President Bill Clinton and his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, to testify about atrocities committed during the U.S.-led 78-day bombing campaign over the embattled Yugoslav republic of Kosovo.
Other prominent Americans would also be called to respond to his charges that the United States carried out a policy of genocide in the Balkans, Milosevic said.
While the UN International Criminal Tribunal had ruled in an earlier case that sitting world leaders cannot be compelled to testify, that would not necessarily apply to Clinton and Albright. The court has no power to compel testimony, but experts said they would come under tremendous moral pressure to appear.
"The theory is that states should cooperate with the tribunal," said a lawyer involved in other cases before the court. "Any witness who doesn't want to turn up is going to look bad. It reinforces Milosevic's message that this whole thing is a NATO stitch-up."
He added: "I think some of them will make quite interesting witnesses - dirty deeds were done."
Insiders contend that Milosevic specifically named Albright in the suit because it is widely believed that, while secretary of state in 1998, she was one of the loudest voices pressing for U.S. intervention in the bloody internecine fighting.
Shortly before the U.S.-led bombing campaign commenced, while negotiating a peace deal in France, it was reported that U.S. officials were overheard saying that what Yugoslavia needed was "a little bombing."
MORE WAR CRIMINALS
In addition to Clinton and Albright, Milosevic said he would call UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), former German chancellor Helmut Kohl and the entire U.S. negotiating team at the 1995 Bosnian peace talks in Dayton, Ohio.
In two days of opening comments, beginning Feb. 14, Milosevic pointed out that, under prompting by Washington, NATO had invaded Yugoslavia. Obviously, Yugoslavia posed no military threat to Western Europe or the United States.
It was the only time in more than a half-century of existence that NATO had fired shots in anger. In invading Yugoslavia, NATO violated its own stated policy of being a defense force, originally established to check expansion of the Soviet Union.
Milosevic showed numerous photos of dead civilians and burning buildings from the 78 days of NATO bombing, mostly by the U.S. Air Force. He scoffed at the U.S. claim that striking the Chinese Embassy - the hub of China's intelligence apparatus in Western Europe - was an accident.
Milosevic's charge that the bombing campaign in 1998 had largely targeted civilians was partially supported by Richard Dicker, director of the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch.
Dicker said NATO had been "more than negligent" in failing to define its targeting rules.
Questions have been raised by a number of critics of NATO's handling of the terrible infighting that plagued Yugoslavia for a decade, namely if Milosevic is a bloody Stalinist killer, does that justify a coalition of Western states attacking his country?
Moreover, would prosecuting Milosevic for his heavy-handed attempts at keeping Yugoslavia from disintegrating lead to further cases being brought against world leaders such Clinton for his handling of Waco, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for his involvement in massacres in Chile, Indonesia and Greece, and George W. Bush for bombing innocent civilians in Afghanistan?
"This is a crime against the truth," Milosevic said.
"The whole world knows that this is a political trial that
has nothing to do with the law whatsoever."
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In D.C. the name of the game is public relations and the Bush Administration has contracted some old pros to foist the ever widening war on terrorism on the world.
By Christopher Bollyn
The Pentagon has hired the Rendon
Group (TRG), a powerful Washington public-relations firm run by
John W. Rendon Jr., to "advise" the Pentagon's newly-formed
disinformation agency, the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI).
TRG reportedly had a four-month contract worth $397,000 to help the Pentagon look good while bombing Afghanistan. TRG will supplement the efforts of the Army's 4th Psychological Operations Group, which is based at Fort Bragg and is now conducting operations in Afghanistan and the surrounding region.
Rendon coordinated George McGovern's presidential campaign in Maine in the early 1970s and later worked for Michael Dukakis when he ran for governor of Massachusetts. After working on Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign in 1980, Rendon went to work for the Democratic National Committee, and eventually became its executive director.
TRG's biggest operations are reported to have been in support of the Pentagon and the CIA. In describing his work in a speech to the Air Force Academy in 1996, Rendon said, "I am a person who uses communications to meet public policy or corporate objectives. I am an information warrior and a perception manager.
The group has been hired on several occasions to support U.S. military actions. During the past decade the firm has worked to shape public opinion during the conflicts in Panama, Haiti, Kuwait and Iraq.
TRG's first national security assignment came in 1989, during Operation Just Cause, the U.S. invasion of Panama. After Manuel Noriega was overthrown, TRG offered "crisis management and operational support" to the new U.S.-backed government and "courted the international press and overseas radio stations to make the cause real to other governments and to give hope to Panamanians."
FABRICATED ATROCITIES
TRG's next assignment came the following year, when it supported the Kuwaiti government in exile after the Iraqi invasion. Rendon and his staffers set up a TV production house in London that specialized in fabricating atrocities carried out by Saddam Hussein's troops.
The group has done extensive work for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Kuwaiti royal family, and the Iraqi National Congress - the opposition group seeking to oust Saddam.
Founded in 1981, TRG has offices in Boston and Washington and a staff of about two dozen people, including a number of former White House operatives and congressional staffers.
TRG worked with Hill & Knowlton, who masterminded the pro-Kuwaiti propaganda campaign. And while Kuwait's activities directed at manipulating American public opinion should have been exposed as foreign propaganda under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the Justice department chose not to enforce it.
In one of the most glaring examples of disinformation foisted on the American public, in November 1990, a 15-year old Kuwaiti girl testified before the Congress that she had seen Iraqi soldiers tossing premature babies onto the floor of a Kuwaiti hospital so their incubators could be sent to Iraq.
Senators cited her testimony as a crucial factor in their decision to go to war with Iraq.
It later turned out that the girl was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United states and that her "testimony" had been arranged and scripted by Hill & Knowlton.
As a public-relations firm, Rendon has clients in 79 countries, including official trade agencies of the United States, Bulgaria, Russia, and Uzbekistan. One of Rendon's clients has been the alSabah family, the royal family of Kuwait.
TRG helped al Sabah create a sympathetic image in the United states during the Gulf War.
Rendon has worked with the CIA to build the Iraqi National Congress, the U.S.-backed group that is seeking to oust Saddam Hussein. In 1991, TRG "provided it with its name and more than $12 million in covert funding between 1992 and 1996," according to ABC News.
TRG spent nearly $24 million in 1991 and 1992 to produce a nedia blitz against Saddam with comic books, videos, a traveling "atrocity exhibition" photo exhibit, and two "gray" clandestine radio stations. The stations Rendon designed and supervised were Radio Hurriah (Radio Freedom) and the Iraqi Broadcasting Corporation (IBC).
TRG also worked to build international support for continued
economic sanctions against Iraq, even as reports of civilian suffering
and mass starvation were beginning to attract widespread attention.
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Bureaucrats had agreed to meet with the We the People Foundation in Washington to answer questions about the legal and constitutional bases for the federal income tax. But they were afraid to appear and confront the truth, just as we told you on Feb. 4.
By James P. Tucker Jr.
The federal income tax is unconstitutional and there are no laws requiring you to either file or pay, according to experts assembled by the We the People Foundation for a two-day conference in Washington on Feb. 27 and 28.
And the Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department do not disagree—they had their chance. Bureaucrats from both were invited to respond and had accepted. Then, they canceled rather than confront the questions.
However, Dan Pilla and other experts warn that tax laws, whether valid or not, are being enforced and many patriots have gone to jail for resisting. (See the Personal from the Editor on page 2 for more on this.)
America faces a "constitutional crisis" with the IRS and Justice Department over the in come tax, said Bob Schulz, head of the foundation, in opening the meeting.
Poised to question the bureaucrats were a lineup of lawyers, scholars, certified public accountants and even a former IRS agent who now support the We the People Foundation's efforts to eliminate the income tax.
The income tax is a "slave tax," Shulz said.
Joe Bannister, a CPA who served five years in the IRS criminal investigations division before concluding that the income tax has no foundation in the Constitution or law, said the government "knowingly steals from the American people" by confiscating their money.
U.S. Assistant Attorney General Dan Bryant and IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti formally agreed on July 20, 2001, to have representatives be questioned at a hearing conducted by the foundation on Capitol Hill. But on Jan. 17, 2002, the government formally cancelled the promised appearances. The foundation said "memos and other evidence indicate government officials never in tended to participate but only agreed to stifle significant media attention and pressure that was building."
The agreement was a result of a formal "Petition for Redress of Grievances" signed by thousands of Americans seeking government answers to years of research documenting findings that include:
• "There is no U.S. law or regulation that explicitly imposes a legal obligation on the average citizen to pay any tax on income, file a tax return or submit to tax withholding.
• "The 16th (income tax) Amendment was fraudulently ratified in 1913 and does not apply to normal wages and salaries.
• "You voluntarily waive your Fifth Amendment rights when you file a tax return."
The foundation also said tax laws violate the Fifth Amendment
by requiring that a return be filed. The personal financial information
you are required to provide when filing a tax return is often
used by the IRS and other agencies to build a criminal case, violating
your Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
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The tragic killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl highlights the impropriety of placing dual nationals in regions of the world where it could put them in mortal danger.
Although the killing of Daniel Pearl was a tragedy for his family and loved ones, the American media has once again misreported the facts. Contrary to the claim that Pearl was an American, at best he was half American because he was also a citizen of Israel.
What is fact is that Pearl's killers claimed that he was Mossad and executed him as an Israeli spy.
One week after Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, was kidnaped in Pakistan on Jan. 23, his captors claimed he was working with Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, and that, if their demands were not met, he would be killed. The American mass media cooperated to conceal Pearl's Israeli origin and citizenship while he was held, ostensibly to protect his life and, unlike the Israeli press, continued to do so even after his death.
During the month following Pearl's kidnaping, there was great concern that publication of his family's Israeli roots would further endanger his life. In Israel, as soon as news of Pearl's death was disclosed, newspapers rushed to report his Israeli origins.
ACCUSED OF SPYING
An unsigned email purportedly sent by the kidnappers on Jan. 30 showed Pearl with a gun to his head and threatened to kill him within 24 hours. The message claimed that Pearl, the paper's South Asian bureau chief, was a Mossad agent.
"We talked to Daniel Pearl and we learned that he is not a CIA officer but is an agent of Mossad," the statement said.
The previously unknown group, the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, demanded the release of Pakistani prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in exchange for Pearl. Their messages denounced the detention of Pakistanis in the United States and Cuba on terrorism-related charges without benefit of lawyers or trials.
The kidnappers accused U.S. reporters of working for intelligence agencies and warned "all American journalists" in Pakistan to leave the country within three days. "Anyone remaining after that will be targeted," it said. Fahad Naseem, one of three men accused of involvement in the kidnaping, said Pearl was abducted be cause he was a Jew working against Islam.
Efforts to rescue Pearl were in vain and four weeks after he was kidnaped his death was confirmed in a videotape. The State Department said the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan received evidence on Feb. 21 that Pearl was dead.
The Journal denied that Pearl was a spy while representatives of Dow Jones, its parent company, reportedly worked intensively behind the scenes to alert news organizations to the danger in publishing the names of Pearl's parents or the family's Israeli background.
PEARL'S ISRAELI ROOTS
Although a Dow Jones spokesman, Gary Foster, said Daniel Pearl was "very proud of his heritage" the company organized a concerted effort to keep the details of Pearl's Israeli heritage out of the news.
"We were particularly anxious that networks reaching large international audiences, such as CNN and BBC, would not break the news," Foster said. Since his death announcement, some newspapers have reported, briefly, that the Pearl parents have "remained Israeli citizens."
Pearl's father, Yehuda Pearl, was born in Tel Aviv in 1936 to parents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe. He served in the Israeli army and studied electronics at the Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology in Haifa, where he met his future wife, Ruth. They came to the United States in the late 1950s, where they had three children, Daniel, Tamara, 41, and Michelle, 32.
Yehuda and Ruth came to Princeton, N.J., for graduate studies and he subsequently worked at the RCI research center near Princeton, where Daniel was born in 1963. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1969, after Yehuda was offered a position at UCLA. They eventually became American citizens but retained their Israeli citizenship and close links with Israel.
Tova Pearl, Daniel's grandmother, lives in north Tel Aviv. "His parents were Israeli but he was not Israeli. He came to Israel a few times to be with his grandmother and take part in celebrations," she told Ma'ariv newspaper, adding, "And even if he had been an Israeli, it's also not a crime for which he needed to die."
Although the Israeli interior ministry considered Daniel Pearl a citizen, he reportedly did not use an Israeli passport, and according to his father saw himself as an American.
Yehuda Pearl expressed anger over the revelation by the Israeli media of his family's "Israeli connection" and Daniel's Israeli citizenship. Los Angeles is home to some 150,000 Israelis, many of them U.S.-Israel dual citizens like the Pearls. The American media continued to comply with this request even after confirmation that the 38-year-old reporter was dead.
The WSJ denied that Pearl was a spy for Israel or the U.S. government and even that he was an Israeli citizen.
When AFP asked Steven Goldstein of Dow Jones about Pearl's ties to Israel, Goldstein claimed to have no understanding of U.S.-Israel dual nationality, saying, Israeli law "has no bearing or significance" because Pearl "was an American."
Both Goldstein and Aaron Bedy, a spokesman for the Journal, denied that Pearl was an Israeli citizen. "He is an American," Bedy told AFP. "The Israelis can say whatever. He is not an Israeli."
"Danny Pearl was an American citizen. He was born an American and, sadly, died an American. He only traveled on an American passport," Goldstein told AFP. Questions about Pearl's ties to Israel "are moot as he was not a citizen of any other country," Goldstein said.
Pearl was an Israeli by virtue of the fact that his parents were both Israelis when he was born in Princeton, N.J. Children born in the United States to Israeli parents, like the Pearls, usually acquire both U.S. and Israeli nationality at birth. Israeli nationality is given to any person whose father or mother was an Israeli national at the time of his birth, regardless of where the person is born.
Daniel had frequently visited his relatives in Israel and celebrated his Bar Mitzvah at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. In 1976, as a 13-year-old, he "registered himself" as a citizen with the Israeli government, according to The New York Post.
U.S.-Israeli dual citizens are required to serve in the Israeli
armed forces and need an exemption or deferment from Israeli military
service before going to Israel. Without this document, they may
not be able to leave Israel without completing military service
or may be subject to criminal penalties. AFP was unable to confirm
whether Pearl had served in the Israeli army.
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The secret, powerful Bilderberg group is grooming one of its own for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. Bilderberg has a long history of owning American Presidents and heads of state in Europe.
Bilderberg and its world govern ent network believe they own President Bush because of his father's participation in a brother group, the Trilateral Commission, but the secret international elite likes to own both horses in a two-horse race: Enter Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.).
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) has also attended two and was invited to Sweden last year but cancelled because Sen. Jim Jeffords (Ver.) was at the same moment bolting the Republican Party and was handing control of the Senate over to the Democratic Party.
The prestigious and pricey White House Weekly, a journal covering the inner workings of the White House, has already pronounced Dodd, who has made no public move toward a presidential campaign, a strong White House contender.
The Journal quotes a top strategist for a competing presidential candidate saying: "This Dodd for president business is getting talked about a lot." He said it is scaring some contenders.
"Dodd has significant relationships with all the top Democratic money folks around the country, going back to his time as DNC (Democratic National Committee) chairman under Clinton," another opponent's aide is quoted.
"He's championed election reform which racked up big chits with the civil rights community and the Democratic base; he's fighting Bush's right-wing nominations on the Foreign Relations Committee," the aide is quoted.
The secret international cabal has a history of owning presidents. President Gerald Ford was Bilderberg. He was defeated by President Jimmy Carter, who, like his vice president, Walter Mondale, were Trilaterals.
The Trilateral Commission, which will meet at the Ritz Carlton in Washington April 5-7, is less secretive than Bilderberg, with Which it has interlocking leadership and a common agenda. David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger are powers in both groups. Trilaterals huddle behind closed and guarded doors but the fact of their meetings is acknowledged.
In the 1980 primaries, Ronald Reagan scoffed at the Trilateral Commission. His campaign operative, former Texas governor and treasury secretary John Connally, said Reagan would block Trilaterals from hi administration. After his nomination, Reagan took Trilateral Bush on the ticket. As vice president, Bush the Elder addressed the Trilaterals in Washington and they were received at the White House.
In 1992, Bush lost to Bill Clinton, an obscure governor of Arkansas. Clinton was a Trilateralist who had been promoted to Bilderberg when it met in Baden Baden, Germany in 1991.
Dodd's "potential candidacy is major trouble for Joe Lieberman," the journal said, referring to the Democratic senator from Dodd's state of Connecticut who was Al Gore's running mate in 2000. It quoted another source:
"Not only is Lieberman's fate taken out of his hands by
Gore's Hamlet routine, which is expected to continue through ‘03,
but now Dodd will split his [Lieberman's] Connecticut and New
York and national fund-raising base. He could make Nutmeg State
politics and absolute soap opera."
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Some people thought they had buried the story of Israeli foreknowledge of the impending 9-11 terrorist attacks, but now that story is taking on a new life of its own.
There is strong evidence Israeli intelligence operatives engaged in clandestine dealings on American soil and almost certainly had advance knowledge of the impending terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. Israel, however, did not report this information to the American authorities. A sudden spate of news stories in the mainstream media over a three-day period cast new light on this story that first reached a national audience in the Dec. 17 issue of American Free Press which actually went to press on Dec. 7, 2001.
At that time, AFP noted that buried within a story in The Washington Post on Nov. 23 was the little-known fact that a number of Israeli nationals taken into custody by federal authorities after the Sept. 11 tragedy were suspected of having material knowledge relative to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
Then, on Dec. 12, five days after the AFP story was published, Carl Cameron of Brit Hume's Special Report on Fox News, broke his report on a wide-ranging Israeli espionage ring uncovered on U.S. soil.
Cameron reported that there was evidence that those Israeli agents were watching the 9-11 terrorists prior to the Sept. 11 tragedy. On Dec. 24, AFP summarized Cameron's report in which he stated in part:
There is no indication the Israelis were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance and not shared it. A highly-placed investigator told Fox News there are "tie-ins," but when asked for details flatly refused to describe them. "Evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It is classified information."
During the segment, host Brit Hume asked Cameron: "What about this question of advanced knowledge of what was going to happen on 9-11? How clear are investigators that some Israeli agents may have known something?"Cameron responded: "It's very explosive information, obviously, and there's a great deal of evidence that they say they have collected. None of it necessarily conclusive. It's more when they put it all together. A bigger question, they say, is "How could they not have known?" [That is] almost a direct quote [from the investigators]."
The Fox report indicated that even prior to Sept. 11 as many as 140 other Israelis had been detained or arrested in what was described by reporter Cameron as "a secretive and sprawling investigation into suspected espionage by Israelis in the United States." According to Cameron:
Investigators are focusing part of their efforts on Israelis who said they are art students from the University of Jerusalem or Bezalel Academy and repeatedly made contact with U.S. government personnel by saying they wanted to sell cheap art or handiwork.
Documents say they "targeted" and penetrated military bases, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, dozens of government facilities and even secret offices and unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel.
After Fox made this amazing report, there was an angry response from the Israeli lobby in America. The Dec. 21 issue of the New York-based Forward reported that Fox and Cameron were "under fire."
Whatever the case, Fox News pulled the transcriptions of Cameron's broadcast reports off its Internet web site, saying that "this story no longer exists," even though, at the time, Cameron had told Forward that he continued to stand behind his story. It appeared as though Cameron's story was destined for the Memory Hole, but for reports about it that had appeared in AFP and on the Internet.
However, on March 4, the story first pioneered by AFP and Fox News came back to life thanks to the famous French daily, Le Monde which hit the streets with a story charging that "a vast Israeli espionage network operating on American territory has been broken up," describing the network of "Israeli art students" that Fox had first reported.
Le Monde's story relied largely on reporting an independent investigation conducted by the Paris-based Intelligence Online (an Internet-based newsletter), which, in turn, had obviously been directed by the Fox report and the sources made available to Fox.
The story developed by Intelligence Online, according to Le Monde, charged quite specifically that Israel had withheld information that it had developed, through its spying operations in the United States, about the impending Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
LeMonde cited transcriptions of the previous work by Carl Cameron on Fox and pointed out how Fox itself refused to cooperate with Le Monde, saying that it was "a problem," but that Fox refused to be specific.
According to Intelligence Online, the suspects in the Israeli spying operation were all between 22 and 30 and had recently completed their Israeli military service. Six of the suspected spies had used portable telephones bought by a former Israeli vice consul in the United States. Many of the suspects were also linked to Israeli information technology companies.
Le Monde also noted that Intelligence Online had received a copy of a 61-page report prepared by an officer of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and others from the Immigration and Naturalization Service. (A spokesman for the DEA, Will Glaspy, confirmed to Le Monde that the DEA "holds a copy" of that report.)
The report cited by Le Monde specifically pointed out that one-third of the suspected Israeli spies had been based in Florida, and at least five of them were on site in Hollywood, Fla., where accused Sept. 11 hijacker ringleader Muhammad Atta and four of his purported accomplices also lived.
The United States has deported 120 young Israelis posing as "art students" for visa violations. However, some officials do suspect them of spying.
On March 5, Reuters, the sometimes quite independent press service, carried a report describing Le Monde's article (even including the allegation of Israeli foreknowledge of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks). Reuters, however, cited an un-named FBI spokesman who called it a "bogus story," saying—despite all the evidence to the contrary—that "there wasn't a spy ring."
On March 6, the Associated Press ran its own version (which appeared in some newspapers across the country) and reported that there had been allegations that so-called Israeli "art students" deported from the United States were "suspected" of spying.
AP's report, however, did not mention the implication that this spy ring had advance knowledge relating to the activities of the 9-11 terrorists.
On March 6 Washington Post staff writers John Mintz and Dan Eggen also wrote a story about the affair, but their version had a notably different spin.
The Post story was headlined "Reports of Israeli spy ring dismissed" and claimed that "a wide array of U.S. officials" had dismissed the reports that the U.S. government had broken up "an Israeli espionage ring that consisted of young Israelis attempting to penetrate U.S. agencies by selling artwork in federal buildings."
Mintz and Eggen reported that Attorney General Ashcroft's spokeswoman at the Justice Department, Susan Dryden, described the story as "an urban myth that has been circulating for months." She added: "The department has no information at this time to substantiate these widespread reports about Israeli art students involved in espionage."
The two Post writers suggest that the allegations appear to have been circulated in a memo written (and leaked) by a single "disgruntled" employee of the DEA who, Mintz and Eggen say, is "angry" that FBI and CIA sources have rejected what the Post duo dismissively calls his "theories."
The memo is presumably the same one that Intelligence Online used in as partial basis for its report.
So while the Post admits that the DEA memo does exist, the Post is trying to dismiss its reliability by charging that "a single employee" who is "disgruntled" and "angry" is its source.
However, even as it is trying to suggest that a DEA loner was behind the charges, the Post article does acknowledge in its closing paragraph:
DEA spokesman Thomas Hinojosa said that multiple reports of suspicious activity on the part of young Israelis had come into the agency's Washington headquarters from agents in the fields. The reports were summarized in a draft memo last year, but Hinojosa said he did not have a copy and could not vouch for the accuracy of media reports describing its contents.
What is perhaps the most intriguing twist about the Post story is that co-author Mintz is the Post staffer who wrote in the Post on Nov. 23 that among a total of some 60 young Israeli Jews picked up by the FBI in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, there was at least a handful being held on suspicion of having material knowledge about the attacks themselves.
At that time Mintz pointed out that while most of the Israelis arrested and detained since Sept. 11 were held on immigration charges and not suspected of any involvement in terrorism, there were exceptions. According to Mintz's previous Post article (published on Nov. 23):
In several cases, such as those in Cleveland and St. Louis, INS officials testified in court hearings that they were "of special interest to the government," a term that federal agents have used in many of the hundreds of cases involving mostly Muslim Arab men who have been detained around the country since the terrorist attacks.
An INS official who requested anonymity said the agency will not comment on the Israelis. He said the use of the term "special interest" means the case in question is "related to the investigation of Sept. 11."
What Mintz did not say in his more recent Post article of March 6 was that some of these same Israelis that he was writing about on Nov. 23 have been implicated in the spy ring that his most recent article suggests is "an urban myth."
Now, Mintz's co-author, Dan Eggen, has revealed a new detail about yet another Israeli official to the events of 9-11. It turns out that another "former" Israeli operative was actually traveling on one of the ill-fated Sept. 11 flights alongside the Arab hijackers. (See related story on page 4.)
United Press International has yet to cover the developments
in the Israeli spy ring story, which might be explained by the
fact that its chief international correspondent, Eli Lake, is
a devotee of Israel who previously worked for Forward,
the Jewish community newspaper which bragged on Dec. 21 how the
Fox story had been buried by other media.
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Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) introduced legislation Feb. 27 that
would end altogether U.S. membership in the International 
Monetary Fund (IMF).
Paul's action came as Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was testifying before" of the IMF, which is a major conduit for sending American tax dollars overseas. Paul called the reform talk "specious."
Paul's new bill, the sunset the Bretton-Woods Agreement Act (H.R. 3812), would end U.S. membership in the IMF after three years. It was the Bretton Woods Agreement, created in Bretton Woods, N.H. in 1944, which originally established the global financial institutions, the World Bank and the IMF.
Paul's legislation was referred to the House Committee on Financial Services.
"The IMF should be abolished, not reformed," Paul said. "Congress cannot hope to reform an organization that violates basic constitutional, moral and economic principles by sending taxpayer funds overseas to subsidize multinational corporations and questionable governments. Congress should follow the Constitution and stop making bad loans to unqualified borrowers with American tax dollars."
Rep. Jim Saxton (R-N.J.), chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, recent described how IMF lending worsened the Argentine financial crisis and precipitated its monetary collapse.
Even as Argentina's fiscal position deteriorated throughout 2001 under widely broadcast allegations of government corruption and fiscal irresponsibility, the IMF continued to pumped more than $8 billion in loans to the South American country. "The IMF's generous bailouts lead to moral hazard problems and enable shaky governments to pressure the IMF for even more funding or risk disaster," Saxton said.
The Argentine crisis "is just the latest example of the folly" of IMF policies, Paul said.
"The IMF regularly puts taxpayers on the hook for bad loans, as evidenced by the IMF-created Asian financial crisis three years ago," Paul said. "While the IMF claims it seeks to alleviate poverty in Third World nations, its loans are far more likely to end up in the hands of corrupt dictators."
Those dictators "use our taxpayer-provided largess to
prop up their regimes by rewarding their supporters and denying
their opponents access to capital," Paul said. Furthermore,
multinational corporations are often the targeted recipients of
IMF funds, as loans are made knowing that certain firms will be
awarded contracts."
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Some Washington bureaucrats whimpered that it was an exaggeration when it was reported that legislation proposed by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and other prop9onents of social engineering could force an employer to hire homosexual or "transgendered" applicants who cross-dress.
Well, let us heed the words of Al Smith and look at the record.
Under the "Employment Non-Discrimination Act" (S.1284) employment cannot be denied because of "sexual orientation" which obviously includes "transgenders," a name for people who are in the midst of surgically changing their sex from male to female or vice versa.
But forcing America's businessmen to coddle kooks doesn't end there.
Kennedy's ridiculous legislation establishes that an employer cannot "interfere with any individual in exercise of enjoyment of, or on account of such individual's having exercised, enjoyed, or assisted in or encouraged the exercise or enjoyment of any right granted or protected by this act," the legislation reads.
Translation from bureaucratese: When your "transgendered" male employee shows up to greet your firm's public, you must not make derogatory comments about his dress. ("You are lovely, your dress is simply darling and utterly precious" is OK unless your man decides that your statements constitute sexual harassment.)
Nor can you "limit, segregate or classify the employees
or applicants for employment in any way that would deprive or
tend to deprive any individual of employment or otherwise adversely
affect the status of the individual an an employee because of
such individual's sexual orientation.
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