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Subject: Bush's Perverted, Depraved Skull&Bones Club PENETRATED,
EXPOSED!! BIG
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4.19.01
Bush's Perverted, Depraved Skull&Bones Club PENETRATED,
EXPOSED!! BIG BUST!!
Find out how utterly filthy and SICK are the members of the
usurping power cabal now running the nation!!
AWESOME!!
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http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage1.asp
April 19, 2001|7:37 PM
At Skull and Bones, Bush's Secret Club Initiates Ream Gore
by Ron Rosenbaum
It's the primal scene of American power, of Bush family
values. For two centuries, the initiation rite of Skull and
Bones has shaped the character of the men who have shaped
the American character, including two Presidents named Bush.
And last Saturday, April 14--for the first time ever--that
long-secret rite was witnessed by a team of outsiders,
including this writer.
Using high-tech night-vision video equipment able to peer
through the gloom into the inner courtyard of the Skull and
Bones "Tomb" in New Haven, The Observer team witnessed:
The George W. effect: intoxicated by renewed proximity to
Presidential power, a robed Bonesman posing as George W.
harangued initiates in an eerily accurate Texas drawl: "I'm
gonna ream you like I reamed Al Gore" and "I'm gonna kill
you like I killed Al Gore."
Privileged Skull and Bones members mocked the assault on
Abner Louima by crying out repeatedly, "Take that plunger
out of my ass!"
Skull and Bones members hurled obscene sexual insults ("lick
my bumhole") at initiates as they were forced to kneel and
kiss a skull at the feet of the initiators.
Other members acted out the tableau of a throat-cutting
ritual murder.
It's important to remember this is not some fraternity
initiation. It is an initiation far more secret--and far
more significant, in terms of real power in the United
States--than that of the Cosa Nostra. If the Bushes are "the
WASP Corleones"--as the ever more stingingly waspish Maureen
Dowd has suggested--this is how their "made men" (and women)
are made.* It's an initiation ceremony that has bonded
diplomats, media moguls, bankers and spies into a lifelong,
multi-generational fellowship far more influential than any
fraternity. It was--and still remains--the heart of the
heart of the American establishment.
Further revelations turned up by the Observer Bones
Investigation Unit include:
The words to the secret Skull and Bones "death mantra."
Copies of the Skull and Bones tax returns, obtained through
Freedom of Information Act requests, raise questions about
the legitimacy of the secret society's claim to charitable
tax-exempt deduction status--particularly relevant
considering recent criticism of the Bush tax plan for
favoring the privileged few.
A possible explanation emerged in the course of the
initiation ceremony for George W.'s decision to run for
President in the first place.
'the devil equals DEATH'
The Observer Mission Impossible expedition had its inception
several months ago with a phone call from Peggy Adler, the
research associate on my previous Skull and Bones piece in
The Observer (July 17, 2000). She is the demon investigator
and former Iran-contra committee staffer who, among other
coups, cross-referenced corporate boards to crack the "RTA
code," the corporate shell game by which the corporate shell
of the Skull and Bones society, the Russell Trust
Association, shielded its paper trail from prying eyes by
changing its name to RTA Inc.
Ms. Adler said she had been approached by a member of the
Yale community who wanted to share with us a remarkable coup
of his own: He had found a way last year, in April of 2000,
to audiotape the Skull and Bones initiation ceremony. And he
wanted to know if we'd be interested in an attempt to
videotape it this time.
And so one afternoon last December, shortly after the Bush
electoral victory had been certified, I met with the
intrepid fellow; he booted up his laptop and let me listen
to the sounds of a ceremony that had been the subject of
fevered speculation for nearly two centuries now.
Of course, there is more to Skull and Bones than the
mystical mumbo-jumbo of its rituals. The rituals are less
important than the relationships--the bonds of power and
influence that develop between Skull and Bones initiates
after they graduate. But the relationships are first forged
by the rituals and fact that the founders of Time Inc. and
the C.I.A., as well as several Secretaries of State and
National Security Advisors--the men who made the decision to
drop the Hiroshima bomb, invade the Bay of Pigs and plunge
us into Vietnam, the Tafts, the Bundys, the Buckleys, the
Harrimans, the Lovetts--all took part in this initiation
ritual may have something to do with the real world power of
those bonds. The unspoken understanding, the comfort level
with the clandestine, the nods and winks with which power is
exercised.
The initiation ceremony begins the process of inculcating
into the elect of the elite (just 15 out of 1,300 in every
Yale class) the same mystical sense of mission that allowed
the British Old Boy network to rule a worldwide empire.
The whole phenomenon is rarely looked into beyond the exotic
ritual trappings (although Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson
talk about the world-wide web of Bones foreign policy
mandarins in The Wise Men). But it's something I've been
investigating off and on for a quarter of a century now. I
am the Ahab of Skull and Bones, pursuing the white whale (or
white male) leviathan to the utmost depths. As an
undergraduate at Yale I lived next door to the Skull and
Bones Tomb, and back in 1977 I published the first
outsider's investigation into Skull and Bones, its rituals
and its influence on American political culture (an updated
version of that piece, revised to include my chilly exchange
with George and Barbara Bush on Air Force Two, can be found
in my recent nonfiction collection, The Secret Parts of
Fortune).
And so it was momentous for me to actually hear the sounds
of the Skull and Bones initiation on that laptop. But in
listening to it, awe gave way to a mixture of puzzlement and
embarrassment--and an even deeper, unsatisfied curiosity.
In part it was the fact that the ritual was heard but not
seen. My Yale source had found a previously unexploited
perch from which to record the sounds of the ceremonies, but
could glimpse them only incompletely. He reported a figure
dressed like the devil, another one in a hooded-skeleton
costume and others in robes. The thing that stood out for
me, listening to it, was what I've come to think of as "the
death mantra."
Yes, the death mantra--here it is, the three-line Skull and
Bones initiation-ritual theme that has bound three
Presidents (including the present one) to their secret
society:
'THE HANGMAN EQUALS DEATH!
THE DEVIL EQUALS DEATH!
DEATH EQUALS DEATH!'
Most of the speculative lore about the Skull and Bones
ritual has centered on its death fixation. Beyond the
obvious skull-and-crossbones insignia, of course, the most
persistent story is that initiates spend their senior year
in the basement crypt of the Bones Tomb taking turns lying
in a coffin and, in two long, intense, psycho-drama
autobiographical sessions in said coffins, recount their
personal and sexual history to the other 14 chosen ones. The
better to bond for life with those they know best and
prepare for their destiny as stewards of the ruling class.
The death-centered imagery, the injunction to initiates that
they must "die to the barbarian world" and be reborn in the
Elysian company of the elect of "The Order," as they call
it, is what makes Skull and Bones as radically different
from a college fraternity as the Gambino family is from the
"hunting and fishing club" that was their nominal
headquarters.
The hangman equals death. The devil equals death. Death
equals death ....
What the hell is going on there? Is it a puzzle in logic,
like "All men are mortal. Socrates is mortal ..."? Does it
solve out to "The hangman equals the devil?"
Could one detect a capital-punishment theme here--the
hangman as executioner presaging George W.'s prolific
execution rate as Texas governor? "George W. equals death,"
you might say.
And what about the devil? (Well, the figure dressed like the
devil.) Is that the secret they've been covering up ever
since the society was founded in 1832, the offshoot of a
German secret society: devil worship? A fulfillment of the
paranoid fantasies of the fundamentalist right, who believe
the Eastern establishment is a front for Satanic conspiracy.
Probably not, but it made me more eager to participate in
this year's caper: the attempt to see as well as hear it, to
capture it all on video--for educational, historical and
journalistic purposes to document a defining rite of passage
of the American ruling class.
Oh, yes--before we get to the night-vision videotape, there
was one more thing, the embarrassing part of the audiotape,
the OOGA-BOOGA part. Part of the ceremony on the tape
involved an initiation master ordering the neophytes to
fetch bones and uttering the (I guess) fake Tarzan-movie
"native" chant "OOGA BOOGA." It left me feeling embarrassed
for Skull and Bones. Hard to ever take seriously again
anyone whose defining life-mission moment includes an OOGA
BOOGA.
But as it turned out, "OOGA BOOGA" was not evident in this
year's ceremony, as far as we were able to tell. Perhaps it
was an improvisation, like this year's impersonation of
George W. ("I'll ream you like I reamed Al Gore") was.
The Observer Mission Impossible Force met to plot strategy
an hour before sunset on initiation night, Saturday, April
12. It is not widely known, but Tap Night, which occurs on
Thursday, is not generally the same as initiation night. The
good stuff happens on Saturday night, and already limos are
cruising the quiet streets that crisscross the Yale campus,
conveying initiates of other secret societies to their
rituals. Bones initiates come on foot, knock on the massive
triple-locked wooden door of the Tomb and are conveyed to
the first stage of the ritual. But we are getting ahead of
ourselves.
Let me just mention how much I admired the intrepid Yale
members of the Observer Bones Task Force for displaying the
kind of curiosity, initiative and heretical, skeptical
impulse apparently absent on most Ivy campuses, if you
believe David Brooks' recent Atlantic Monthly cover story on
get-along-go-along premature careerists. The guys on my team
will make more of a real contribution than any of the smug
secret-society types.
First on the agenda was a quick examination of the Bones
income-tax filings, which an outside consultant to the team
had obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. He
and Peggy Adler pointed out to me a couple of dubious
assertions on the Form 990's (Return of Organization Exempt
from Income Tax), which called into question certain of the
grounds for charitable exemption. In particular, there was
the assertion in the 1997 RTA Incorporated filing (Part VI,
line 80b) that the organization was not "related ... through
common membership, governing bodies, trustees, officers etc.
to any other exempt or non-exempt organization."
Contradicting that assertion is information on the filing of
the Deer Island Club Corporation. Deer Island is the private
island of the Skull and Bones Society, located in the St.
Lawrence River. It is the place where Bones members bring
their families for summer get-togethers. It is wholly owned
and run by Skull and Bones members, apparently contradicting
Bones' claim of "no relationship" to another exempt
organization, and appearing to contradict the strictly
educational and charitable mission for which RTA gets its
exemption for Skull and Bones.
The consultant argues in a memo that the purpose of the 80b
question on the Bones deduction claim form "is to prevent
tax exempt charities from undertaking non-charitable
activities by hiding them in another corporation. This is of
course precisely what RTA Inc. is accomplishing through the
Deer Island Club Corporation. In order to conceal this
arrangement however RTA Inc. denies its connection to the
DICC."
In fact, he goes on, "RTA and the DICC are so closely linked
that for all intents and purposes RTA Inc. does own Deer
Island despite its claims to the contrary."
I'm not going to go into the whole tax issue here. Perhaps
the Bones shell corporation has a good and valid reason for
claiming that it has no connection to the Bones
private-island country club.** Perhaps this sort of thing
goes on all the time among the private charities of the
privileged. I don't think Deer Island will become George W.
Bush's Whitewater. But one might think that a scrupulous
White House counsel would want to look at the kind of tax
information George W.'s secret society is filing on his
behalf. Particularly since he's promising enormous windfalls
for the privileged, the tax breaks his secret society takes
should be utterly beyond suspicion. Does the President, I'd
like to know, claim his Skull and Bones dues as a charitable
deduction, when the only charity seems to be providing a
club house and country house for the privileged? The RTA
filing claims Skull and Bones exists "for the benefit of
Yale University." But Yale--which celebrates three centuries
of luminous atainments this weekend--ought to question what
"benefit" it gets from chants of "lick my bumhole" and the
mockery of Abner Louima.
Anyway, as night came falling and we choreographed the
evening's caper, I felt that we were carrying on an
old-fashioned, longstanding tradition: the natural reaction
of the democratic (small D) tradition to elitist power that
conceals itself within the cloak of privilege and secrecy.
And for me, it was a culmination of my own quarter-century
quest, one that had become personalized lately by the fact
that our Skull and Bones President had been a classmate of
mine at Yale.
'run, neophyte, run!'
At last, zero hour approached. For two centuries, the
outside world had wondered and fantasized about what was
about to happen, what actually went on in the fabled Skull
and Bones initiation. There's a long tradition of Yale
secret societies (including Bones) raiding other secret
societies to capture their ritual artifacts. In the 1970's,
an all-woman break-in team published photographs of the
Bone's Tomb's interior. But tonight, for the first time
ever, we would attempt to capture the actual secret
initiation ritual and bring it to light for anthropological
study. Our team's equipment included three
night-vision-capable digital-video cameras, one tape
recorder, a stepladder and two walkie-talkies. (I could
never get mine to work.) Because of a recent injury which
limits my mobility, I was stationed at a listening post with
my tape recorder while the video-cam team proceeded to their
more perilous perch at the forward base (as those of us in
special ops call it). We planned to rendezvous afterward for
me to view the tape.
We split up just as the whoops and groans, the screams and
moans began to emanate from inside the Tomb and the masters
of the Skull and Bones initiation began establishing the
posts they'd man for the occult psycho-drama to come.
>From my post, I could see through an open window shadowy
>figures walking
very close above my head. Later I'll put my audio
impressions together with the video-cam record the other
team obtained for a more complete picture, but first let me
transcribe some of the notes I made from listening in.
Fragmentary as they are, they capture some of the
strangeness, and perhaps the kind of disorientation the
initiates themselves experienced there in the courtyard of
Skull and Bones.
First, there was the guy posing as George W. He seemed to be
a bit disgruntled at being given this role--a feeling he
expressed by calling out in his George W. drawl to another
"Patriarch" (as they're called): "I got the power to bomb
the crap out of China and they give me this station."
Then someone--one of the initiates?--called out "Uncle
Toby!" (Many Bone ritual personae are taken from Laurence
Sterne's Tristram Shandy-- you gotta give them credit there
for good taste.)
"Uncle Toby!" the cry repeated.
"Shut up, neophyte."
"Take that plunger out of my ass, Uncle Toby."
Presumably, this mocking Louima reference was a ploy to
scare initiates into thinking Uncle Toby was going to give
them the plunger treatment.
That cheerful rectal theme was followed up by:
"I'm gonna ream you like I reamed Al Gore!" from the George
W. imitator.
Followed by "Help me! It's the devil!"
And then "George W." really getting into it: "I'm gonna kill
you like I killed Al Gore."
Silence. Then a door opened. Voices--half of them, it
seemed, women--were screaming: "Run! Neophyte! Run,
neophyte!"
(The neophytes are, of course, the new initiates.)
>From my post, I could only see hooded figures racing about
>in the
darkness above my head, accompanied by cries of:
"Run, neophyte!"
"Find the femur!"
And (again): "Take that plunger out of my ass, Uncle Toby!"
Then silence for awhile. The neophyte seemed to have gone
back inside the Tomb. After which one of the Patriarchs
complained, "We ought to get better blood than this fuckin'
syrup, man."
It was only later that I learned what the blood was for: the
whole throat-slitting "barbarian" tableau after the
skull-kissing.
But first there was a different kind of kissing being
referred to. There were cries of "Lick my bumhole,
neophyte!" "Lick my ass, neophyte!" "Do you like my bum,
neophyte?" (Despite these heartfelt pleas, we did not
witness any of those acts being consummated.)
The bumhole tribute was followed by more cries of "Get the
femur!" and at least part of the death mantra I'd heard
before: "DEATH EQUALS DEATH."
Following which, "George W." chimed in with "I'm the
President of the motha-fuckin' U.S.A."--apparently just for
the sheer pleasure of saying it. (He was sounding more like
the real George W. all the time.)
It began to be clear that what was going on outside in the
courtyard was the climax of an initiation ceremony that
began inside the Tomb. There, it's reputed, the initiates
must first enter into a coffin and "die to the barbarian
world," to the world of "savages" (all but the Skull and
Bones elect), in order to be reborn as a member of "The
Order." Then comes the skull-kissing and the
throat-slashing.
Two hours later, after all 15 of the initiates had burst out
to be harangued and scared, I approached the rendezvous
point with the night-vision camera team. This was the moment
of truth: The night-vision team wasn't sure what their
digicams had picked up. With their own eyes they'd gotten
evocative glimpses, but the playback on the camera's
swing-out view screens would be the first time, so far as we
knew, any outsider had really seen the legendary ritual. A
ritual three Presidents, a few Supreme Court justices, maybe
a dozen Senators (including 2004 Democratic Presidential
contender John Kerry--which would mean a head-to-head,
Skull-to-Skull smackdown with George W.), several
Secretaries of State, literary and cultural luminaries
including John Hersey and William F. Buckley, had all
undergone.
The footage was ghostly, it was grainy--but from the angles
of the night-vision cams, we were able to piece together a
narrative of what happened when the initiates emerged one at
a time from the preliminaries inside the Tomb.
First they were led forward by a figure in a devil costume.
Not really a sinister, Satanic-looking figure but, as one of
the team put it, "More like Satan's Little Helper."
A shrill, menacing and sometimes blood-curdling chorus of
cries and screams and imprecations accompanied the
emergence:
"Hurry, neophyte!" "Run, neophyte!"
"Find the femur, neophyte!" Along with the occasional "Lick
my bumhole!" "Remove the plunger!"--type outcries.
The devil figure pulled them into a white tent in the
courtyard where, we think, they found their femurs and
emerged with what looked like a thigh bone, although it was
impossible to tell whether it once belonged to a human or
not.
When they reemerged from the tent, they were led to the
centerpiece of this part of the ritual.
They were forced face-to-face with a shocking tableau: a guy
holding what seemed like a butcher knife, wearing a kind of
animal-skin "barbarian" look, stood over what seemed to be a
woman covered in fake blood and not much else. The neophyte
then approached a skull a few feet away from the
knife-wielder-and-victim tableau. The neophyte knelt and
kissed the skull, at which point the guy with the knife
knelt and cut the throat of the prone figure. (Well,
pretended to cut the throat.)
I'm not sure what it all means. I've yet to decode the
mystical significance of this, although I do love to think
of former President George Bush kissing the skull.
Obviously, it has something to do with subservience. Kiss
the skull of power. Bow down to The Order. But what about
the "barbarian" cutting the throat of his victim?
Does it mean "One dies to the barbarian world"? Does it mean
"Death to the barbarians"? Does it endorse cutthroat
tactics? Is that how they enforce silence and secrecy?
I plan to continue my relentless study of the hermeneutics
of the Bones rituals, myths and symbolism based on these new
revelations, and perhaps with the help of a Bones graduate
who feels the time has come to lift the veil on the silly
(and no longer even secret) symbolism of their society.
(Contact me privately c/o The Edgy Alliance, 577 Second
Avenue, Box 105, N.Y., N.Y. 10016.)
All that death imagery, though: Maybe it's meant to be a
first ritualistic confrontation with Mortality, the skull as
a memento mori designed to instill in the "neophyte" a sense
of the gravity of one's mission in life.
In that regard, consider the direct relevance of at least
one aspect of the ritual to George W. That recurrent phrase:
"Run, neophyte, run!"
Think about it. When George W. was first considering the
fairly serious shift from baseball-team owner (whose major
achievement was trading away Sammy Sosa) to governor of
Texas, or when he was considering the shift from one-term
governor of Texas to President of the United States, what
decided him--what made him think he could pull it off,
despite years as a semi-permanent neophyte? Could it be that
what he heard, echoing in his brain, down the corridors of
the years, was the injunction from that long-ago April night
when he was a Skull and Bones initiate? When he bent down to
kiss the skull and heard, resounding in his ears, the
command: "Run, neophyte, run!"
You may reach Ron Rosenbaum via email at:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] back to top
This column ran on page 1 in the 4/23/2001 edition of The
New York Observer.
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