-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- from: http://www.parascope.com/articles/0997/skullbones.htm Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.parascope.com/articles/0997/skullbones.htm">Th e Order of Skull and Bones</A> ----- VIETNAM: THE BONESMEN'S DEBACLE According to author David Halberstam's best-selling critique of the Kennedy years, "The Best and the Brightest," the JFK presidency marked the high point of Skull & Bones postwar power. But it also marked the beginning of the secret fraternity's fall from the position of unchallenged power, and the beginning of America's precipitous decline as a world power. All these factors are summed up in one word: Vietnam. John Fitzgerald Kennedy's Cabinet was largely handpicked by Skull & Bones elder statesman Robert Lovett, who was personally approached by Joseph Kennedy, the president's father, and asked to shape the direction of the new administration. Lovett had been one of the architects of the World War II industrial mobilization under President Franklin Roosevelt, which helped bring the United States out of the Great Depression. He had been a factional opponent of Averell Harriman within the Skull & Bones circles, initially opposing the Cold War containment doctrine and pushing the idea of Atoms for Peace during the early years of the Eisenhower presidency (l952-1960). Kennedy had personally asked Lovett to join his Cabinet, but Lovett, a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, preferred to shun formal government service. Instead, he placed a number of younger Bonesmen into the critical posts. McGeorge Bundy was appointed Kennedy's National Security Adviser. Averell Harriman was made Under Secretary of State for Asian Affairs, a position that placed him in charge of many of the most critical decisions along the way to disaster in Vietnam. William Bundy remained in a senior post at CIA. The decision to escalate the American military involvement in Vietnam -- a rejection of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's prophetic warning that the United States should never engage in a ground war in Asia -- was made by members of the Order. According to some accounts, President Kennedy began to have serious second thoughts about escalating the war, particularly after several private Oval Office discussions with MacArthur. With Kennedy's assassination, American soldiers began pouring into Southeast Asia. Harriman remained a fixture of Vietnam policy under President Lyndon Baines Johnson. McGeorge Bundy remained on as LBJ's National Security Adviser untill , when he left government service to assume the presidency of the Ford Foundation, the largest tax-exempt philanthropic agency in the United States. The Ford Foundation annually dispenses of nearly $3 billion in grants. In his capacity as president of the Ford Foundation, Bundy helped finance the anti-Vietnam War movement. The National Student Mobilization Committee, the umbrella group for the entire New Left of the late 1960s and early 1970s, was led by David Dellinger, a Yale graduate. Episcopal Church activist William Sloan Coffin, a Bonesman, a second leading figure in the anti-war protest movement, had previously served as a CIA officer. Thus, the Order had its hands in two critical elements of the policy debacle of the second half of the 1960s. Some leading Bonesmen helped shape the disast rous limited war strategy in Vietnam, while other members of the Order, at least tacitly, contributed to the growth of the drug-rock-sex counterculture by nourishing the New Left soil from which it sprang. As a result of the Vietnam debacle, the "Stimson Kindergarten" literally drove itself out of the corridors of power which it had occupied without challenge for the previous 20 years. With the election of Richard Nixon as president of the United States in November 1968, a different team came into prominence. The politics of that team were personified by Henry A. Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. In a May 1982 speech in London at the Chatham House headquarters of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, Kissinger boasted that he was an enthusiastic follower of the late British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and that throughout his years in senior government posts under Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford (1974-1976), he had always consulted more frequently with his counterparts in the British Foreign Office than he had with officials of his own government. Although Kissinger had enjoyed early patronage from McGeorge Bundy, when the Bonesman was Dean of Harvard University and Kennedy's NSC adviser, the Kissinger era marked a low point in Skull & Bones' government power. The Central Intelligence Agency, a hub of the Order's clout, was decimated by scandals that only compounded the damage done to the Agency as the result of its role in the Vietnam disaster. According to some respected writers, for example, Jim Hougan, author of "Secret Agenda," the CIA attempted to reverse the route by helping to bring down Richard Nixon in Watergate. There is significant evidence to bolster some of these accounts. When Gerald Ford became president in August 1974 following Nixon's resignation, Skull & Bones made a brief comeback. In what came to be known as the "Saturday Night Massacre," Ford, in the autumn of 1975, removed Henry Kissinger from his post as NSC Adviser, replacing him with Gen. Brent Scowcroft. Kissinger ally James Schlesinger was fired as Secretary of Defense and replaced by Donald Rumsfeld. And CIA Director William Colby, who had dueled with Angleton, was fired and replaced by Skull & Bones member George Bush. If these maneuvers were intended to be the first step in a more ambitious comeback by the WASP warrior faction, the plan was short-circuited with the election in November 1976 of Jimmy Carter as president. It would really not be until the inauguration of George Bush as president in January 1989 -- a dozen years later -- that Skull & Bones would resurface with the same degree of governmental power that it had enjoyed during the Stimson years. George Bush's selection as Ronald Reagan's vice presidential running mate in the 1980 and 1984 elections was the transition back to that power. Many things had gone wrong in the years since Vietnam to drive the Bonesmen off the center stage. With more than a little input from Bonesmen like McGeorge Bundy and Averell Harriman, the United States had gone into a period of scientific, technological and industrial retreat. The Nixon decision on August 15, 1971 to remove the dollar from a fixed, gold-backed exchange rate system, had triggered a move toward double-digit inflation, urban decay, rising unemployment and soaring interest rates. The Kissinger-orchestrated Iranian-Middle East oil crisis in the early 1970s had contributed to a rate of deindustrialization that ultimately transformed the United State from the biggest creditor nation in the world to the world's biggest debtor nation. According to estimates compiled around the time of George Bush's inauguration as president, the total U.S. internal indebtedness had skyrocketed to more than $12 trillion. Moreover, the period of the 1970s and 1980s had given rise to a new and powerful political-financial combination demanding a share of government clout. This new grouping, with its principle power bases in the U.S. Congress, in Hollywood and on Wall Street, was known as the Zionist lobby. Although Jewish names had been prominent in the legal profession and on Wall Street since the founding of the American republic, in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and her Arab neighbors, Zionist power took on a whole different proportion. Again, Henry Kissinger's position in the Nixon administration symbolized the fact that the pro-Israel lobby had moved in with a vengeance to the corridors of power in the nation's capital. Even on Wall Street the 1970s and 1980s had seen a new generation of Jewish financiers come into power, replacing their more cultured and Anglicized predecessors. The WASP Establishment had developed a tolerance of and working relationship with the largely German Jewish bankers known among themselves as "Our Crowd." The new upstart Wall Street Zionists, however, were viewed by the WASPs as a collection of gangsters. If the Skull & Bonesmen needed a legitimate justification for reviving their ever-present dislike of the East European Ashkenazic Jews, the Wall Street Zionists who became known as the so-called "New Crowd" provided them with all the excuses necessary. When Jonathan Jay Pollard, a Naval intelligence analyst, was arrested in November 1985 and charged with spying for Israel against the United States, there was a resurgence of more unabashed antisemitism among the Bonesmen and their blueblood upperclass mates. It has since become a hallmark of the Bush White House. Even when practical political affairs have demanded that the Bush administration deal with the American Zionist lobby or the right-wing Shamir government of Israel, there has been a distinctive undertone of distrust bordering on overt hostility. BUSH IN PROFILE Unlike Averell Harriman, who reportedly coveted personal political power and drew sharp criticism from some of his fellow Bonesmen, George Bush has been a long-term "project" of Skull & Bones. The Bush presidency in real and symbolic terms represents the effort by the Order to restore the lost spirit of the WASP warrior Henry Stimson. With the passage of time and the decay of the WASP elite, the Bush presidency may yet prove to be a tragic replay of past American dreams. George Bush's career was sponsored every step of the way by Skull & Bones members, mostly of his father's generation. Prescott Bush (Skull & Bones Class of 1917), a Brown Brothers Harriman partner who would serve one term in Congress as senator from Connecticut, sent George to the traditional private preparatory school, Phillips Academy in Andover, New Hampshire, which grooms young New England squires for later studies at Yale. It was while finishing his prep school training at Andover that Bush was first exposed to Henry Stimson. Reportedly, Stimson delivered a stirring patriotic speech to the Phillips student body in l940 arguing forcefully for American intervention in the war in Europe. Ironically, at that very moment on the Yale campus, the majority of Skull & Bonesmen were leading the America First movement, which opposed any such U.S. entanglement in Europe. When war with Japan broke out a year later, George Bush enlisted in the Navy and was trained as a pilot. He flew more than 50 missions before being shot down in the Pacific. At Yale after the war, Bush captained the baseball team and followed his father's footsteps into the Order. Political legends have it that George Bush shunned his family's patronage and went off on his own to launch a business career as an oil wildcatter, or speculator, in Texas. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Bush moved to Texas to work for Dresser Industries selling oil drilling equipment. The job was arranged for him by his father with Dresser president Neil Mallon, who was a fellow member of Skull & Bones. Desser, according to several sources, had close ties with the CIA. After a few years with Dresser, George Bush set up his own company, Zapata Oil, to explore new oil fields in Texas and Mexico. Again, Bush was heavily backed by member of his family. Uncle George Herbert Walker, also a Skull & Bonesman, put up a large amount of capital, as did Brown Brothers Harriman. Lazard Brothers, a Jewish brokerage house with longstanding friendly ties to the New England WASPs, put up some money as well, at the urging of Andre Meyer, the owner of the Washington Post Corporation and the father of the current Post publisher Kathanne Graham. Zapata Oil sunk the first offshore well for the Kuwaiti government. Even with that kind of backing, George Bush was less than a success as a businessman. In 1964, a longtime Bush friend, William Farrish III of Scotland, bought the majority of shares in Zapata for $3.2 million to keep the business afloat, while George, in a major career shift, ran for U.S. Congress from a wealthy district in Houston, Texas. He won. During his three terms in Congress (Bush lost the 1970 Senate race to Lloyd Bentsen), George Bush distinguished himself as an advocate of zero population growth and a defender of the eugenics movement. Both of these positions, radical for their day, were probably the result of Bush's close friendship with William Draper Jr. -- a fellow Bonesman and a longtime advocate of population reduction schemes in the Third World. The 1970s were for George Bush years of grooming in high-level politics and foreign policy. During the Nixon re-election campaign of 1972, George Bush was the chairman of the Republican National Committee. He later joined the chorus calling for Nixon's resignation. After a tour as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Bush was sent off to Communist China as the Chief Liaison Officer prior to the formalization of diplomatic relations. Bush shared the Beijing experience with Winston Lord, a fellow Skull & Bones member who was the CIA station chief. Lord went on to become president of the New York Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 1983. (The Lord family founded the city of Hartford, Connecticut, has a large number of Skull & Bones members on its family tree, and set up one of the most powerful old-line Wall Street law firms, Lord Day Lord.) In 1975, George Bush completed his "grooming" with a brief stint as Gerald Ford's CIA director. In 1980, Bush ran a short-lived campaign against Ronald Reagan for the Republican Party's presidential nomination. Future running mate Reagan cut short Bush's 1980 presidential hopes by defeating him soundly in the primary election in New Hampshire, in the heart of New England. Reagan blasted Bush for his membership in the internationalist Trilateral Commission, which had attained notoriety because 20 members of the unpopular Carter administration had served on the commission. Bush's campaign was otherwise noteworthy because a significant number of his campaign volunteers were CIA officials; his campaign organization was directed by six top Agency and Pentagon retirees. THE ORDER'S NETWORK With Bush in the White House, the WASP Establishment is seeking to re-conquer lost territory, not only within the domain of national politics, but within the financial community, the legal profession and big business. A struggle between some elements of the WASP crowd and the Jewish "New Crowd" on Wall Street has been playing out in the newspapers and federal courts for the past six years, beginning with the criminal indictments of junk bond dealers Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken and the bankrupting and criminal prosecuting of the powerful Zionist-run brokerage house Drexel Rurnham Lambert. To some extent these wars reflect the kind of scramble that always takes place during a financial crisis and shakeout, when certain formerly powerful financial institutions are wiped out and others profit from their rivals' adversity. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the House of Morgan came out on top. Not coincidentally, Morgan Guaranty Trust and Morgan Stanley have been cornerstones of the Skull & Bones grouping on Wall Street since their founding during the last century. Founding partner Harold Stanley was a Bonesman. One hub of the Order's postwar economic power, the major multinational oil corporations, have clearly benefited greatly from President Bush's "charming little colonial war" in the Persian Gulf. The leading oil companies which are linked to the Order are: Standard Oil Trust Corporation, Shell Oil of America, Creole Petroleum Corporation and Pennzoil Corporation. The founder and present chairman of the board of Pennzoil started out in the oil business in partnership with George Bush in Zapata Oil. It is interesting to note in the context of the Bonesmen's deep involvement in the world petroleum business that George Bush, during his early days as a Texas oilman, had worked closely with the Kuwaitis. Eight major Wall Street and Washington, D.C. law firms stand out as practically wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Order of Skull & Bones. Each of these firms was founded by members of the Order, and each of these firms continues to provide up-and-coming Order initiates in the legal community with training, credentials and connections. A review of the major corporate clients of these firms would reveal many of the most powerful companies among the Fortune 500. The Skull & Bones law firms are: * Lord Day Lord * Davis Polk Wardwell * Simpson Thacher Bartlett * Debevoise Plimpton Lyons & Gates * Cravath Swaine & Moore * Covington & Burling * Dewey Ballantine Palmer & Woods * Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy. In addition to their corporate clientele and their direct involvement in government through the frequent appointment of partners to Cabinet posts, these firms also specialize in handling the personal financial affairs and investment portfolios of the leading WASP families. In this respect, the Skull & Bones-centered WASP Establishment imitates the Venetian model. During the height of power of Venice, which was the trading capital of the Byzantine Empire, the leading families used their personal wealth to establish insurance companies, family funds and cultural programs through which they extended their political power. Today, the prominent law firms listed above play a special role in directing the affairs of the leading tax-exempt foundations which shape the culture and public opinion of the United States and many foreign countries. We have already seen that McGeorge Bundy, a leading Bonesman, left his position as National Security Adviser to President Lyndon Johnson in 1966 to assume the presidency of the Ford Foundation. During the nearly two decades that Bundy spent directing the $3 billion tax-exempt fund, he arguably wielded more power than he did during his six years as the National Security Adviser to two presidents. Under the Bundy reign the Ford Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars to launch the environmentalist movement and funded scores of projects devoted to population reduction in the Third World. >From its early decades, the Order has concentrated much of its efforts at establishing, controlling and, in some instances, capturing the major tax-exempt philanthropic foundations of America. The Russell Sage Foundation, which specializes in "social control" programs, was founded by Bonesmen. Among the leading functions of the Russell Sage Foundation today is the maintaining of a centralized tracking of the finances of all the large tax-exempt foundations in the United States. The Peabody Foundation, the Slater Foundation and several of the Rockefeller foundations were all either started by members of the Order or have been dominated by Bonesmen from their inception. Other major family funds, like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment, were wrestled from family control by the Skull & Bones apparatus. During the tenure of McGeorge Bundy, two members of the Ford family resigned from the Ford Foundation in disgust over the direction in which Bundy had taken the philanthropic agency. THE NEW WORLD ORDER Between 1983-1986, the British-born conspiracy theorist Antony Sutton wrote a series of pamphlets about the Order of Skull & Bones. According to informed sources, Sutton was one of several historians who were provided with a large file of the Order's internal documents, including minutes of some meetings, descriptions of rituals, and what would appear to be a rather complete list of its members from its founding through to the early 1980s. The short pamphlets were compiled into one volume and published as a book in 1986. For someone closely following the just-concluded Persian Gulf War and attempting to gain some insight into George Bush's performance during that largely orchestrated affair, one recurring theme in the Sutton volume stands out like a sore thumb: the New World Order. According to the Skull & Bones documents used by Sutton in his somewhat flawed profile of the Order, the creation of a New World Order is a primary goal of the Bonesmen and has been for decades. For the initiates into the Order, the term New World Order has a very specific meaning. It is a world dominated by American military power and American control over all strategic raw materials. Just as the Greek city-state of Sparta provided the Skull & Bones with the image of a WASP warrior caste, the Persian Empire, with its system of coalitions of satrap armies, provides the model for the Bonesmen's New World Order. The image of Secretary of State James A. Baker III traveling from foreign capital to foreign capital demanding military legions or chests of gold to finance the war for a New World Order is an image straight out of the chronicles of the Persian Empire. According to the recent biography of Henry Stimson, the man who inspired President Bush was firmly convinced that it was essential for America to go to war once every generation or so. It was, for Stimson, a spiritually cleansing process which enables the nation to rally behind a cause and overcome its weaknesses and shortcomings in one grand burst of military fervor. The romantic mystique of the purgative powers of combat is key to understanding the political philosophy of Skull & Bones. Although America's Vietnam debacle remains a bitter memory of the Bonesmen's failure in war, the recent Persian Gulf conflict, with its massive overkill and the use of highly advanced weapons and technologies, is now the new glorious symbol of the WASP warrior caste's reincarnation. When President Bush vowed that the Gulf War would not be another Vietnam, he was speaking first and foremost to his fellow Bonesmen -- not to the American people. If such thinking smacks of dangerous fantasy on the part of a major world power in the modern era, it is indeed. On a more practical political level, the Gulf War was a gambit to save the Bush presidency from a mounting pile of domestic financial woes, not the least of which was the savings and loan (S&L) crisis and a pending series of failures of major commercial banks. In the months preceding the Gulf showdown, the president's own son, Neil Bush, came under intense media scrutiny for his role in the failure of a large S&L in Colorado. Neil's photograph, testifying under oath before a congressional committee probing fraud among top S & L managers, became a familiar front-page feature in every major newspaper in America, threatening dangerous popular disillusion with the Yale Bonesman in the White House. With a U.S. federal government deficit projected at nearly a half a trillion dollars for Fiscal Year 1991, in large part because of the S&L crisis and a shrinking business tax base, the Democratic Party majority in the U.S. Congress was pressing for deep cutbacks in defense spending now that the Cold War had ended. On the international stage, the reunification of Germany, clearly the most dramatic event of 1990, posed new challenges to the Bush team. Germany was about to emerge as the dominant power in continental Europe by virtue of its advanced industrial infrastructure and its long tradition of independent political dealings with Moscow. Just months before the outbreak of the Gulf crisis, Germany's Chancellor Helmut Kohl had met with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and signed a long term economic assistance pact. As a result, Gorbachev dropped all remaining objections to the immediate reunification of Germany. At that point, the Bush administration changed its tactics. Previously, in sharp contrast to the Thatcher government in Great Britain, it had been nominally in favor of German reunification. But at the Houston economic summit of the Group of Seven Industrialized Countries in the summer of 1990, the United States blocked (with Britain) Germany's plan of unconditional economic aid to the Soviet Union. President Bush took the position that the Soviet Union must submit to International Monetary Fund requisites as a precondition for any substantive economic assistance. In the Far East, Japan's continuing growth in manufacturing also posed a threat to Washington's desire to retain superpower status. If President Bush and his Bonesmen coterie were unaware of a stunning historical analogy, their British "cousins" were quick to pick up on the parallels between the global strategic situation in July 1990 and the identical international situation that existed 100 years earlier. In the 1890s, France, under the brilliant political leadership of Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanataux, was attempting to forge a Eurasian alliance with Germany, Russia and Meiji Japan. The idea was to link continental Europe with Japan and China through a series of large overland infrastructure projects, beginning with the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Through treaties covering key areas of economic and security matters, Hanataux hoped to create a zone of prosperity, built on a foundation of rapid economic growth and extensive trade. Such a political-economic common interest alliance threatened the imperial hegemony of Great Britain. At the turn of the 20th century, Britain looked to the United States (as its English-speaking ally) to join in sabotaging the Hanataux plan. Through the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Britain and her American junior partner (by then led by Henry Stimson's old mentor Teddy Roosevelt) managed to disrupt the French-German-Russian-Japanese economic axis. Two world wars and the Great Depression were the consequences of that interference. THE PERSIAN GULF WAR It was against this historical backdrop that President Bush, invoking the World War II imagery of his Skull & Bones idol Henry Stimson, went to war against Iraq. There is even speculation that President Bush was personally instrumental in luring Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait, thereby provoking the American-led military response. Many news accounts have emphasized that a two-hour private meeting between the president and Margaret Thatcher in the Aspen, Colorado vacation chalet of U.S. Ambassador Henry Catto on August 2, 1990 helped finalize Bush's decision to immediately deploy military force. Recently, an astute Japanese analyst drew a disturbing parallel between Bush and FDR, who was greatly influenced by Stimson. According to the writer, FDR lured Japan into World War II through an intricate series of economic warfare maneuvers which left Japan with little choice but to strike-back. In much the same way, said the analyst, Bush had lured Saddam Hussein into Kuwait in order to launch a new Gulf War that would have consequences reaching far beyond Iraq and the Middle East. As a result of the military victory over Iraq, the United States is in the process of establishing a string of permanent military bases throughout the Persian Gulf and Near East. The oil sheikdoms of the region, led by Saudi Arabia, are now thoroughly dependent on the American military presence to ensure the survival of their regimes. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is effectively captured by Washington. American bankers aided by U.S. gunboats now are setting world oil prices. Thus, one consequence of the Persian Gulf War is that the United States now has an oil weapon -- pointed principally at Germany and Japan. Ironically, America's two chief economic rivals have paid out a total of $27 billion to date to help finance a Bush administration military adventure which put the oil weapon in Washington's hand. Another telling example of how the Order's man in the Oval Office intends to administer a crumbling U.S. domestic economy while imposing the New World Order on the rest of the world is to be found in the recent buyout of the majority of stock in Citicorp, the largest U.S. commercial bank, by Saudi Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz. Citicorp is one of the major American commercial banks on the verge of collapse, but which is considered by the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve System to be "too big to fall." The stock purchase amounted to a Saudi Royal Family bail-out of Citicorp, using the increased profits being enjoyed by the House of Saud as a result of the massive jump in Saudi oil production since the beginning of the Gulf crisis in August 1990. There points up a striking difference between the role of the United States in World War II and the Bush administration's handling to date of the Middle East crisis. During World War II, the United States went through a genuine economic revival. Skull & Bones historian Samuel Huntington described it as a "neo Hamiltonian" policy, a reference to the first United States Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Beginning in 1939, America became a major supplier of military and industrial goods under the Lend-Lease program to the European states fighting Hitler. At the same time, the federal government began issuing low-interest credits to revive the nation's manufacturing base which had been gutted by a decade of economic depression. The industrial buildup accelerated once the United States formally entered .World War II, leading to the establishing of entirely new industrial sectors, such as aerospace and petrochemicals. This time around -- at least to date -- there has been no such marshaling of the U.S. domestic industrial base. Despite moderate increases in the production of certain high-tech weapons systems, the U.S. economy continues its gradual slide into what could be a new depression. Unemployment is greater than at any point in the last decade. Some sociologists fear that the complete disintegration of America's urban centers could produce new race-riots as early as the summer of 1991. The single greatest challenge to George Bush and the Order is: Can they capitalize on the current revival of the American spirit to reverse the disastrous post-industrial society dogmas, and launch their own version of the World War II neo-Hamiltonian industrial recovery? So far, some doomsayers claim, it appears that Bush and his administration plan instead to direct their efforts at looting and blackmailing the rest of the world -- especially the gulf oil sheikdoms, Japan and Germany -- into bailing out the bankrupt U.S. financial houses and federal government and financing the posting of American-led foreign legions at every corner of the globe where there are large deposits of strategic raw materials. If this policy is not altered, George Bush may soon find himself presiding over a new disaster that will make the Vietnam debacle appear insignificant in comparison. The politics of the New World Order appear to be borrowed largely from the pages of the decline and fall of the British Empire. Political columnist Patrick Buchanan, an early vocal opponent of the Bush Persian Gulf strategy, warned as early as August 1990 that the White House was falling into the trap of British "balance of power" politics, the very politics that left Great Britain on the scrap heap of world powers at the close of World War II, and put Winston Churchill, the architect of World War II and the Cold War, out of a job. Since the crushing military defeat of Iraq by a technologically far superior American-led coalition, the Bush administration has vacillated on a postwar policy for the region. It has pursued a pragmatic power balancing game which is rife with potential problems. The two key elements of the American balance-of-power politics in the region are the preservation of a weakened but territorially whole Iraq to offset the other would-be regional-powers Iran and Syria. At the same time, it is tilting toward a nominally more "pro-Arab" position with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict. While the harsh reparations terms being imposed upon a war-devastated Iraq are probably, in the mind of Bush, aimed at dissuading any future regional military power from launching-cross-border aggressions, they amount to the slow, excruciating extermination of the population of that country. As one seasoned observer noted recently, earlier air wars had caused greater immediate losses of life, due to the inaccuracy of bombs and rockets, but had generally left basic infrastructures intact. The precision bombing of Iraq's entire infrastructure has caused what a United Nations team has called an "apocalypse." The greater loss of life will occur in the aftermath of the combat as a country with 16 million inhabitants is suddenly thrown into a "pre-industrial" state with no electricity, no water or other necessities. American humanitarian aid, administered by occupying troops, will not offset this apocalypse -- especially if harsh war reparations and asset seizures deprive Iraq of the financial resources needed to begin a rebuilding process. Regardless of the fact that the United States has not thrown the full weight of its military presence behind the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, the shortsightedness of the present Bush policy may very well lead to a Lebanon-type protracted civil war in Iraq. Such a war could potentially spread throughout the region. IMPLICATIONS FOR JAPAN Throughout this short study of the Order of Skull & Bones, emphasis has been placed on the philosophy, the rituals and the modus operandi of the Bonesmen who have devoted their post-Yale careers to world politics. This particular emphasis was chosen in order to provide the Japanese reader with an insight into how the Bush presidency views the rest of the world, so that it will be possible for Japan to better understand what it faces in the post-Persian Gulf War strategic environment. The implications of Skull & Bones domination over American policymaking under the Bush presidency are enormous. Japan must be prepared to meet what amounts to a fundamentally new challenge. Few of the postwar experiences in U.S. Japanese relations will have prepared the Japanese government and the leaders of Japanese industry and finance for-what they now face. In the recent past, the policy of Washington toward Japan has been simply to use political leverage, mostly related to Japan's regional security concerns, to exact compromises and concessions in the economic and financial sphere. But the United States, under its policy of free trade, privatization of the monetary and credit mechanisms, and the transition to post-industrial service-oriented forms of economic activity at home, has suffered a gradual but steady decline over the past 20 to 30 years. Japan, meanwhile, has prospered under a more protectionist and industry oriented policy. In the past decade, Japan has been increasingly thrust into the role of scapegoat for the decline of American prosperity, while at the same time coming under mounting pressure to help finance the United States out of its economic mess. The pressures upon Japan to bail out its postwar big brother have caused tensions between Washington and Tokyo, but the Cold War had provided a common security interest that generally offset the occasional rough language. Under the George Bush Skull & Bones regime at the White House all that has changed. True to the Bonesmen's credo of constructive chaos and global political domination by the WASP Establishment, the United States is now out to dominate U.S.-Japanese relations with a degree of brutal frankness that will fly in the face of all previous American sensitivities to Japan's honor. Gone are the days of former U.S. Ambassador Michael Mansfield, who always sought to maintain a public climate of friendship and cooperation between the two nations even when behind the scenes he was taking the toughest of stands on the most divisive issues. Under the American-led New World Order, Japan can expect to be treated with far less respect publicly. It can expect that the Bush administration, including his coterie of former top CIA men now working directly out of the Oval Office, will be constantly interfering, covertly in the internal affairs of Nippon. This shift in style has held sway since the Bush inauguration and the subsequent appointment of Michael Armacost as U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo. Armacost has assumed the posture of a Roman pro-consul, dictating policy to a weak satrap, rather than to engage, in diplomatic dialogue. Armacost's performance even before the recent events in the Persian Gulf reestablished American military might as the defining factor in world affairs -- should have provided the Japanese leadership with a clue as to the shift under way in Washington's new policy approach. The Bush policy can best be described as a sophisticated containment policy. The new approach to Pacific affairs was telegraphed in the early days of the Bush administration when the president deployed three of his most trusted senior spooks to three critical Asian diplomatic posts: Armacost was sent to Tokyo; Bush's vice presidential national security aide and former career CIA operator Donald Gregg was sent to Seoul; and John Lilly, another career CIA man and a fellow Yale Skull & Bones member, was sent to Beijing. The fact that three of the CIA's most experienced clandestine field operators were assigned the senior diplomatic posts says a great deal about the Bush administration's intentions to conduct sophisticated political-warfare and sow confusion among the three major nations of the Far East. Bush clearly intends to pursue the historic Skull & Bones mission of extending America's dominion over the entire Pacific region. The idea of even paying lip service to equal partnership between Washington and Tokyo is over, at least for the time being. The process of internally weakening Japan's resistance to this overarching domination by Washington's New World Order began with the Recruit scandal, when the Takeshita government was brought down through a U.S.-inspired secret intelligence operation. One of the primary targets of that operation was Yashuhiro Nakasone, the former prime minister and the architect of Japan's post-1973 effort to develop independent ties to the oil-producing Arab states of the Persian Gulf. It is important to understand that Bush's WASP warriors, while adopting a similar approach of non-compromise and domination over Israel and the Zionist lobby inside the United States, will not hesitate to use the Jewish lobby as an instrument for bashing Japan into line. Thus, Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher went out of his way to encourage the Anti-Defamation League's leadership convention, which he addressed last year, to join with the Bush administration in pressuring Japan to submit to American free trade demands. The Bush administration will at times encourage the Zionist lobby and Israel to mercilessly attack Japan and will at other times severely criticize Zionist "insensitivity" to Tokyo. This will all be part of the Bush strategy to dominate the Pacific Rim by playing one country or faction off against another, using hard cop-soft cop and other classic techniques of the intelligence trade. Japan will be offered a limited junior partner status in the New World Order, while coming under mounting pressure to continue providing tribute to finance the American imperium. Above all else, Japan will be forbidden from developing any independent foreign policy toward its neighbors, the Soviet Union, the Arab world or anyone else. Such programs as the Global Infrastructure Fund, to the extent that they pose an alternative to the U.S.-dominated international regime, will be vetoed. As a subservient junior partner in the New World Order arrangement, Japan's financial and economic muscle will be used as the piggy-bank for U.S. imperial objectives. The $14 billion "contribution" to the U.S.-led Gulf-War coalition was another benchmark in the transition in U.S.-Japanese relations, as was President Bush's abrupt cancellation of his long-sheduled state visit to Tokyo. When the chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) attempted to visit Kuwait immediately after the gulf cease-fire in March l991, the U.S. State Department refused to grant him permission to go into the American-occupied territory. These intentional diplomatic affronts should be understood as telling signs of the new American-Japanese relationship. On the other-hand, President Bush also suddenly scheduled a brief summit with Japanese Prime Minister Kaifu in Newport Beach, California for April 4, 1991. One purpose of the sudden meeting was to lay out clear parameters of acceptable behavior on the part of the Japanese government when the prime minister meets later in April with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Japanese Soviet relations, like all other crucial Japanese foreign relations, will be expected to conform with those of the U.S. An essential blackmail "stick" that the Bush administration intends to hold over Tokyo is-Japanese dependency on Persian Gulf oil. As-the result of the Gulf War and the post war American military occupation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other-key oil-producing sheikdoms, the Bush administration will exert unabashed control over world oil supplies -- and prices. In the New World Order, Japan's oil supply will be increasingly linked to concessions on a range of monetary and economic issues, including the Global Agreements on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) talks, which broke up last year as the result of largely Japanese and continental European resistance to the pure free-trade system sought by Bush and Thatcher. Assistant Treasury Secretary David Mulford, a former senior official at White Weld Securities, Inc., which restructured Saudi Arabia's entire financial apparatus, has recently announced that he will seek to prosecute Japan for its violations of the GATT regulations that call upon Tokyo to surrender government control over interest rate policies to the international banking community. The Bush presidency, with its ambitious drive for domination over former friends and foes alike, poses an unprecedented challenge to Japan. While this is neither the time nor the place to offer a solution to the growing dilemma, the profile of the men of Skull & Bones in this white paper should provide the Japanese reader with helpful insights into the nature of the American WASP warrior class and the secret society which spawned it. Bibliography "Bush Boy's Club: Skull and Bones." Covert Information Action Bulletin, Winter, 1990. Halberstam, David. The Best and the Brightest. Random House, New York, 1969. Hodgson, Godfrey. The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson. Alfred Knopf, New York, 1990. Isaacson, Walter and Evan Thomas. The Wisemen: Six Friends and the World They Made. Simon and Schuster, New York, l986. "Membership List of All Skull and Bones Members From 1833-1950." The Russell Trust Association, New Haven, Conn., 1949. Ranleagh, John. The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1986. Rosenbaum, Ron. "Skull and Bones: An Elegy for Mumbo Jumbo." Esquire Magazine, September, 1977. "Skull and Bones: A Short History." Executive Intelligence Review, January 30, 1980. Stimson, Henry and McGeorge Bundy. In Active Service in Peace and War. Octagon Press, New York, 1949 Sutton, Antony C. America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones. Liberty Press, Billings, Mont., 1986. Winks, Robin. Cloak and Gown Scholars in the Secret War William Morrow, New York, 1987. Some Prominent Members of Skull & Bones: William F. Buckley, Jr. (Bones Class of 1950): Founder of National Review, the leading conservative magazine in the United States. Brother James (Skull & Bones l944) is now a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals. William F. Buckley, Jr., former CIA officer in Mexico, also built the political grassroots conservative movement in the U.S. in the 1960s. President Bush and Buckley have recently split over Buckley's strong pro-lsraelism. McGeorge Bundy (Skull & Bones initiate of 1940): Scion of the Skull & Bones Bundy family. Father Harvey H. Bundy was Skull & Bones, as was brother William P. Bundy. McGeorge served in the War Department during World War II as Henry Stimson's assistant and later became the National Security Adviser to President Kennedy. William Bundy became a CIA official and later served in key positions at the Departments of State and Defense. McGeorge headed the Ford Foundation (1968-1980) and William chaired the Council on Foreign Relations (1972-1983). George Bush (initiated in 1948): President of the United States. Comes from a complete Bones family. Father Prescott, a Bones initiate of the class of 1917. Uncle George Herbert Walker, Bones Class of 1927. U S Federal District Court Judge John Walker is also a relative and a Bonesman. Alfred Cowles (Class of 1913): Built the Cowles Communication empire based on the Des Moines (lowa) Register and the Minneapolis (Minnesota) Star and Tribune. These two newspapers play a significant role in shaping the early presidential primaries, especially in Iowa. Hugh Cunningham (Bones 1934): CIA man from 1947 to 1973. He served in top positions in the Clandestine Services, the Board of National Estimates and later as Director of Training. Thomas Daniels (initiated in 1914): Founder of the largest agro-business and grain cartel company in Minnesota -- Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM). Served in the Foreign Service and later during World War II as head of the Fats and Oils Section of the War Production Board. ADM Corporation's new head Dwayne Andreas is one of the most powerful figures in U.S.-Soviet trade relations. Daniels's only son, John (Bones 1943), also works in ADM. The bank which underwrites ADM stock issues is the Morgan Stanley investment bank Richard Ely Danielson (Skull & Bones 1907): Past publisher of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, one of the leading magazines for seeing which policy line on a variety of issues is coming out of the Eastern Establishment. Russell Wheeler Davenport (initiated in 1923): Fortune magazine writer and editor, made this magazine the leading authority on financial matters in the United States. Davenport created the Fortune 500 companies list. Henry P. Davison (Bones Class of l920): Key senior partner in the Morgan banking and financial trust networks. His fellow Bonesman Harold Stanley (1908) founded the investment bank Morgan Stanley. Davison and his family helped set up the Guaranty Trust Corporation which became Morgan Guaranty Thomas Cochran (1904 Bonesman) was one of the most powerful partners in the Morgan bank. The influence of the Morgan banking system can be seen in its relationship with the hierarchy of U.S. intelligence. The head of the Office of Strategic Services, Gen. William Donovan, worked as a Morgan intelligence operative in the 1920s and prepared the intelligence reports for the Morgan banking concerns on developments in Europe. F. Trubee Davison became CIA Director of Personnel in 1951 and placed key Bonesmen in the right positions inside the CIA. Averell Harriman (1913 initiate): Scion of the Harriman railroad family. His brother Roland (Skull & Bones 1917) ran the investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman. Averell was one of the most powerful members of the Skull & Bones fraternity, His government posts ranged from Ambassador to Russia during World War II and various State Department positions to chief negotiator on the Vietnam Talks. Confidential adviser to Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and later Nixon and Carter. His investment banking firm is virtually a Skull & Bones bank‹nine senior partners are from Skull & Bones. President Bush's father worked in Brown Brothers Harriman after helping to merge several companies in the United Rubber Corporation of America. Winston Lord (Bones Class of 1959): Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (1983-l988). Former State Department official and CIA officer in Asia. China expert. Six members of the Lord family were Skull & Bones, including Charles Edwin Lord, former Comptroller of the Currency, Department of the Treasury. Oswald Bates Lord (Skull & Bones l926) married Mary Pillsbury of the Minnesota based Pillsbury Flour Corporation. Winston Lord is their son. Robert A. Lovett (1918 initiate): Put together the Brown Brothers Harriman merger and later organized the aviation industry mobilization for World War II. Became part of the most exclusive power group in World War II under Henry Stimson. Lovett was one of the five or six most powerful men in the United States for nearly 40 years until his death in 1986. Henry Luce (initiated in 1920): Built the Time-Life publishing empire. Became the leading publicist of the "American century" doctrine. Dino Pionzio (Bones Class of 1950): CIA deputy chief of station in Chile during the overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende. Now works at the investment firm Dillion Read. Alphonso Taft (initiated in 1833): Secretary of War (1876), Attorney General (1876-1877) and later Minister to Austria and Russia. Co-founder of Skull & Bones. Robert A. Taft (1910 initiate): Speaker of the House of Representatives (1921-1926) and Senator (R-Ohio). Leader of the Isolationist movement in the 1930s. His son Robert A. Taft, Jr., also senator from Ohio, led the right-wing of the Republican Party in the 1950s and 1960s. Robert A. Taft, Jr., however, was the only member of the Taft family who was not Skull & Bones. William H. Taft (Skull & Bones 1878): President of the United States (1908-1912) and appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (1921-1930). Secretary of War (1904-1908). Trustee, Carnegie Institution. Part of the long line of Tafts who served in the U.S. government. William Collins Whitney (initiated 1863): Secretary of the Navy (1885-1889). Promoter of the Naval Shipyards and financier. Part of the Whitney family which sent eight of its members to Yale to become Skull & Bonesmen. Family intermarried with the Payne, Harriman and Vanderbilt clans. The Whitneys became some of Wall Street's most powerful financiers through the Guaranty and Knickerbocker Trust Companies. Current U.S. senators who are Skull & Bones members: Sen. Jonathan Bingham (D-N.M.). Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.) is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sen. John Chafee (R-R.I.); Former Navy Secretary and on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sen. John Heinz (R-Pa.): Recently killed in an airplane crash. was a Bonesman as was his father. The Heinz family has one of the largest food-producing companies in the world. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.): Formerly on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Kerry is now on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Selected Quotations: -- During the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, two Skull & Bones advisers to President Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy and Robert Lovett, met in the west wing of the White House to discuss strategy. According to author Godfrey Hodgson, there was a photograph of master Bonesman Henry L. Stimson, their mentor, on Lundy's desk. "All during the conversation the old Colonel seemed to be staring me straight in the face," recalled Lovett. Finally, he said to Bundy, "Mac, I think the best service we can perform for the president is to try to approach this as Colonel Stimson would." -- At the Potsdam summit in 1946 when President Truman first met Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Stimson told the president: "The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him." -- Commenting on the plan of Robert Morgenthau, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary, to deindustrialize Germany after World War II, Stimson wrote: ". . . just such a crime as the Germans themselves hoped to perpetrate on their victims . . . a crime against civilization itself?" He added rather ironically that the plan was like "a beautiful Nazi program! This is to laugh!" -- "They possessed a common background, common experience, and a common liking for old wines, proper English and Savile Row clothing," wrote the biographer of former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew. A top level diplomat and State Department powerhouse during the first half of the 20th century, Bonesman Hugh Wilson adds, "The Foreign Service [is] a pretty good club." -- "These men helped establish a distinguished network connecting Wall Street, Washington, worthy foundations and proper clubs," wrote historian and former JFK aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. "The New York financial and legal community was the heart of the American Establishment. Its household deities were Henry L. Stimson and Elihu Root; its present leaders, Robert A. Lovett and John J. McCloy; its front organizations, the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations and the Council on Foreign Relations." -- British author Godfrey Hodgson stated in an essay on the American Establishment that it was "characteristic of these men to take on the burdens of world power with a certain avidity... It reflected a grim but grand duty that was a legacy from half-buried layer of New England Puritanism." -- Averell Harriman's father, owner of the largest railroad company in the United States at the turn of the century, told his son: "Great wealth is an obligation and responsibility. Money must work for the country." -- "I scoffed at Harvard's Porcellian club. It was too smug. But to get into Bones, you had to do something for Yale, wrote Averell Harriman. He would frequently return to the "Tomb on High Street." During the Paris Peace Conference on the Vietnam War, Harriman was quite upset about not being able to attend a "Bones Reunion." In the book The Wise Men, Harriman is described as willing to talk openly about national security affairs, but "he refused, however, to tell [even] his family anything about Bones... so complete was his trust in Bones's code of secrecy..." -- Stimson during the liberation of France in 1944 wrote about the need for France's reconstruction following the Nazi occupation of France: "America cannot supervise the elections of a great country like France. Consequently, we must eventually leave the execution of the State Department formula to the French themselves... where we ourselves will assume responsibility in part or more for its execution according to Anglo-Saxon ideals." -- Stimson on Austria and Germany following World War II: "They [the British] haven't any grasp apparently of the underlying need of proper economic arrangements to make peace stick... If they restore Austria to her position in which she was left by the Versailles arrangement 25 years ago, why they would reduce her to a non-self-sustaining state [is beyond me]... Central Europe after the war has got to eat. She has got to be free of tariffs in order to eat." -- Stimson was "opposed to a Carthaginian Peace" in which Germany was reduced to a non functioning society. He wrote, "The Ruhr and Saarland... [must not] be turned into a second rate industrial land . . . regardless of what it means to Germany... [rather] to the welfare of the entire continent " -- In 1948, the debate within the U.S. government over the creation of the state of Israel was reaching critical intensity. President Truman was the "dark horse" candidate to defeat the Republican nominee, Thomas Dewey. Truman thought he needed the Jewish groups to mobilize in his support in order to get elected. He also believed that after so many years of suffering and persecution, the Jews deserved a homeland of their own. However, his most trusted foreign policy advisers, George Marshall, Dean Acheson and Robert Lovett, were, according to the book The Wise Men, "all dead set against the birth of Israel... However humanitarian a Jewish homeland might seem... it posed a real risk to U.N. national security. It was absolutely vital that the U.S. maintain its pipeline to Mideast oil. Supporting the Zionist cause would only antagonize the Arabs." Lovett said, "Israel was one ally too many " -- On Japan, Stimson and McGeorge Bundy wrote their book On Active Service in Peace and War: "Since 1937, when the Japanese attacked China, Stimson had been urging, as a private citizen, an embargo on all American trade with Japan, and this attitude he carried with him into the Cabinet [when he became Secretary of War]." Stimson prepared a memorandum in 1940 pointing out how Japan had yielded before American firmness, in her withdrawal from Shantung and Siberia in 1919 and her acceptance of naval inferiority in 1921. "Japan," Stimson wrote, "has historically shown that she can misinterpret a pacifistic policy of the United States for weakness. She has also historically shown that when the United States indicates by clear language and bold actions that she intends to carry out a clear and affirmative policy in the Far East, Japan will yield to that policy even though it conflicts with her own Asiatic policy and conceived interests. For the United States now to indicate either by soft words or inconsistent actions that she has no such clear and definite policy towards the Far East will only encourage Japan to bolder action." -- On December 7, 1941, Stimson wrote in his diary: "When the news first came that Japan had attacked us, my first feeling was of relief that the indecision was over and that crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people. This continued to be my dominant feeling in spite of the news of catastrophes which quickly developed. For I feel that this country united has practically nothing to fear, while the apathy and division stirred by unpatriotic men have been hitherto very discouraging." -- On the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Stimson wrote in an article for Harper's Weekly in 1947: "My chief purpose was to end the war in victory with the least possible cost in the lives of men in the armies which I had helped to raise. In the light that no man, in our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hands a weapon of such possibilities for accomplishing this purpose and saving those lives, could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face." -- At the Truman White House in the presence of Secretary of State James Byrnes, Adm. Leahy and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, according to his biographer: "Stimson had argued consistently for a commitment to allow the Japanese to keep their Emperor, not because- with the memory of Manchuria in his mind‹he had any special sympathy for him, but because only the Emperor could persuade the Japanese to surrender and therefore save American lives." ----- 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. 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