-Caveat Lector- http://www.bowstring.net/gold_warriors.htm ==== GOLD WARRIORS
See Author's Note >From the back cover: BLACK GOLD In 1945, American Intelligence officers in Manila discovered that the Japanese had hidden large quantities of gold bullion and other looted treasure in the Philippines. President Truman decided to recover the gold, but to keep its recovery secret. The treasure -- gold, platinum, barrels of diamonds and gemstones plundered by Japan from all of East and Southeast Asia -- would be combined with Nazi loot recovered in Europe to create a worldwide American political action fund to fight communism. This 'Black Gold' gave Washington virtually limitless unvouchered funds for covert operations. According to CIA officials, between 1945 and 1947 the gold bullion was secretly moved to 176 accounts at banks in 42 countries. This provided an asset base to reinforce the treasuries of America's allies, to bribe political and military leaders, and to manipulate elections in foreign countries. Other treasure was recovered inside Japan during the U.S. Occupation. General MacArthur, President Truman, John Foster Dulles, and a handful of others, knew all about the hidden plunder. Every president since Harry Truman has been involved in covering up the existence of these secret funds. Gold Warriors traces more than half a century of secret collaboration between Washington and Tokyo, between the CIA and the underworld in Japan and other countries. The cloak of 'national security' created a situation ripe for abuse and corruption. The authors reveal how former CIA and Pentagon officials, and rogue entrepreneurs, use these secret funds to set up private intelligence and security operations to meddle in American foreign policy -- without Congressional oversight, or the knowledge of the American people. Drawing on thousands of pages of original documents and thousands of hours of interviews, the Seagraves expose one of the great state secrets of the 20th Century. ===== GOLD WARRIORS: Authors' Note SLAYING THE MESSENGER Many people told us this book was historically important and must be published - then warned us that if it were published, we would be murdered. An Australian economist who read it said, "I hope they let you live." He did not have to explain who 'they' were. Japan's looting of Asia, and the hiding of this war-gold in American banks, is closely linked to the issue of Holocaust gold hidden in Swiss banks. Revealing the secrets of either is a dangerous business. Jean Ziegler, a Swiss professor and parliamentarian, did much to expose five decades of official amnesia in his book The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead. After publishing it and testifying in 1998 before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee about Jewish assets in Swiss banks, he was charged with 'treason' by Swiss Federal Prosecutor Carla del Ponte. The charge was brought by twenty-one financiers, commercial lawyers, and politicians of the far right, many of them major stockholders in large Swiss banks. They accused Ziegler of being an accomplice of Jewish organizations who 'extorted' vast sums of money from Switzerland. Ziegler is only one of many who have been persecuted for putting ethics before greed. Christophe Meili, a Union Banque Suisse (UBS) security guard, was threatened with murder and the kidnapping of his wife and children after he testified before a U.S. Senate committee about documents he rescued from UBS shredders. He and his family were given asylum in America. We have been threatened with murder before. When we published The Soong Dynasty we were warned by a senior CIA official that a hit team was being assembled in Taiwan to come murder us. He said, "I would take this very seriously, if I were you." We vanished for a year to an island off the coast of British Columbia. While we were gone, a Taiwan hit team arrived in San Francisco and shot dead the Chinese-American journalist Henry Liu. When we published The Marcos Dynasty we expected trouble from the Marcos family and its cronies, but instead we were harassed by Washington. Others had investigated Marcos, but we were the first to show how the U.S. Government was secretly involved with Marcos gold deals. We came under attack from the U.S. Treasury Department and its Internal Revenue Service, whose agents made threatening midnight phone calls to our elderly parents. Arriving in New York for an author tour, one of us was intercepted at JFK airport, passport seized, and held incommunicado for three hours. Eventually the passport was returned, without a word of explanation. When we ran Freedom of Information queries to see what was behind it, we were grudgingly sent a copy of a telex message on which every word was blacked out, including the date. The justification given for this censorship was the need to protect government sources, which are above the law. During one harassing phone call from a U.S. Treasury agent, he said he was sitting in his office watching an interview we had done for a Japanese TV network - an interview broadcast only in Japanese, which we had never seen. After publishing The Yamato Dynasty, which briefly mentioned the discovery that is the basis for Gold Warriors, our phones and email were tapped. We know this because when one of us was in a European clinic briefly for a medical procedure, the head nurse reported that 'someone posing as your American doctor' had been on the phone asking questions. When a brief extract of this book was published in the South China Morning Post in August 2001, several phone calls from the editors were cut off suddenly. Emails from the newspaper took 72 hours to reach us, while copies sent to an associate nearby arrived instantly. In recent months, we began to receive veiled death threats. What have we done to provoke murder? To borrow a phrase from Jean Ziegler, we are 'combating official amnesia'. We live in dangerous times, like Germany in the 1930s, when anyone who makes inconvenient disclosures about hidden assets can be branded a 'terrorist' or a 'traitor'. A few months ago, three ex-ambassadors to Japan declared that former American POWs and civilian slave laborers, suing giant Japanese corporations for compensation, were tantamount to terrorists. Now a CIA official says that leaks of classified information must be stopped, even if it is necessary to "send SWAT teams into journalists' homes". Everybody's national security is a serious matter. We have no argument with that. But national security can be invoked to hide official corruption, and conflict of interest. It's called tyranny. The only cure is openness and sunlight. In this book, we do not question whether President Truman did the right thing in keeping these war-gold recoveries secret. That is for others to debate. What we point out is that total secrecy enabled corrupt people to abuse the resulting slush funds, and these abuses have multiplied like a cancer, ever since. A global network of corruption has grown around the slush funds. Bureaucrats, politicians, spooks, and generals, have become addicted to black money. There are indications that a lot of this war-gold has been siphoned off by America's far right, under the guise of patriotism. The unintended consequences of Truman's decision have become a poisonous part of the world financial system, putting innocent people at hazard. Those people and institutions benefiting from this corruption will do everything possible to hide it, including murder. The only way to get rid of an illness is first to recognize what it is. But when the emperor goes crazy from syphilis of the brain, the first person to be tortured and burned at the stake is the doctor who made the diagnosis - slaying the messenger. Despite the best efforts of the American and Japanese governments to destroy, withhold, or lose documentation related to Golden Lily, we have accumulated thousands of documents, conducted thousands of hours of interviews, and we make all of these available to readers of this book, and on the two accompanying Compact Disks, so they can make up their own minds. We encourage others with knowledge of these events to come forward. When the top is c orrupt, the truth will not come from the top. It will emerge in bits and pieces from people like Jean Ziegler and Christophe Meili, who decided they had to 'do something'. As a precaution, should anything odd happen, we have arranged for this book and all its documentation to be put up on the Internet at a number of sites. If we are murdered, readers will have no difficulty figuring out who 'they' are. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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