The Skull and Bones - Yale University
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The Skull and Bones - Yale University
Third SS Panzer Division 'Der
Totenkopf'
Living quarters of the Dutch Volunteer Legion
on the Leningrad front, December 1943
The use of Skull and Bones is a popular symbol, especially in military circles. It is usually associated with the concept of 'death before dishonour'. It is also meant to intimidate the enemy.
To show the enemy the black flag (which is usually adorned with the death's head) meant you were not taking prisoners. The cavalry connection was also important because cavalry are associated with danger and daring. There have been many stories of fateful cavalry charges from the Crimean War to WWII (by Polish and Italian cavalry men).
Panzertroops also wore the the Totenkopf because armor is seen as the modern equivalent of horse cavalry. In the case of the 3rd SS division "Totenkopf", this unit was created from members of the Totenkopf-Verband, a section of the SS. The skull and cross bones is a very popular symbol. Some of the more prominent uses of the symbol in the war came from Bulgaria, Serbia, Latvia, and Hungary.
Italy used a lot of variations but most of theirs were a skull with a dagger in its teeth, probably a salute to the Italian "Arditi" of WWI.
It is foolish to try to link the use of this symbol to some kind of world wide conspiracy. There are only so many symbol designs out there, and they tend to get reused often.
J.P. Slovjanski
Skull and bones motif used by UK far
left and far right
Advocates of hatred and violence at both ends of the left-right political spectrum in the UK use the skull and cross bones as their symbol. Both the following groups have a higher profile than their actual support in the country might suggest, probably because their controversial ideas attract attention. It is far from impossible that BOTH organisations are political plants supported and funded by a wealthy Satanic death cult involved in drug/arms smuggling.
Is it necessary to point out to any vaguely intelligent
person or sentient being why Combat 18 is not a nice organisation? Their
open support for the Nazi fascists and 'White Power' (do whites really need
any more power?) and anti-Jewish stance unashamedly welds them in with the
vilest race-hate atrocities committed by the SS and Gestapo etc. in World
War II.
One section of the combat 18 web forum is entitled 'The Zyklon Zone', taking its name from IG Farben's poison gas used for mass murder in Nazi death camps. The two sub-sections of this forum zone are demeaningly entitled 'Jew Stuff' and 'Blackie Stuff'.
Only someone who rejoices in the worst excesses of man's inhumanity to man could support or connect themselves with such an organisation.
Class War
Class War are left wing advocates of violence, blaming the upper and middle 'ruling' classes as a whole for the ills of working people and advocating a fundamentalist Marxist worldview. They make no distinction between well-off groups and individuals that fight for social justice and those selfish capitalists that work to destroy the lives and communities of the poor, exploiting and legitimising the jealousy of the poor for the rich. I have been personally criticised by Class War's Paul Marsh for exposing what I believe to be their infiltration by Britain's counterintelligence service MI5.
Class War supports important groups such as Against Prison Slavery but attacks Britain's first black MP Diane Abbott for "maintaining close relations with the biggest racists of the lot, the Metropolitan Police". Class War also blame the MP personally for Hackney's "bizzare mixture of grinding poverty and wealthy middle class idiots".
One of the issues Class War appear to have avoided is the fact that far-right organisations such as Combat 18 (above) and the BNP are essentially working class movements.
In an era where the U.S. administration is leading the world into a state of permanent 'war on terrorism' Class War's violent response and perpetuation of the 'war' mindset begs the question "can you fight violence with violence?" In fact the issues raised by Class War lie at the heart of differences on the left between those that see man's propensity for violence against the person as the solution and those that see it as the problem.
Documented Evidence of a Secret Business and Political Alliance Between the U.S. "Establishment" and the Nazis - Before, During and After World War II - up to the Present.http://www.sumeria.net/politics/shadv3.html
Death's Head: Piracy, Plunder and Foreign Policy
http://www.rense.com/general48/deathead.htm
THE US FLIES THE JOLLY ROGER - WITH SKULL AND BONES LEADERS AT THE HELM -
By: Dorothy Anne Seesehttp://www.etherzone.com/2003/sees062503.shtml
Symbolism
of the Skull and Crossbones, otherwise known as the Deaths Head
Secrets
of the Tomb book excerpt: The Legend of Skull and Bones
READ UP ON OCCULTISM:
DON'T DIE OF IGNORANCE!!
1. Unholy Alliance, A history of Nazi involvement with the occult, Peter
Levenda, forward by Norman Mailer, Continuum publishing, 2002.
2. The occult roots of Nazism, secret aryan cults and their influence on
Nazi ideology, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, NYU press, 1992.
3. The Occult Conspiracy, secret societies-their influence and power in world
history, Michael Howard, Destiny books, 1989.
4. The Dark Worship, Toyne Newton. 2002
5. Erwin W. Lutzer, 'Hitler's Cross, the revealing story of how the Cross
of Christ was used as a symbol of the Nazi agenda.' pub. Moody press, Chicago,
1995 [available from more mainstream bookshops].
If you have audio: Skull and Bones - The Connection - WBUR 90.9 FM, Boston
http://www.indiancountry.com/index.php?1086105944
Posted: June 01, 2004 - 12:04pm EST
by: Brenda Norrell / Southwest Staff Reporter / Indian Country Today
SAN CARLOS, Ariz. - President George W. Bush, Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry and Homeland Security counsel Ed McNally are all members of the Yale secret society Skull and Bones. So where does that leave America? San Carlos Apache elder Raleigh Thompson said the current darkness in America and the world stems from Skull and Bones, a far-reaching brotherhood of power, which defiled the remains of Geronimo.
Thompson said horrible things are happening in the world today as a result of the defilement of the sacred, including defacing sacred Mount Graham with a complex of telescopes and the unearthing of Geronimo’s remains by Prescott Bush. "In tribal traditions, only witchcraft people dig up these bones," Thompson said of the defilement of the grave by President George W. Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush, as recorded in a Skull and Bones log entry provided to San Carlos Apaches.
Thompson said the truth about the war in Iraq is now being exposed, linking the Bush family pressure for a pipeline in the Middle East, the war in Afghanistan and attacks of Sept. 11. Thompson said this dark path was present when the grave of Geronimo was desecrated. Interviewed on the day of the release of the video of the beheading of Nicholas Berg, Thompson said everything is out of control.
Referring to the series of events leading up to today, Thompson said of President Bush, "Now he is in deep trouble."
Thompson said the world’s equilibrium becomes imbalanced when there is a violation of the sacred, as evidenced by recent violence and murders on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson. The university has taken the lead in the international consortium responsible for the telescopes on Mount Graham.
"When you destroy sacred places, sacred mountains, these things happen," Thompson said.
Members of the Skull and Bones Society, based at Yale University in Connecticut, have long held power in the United States. Bonesmen have included Presidents Taft and Bush and members of the Supreme Court, CIA and Homeland Security. The men who oversaw the production of the first atomic bomb were members of Skull and Bones, wrote Alexendra Robbins in the book "Secrets of the Tomb."
The group of Bonesmen who oversaw the construction and deployment of the first atomic bomb included Henry Stimson, George L. Harrison, Robert A. Lovett, Averell Harriman and Harvey H. Bundy. An assistant to the secretary of war, John J. McCloy, later became chairman of Chase Bank and president of the World Bank, protested by indigenous people worldwide for exploitation of natural resources and violations of indigenous land rights.
Stimson was in the same law firm as Endicott Peabody Davison, the attorney who met with San Carlos Apache in New York concerning the return of Geronimo’s remains.
In "Secrets of the Tomb", Robbins explains Bonesmen financed the Bush family’s oil companies and dominate financial institutions such as J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley Dean Winter, and Brown Brothers Harriman
"Through these companies, Skull and Bones provided financial backing to Adolph Hitler because the society then followed a Nazi - and now follows a neo-Nazi - doctrine. At least a dozen Bonesmen have been linked to the Federal Reserve, including the first chairman of the New York Federal Reserve." Skull and Bonesmen control the wealth of the Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford families, Robbins said.
Last fall, in an interview with Indian Country Today, Robbins said for the first time in history the race for president could be between two Bonesmen. Recently, Robbins spoke of those odds on the radio program "Democracy Now."
"There are only 800 living members. Only 15 per year. It’s staggering that two of them could be facing off for the presidency and so many of them have achieved positions of prominence."
http://www.indiancountry.com/index.php?1086105944
Investigations into America's most powerful secret
society
Through these doors pass the members of the Order of Skull & Bones, a small secret society founded at Yale University in 1832 that has risen to the top of American political and economic power. Three U.S. Presidents, two Chief Justices of the United States, over twenty U.S. Senators, and many congressmen, cabinet officers, judges and state officials are testimony to the power, privilege and prestige of Bones.
What do these elite secret society members have over us regular folks? Who are they? What do they do? Did members of Skull & Bones really finance Hitler? Do they hold the bones of Geronimo in their Tomb? This book is your chance to investigate these questions and more.
“These secret societies are behind it all,” my father told me many years ago, During the early ‘50s he was a CIA branch chief, head of the East Asia intelligence analysis office. “The Vietnam War,” he said soberly, “is about drugs.” Many years later I finally had some understanding of what Dad was talking about. I wish I had asked more questions. Such as, was he talking about the Order of Skull and Bones?
It’s a symbol used by pirates, poisons and the Nazis but it’s also a “fraternity” at Yale University. College kids having fun? Well, … ?
Fifteen juniors are tapped each year. Around 2,500 Yale graduates have been members, mostly white males from wealthy Northeastern families: Bush, Bundy, Cheney, Dodge, Ford, Goodyear, Harriman, Heinz, Kellogg, Phelps, Pillsbury, Rockefeller, Taft, Vanderbilt, Weyerhaeuser and Whitney are some of the names on its roster. Minorities were brought into membership in the 1950s, and the first women were admitted in 1991,
The Order of Skull and Bones is a secret society begun at Yale by William Huntington Russell. His cousin Samuel Russell’s family enterprise was the largest American opium smuggler. When Russell & Co. worked with the world’s largest smuggler, the Scottish firm Jardine-Matheson, they were known as the Combination.
Many New England and Southern families in the “China Trade” sent their sons to Yale, and many were tapped into Skull and Bones. From Yale, Bonesmen went into and were very influential in the worlds of commerce, communications, diplomacy, education, intelligence, finance, law and politics.
http://www.fleshingoutskullandbones.com
The Health Establishment and the Order
of Skull & Bones
An SS armoured car in the
fighting in Danzig, September 1939
from http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/CarolASThompson/theorder.htm
From: America's Secret Establishment, An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones, by Antony C. Sutton. Liberty House Press, 1986, pages 89-91.
Welch's ties to Skull and Bones are explicitly noted in his papers collection in the Johns Hopkins archives: Folder 67/13-15, YALE COLLEGE "Skull and Bones," 1871-1933.
Welch papers Series II / Johns Hopkins Medical Institute
He was a correspondent of George D. Miller from 1870 to 1929. George Douglas Miller (also S&B 1870) was the "Patriarch" who donated the Deer Iland retreat to the group, and requested that peculiar spelling of the word "island."
The History of Deer Island / NewRuins.com
1916 Postcard of Deer Island / Vintage Views
"As Dr. Welch gradually retired, Father [Simon Flexner] stepped into his shoes as the leader of the American scientific medical establishment. Under successive governors he served as chairman of the Public Health Council of the State of New York, an advisory body to the Board of Health that had administrative powers of its own. For my brother and me, it was particularly delightful that the very low number of our automobile license plate indicated a high state official who it was wise for the police not to tangle with." (Maverick's Progress. An Autobiography. By James Thomas Flexner. Fordham University Press, 1996.) Simon Flexner married into the Maryland aristocracy. His wife's father, James Carey Thomas, was one of the founding trustees of JHU and was influential in establishing the medical school.
Of skulls and bones: More secrets of the
tomb
SS Obergruppenfuhrer Karl Wolff with Benito Mussolini.
Note Wolff's skull and cross bones 'totenkopf' on his hat
http://www.yaleherald.com/article.php?Article=2523
BY NOAM RUDNICK - 24th October 2003
An axe pried open the iron door of the tomb, and Pat[riarch] Bush entered and started to dig...Pat[riarch] James dug deep and pried out the trophy itself...I showered and hit the hay...a happy man...''
So recounts a document thought to be an internal record from the Skull and Bones Society. "Pat[riarch] Bush" is Prescott Bush, father of an American political dynasty. His "trophy" is the skull of Geronimo, the Native American spiritual and military leader laid to rest in 1909 at Fort Still, Oklahoma, where Bush and fellow Bonesmen were stationed nine years later.
Alexandra Robbins, ES '98, has researched Bush's secret society extensively. Her recent book, Secrets of the Tomb, has heightened interest in the activities of Skull and Bones. She attests to the legitimacy of the story, "The text looks to be an authentic Bones document describing Prescott Bush and other Bonesmen robbing Geronimo's grave and cleaning the skull with carbolic acid." In interviews with Robbins, Bonesmen have admitted that there is a skull in the tomb that they call Geronimo.
Current Members of Skull and Bones chose not to comment on the legitimacy of the allegations.
Apache tribal leader Ned Anderson was informed of the alleged theft in 1986. As an ancestor of Geronimo, Anderson petitioned the Federal Bureau of Investigations to force the return of the skull. Noting that Apaches have a "great fear and respect for death," Anderson said that he hoped to honor Geronimo's express wish to be laid to rest in "Arizona acorn country."
Unwilling to remove himself from the case entirely and yield all his evidence to the FBI, Anderson withdrew his request for action. Instead, he arranged to meet with George H. W. Bush's, DC '48, brother Jonathan in New York City. Anderson recounts that Bush sounded "very encouraging" during their initial meeting. Eleven days later, Bush presented the display case. Anderson refused to accept the skull because it appeared to belong to a small child. Bush acknowledged this fact but claimed that it was the only relevant artifact in the society's possession.
He urged Anderson to accept the display and sign a document verifying that the society was not in possession of Geronimo's skull. Anderson refused.
Since the meeting in Manhattan, no further efforts to recover the skull have been made. Anderson puts great faith in the Bonesmen. "I believe that those who are involved need to come clean on this," he said. "I think they'll come around and do what is appropriate."
Jim Adams, managing editor of Indian Country Today, provides an explanation for the notable absence of recovery efforts. "Apache tribal governments seem reluctant to raise the issue because it does violate taboos about speaking about the dead. This doesn't mean they're not concerned; rather they have their own laws of secrecy."
Native Americans are far from unconcerned. Adams' publication, the leading Native American news source, has run several articles on the secret society's alleged possession of the skull. On Oct. 6, 60 Minutes televised a segment on Skull and Bones that briefly addressed the society's posession of Geronimo's skull.
James Craven, an economics professor at Clark College, suggests that such media exposure is leading to action. "In the near future, there will finally be large groups of Natives showing up in front of 'the tomb' to protest this ugly racism and grave robbing by the Bones, and they will not be leaving until that skull and any other Native artifacts have been returned."
Adams expressed similar sentiments. "My sense is that American Indians in general are appalled—outraged by the accusation, but not surprised," he said. "Remains of ancestors have been exploited and desecrated for centuries in the name of anthropology or simply for idle curiosity. But even by these standards, it's bizarre and embarrassing that a supposedly elite group would use the remains of any human being for its own entertainment."
SS gruppenfuhrer Theodor Eicke, commander of
the SS Totenkopf Division on the Eastern front 1942. Prior to being appointed
to the command of the Totenkopf he was chief of the concentration camps.
'Papa' Eicke was shot down and killed in February 1943 near Orelka while
visiting a forward unit in his Fieseler Storch
Supposing the grave-robbing allegations are true, why would the Skull and Bones be interested in the head of Geronimo? Robbins suggests that the answer lies in their name. "Bones as a society is preoccupied with death; skulls, skeletons, and artwork depicting death are prevalent in the tomb. When Bonesmen steal things they use the euphemism that they are taking 'gifts to the goddess' whom they honor within the tomb." The focus on death is not arbitrary. The society emphasizes mortality in order to illustrate the necessity of success.
Robbins, herself a member of Scroll and Key, attests to the centrality of ritualized stealing in many of the societies at Yale. Each class attempts to outdo its predecessor in the acquisition of valuables. In addition to Geronimo's skull, the Bonesmen's tomb is rumored to contain the skull of Pancho Villa and Adolf Hitler's silverware.
Robbins expresses outrage at Skull and Bones' behavior. "I think it's ridiculous that Bonesmen's sense of entitlement is broad enough to include items that allegedly don't belong to them. The items they supposedly steal as a prank or competition may be valuable and meaningful to the actual owners. It's appalling that proper authorities have not forced their way into the tomb to retrieve the items that don't belong in there."
The legality of Skull and Bones' behavior is dubious. According to Adams, members of Skull and Bones have violated laws preventing the desecration of graves and should be held responsible as felons. "If it is true that Skull and Bones and its corporate parent RTA Inc., continue to hold these skulls, my belief would be that they are participating in a continuing conspiracy to be in possession of stolen property." Many are quick to cite the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act as grounds for prosecuting Skull and Bones. Ironically, it was George H. W. Bush, DC '48, a member of Skull and Bones, who signed this bill into law in 1990. However, NAGPRA only applies to organizations that receive federal funding. The University, in fact, was forced to return certain artifacts previously held by its Peabody Museum in accordance with the bill. However, secret societies are not directly affiliated with the University, exempting them from NAGPRA jurisdiction.
"SS Oberstgruppenfuhrer
Paul Hausser (seen here as an Obergruppenfuhrer while commanding the Das
Reich Division in Russia, winter 1941) was unquestionably the ablest military
commander in the Waffen SS. After the war he sought to re-establish the
reputation of the SS and claimed that the foreign units of the SS were really
the precursors of the NATO army. Hausser's skull and cross bones 'totenkopf'
is on his hat."
by A.J. Barker
While the society's exemption from NAGPRA relies on financial independence from Yale, the two organizations are in fact closely intertwined. As Robbins emphasizes, the administration hasn't taken steps against the societies because administrators have historically been members. To this day, prominent figures on the Yale faculty and administration are members of Yale secret societies. There has always been a kinship between society men at the faculty, administration, and undergraduate levels. This close connection may explain Yale's failure to investigate the activity of certain students.
In addition to being high-ranking members of the Yale administration, members of Skull and Bones work in important governmental positions. The upcoming presidential election could potentially pit Bonesman against Bonesman.
George Bush, DC '68, and John Kerry, JE '66, both members of the society, could be hurt by their involvement in an organization that allegedly takes part illegal behavior. "I think these politicians are caught in a real conflict between their loyalty to Bones and their oaths as public servants if they don't take positive steps to return any human remains. The reports about Geronimo certainly poison relations between the Presidency and the tribes," Adams said.
Whatever the repercussions, many see the society's behavior as wholly reprehensible, particularly among those who would run for high public office. "[The theft] is a metaphor for something much bigger and even uglier. It is the ugly racism and hubris of the in-bred power elites who seek to infiltrate positions of power," Craven said.
http://www.yaleherald.com/article.php?Article=2523
Skull
And Bones
Oct. 5, 2003
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/02/60minutes/main576332.shtm
(CBS) There are secrets that George W. Bush guards at least as carefully as any entrusted to a president.
He's forbidden to share these secrets even with the vice president -- secrets he has held ever since his days as an undergraduate at Yale.
In his senior year, Mr. Bush - like his father and his grandfather - belonged to Skull and Bones, an elite secret society that includes some of the most powerful men of the 20th century.
All Bonesmen, as they're called, are forbidden to reveal what goes on in their inner sanctum, the windowless building on the Yale campus that is called "The Tomb."
There are conspiracy theorists who see Skull and Bones behind everything that goes wrong, and occasionally even right in the world.
Apart from presidents, Bones has included cabinet officers, spies, Supreme Court justices, statesmen and captains of industry - and often their sons, and lately their daughters, too.
It’s a social and political network like no other. And they've responded to outsiders with utter silence – until an enterprising Yale graduate, Alexandra Robbins, managed to penetrate the wall of silence in her book, “Secrets of the Tomb.” Correspondent Morley Safer reports.
”I spoke with about 100 members of Skull and Bones and they were members who were tired of the secrecy, and that's why they were willing to talk to me,” says Robbins. “But probably twice that number hung up on me, harassed me, or threatened me.”
Secret or not, Skull and Bones is as essential to Yale as the Whiffenpoofs, the tables down at a pub called Mory's, and the Yale mascot - that ever-slobbering bulldog.
Skull and Bones, with all its ritual and macabre relics, was founded in 1832 as a new world version of secret student societies that were common in Germany at the time. Since then, it has chosen or "tapped" only 15 senior students a year who become patriarchs when they graduate -- lifetime members of the ultimate old boys' club.
“Skull and Bones is so tiny. That's what makes this staggering,” says Robbins. “There are only 15 people a year, which means there are about 800 living members at any one time.”
But a lot of Bonesmen have gone on to positions of great power, which Robbins says is the main purpose of this secret society: to get as many members as possible into positions of power.
“They do have many individuals in influential positions,” says Robbins. “And that's why this is something that we need to know about.”
President Bush has tapped five fellow Bonesmen to join his administration. Most recently, he selected William Donaldson, Skull and Bones 1953, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Like the President, he's taken the Bones oath of silence.
Ron Rosenbaum, author and columnist for the New York Observer, has become obsessed with cracking that code of secrecy.
“I think there is a deep and legitimate distrust in America for power and privilege that are cloaked in secrecy. It's not supposed to be the way we do things,” says Rosenbaum. “We're supposed to do things out in the open in America. And so that any society or institution that hints that there is something hidden is, I think, a legitimate subject for investigation.”
His investigation is a 30-year obsession dating back to his days as a Yale classmate of George W. Bush. Rosenbaum, a self-described undergraduate nerd, was certainly not a contender for Bones. But he was fascinated by its weirdness.
“It's this sepulchral, tomblike, windowless, granite, sandstone bulk that you can't miss. And I lived next to it,” says Rosenbaum. “I had passed it all the time. And during the initiation rites, you could hear strange cries and whispers coming from the Skull and Bones tomb.”
Despite a lifetime of attempts to get inside, the best Rosenbaum could do was hide out on the ledge of a nearby building a few years ago to videotape a nocturnal initiation ceremony in the Tomb's courtyard.
“A woman holds a knife and pretends to slash the throat of another person lying down before them, and there's screaming and yelling at the neophytes,” he says.
Robbins says the cast of the initiation ritual is right out of Harry Potter meets Dracula: “There is a devil, a Don Quixote and a Pope who has one foot sheathed in a white monogrammed slipper resting on a stone skull. The initiates are led into the room one at a time. And once an initiate is inside, the Bonesmen shriek at him. Finally, the Bonesman is shoved to his knees in front of Don Quixote as the shrieking crowd falls silent. And Don Quixote lifts his sword and taps the Bonesman on his left shoulder and says, ‘By order of our order, I dub thee knight of Euloga.’"
It’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo, says Robbins, but it means a lot to the people who are in it.
“Prescott Bush, George W's grandfather, and a band of Bonesmen, robbed the grave of Geronimo, took the skull and some personal relics of the Apache Chief and brought them back to the tomb,” says Robbins. “There is still a glass case, Bonesmen tell me, within the tomb that displays a skull that they all refer to as Geronimo.”
“The preoccupation with bones, mortality, with coffins, lying in coffins, standing around coffins, all this sort of thing I think is designed to give them the sense that, and it's very true, life is short,” says Rosenbaum. “You can spend it, if you have a privileged background, enjoying yourself, contributing nothing, or you can spend it making a contribution.”
And plenty of Bonesmen have made a contribution, from William Howard Taft, the 27th President; Henry Luce, the founder of Time Magazine; and W. Averell Harriman, the diplomat and confidant of U.S. presidents.
“What's important about the undergraduate years of Skull and Bones, as opposed to fraternities, is that it imbues them with a kind of mission for moral leadership,” says Rosenbaum. “And it's something that they may ignore for 30 years of their life, as George W. Bush seemed to successfully ignore it for quite a long time. But he came back to it.”
Mr. Bush, like his father and grandfather before him, has refused to talk openly about Skull and Bones. But as a Bonesman, he was required to reveal his innermost secrets to his fellow Bones initiates.
“They're supposed to recount their entire sexual histories in sort of a dim, a dimly-lit cozy room. The other 14 members are sitting on plush couches, and the lights are dimmed,” says Robbins. “And there's a fire roaring. And the, this activity is supposed to last anywhere from between one to three hours.”
”I believe the point of the year in the tomb is to forge such a strong bond between these 15 new members that after they graduate, for them to betray Skull and Bones would mean they'd have to betray their fourteen closest friends,” says Robbins.
One can't help but make certain comparisons with the mafia, for example. Secret society, bonding, stakes may be a little higher in one than the other. But everybody knows everything about everybody, which is a form of protection.
“I think Skull and Bones has had slightly more success than the mafia in the sense that the leaders of the five families are all doing 100 years in jail, and the leaders of the Skull and Bones families are doing four and eight years in the White House,” says Rosenbaum.
Bones is not restricted to the Republican Party. Yet another Bonesman has his eye on the Oval Office: Senator John Kerry, Democrat, Skull & Bones 1966.
“It is fascinating isn't it? I mean, again, all the people say, ‘Oh, these societies don't matter. The Eastern Establishment is in decline.’ And you could not find two more quintessential Eastern establishment, privileged guys,” says Rosenbaum. “I remember when I was a nerdy scholarship student in the reserve book room at, at the Yale Library, and John Kerry, who at that point styled himself ‘John F. Kerry’ would walk in.”
“There was always a little buzz,” adds Rosenbaum. “Because even then he was seen to be destined for higher things. He was head of the Yale Political Union, and a tap for Skull and Bones was seen as the natural sequel to that.”
David Brooks, a conservative commentator who has published a book on the social dynamics of the upwardly mobile, says that while Skull & Bones may be elite and secret, it's anything but exciting.
“My view of secret societies is they're like the first class cabin in airplanes. They're really impressive until you get into them, and then once you're there they're a little dull. So you hear all these conspiracy theories about Skull and Bones,” says Brooks.
“And to me, to be in one of these organizations, you have to have an incredibly high tolerance for tedium 'cause you're sittin' around talking, talking, and talking. You're not running the world, you're just gassing.”
Gassing or not, the best-connected white man's club in America has moved reluctantly into the 21st Century.
“Skull and Bones narrowly endorsed admitting women,” says Robbins. “The day before these women were supposed to be initiated, a group of Bonesmen, including William F. Buckley, obtained a court order to block the initiation claiming that letting women into the tomb would lead to date rape. Again more legal wrangling; finally it came down to another vote and women were admitted and initiated.”
But Skull & Bones now has women, and it’s become more multicultural.
“It has gays who got the SAT scores, it's got the gays who got the straight A's,” says Brooks. “It's got the blacks who are the president of the right associations. It's different criteria. More multicultural, but it's still an elite, selective institution.”
On balance, it may be bizarre, but on a certain perspective, does it provide something of value?
“You take these young strivers, you put them in this weird castle. They spill their guts with each other, fine. But they learn something beyond themselves. They learn a commitment to each other, they learn a commitment to the community,” says Brooks. “And maybe they inherit some of those old ideals of public service that are missing in a lot of other parts of the country.”
And is that relationship, in some cases, stronger that family or faith?
“Absolutely,” says Robbins. “You know, they say, they say the motto at Yale is, ‘For God, for country, and for Yale.’ At Bones, I would think it's ‘For Bones.'”
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/02/60minutes/main576332.shtm
http://bks.ark11.net/symbdeathshead.htm
The image of the Skull and Crossbones is recognised in the popular imagination the world over first and foremost as the flag flown by pirates on the high seas going about their business of looting, rape and murder - it seemingly being nothing more than a device meant ot strike fear into the hearts of those who saw a ship flying the dreaded flag bearing down on them. And though not complete bull-shit, being the effect would have been existent in those on the receiving end of the banner bearing the Skull and Crossbones, there is a whole lot more to the origin, use and meanings of the symbol; such a simple explanation doesn’t suffice.
To begin with, the very image of a legendary pirate captain appears to confirm a greater, deeper meaning. Going out on a limb, firstly the wearing of a patch - being one-eyed is of major significance when we recall Odin/Wotan, the chief of the Gods of the Norse, Tuetonic peoples, and Horus, the Hawk-headed son of the resurrected Osiris, who ‘sets things to right’, are both one-eyed - or at the least have lost an eye; Odin sacrificing an eye for wisdom, while the eye of Horus was lost battling Set (cosmic destructive energies). Then of course there is the obligatory bird on the pirates shoulder; here we might bring to mind Odins ravens, his eyes in the sky, Huginn and Muninn, and their portrayal in John Boorman’s excellent film ‘Excalibur’ accompanying Merlin, or perhaps the Egyptian rendition of a persons soul as a bird - the Ba bird. If one was really game, one could draw comparisons between a pirates wooden leg - bared below the knee with the trouser leg rolled up, and the candidate for 3 rd degree, that of a Master Mason, in Freemasonry being similarly attired… and even further, maybe at the extreme limit of where only Fool’s don’t fear to tread, is the pirates hunt, seizure and secreting away of treasure - just as legend ascribes to the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon - the Knights Templar.
The Templars, formed in 1118 and ‘disbanded’ in 1307, are surrounded by myth and legend, from searching and reputedly finding the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, sacred Gnostic texts even more dangerous than those found by the Dead Sea or at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, to the disappearance of their naval fleet from La Rochelle just before King Phillipe of France moved to have all Templars arrested and their assets seized. Some say if it wasn’t the first, then one of the trips the Templare made across the Atlantic to various locations in North America(1). And others, while agreeing the Templars most probably did make a couple of trans-Atlantic crossings prior to Columbus famed journey of 1492, the La Rochelle fleet more likely found a sage haven in Scotland(2) as the nation and its King, Robert the Bruce, were excommunicated by Rome at the time and therefore somewhat beyond the reach of Papal Bulls and Edicts. In fact, Baigent and Leigh, and Knight and Lomas agree, contend the very Scottish victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314, that which ended English designs on Scotland, was due to a mounted charge of Templars throwing themselves into the fray late in the day(3). The connection here with the Skull and Crossbones is that it was the Templars marine battle flag. The Scottish destination of the Templars in 1307 is further implied by the tale relating that Robert the Bruce’s remains were placed in such a ‘skull and crossbones’ manner(4), though the more concrete evidence is that of a large number of Templar gravestones found in Scotland(5), not to mention the very existence of Rosslyn Chapel(6). Whatsmore, the concentration of these anonymous, spartan gravestones, as the centuries go by gradually develop more elaborate, florid and decidedly Masonic, incorporating both the Masonic square and compass and on some examples, the skull and crossbones itself in place of the single, undated flat stones bearing the outline of the particular knights sword(7). That Masonry has roots in the Templars is a matter beyond the scope of the present piece, is dealt with thoroughly elsewhere and considering the above is undoubtedly a certainty. The use of the Skull and Crossbones in Freemasonry beyond that already mentioned on some headstones, is nearly as prevalent as the aforementioned ubiquitous square and compass; being a feature of the hilt of ceremonial swords, embroidered on the aprons or sashes worn by brethren or most impressively, stirringly employed in the ritual of the 3 rd degree, from whence on completion a Mason is thereafter a Master Mason. The 3 rd degree is a ritual raising from the dead following the candidate’s re-enactment of the first Mason - Hiram Abiff’s death at the hands of the traitors Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum(8), the three Juwees.
Already noted is the strange attire worn during the ceremony, which is exactly as a condemned heretic was brought to the gallows in the Middle Ages(9). The Skull and Crossbones themselves are placed on the death shroud from which the brother is raised, the ‘Worshipful Master’(a masonic ‘master of ceremonies’) then explains the bones are ‘emblems of mortality’, from which this rite of initiation could be speculated to be a revelation of the illusory nature of the material realm, as well as being a figurative death within the brother of those elements of his person rooted in the physical world and our five most basic senses used to interact and interpret it - eternity awaits…
A more completely modern usage of the Skull and Crossbones, in this instance referred to as the Death’s Head, was among the SS of Nazi era Germany. Apart from its most visible use on the officers caps, it is probably most famously, or infamously, prominent use was the very highly regarded Totenkopfring/Deaths Head Ring awarded to SS officers in recognition of their “…personal achievement, devotion to duty, and loyalty to the Fuhrer and his ideals.”(10) Though to say what reasons the SS had for adopting the Deaths Head/Skull and Crossbones beyond a connection with the past German military units who too used the symbol in their insignia(11), an ongoing tradition, would be pure guesswork, the reverence with which the Totenkopfrings were held intimates something greater than mere military insignia. Upon death or on leaving the SS, the officers rings were retuned to officialdom whereon they were sent to the SS castle of Wewelsburg in Wesphalia where they were placed in a particular chest kept in the castle’s main tower(12,13). Though rarely more than a footnote in history books, Wewelsburg was ultimately of more import to the SS; it was to be reconstructed as the most sacred temple of the SS, emulating Camelot of the Knights of the Round Table(14). At the centre of the Wewelsburg complex, the castle said to house the Holy Grail and/or the Ark of the Covenant(15). Essentially, the castle, moreso than the surrounding planned township, was conceived to be the mystical axis of the world(16) - in an esoteric sense, the centre from which all universal creative movement is imparted.
Focussing directly on the Skull and Crossbones or Death’s Head, that is the constituent parts to the whole, a further wealth of value may be revealed to us. The Skull and the two human thigh bones crossed are in some instances ascribed the astrological rulership of the first zodiacal sign Aries and the 9 th sign Sagittarius(17), both positive, Fire signs, the former cardinal - more dominant, while the latter is mutable - passive. The combination of Aries and Sagittarius, ruled by Mars and Jupiter respectively, brings together leadership and courage with profound philosophical thought. There is however another system that ascribes the rulership of the entire skeleton, and the skin as well, to Capricorn(18), which puts things into quite a different perspective. Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, whom in a shallow sense is more or less just that old scythe carrier, the Grim Reaper or plain old ‘Death’. However, looking at the picture in its entirety, the death signified by Capricorn, which is the physical death, is at once the beginning of the path to incarnation, the re-birth itself being the domain of Capricorn’s opposite Cancer(19). This death and re-birth is carved into the very fabric of the great medieval cathedrals; Capricorn - death - situated at the portal/doorway, running up the nave through the zodiac to a Cancerian re-birth at the altar(20).
The skeleton of Capricorn finds further significance in the form of the ‘Mithraic Cap’; its form at once imitating the sigil of Capricorn - the cap itself being the fish tail while the very skull it is placed on is the head of the goat… this being the case, it serves to bring the head, ruled by Aries in touch with the feet of Pisces(21), the first and last signs of the zodiac. The significance of uniting the first and last - Alpha to Omega - that of completion, initiation, enlightenment is further enhanced by Capricorn’s sexual connotations; the sigil being both soft and hard is the phallus while Capricorn’s opposite, Cancer, is entirely soft - the vulva, kteis, yoni, cunt(22). The combination of which while engendering life, a Horus to Isis and Osiris, is also the uniting of male and female, the melding of opposites that tantrically(sex magic) is required to attain a state of enlightened initiation - nirvana. Alchemically, of the 3 great principles of Sulphur, Mercury and Salt, it is Salt by way of a well known sigil hints at further revelations in this area; “…this widely used sigil [salt sigil] was derived from the capital letter, the theta, of the Greek Thanatos which meant ‘death’”(23). Salt in this direction is connected with the thought processes of man(24), the very seat of thought - the grey matter of the brain housed by the skull is the very veil to be pierced(25) to gaze upon the true nature of reality/Isis unveiled. In this sense then, Salt is “…the dross left over when life has fled, it is the skull, the death’s head; it is the white powder left behind when the gold is extracted, It is the ash of thought.”(26) Be that as it may, the skull is not so much a ‘sentence of death’, but as Hedsel reveals its position in the old mythologies “…tend to present the image of the head as a castle, from which the soul, or princess, peers out from one of the windows. In the fairy lore, the castellated head is the guardian of our spiritual activity. A comely knight rides out of the castle in search of the Holy Grail.”(27) This quest for the ultimate truth being no less than coming to grips with, understanding the nature of the cosmos, and hence in turn oneself - essentially a godlike acquisition of profound knowledge, the root of all religious concepts and philosophies(28).
Further, a flower being “…the glorified reflection of last years sun…that flower is not a product of the present years Earthly and Spiritual activity…[but is] a manifestation of forces engendered in the previous year…”(29), the implication of drawing an analogy with humans is the “…the head-forces of man are the transformed forces carried over from a previous growth into the present lifetime.”(30) This transmission through incarnations occurs via the thigh-bones, wherein it is the Alchemical ‘fixed salt’ thus situated where a person’s being, their very essence is recorded(31). The femur is thus an ‘inheritor’ and an ‘organ of generation’, the intimation though is obviously not sexual, for the ‘indestructible nucleus’ that is “…the fixed salt transports the conciousness acquired by an individual demanding a modification of form in order to provide his conciousness the means of expressing itself.”(32) Goes a long way in explaining a ‘ritual cannibalism’ such as in the inbibing of the host in Christian churches and perhaps was the reason behind the quasi-masonic group ‘Skull and Bones’, numbering among them Prescott Bush - George Dubya’s grandfather, raiding the Native American leader Geronimo’s grave and taking his remains back to their lodge.(33)
Whatever the case, a wealth of meaning encapsulated by the Skull and Crossbones/Deaths Head, and whatsmore, this is just the briefest of outlines.
1. Micheal Baigent, Richard Leigh “The Temple and the Lodge” 1996 and Christopher Knight, Robert Lomas “The Hiram Key” 1997
2. Baigent & Leigh, 1996; p 98-116
3. Ibid, p 61-65, Knight & Lomas 1997; p 388
4. Baigent & Leigh, 1996; p 68-9
5. Ibid, p 24-35
6. Rosslyn Chapel, built circa 1440-80, is an elaborately decorated ‘chapel’ not far from Edinburgh, Scotland. Although it is literally covered with carvings, the iconography contains no Christian elements, rather they are Templar, Masonic and Celtic.
7. Op cit
8. Knight & Lomas 1997; p 11-21
9. Ibid, facing p 176
10. Robin Lumsden “SS Regalia” 1995; p 57
11. Ibid, p 32
12. Ibid, p 57-8
13. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke “Occult Roots of Nazism” 1992; p 187
14. Peter Moon “The Black Sun” 1997; p 67-8
15. Ibid, p 68 & 109
16. Goodrick-Clarke 1992; p 188
17. Emille Grillot de Grivy “Sorcery, Magic and Alchemy” 1991; p 241-2
18. Mark Hedsel “The Zelator” 1999; p 350
19. Ibid, p 351
20. Ibid
21. Ibid, p 353-5
22. Ibid, p 356-7. Of interest, Aleister Crowley’s spelling of ‘magick’ with its ‘k’ is said by some to derive from the ‘kteis’ - note also Crowley’s self- nomination as the Great Beast 666(the number of Sorath, the demon of the Sun), and his aim of mating with Babalon(the moon) - conjoining of polarities.
23. Hedsel 1999; p 120
24. Ibid
25. Ibid, p 45
26. Ibid, p 120
27. Ibid, p 341
28. A good study of the meaning of the Grail is “The Mystery of the Grail” by Julius Evola, Inner Traditions International, 1994
29. Op cit, p 340
30. Ibid, p 341
31. Andre Vandenbrock “Al-Kemi - A Memoir” 1987; p 172-7
32. Ibid, p 285
33. Moon 1997; p 275-7
http://bks.ark11.net/symbdeathshead.htm
by Douglas Herman - May 22, 2003
http://www.strike-the-root.com/
Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills? ~ Kahlil Gibran
Piracy is a poor type of foreign policy.
The lawless practice of seizing ships for commercial gain that plagued the coasts of the Americas in the late 17th century seems to have evolved into the outright seizure of ships of state in the 21st century. When Bartholomew Roberts, a man of some principle, captured 400 ships in four short years of piracy before being killed in battle, he skirted the law of man, preemptively striking his prey, yet doubtful he ever justified his actions before God.
Blackbeard flourished for one short year toward the end of the Golden Age of Piracy (1689-1718), seizing some 40 ships before being killed in bloody, hand-to-hand battle at Ocracoke Inlet in 1718. Perhaps had he been born later and served aboard the USN aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, for example, Captain Edward Teach could have helped capture an entire vassal state without so much as risking his neck (he was beheaded). One man’s act of piracy for selfish gain is another man’s grand, patriotic act.
“The line between officially sanctioned acts and actual piracy was always a fine one,” said Libby Klekowsli, a biologist researching Captain Kidd’s excursion into the Connecticut River . Historical documents list well over 500 English “pirates, buccaneers, corsairs” independently attacking “targets of opportunity.” Privateers like Morgan and Drake acted under the sanction of sovereign states, ostensibly raiding enemy shipping under the aegis of exploration while sharing the plunder with king or queen. That fine line between legality and acts of piracy often got a man knighted—Sir Francis Drake, Sir Henry Morgan—or hung from the neck, if not beheaded in battle.
The conquest of Iraq by seizing command of the skies and seas, surrounding her and outgunning this lumbering warship of a country with broadsides represents the capture of a trophy ship by a buccaneer. The treasure beneath the sands of Iraq —black gold in the form of billions of barrels of oil--exceeds in value all the gold from all the fleets of Spanish galleons that ever sailed. Seen from the perspective of a 17th century buccaneer, the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld foreign policy of plundering countries on the high seas makes good economic sense. All that is lacking is legality and a suitable pirate banner.
The glyphic devices of Christopher Moody’s banner (pictured above), while designed in the early 18th century, perhaps best symbolizes occupied Iraq . The winged hourglass symbolizes the fleeting notion of liberty, or, if you prefer, the insistent, never-ending search for WMD. The upraised arm symbolizes tyranny both past, present and to come, while the grinning skull symbolizes victims, both American and Iraqi, of depleted radiation poison or perhaps only the mocking of our moral ambiguity.
The black flag, death’s head, jolly Roger or skull and crossbones still flies prominently—although hardly visibly—from the ship of American foreign policy as she plows through uncharted waters. Truthfully, the days of swashbuckling pirates never really died in North America but became more secretive, sinister and—some say—far more dangerous. The flag of convenience hoisted by our captains of industry, banking, law, military and media (or propaganda) resembles not Old Glory but the death’s head pictured to the left (322). While you and I sing garbled stanzas to the Stars and Stripes, the most powerful men in America salute the death’s head banner of a secret society at Yale University in Connecticut.
“Those on the inside know it as The Order. Others have known it for more than 150 years as Chapter 322,” said Antony C. Sutton, author of the book, America ’s Secret Establishment, a revealing look inside the Skull and Bones Society. “It was also once known as ‘The Brotherhood of Death’,” Sutton added. “The power of the place remains unmistakable . . . . To rival institutions and academic reformers there was something irritating and disquieting about old Yale College .”
Disquieting? Consider our last three presidents, whether Republican or Democrat, attended Yale and, not coincidentally, the “terror expert” governing Iraq , Paul Bremer III, is another Yale insider. Former CIA Director James Woolsey, who lauded the approach of "World War IV," John Bolton and Lewis Libby, all Yale. All powerful. Disquieting.
The elite and powerful, some say altogether sinister, cult of the Skull and Bones Society—think of the masked revelers in the movie “Eyes Wide Shut"--traces its origins back to Germany . From there the philosophy of an all-powerful state, sharing many of the same tenets and rituals of the Third Reich, took root with the WASPs of New England, many of whom could trace their roots, ironically, to buccaneer brethren. Not surprisingly, the Nazis adopted a parallel vision, decorating the military badges (shown at left) of their SS special forces with a death’s head lifted, as was that of Yale’s Skull and Bones Society, from the existing flags and symbols of piracy, murder and mayhem.
While many Bonesmen of Yale downplay the symbolism and fascist pageantry that occurs in the windowless meeting hall--known as “The Tomb”--as nothing more than youthful merriment and harmless initiation rites, some critics see a darker side, suggesting the “double cross” of the black flag signifies a truer ambition, similar to the more explicit motto of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad—“By way of deceit, thou shalt make war.”
Examples of subverted, occupied, undermined or double-crossed nations lend weight to those who contend a US conspiracy for unlimited global power is well underway. “Between 1945 and now, the US has never stopped being at war with the world. For 58 years, there has never been a single year in which it has not bombed and occupied another country, and in most years, it has attacked two or more countries at the same time,” said Professor of English literature, Uzma Khan. “I haven’t even touched upon America ’s non-military, CIA-backed interference in the governance of sovereign countries all over the world,” she added.
Doug Henwood, author of Spooks In Blue, said, “There is something profoundly undemocratic about the culture . . . . The CIA’s Yale is the Yale of secret societies, like the infamous Skull and Bones, whose alumni fill the Agency.” By contrast to the eastern elites playing at pirate, playing at spy, helming a ship with a madman’s eye, let us pause to consider a buccaneer who actually lived and died by a code, by principles yet foreign to our jingoist’s mode of saluting the death’s head, but usually attired in black tie while lesser worlds explode.
Article 1—“Every man has a vote in affairs of moments; has equal title to the fresh provisions, or strong liquors at any time seized, and may use them at pleasure, unless a scarcity makes it necessary, for the good of all, to vote a retrenchment,” wrote Bartholomew Roberts in his Articles. Notice the almost Jeffersonian phrases at beginning and end. Recall that these Articles--eleven in all--were written long before the US Constitution, and since then have not been improved upon but rather eroded by those who would sail us into a war in the name of God, while play-acting at pirate.
Will we Americans simply be remembered by the world as just another band of pirates? Bigger but no better? Toward the end of the Golden Age of Pirates, the repercussions of resentment by land dwellers eventually overtook most of these buccaneers; those not killed in battle were captured and hung. Bartholomew Roberts, killed in 1722. Blackbeard 1718. Captain Kidd, hung by the neck and then allowed to rot, in 1701. The difference between pirates and those who play at being pirates is that the swashbuckler risked his own neck. Antony Sutton said of the modern pretender: “These prominent men are really immature juveniles at heart. The horrible reality is that these little boys have been dominant in world affairs. No wonder we have wars and violence.”
Nowadays we may find ourselves charmed by the legends of buccaneers while overlooking the reality, and yet some legends offer a colorful story and a moral lesson as well. While the banner of Calico Jack Rackham (left) resembles the flag of the world champion NFL Buccaneers of Tampa Bay (home of CentCom), Calico Jack became known as much for his crew as for his exploits. Legendary lady pirate, Ann Bonny, a quick-triggered cutthroat attired in trousers, fought alongside Jack and may have been his mistress. When their ship was attacked in 1720, Rackham and many of his men fled to the hold while Ann Bonny and another woman, Mary Read, remained on deck and resisted their captors. Pregnant, the two women avoided the gallows, and Bonny witnessed the execution of Calico Jack. “I’m sorry to see you here, Jack,” she said, “but if you’d have fought like a man you needn’t hang like a dog.”
And perhaps if we conducted ourselves like men, instead of spoiled, rich kids playing at pirate, the world wouldn’t snarl at us like dogs.
http://www.strike-the-root.com/
http://www.secretsofthetomb.com/excerpt.asp
Sometime in the early 1830s, a Yale student named William H. Russell - the future valedictorian of the class of 1833 - traveled to Germany to study for a year. Russell came from an inordinately wealthy family that ran one of the United States' most despicable business organizations of the nineteenth century: Russell and Company, an opium empire. Russell would later become a member of the Connecticut State Legislature, agGeneral in the Connecticut National Guard, and the founder of the Collegiate and Commercial Institute in New Haven. While in Germany, Russell befriended the leader of an insidious German secret society that hailed the death.s head as its logo. Russell soon became caught up in this group, itself a sinister outgrowth of the notorious eighteenth century society of the Illuminati. When Russell returned to the U.S., he found an atmosphere so anti-Masonic that even his beloved Phi Beta Kappa, the honor society, had been unceremoniously stripped of its secrecy. Incensed, Russell rounded up a group of the most promising students in his class - including Alphonso Taft, the future Secretary of War, Attorney General, Minister to Austria, Ambassador to Russia, and father of future President William Howard Taft - and out of vengeance constructed the most powerful secret society the United States has ever known.
The men called their organization the "Brotherhood of Death," or, more informally, "The Order of Skull and Bones." They adopted the numerological symbol 322 because their group was the second chapter of the German organization, founded in 1832. They worshipped the goddess Eulogia, celebrated pirates, and covertly plotted an underground conspiracy to dominate the world.
Fast forward 170 years. Skull and Bones has curled its tentacles into every reach of American society. This tiny club has set up networks that have thrust three members to the most powerful political position in the world. And its power is only increasing - the 2004 Presidential election might showcase the first time each ticket has been led by a Bonesman. The secret society now, as one historian admonishes, is "'an international mafia' . . . unregulated and all but unknown." In its quest to create a New World Order that restricts individual freedoms and places ultimate power solely in the hands of a small cult of wealthy, prominent families, Skull and Bones has already succeeded in infiltrating nearly every major research, policy, financial, media, and government institution in the country. Skull and Bones, in fact, has been running the United States for years.
Skull and Bones cultivates its talent by selecting members from the junior class at Yale University, a school known for its strange, Gothic elitism and its rigid devotion to the past. The society screens its candidates carefully, favoring Protestants, or, now, white Catholics, with special affection for the children of wealthy, East Coast Skull and Bones members. Skull and Bones has been dominated by approximately two dozen of the country.s most prominent families - Bush, Bundy, Harriman, Lord, Phelps, Rockefeller, Taft, and Whitney, among them - who are encouraged by the society to inter-marry so that the society.s power is consolidated. In fact, the society forces members to confess their entire sexual histories so that Skull and Bones, as a eugenics overlord, can determine whether a new Bonesman will be fit to carry on the bloodlines of the powerful Skull and Bones dynasties. A rebel will not make Skull and Bones; nor will anyone whose background in any way indicates that he will not sacrifice for the greater good of the larger organization.
As soon as initiates are allowed into the "tomb," a dark, windowless crypt in New Haven with a roof that serves as a landing pad for the society's private helicopter, they are sworn to silence and told they must forever deny that they are members of this organization. During initiation, which involves ritualistic psychological conditioning, the juniors wrestle in mud and are physically beaten - this stage of the ceremony represents their "death" to the world as they have known it. They then lie naked in coffins, masturbate, and reveal to the society their innermost sexual secrets. After this cleansing, the Bonesmen give the initiates robes to represent their new identities as individuals with a higher purpose. The society anoints the initiate with a new name, symbolizing his rebirth and re-christening as Knight X, a member of The Order. It is during this initiation that the new members are introduced to the artifacts in the tomb, among them Nazi memorabilia - including a set of Hitler's silverware - dozens of skulls, and an assortment of decorative tchochkes: coffins, skeletons, and innards. They are also introduced to "the Bones whore," the tomb's only full-time resident, who helps to ensure that the Bonesmen leave the tomb more mature than when they entered.
Members of Skull and Bones must make some sacrifices to the society - and they are threatened with blackmail so that they remain loyal - but they are remunerated with honors and rewards, including a graduation gift of $15,000 and a wedding gift of a tall grandfather clock. Though they must tithe their estates to the society, each member is guaranteed financial security for life; in this way, Bones can ensure that no member will feel the need to sell the secrets of the society in order to make a living. And it works: no one has ever publicly breathed a word about his Skull and Bones membership, ever. Bonesmen are automatically offered jobs at the many investment banks and law firms dominated by their secret society brothers. They are also given exclusive access to the Skull and Bones island, a lush retreat built for millionaires, with a lavish mansion and a bevy of women at the members. disposal.
The influence of the cabal begins at Yale, where Skull and Bones has appropriated university funds for its own use, leaving the school virtually impoverished. Skull and Bones. corporate shell, the Russell Trust Association, owns nearly all of the university.s real estate, as well as most of the land in Connecticut. Skull and Bones has controlled Yale.s faculty and campus publications so that students cannot speak openly about the secret society. "Year by year," the campus' only anti-society publication stated during its brief tenure in 1873, "the deadly evil is growing."
The year in the tomb at Yale instills within members an unwavering loyalty to Skull and Bones society. Members have been known to stab their Skull and Bones pins into their skin to keep them in place during swimming or bathing. The knights (as the student members are called) learn quickly that their allegiance to the society must supercede all else - family, friendships, country, God. They are taught that once they get out into the world, they are expected to reach positions of prominence so that they can further elevate the society.s status and help promote the standing of their fellow Bonesmen.
This purpose has driven Bonesmen to ascend to the top levels of so many fields that, as one historian observes, "at any one time The Order can call on members in any area of American society to do what has to be done." Several Bonesmen have been senators, congressmen, Supreme Court justices, and cabinet officials. There is a Bones cell in the CIA, which uses Skull and Bones as a recruiting ground because the members are so obviously adept at keeping secrets. Society members dominate financial institutions such as J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and Brown Brothers Harriman, where at one time more than a third of the partners were Bonesmen. Through these companies, Skull and Bones provided financial backing to Adolf Hitler because the society then followed a Nazi - and now follows a neo-Nazi - doctrine. At least one dozen Bonesmen have been linked to the Federal Reserve, including the first Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve. Skull and Bones members control the wealth of the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford families.
Skull and Bones has also taken steps to control the American media. Two of its members founded the law firm that represents the New York Times. Plans for both Time and Newsweek magazines were hatched in the Skull and Bones tomb. The society has controlled publishing houses such as Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. In the 1880s, Skull and Bones created the American Historical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Economic Association so that the society could ensure that history would be written under its terms and promote its objectives. The society then installed its own members as the presidents of these associations.
Under the society's direction, Bonesmen developed and dropped the nuclear bomb and navigated the Bay of Pigs invasion. Skull and Bones members had ties to Watergate and the Kennedy assassination. They control the Council of Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission so that they can push their own political agenda. Skull and Bones government officials have used the number 322 as codes for highly classified diplomatic assignments. The society discriminates against minorities and fought for slavery; indeed, as evidence eight out of twelve of Yale.s residential colleges are named for slave owners while none are named for abolitionists. The society encourages misogyny: it did not admit women until the 1990s because members did not believe women were capable of handling the Skull and Bones experience and because they said they feared incidents of date rape. This society also encourages grave robbing: deep within the bowels of the tomb are the stolen skulls of the Apache Chief Geronimo, Pancho Villa, and former President Martin van Buren.
Finally, the society has taken measures to ensure that the secrets of Skull and Bones slip ungraspable like sand through open fingers. Journalist Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote a long but not probing article about the society in the 1970s, claimed that a source warned him not to get too close.
"What bank do you have your checking account at?" this party asked me in the middle of a discussion of the Mithraic aspects of the Bones ritual. I named the bank. "Aha," said the party. "There are three Bonesmen on the board. You'll never have a line of credit again. They'll tap your phone. They'll. . ." . . . The source continued: "The alumni still care. Don't laugh. They don't like people tampering and prying. The power of Bones is incredible. They've got their hands on every lever of power in the country. You'll see - it's like trying to look into the Mafia."
In the 1980s, a man known only as "Steve" had contracts to write two books on the society, using documents and photographs he had acquired from the Bones crypt. But Skull and Bones found out about Steve. The society broke into his apartment, stole the documents, harassed the author, and scared him into hiding, where he has remained ever since. The books were never completed. In Universal Pictures' Spring 2000 thriller The Skulls, an aspiring journalist is writing a profile of the society for the New York Times. When he sneaks into the tomb, the Skulls murder him. Similarly, in the real Skull and Bones tomb is a bloody knife in a glass case. It is said that when a Bonesman stole documents from the society and threatened to publish Skull and Bones. secrets if they did not pay him a determined amount of money, the society used that knife to kill him.
This, then, is the legend of Skull and Bones.
*** It is astonishing that so many people continue to believe, even in modern America in the twenty-first century, that a tiny college club wields such an enormous amount of influence on the world.s only superpower. The breadth of clout ascribed to this organization is practically as wide-ranging as the leverage afforded to the satirical secret society of the Stonecutters in an episode of the television show The Simpsons. The Stonecutters theme song included the lyrics:
Who controls the British crown? Who keeps the metric system down? We do! We do. Who leaves the Atlantis off the maps? Who keeps the Martians under wraps? We do! We do. Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star? We do! We do.
Certainly, the society does cross boundaries in order to attempt to stay out of the public spotlight. When I wrote an article about the society for The Atlantic Monthly in May 2000, an older Bonesman said to me, "If it's not portrayed positively, I'm sending a couple of my friends after you." After the article was published, I received a telephone call at my office from a fellow journalist, who is a member of Skull and Bones. He scolded me for writing the article - "writing that article was not an ethical or honorable way to make a decent living in journalism," he condescended - and then asked me how much I had been paid for the story. When I refused to answer, he hung up. Fifteen minutes later, he called back.
"I have just gotten off the phone with our people."
"Your people?" I snickered.
"Yes" Our people."
He told me that the society demanded to know where I got my information.
"I've never been in the tomb and I did nothing illegal in the process of reporting this article," I replied.
"Then you must have gotten something from one of us. Tell me whom you spoke to. We just want to talk to them," he wheedled.
"I don't reveal my sources." Then he got angry. He screamed at me for a while about how dishonorable I was for writing the article.
"A lot of people are very despondent over this!" he yelled. "Fifteen Yale juniors are very, very upset!"
I thanked him for telling me his concerns.
"There are a lot of us at newspapers and at political journalism institutions," he coldly hissed. "Good luck with your career" - and he slammed down the phone.
Skull and Bones, particularly in recent years, has managed to pervade both popular and political culture. In the 1992 race for the Republican presidential nomination, Pat Buchanan accused President George Bush of running "a Skull and Bones presidency." In 1993, during Jeb Bush's Florida gubernatorial campaign, one of his constituents asked him, "You're familiar with the Skull and Crossbones Society?" When Bush responded, "Yeah, I've heard about it," the constituent persisted, "Well, can you tell the people here what your family membership in that is? Isn't your aim to take control of the United States?" In January 2001, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd used Skull and Bones in a simile: "When W. met the press with his choice for attorney general, John Ashcroft, before Christmas," Dowd wrote, "he vividly showed how important it is to him that his White House be as leak-proof as the Skull & Bones 'tomb.'"
Later that year, the Universal Pictures film introduced the secret society to a new demographic perhaps uninitiated into the doctrines of modern-day conspiracy theory. At about the time the movie was being pre-screened in theaters - and perhaps in anticipation of the election of George W. Bush - a letter was distributed to Bonesmen from Skull and Bones headquarters. .In view of the political happenings in the barbarian world,. the memo read, .I feel compelled to remind all of the tradition of privacy and confidentiality essential to the well being of our Order and strongly urge stout resistance to the seductions and blandishments of the Fourth Estate.. This vow of silence remains the society.s most important rule. Bonesmen have been exceedingly careful not to break this code of secrecy, and have kept specific details about the organization out of the press. Indeed, given the unusual, strict written reminder to stay silent, members of Skull and Bones may well refuse to speak to any member of the media ever again.
But they have already spoken to me. When? Over the past three years. Why? Perhaps because I am a member of one of Skull and Bones' kindred Yale secret societies. Perhaps because some of them are tired of the Skull and Bones legend, of the claims of conspiracy theorists and some of their fellow Bonesmen. What follows, then, is the truth about Skull and Bones. And if that truth does not contain all of the conspiratorial elements that the Skull and Bones legend projects, it is perhaps all the more interesting for this fact. The story of Skull and Bones is not just the story of a remarkable secret society, but a remarkable society of secrets, some with basis in truth, some nothing but fog. Much of the way we understand the world of power involves myriad assumptions of connection and control, of cause and effect, and of coincidence that surely cannot be coincidence.
http://www.secretsofthetomb.com/excerpt.asp
By Alexandra Robbins
Wednesday, 25 September, 2002
"My senior year (at Yale University) I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society," President Bush wrote in his autobiography, "so secret, I can't say anything more."
He doesn't have to. He's practically turning the government into a secret society - an old-boy, throwback establishment that even holds its secret spy-court proceedings in an elaborately locked, windowless room that sounds similar to the Bones' elaborately locked, practically windowless "tomb," or campus clubhouse.
Bush, a loyal and particularly active member of Skull and Bones, a mysterious, historically misogynist Yale-based secret society, seems to have done almost all he can to promote a level of secrecy in government not seen since the Nixon administration:
* Last month, Bush-appointed Assistant Attorney General Robert McCallum, a member of Bush's 1968 Skull and Bones class, filed pleadings in U.S. District Court seeking to extend executive privilege to any government official in pardon cases; the move makes information on presidential pardons more secret than it has ever been.
* After 9/11, without initially telling Congress, Bush assembled a shadow government assigned to secret bunkers somewhere on the East Coast. He also tried to cut off some members of Congress from classified information about the anti-terrorist campaign.
* The USA Patriot Act Bush eagerly signed lets the FBI - with permission from a secret Washington "spy court" - view some customer records; store owners cannot reveal the review
* In October 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft released a memo encouraging federal agencies to withhold as much information as possible from the public.
* A month later, just before documents from the Reagan-Bush administration were to be released, Bush signed an executive order severely hindering public access to former presidents' records.
* Bush also signed legislation that jails or fines journalists who publish sensitive leaks, essentially reviving the Official Secrecy Act that President Clinton vetoed.
Bush has a "fetish for secrecy," Vanderbilt University professor emeritus Hugh Davis Graham, now deceased, told the National Journal earlier this year.
Granted, pressing issues of national security merit a level of secrecy. But security and secrecy are not always necessary companions, and some of these examples suggest secrecy for secrecy's sake, such as the pardons and the Reagan documents. Also, a government that operates in secret prevents its constituents from holding it accountable and so may be more prone to arbitrariness and ill-considered conduct. This administration may even be doing itself a disservice with its excess secrecy, which can cause people to conjure up much more malicious and elitist scenarios than may actually exist.
That is what has happened with Skull and Bones, which operates a powerful alumni network but, despite the lore, does not run a secret world government, collaborate with Nazis or require initiates to lie naked in a coffin.
Bonesmen have long helped Bush; he received a fair chunk of his early business financing from them and turned to them for help when he needed a job, investors and campaign assistance. Even his baseball-team purchase involved at least one Bonesman. As president, Bush has appointed fellow Bonesmen to high-level positions, such as Edward McNally, the general counsel of the Office on Homeland Security and senior associate counsel on national security. Yet, although one of his first social gatherings at the White House was a Skull and Bones reunion, Bush feigned ignorance when asked recently about Bones: "The thing is so secret that I'm not even sure it still exists," he replied.
Is it a coincidence that the federal government suddenly prioritizes secrecy when a Skull and Bones president is in power? Maybe. But there's no question that the Bush administration increasingly resembles the Bones' dark, locked tomb.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/11.05A.robbins.bones.htm
Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and
the Hidden Paths of Power
http://www.msnbc.com/news/802773.asp?cp1=1
Sept. 4 — Inside a cold, foreboding structure of brown sandstone in New Haven, Conn., lives one of the most heavily shrouded secret societies in American history.
Yale’s super-elite Skull and Bones, a 200-year-old organization whose roster is stocked with some of the country’s most prominent families: Bush, Harriman, Phelps, Rockefeller, Taft, and Whitney. Journalist Alexandra Robbins, herself a member of another of Yale’s secret societies, interviewed more than a hundred Bonesmen and writes about the rituals that make up the organization. Read an excerpt from her book ‘The Secrets of the Tomb’ below.
Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power by Alexandra Robbins
Sometime in the early 1830s, a Yale student named William H.Russell—the future valedictorian of the class of 1833- traveled toGermany to study for a year. Russell came from an inordinately wealthy family that ran one of America’s most despicable business organizations of the nineteenth century: Russell and Company, an opium empire. Russell would later become a member of the Connecticut state legislature, a general in the Connecticut National Guard, and the founder of the Collegiate and Commercial Institute in New Haven. While in Germany, Russell befriended the leader of an insidious German secret society that hailed the death’s head as its logo. Russell soon became caught up in this group, itself a sinister outgrowth of the notorious eighteenth-century society the Illuminati. When Russell returned to the United States, he found an atmosphere so Anti-Masonic that even his beloved Phi Beta Kappa, the honor society, had been unceremoniously stripped of its secrecy. Incensed, Russell rounded up a group of the most promising students in his class-including Alphonso Taft, the future secretary of war, attorney general, minister to Austria, ambassador to Russia, and father of future president William Howard Taft-and out of vengeance constructed the most powerful secret society the United States has ever known.
September 4, 2002 — Journalist and author Alexandra Robbins discusses her book “Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power” with “Today’s” Ann Curry.
The men called their organization the Brotherhood of Death, or, more informally, the Order of Skull and Bones. They adopted the numerological symbol 322 because their group was the second chapter of the German organization and founded in 1832. They worshiped the goddess Eulogia, celebrated pirates, and plotted an underground conspiracy to dominate the world.
Fast-forward 170 years. Skull and Bones has curled its tentacles into every corner of American society. This tiny club has set up networks that have thrust three members into the most powerful political position in the world. And the group’s influence is only increasing-the 2004 presidential election might showcase the first time each ticket has been led by a Bonesman. The secret society is now, as one historian admonishes, ” ‘an international mafia’. . . unregulated and all but unknown.” In its quest to create a New World Order that restricts individual freedoms and places ultimate power solely in the hands of a small cult of wealthy, prominent families, Skull and Bones has already succeeded in infiltrating nearly every major research, policy, financial, media, and government institution in the country. Skull and Bones, in fact, has been running the United States for years.
Skull and Bones cultivates its talent by selecting members from the junior class at Yale University, a school known for its strange, Gothic elitism and its rigid devotion to the past. The society screens its candidates carefully, favoring Protestants and, now, white Catholics, with special affection for the children of wealthy East Coast Skull and Bones members. Skull and Bones has been dominated by about two dozen of the country’s most prominent families—Bush, Bundy, Harriman, Lord, Phelps, Rockefeller, Taft, and Whitney among them—who are encouraged by the society to intermarry so that its power is consolidated. In fact, Skull and Bones forces members to confess their entire sexual histories so that the club, as a eugenics overlord, can determine whether a new Bonesman will be fit to mingle with the bloodlines of the powerful Skull and Bones dynasties. A rebel will not make Skull and Bones; nor will anyone whose background in any way indicates that he will not sacrifice for the greater good of the larger organization.
As soon as initiates are allowed into the “tomb,” a dark, windowless crypt in New Haven with a roof that serves as a landing pad for the society’s private helicopter, they are sworn to silenceand told they must forever deny that they are members of this organization. During initiation, which involves ritualistic psychological conditioning, the juniors wrestle in mud and are physically beaten—this stage of the ceremony represents their “death” to the world as they have known it. They then lie naked in coffins, masturbate, and reveal to the society their innermost sexual secrets. After this cleansing, the Bonesmen give the initiates robes to represent their new identities as individuals with a higher purpose. The society anoints the initiate with a new name, symbolizing his rebirth and rechristening as Knight X, a member of the Order. It is during this initiation that the new members are introduced to the artifacts in the tomb, among them Nazi memorabilia—including a set of Hitler’s silverware-dozens of skulls, and an assortment of decorative tchotchkes: coffins, skeletons, and innards. They are also introduced to “the Bones whore,” the tomb’s only full-time resident, who helps to ensure that the Bonesmen leave the tomb more mature than when they entered.
Members of Skull and Bones must make some sacrifices to the society—and they are threatened with blackmail so that they remain loyal—but they are remunerated with honors and rewards, including a graduation gift of $15,000 and a wedding gift of a tall grandfather clock. Though they must tithe their estates to the society, each member
is guaranteed financial security for life; in this way, Bones can ensure that no member will feel the need to sell the secrets of the society in order to make a living. And it works: No one has publicly breathed a word about his Skull and Bones membership, ever.
Bonesmen are automatically offered jobs at the many investment banks and law firms dominated by their secret society brothers. They are also given exclusive access to the Skull and Bones island, a lush retreat built for millionaires, with a lavish mansion and a bevy of women at the members’ disposal.
The influence of the cabal begins at Yale, where Skull and Bones has appropriated university funds for its own use, leaving the school virtually impoverished. Skull and Bones’ corporate shell, the Russell Trust Association, owns nearly all of the university’s real estate, as well as most of the land in Connecticut. Skull and Bones has controlled Yale’s faculty and campus publications so that students cannot speak openly about it. “Year by year,” the campus’s only anti-society publication stated during its brief tenure in 1873, “the deadly evil is growing.”
The year in the tomb at Yale instills within members an unwavering loyalty to Skull and Bones. Members have been known to stab their Skull and Bones pins into their skin to keep them in place during swimming or bathing. The knights (as the student members are called) learn quickly that their allegiance to the society must supersede all else: family, friendships, country, God. They are taught that once they get out into the world, they are expected to reach positions of prominence so that they can further elevate the society’s status and help promote the standing of their fellow Bonesmen.
This purpose has driven Bonesmen to ascend to the top levels of so many fields that, as one historian observes, “at any one time The Order can call on members in any area of American society to do what has to be done.” Several Bonesmen have been senators, congressmen, Supreme Court justices, and Cabinet officials. There is a Bones cell in the CIA, which uses the society as a recruiting ground because the members are so obviously adept at keeping secrets. Society members dominate financial institutions such as J. P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and Brown Brothers Harriman, where at one time more than a third of the partners were Bonesmen. Through these companies, Skull and Bones provided financial backing to Adolf Hitler because the society then followed a Nazi-and now follows a neo-Nazi—doctrine. At least a dozen Bonesmen have been linked to the Federal Reserve, including the first chairman of the New York Federal Reserve. Skull and Bones members control the wealth of the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford families.
Skull and Bones has also taken steps to control the American media.
Two of its members founded the law firm that represents the New York Times. Plans for both Time and Newsweek magazines were hatched in the Skull and Bones tomb. The society has controlled publishing houses such as Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In the 1880s, Skull and Bones created the American Historical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Economic Association so that the society could ensure that history would be written under its terms and promote its objectives. The society then installed its own members as the presidents of these associations.
Under the society’s direction, Bonesmen developed and dropped the nuclear bomb and choreographed the Bay of Pigs invasion. Skull and Bones members had ties to Watergate and the Kennedy assassination. They control the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission so that they can push their own political agenda. Skull and Bones government officials have used the number 322 as codes for highly classified diplomatic assignments. The society discriminates against minorities and fought for slavery; indeed eight out of twelve of Yale’s residential colleges are named for slave owners while none are named for abolitionists. The society encourages misogyny: it did not admit women until the 1990s because members did not believe women were capable of handling the Skull and Bones experience and because they said they feared incidents of date rape. This society also encourages grave robbing: deep within the bowels of the tomb are the stolen skulls of the Apache chief Geronimo, Pancho Villa, and former president Martin Van Buren.
Finally, the society has taken measures to ensure that the secrets of Skull and Bones slip ungraspable like sand through open fingers. Journalist Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote a long but not probing article about the society in the 1970s, claimed that a source warned him not to get too close.
“What bank do you have your checking account at?” this party asked me in the middle of a discussion of the Mithraic aspects of the Bones ritual.
I named the bank. “Aha,” said the party. “There are three Bonesmen on the board. You’ll never have a line of credit again.
They’ll tap your phone. They’ll. . . ” . . .The source continued: “The alumni still care. Don’t laugh. They don’t like people tampering and prying. The power of Bones is incredible. They’ve got their hands on every lever of power in the country. You’ll see—it’s like trying to look into the Mafia.”
In the 1980s, a man known only as Steve had contracts to write two books on the society, using documents and photographs he had acquired from the Bones crypt. But Skull and Bones found out about Steve. Society members broke into his apartment, stole the documents, harassed the would-be author, and scared him into hiding, where he has remained ever since. The books were never completed. In Universal Pictures’ thriller The Skulls (2000), an aspiring journalist is writing a profile of the society for the New York Times. When he sneaks into the tomb, the Skulls murder him.
The real Skull and Bones tomb displays a bloody knife in a glass case. It is said that when a Bonesman stole documents and threatened to publish society secrets if the members did not pay him a determined amount of money, they used that knife to kill him.
This, then, is the legend of Skull and Bones. It is astonishing that so many people continue to believe, even in twenty-first-century America, that a tiny college club wields such an enormous amount of influence on the world’s only superpower. The breadth of clout ascribed to this organization is practically as wide-ranging as the leverage of the satirical secret society the Stonecutters introduced in an episode of The Simpsons. The Stonecutters theme song included the lyrics:
Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down? We do! We do. . .
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star? We do! We do.
Certainly, Skull and Bones does cross boundaries in order to attempt to stay out of the public spotlight. When I wrote an article about the society for the Atlantic Monthly in May 2000, an older Bonesman said to me, “If it’s not portrayed positively, I’m sending a couple of my friends after you.” After the article was published, I received a telephone call at my office from a fellow journalist, who is a member of Skull and Bones.
He scolded me for writing the article—”writing that article was not an ethical or honorable way to make a decent living in journalism,” he condescended —and then asked me how much I had been paid for the story.
When I refused to answer, he hung up. Fifteen minutes later, he called back.
“I have just gotten off the phone with our people.” “Your people?” I snickered.
“Yes. Our people.” He told me that the society demanded to know where I got my information.
“I’ve never been in the tomb and I did nothing illegal in the process of reporting this article,” I replied.
“Then you must have gotten something from one of us. Tell me whom you spoke to. We just want to talk to them,” he wheedled. “I don’t reveal my sources.”
Then he got angry. He screamed at me for a while about how dishonorable I was for writing the article. “A lot of people are very despondent over this!” he yelled. “Fifteen Yale juniors are very, very upset!” I thanked him for telling me his concerns.
“There are a lot of us at newspapers and at political journalism institutions,” he coldly hissed. “Good luck with your career”—and he slammed down the phone.
Skull and Bones, particularly in recent years, has managed to pervade both popular and political culture. In the 1992 race for the Republican presidential nomination, Pat Buchanan accused President George Bush of running “a Skull and Bones presidency.”
In 1993, during Jeb Bush’s Florida gubernatorial campaign, one of his constituents asked him, “You’re familiar with the Skull and Crossbones Society?” When Bush responded, “Yeah, I’ve heard about it,” the constituent persisted, “Well, can you tell the people here what your family membership in that is? Isn’t your aim to take control of the United States?” In January 2001, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd used Skull and Bones in a simile: “When W. met the press with his choice for attorney general, John Ashcroft, before Christmas, he vividly showed how important it is to him that his White House be as leak-proof as the Skull & Bones ‘tomb.’”
That was less than a year after the Universal Pictures film introduced the secret society to a new demographic perhaps uninitiated into the doctrines of modern-day conspiracy theory. Not long before the movie was previewed in theaters—and perhaps in anticipation of the election of George W. Bush—a letter was distributed to members from Skull and Bones headquarters. “In view of the political happenings in the barbarian world,” the memo read, “I feel compelled to remind all of the tradition of privacy and confidentiality essential to the well-being of our Order and strongly urge stout resistance to the seductions and blandishments of the Fourth Estate.” This vow of silence remains the society’s most important rule. Bonesmen have been exceedingly careful not to break this code of secrecy, and have kept specific details about the organization out of the press. Indeed, given the unusual, strict written reminder to stay silent, members of Skull and Bones may well refuse to speak to any member of the media ever again.
But they have already spoken to me. When? Over the past three years. Why? Perhaps because I am a member of one of Skull and Bones’ kindred Yale secret societies. Perhaps because some of them are tired of the Skull and Bones legend, of the claims of conspiracy theorists and some of their fellow Bonesmen. What follows, then, is the truth about Skull and Bones. And if this truth does not contain all of the conspiratorial elements that the Skull and Bones legend projects, it is perhaps all the more interesting for that fact. The story of Skull and Bones is not just the story of a remarkable secret society, but a remarkable society of secrets, some with basis in truth, some nothing but fog. Much of the way we understand the world of power involves myriad assumptions of connection and control, of cause and effect, and of coincidence that surely cannot be coincidence.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/802773.asp?cp1=1
President George W. Bush, past president Bush senior and his father are all three proven initiates of this occult lodge based at a windowless mausoleum - I kid you not - The Tomb on the Yale campus.
New York Observer investigation http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=2511
A death cult at the heart of the United States establishment? Impossible surely? But look a little closer and you'll see that seems to be exactly what George W Bush's family club, the order of Skull and Bones, is. Known variously as 'Bonesmen', 'The Order' and 'The Russell Trust Association', George W.Bush's father and grandfather were both initiated into this 'society' who's badge is a skull and cross bones with the lodge number 322 below it.
Lodge 322 is believed to have been founded on June 28th 1832. And the Skull and Bones are believed to have a commemoration ceremony on 28th June every year. This year (2002) on this date George W. Bush was relieved of his presidency for several hours, Dick Cheyne took over running the world's only superpower while Bush was 'undergoing hospital tests'.
If the Nazis' occult Thule Society had been exposed in the twenties millions might not have died - I would like to see the 'Bonesmen' and any other secret groups hungry for power fully exposed as unfit to hold positions of public responsibility.
Author and researcher Antony Sutton died earlier this year on June 17th 2002. He was a British born émigré to the USA and spent much of his academic time researching links from the US establishment and business world to fascism and communism. Particularly enlightening is his research on the financing of the Nazi party which he attributed to Wall street bankers - see his book 'Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler'. Sutton was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, from 1968 to 1973. He was a former economics professor at California State University, Los Angeles. He was born in London in 1925 and educated at the universities of London, Gottingen and California.
In September 1977 an article appeared in the US magazine Esquire. Sutton explains it detailed much of the mumbo-jumbo associated with the Bonesmen. When a new member is initiated into the order "Tonight", he is told, "he will die to the world and be born again into The Order as he will thenceforth refer to it. The Order is a world unto itself in which he will have a new name and fourteen new blood brothers, also with new names."
When Rosenbaum starts to enquire about The Order he is told: "They don't like people tampering and prying. The power of Bones is incredible. They've got their hands on every lever of power in the country. You'll see - it's like trying to look into the Mafia. Remember, they're secret society too."
The Washington Post broached the subject on 25th February 2000 - 'Shred This After Reading!' Lloyd Grove called the article:
"Before George W. Bush was a good ol' boy, he was a member of Skull and Bones. Author Ron Rosenbaum calls this club "the most powerful of all secret societies in the strange Yale secret-society system." Its roster includes Averell Harriman, Henry Stimson, Henry Luce, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Dubya's dad, former president George Bush. They all engaged in "certain occult rituals of the ruling class," as Rosenbaum writes, in a windowless mausoleum on Yale's New Haven, Conn., campus."
"Although the club dates back to the mid-19th century, Hollywood has just discovered it. "The Skulls," written and produced by D.C. native and Yale grad John Pogue, premieres next month. The movie portrays a sinister conspiracy, a la John Grisham's "The Firm," in which sons of the power elite have their flesh branded with a skull and crossbones, and keep the society's secrets on pain of death. The real Skull and Bones has a similar mania for secrecy, but that didn't stop us from casting a wide net for the reactions of "Bonesmen" to this crass vulgarization of their sacred brotherhood. Dubya and Kerry didn't return our calls, but we managed to talk to a few."
"Washington writer Christopher Buckley told us: "Don't quote me, or I shall have to come and kill you, burn down your house and rape your dog!" Former Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin said the real thing was bad enough without resorting to Hollywood spin: "It strikes me that if anybody wants to make fun of it in such a gross way, that lets Skull and Bones off the hook." And Oklahoma University President and former senator David Boren cautioned: "Make sure you say that when you asked me about this, I gasped and threw the telephone on the floor. There was never any branding. I'm much too chicken to belong to anything that requires your flesh to be burned. Officially, my response is silence.""
Finally here's a two year old interview from Time magazine with Bush happily admitting his family are in the cult. Extracted from: 'My Heritage Is Part Of Who I Am', by Walter Isaacson, Time Magazine, August 7th 2000 (Time Volume 156, No. 6),
……..ISAACSON: But you sure shared a lot of the same upbringing: Andover, Yale, even Skull and Bones. Did you have any qualms, say, about joining an elite secret club like Bones?
GEORGE W. BUSH: No qualms at all. I was honored. I was fairly nonchalant. I didn't view it as a great heritage thing. I didn't take it all that seriously.
ISAACSON: Demystify it a bit for those who might think it's a cross between a Masonic Lodge and the Trilateral Commission. Did your father show up for your initiation, like your grandfather showed up for his?
GEORGE W. BUSH: Without revealing all the great secrets? I got a few of my old club mates who could demystify it right off the bat. My dad didn't tap me. Someone a year ahead of me tapped me. There was an entry celebration. I can't remember whether my dad showed up or not. I don't think so………………
www.Time.com
......TIME: But you [George W and father] sure shared a lot of the same upbringing: Andover, Yale, even Skull and Bones. Did you have any qualms, say, about joining an elite secret club like Bones?
BUSH: No qualms at all. I was honored. I was fairly nonchalant. I didn't view it as a great heritage thing. I didn't take it all that seriously.
TIME: Demystify it a bit for those who might think its a cross between a Masonic Lodge and the Trilateral Commission. Did your father show up for your initiation, like your grandfather showed up for his?
BUSH: Without revealing all the great secrets? I got a few of my old club mates who could demystify it right off the bat. My dad didn't tap me. There was an entry celebration. I can't remember whether my dad showed up or not. I don't think so.
TIME: What was the most important thing about your family legacy?
BUSH: The unconditional love I got from my family liberated me. It gave me a sense of security. We were all at a church in Maine recently and the preacher asked whether anyone in the congregation had a perfect family, and the only hand that went up without hesitation was Dad's. It helped Jeb and me not be afraid of defeat.......
by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin
``Wise statesmen ... established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity should look up again at the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began....'' -- Abraham Lincoln --
The U.S. Navy delivered George Bush back home for good on Christmas Eve, 1944; the war in the Pacific raged on over the next half year, with Allied forces taking Southeast Asia, the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia), and islands such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Barbara Pierce quit Smith College in her sophomore year to marry George. Prescott and Mother Bush gave a splendid prenuptial dinner at the Greenwich Field Club. The wedding took place January 6, 1945, in the Rye, New York Presbyterian Church, as the U.S. Third Fleet bombarded the main Philippine island of Luzon in preparation for invasion. Afterwards there was a glamorous reception for 300 at Appawamis Country Club. The newlyweds honeymooned at The Cloisters, a five-star hotel on Sea Island, Georgia, with swimming, tennis and golf.
George's next assignment was to train pilots at Norfolk, Virginia Naval Air Station. ``George's duty ... was light. As for other young marrieds, whose husbands were between warzone tours, this was kind of an extended (and paid) honeymoon.''@s2
Japan surrendered in August. That fall, George and Barbara Bush moved to New Haven where Bush entered Yale University. He and Barbara moved into an apartment at 37 Hillhouse Avenue, across the street from Yale President Charles Seymour.
College life was good to George, what he saw of it. A college career usually occupies four years. But we know that George Bush is a rapidly moving man. Thus he was pleased with the special arrangement made for veterans, by which Yale allowed him to get his degree after attending classes for only two and a half years.
Bush and his friends remember it all fondly, as representatives of the Fashionable Set: ``[M]embers of [Bush's] class have since sighed with nostalgia for those days of the late 1940s.... Trolley cars still rumbled along the New Haven streets. On autumn afternoons they would be crowded with students going out to football games at the Yale Bowl, scattering pennies along the way and shouting `scramble' to the street kids diving for them''[emphasis added].@s3
In 1947, Barbara gave birth to George W. Bush, the President's namesake.
By the time of his 1948 graduation, he had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, an honor traditionally associated with academic achievement. A great deal is known about George Bush's career at Yale, except the part about books and studies. Unfortunately for those who would wish to consider his intellectual accomplishment, everything about that has been sealed shut and is top secret. The Yale administration says they have turned over to the FBI custody of all of Bush's academic records, allegedly because the FBI needs such access to check the resume; of important office holders.
From all available testimony, his mental life before college was anything but outstanding. His campaign literature claims that, as a veteran, Bush was ``serious'' at Yale. But we cannot check exactly how he achieved election to Phi Beta Kappa, in his abbreviated college experience. Without top secret clearance, we cannot consult his test results, read his essays, or learn much about his performance in class. We know that his father was a trustee of the university, in charge of ``developmental'' fundraising. And his family friends were in control of the U.S. secret services.
A great deal is known, however, about George Bush's status at Yale.
His fellow student John H. Chafee, later a U.S. Senator from Rhode Island and Secretary of the Navy, declared: ``We didn't see much of him because he was married, but I guess my first impression was that he was--and I don't mean this in a derogatory fashion--in the inner set, the movers and shakers, the establishment. I don't mean he put on airs or anything, but ... just everybody knew him.''
Chafee, like Bush, and Dan Quayle, was in the important national fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE or the ``Dekes''). But Chafee says, ``I never remember seeing him there. He wasn't one to hang around with the fellows.''
George Bush, in fact, passed his most important days and nights at Yale in the strange companionship of the senior-year Skull and Bones Society.@s5
Out of those few who were chosen for Bones membership, George was the last one to be notified of his selection--this honor is traditionally reserved for the highest of the high and mighty.
His father, Prescott Bush, several other relatives and partners, and Roland and Averell Harriman, who sponsored the Bush family, were also members of this secret society.
The undoubted political and financial power associated with Skull and Bones has given rise to many popular questions about the nature and origin of the group. Its members have fed the mystery with false leads and silly speculations.
The order was incorporated in 1856 under the name ``Russell Trust Association.'' By special act of the state legislature in 1943, its trustees are exempted from the normal requirement of filing corporate reports with the Connecticut Secretary of State.
As of 1978, all business of the Russell Trust was handled by its lone trustee, Brown Brothers Harriman partner John B. Madden, Jr. Madden started with Brown Brothers Harriman in 1946, under senior partner Prescott Bush, George Bush's father.
Each year, Skull and Bones members select (``tap'') 15 third-year Yale students to replace them in the senior group the following year. Graduating members are given a sizeable cash bonus to help them get started in life. Older graduate members, the so-called ``Patriarchs,'' give special backing in business, politics, espionage and legal careers to graduate Bonesmen who exhibit talent or usefulness.
The home of Skull and Bones on the Yale campus is a stone building resembling a mausoleum, and known as ``the Tomb.'' Initiations take place on Deer Island in the St. Lawrence River (an island owned by the Russell Trust Association), with regular reunions on Deer Island and at Yale. Initiation rites reportedly include strenuous and traumatic activities of the new member, while immersed naked in mud, and in a coffin. More important is the ``sexual autobiography'': The initiate tells the Order all the sex secrets of his young life. Weakened mental defenses against manipulation, and the blackmail potential of such information, have obvious permanent uses in enforcing loyalty among members.
The loyalty is intense. One of Bush's former teachers, whose own father was a Skull and Bones member, told our interviewer that his father used to stab his little Skull and Bones pin into his skin to keep it in place when he took a bath.
Members continue throughout their lives to unburden themselves on their psycho-sexual thoughts to their Bones Brothers, even if they are no longer sitting in a coffin. This has been the case with President George Bush, for whom these ties are reported to have a deep personal meaning. Beyond the psychological manipulation associated with freemasonic mummery, there are very solid political reasons for Bush's strong identification with this cult.
Observers of Skull and Bones, apologists and critics alike, have accepted various deceptive notions about the order. There are two outstanding, among these falsehoods:
1) that it is essentially an American group, an assembly of wealthy, elite ``patriots''; it is in fact, an agency for British Empire penetration and subversion of the American republic; and
2) that it is somehow the unique center of conspiratorial control over the United States. This misconception is certainly understandable, given the rather astonishing number of powerful, historically important and grotesquely anti-human individuals, who have come out of Skull and Bones. But there are in fact congruent organizations at other Ivy League colleges, which reflect, as does Skull and Bones, the over-arching oligarchical power of several heavily intermarried financier families.
The mistaken, speculative notions may be corrected by examining the history of Skull and Bones, viewed within the reality of the American Eastern Establishment.
Skull and Bones--the Russell Trust Association--was first established among the class graduating from Yale in 1833. Its founder was William Huntington Russell of Middletown, Connecticut. The Russell family was the master of incalculable wealth derived from the largest U.S. criminal organization of the nineteenth century: Russell and Company, the great opium syndicate.
There was at that time a deep suspicion of, and national revulsion against, freemasonry and secret organizations in the United States, fostered in particular by the anti-masonic writings of former U.S. President John Quincy Adams. Adams stressed that those who take oaths to politically powerful international secret societies cannot be depended on for loyalty to a democratic republic.
But the Russells were protected as part of the multiply-intermarried grouping of families then ruling Connecticut (see accompanying chart). The blood-proud members of the Russell, Pierpont, Edwards, Burr, Griswold, Day, Alsop and Hubbard families were prominent in the pro- British party within the state. Many of their sons would be among the members chosen for the Skull and Bones Society over the years.
The background to Skull and Bones is a story of Opium and Empire, and a bitter struggle for political control over the new U.S. republic.
Samuel Russell, second cousin to Bones founder William H., established Russell and Company in 1823. Its business was to acquire opium from Turkey and smuggle it into China, where it was strictly prohibited, under the armed protection of the British Empire.
The prior, predominant American gang in this field had been the syndicate created by Thomas Handasyd Perkins of Newburyport, Massachusetts, an aggregation of the self-styled ``blue bloods'' or Brahmins of Boston's north shore. Forced out of the lucrative African slave trade by U.S. law and Caribbean slave revolts, leaders of the Cabot, Lowell, Higginson, Forbes, Cushing and Sturgis families had married Perkins siblings and children. The Perkins opium syndicate made the fortune and established the power of these families. By the 1830s, the Russells had bought out the Perkins syndicate and made Connecticut the primary center of the U.S. opium racket. Massachusetts families (Coolidge, Sturgis, Forbes and Delano) joined Connecticut (Alsop) and New York (Low) smuggler-millionaires under the Russell auspices.
John Quincy Adams and other patriots had fought these men for a quarter century by the time the Russell Trust Association was set up with its open pirate emblem--Skull and Bones.
With British ties of family, shipping and merchant banking, the old New England Tories had continued their hostility to American independence after the Revolutionary War of 1775-83. These pretended conservative patriots proclaimed Thomas Jefferson's 1801 presidential inauguration ``radical usurpation.''
The Massachusetts Tories (``Essex Junto'') joined with Vice President Aaron Burr, Jr. (a member of the Connecticut Edwards and Pierpont families) and Burr's cousin and law partner Theodore Dwight, in political moves designed to break up the United States and return it to British allegiance.
The U.S. nationalist leader, former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, exposed the plan in 1804. Burr shot him to death in a duel, then led a famous abortive conspiracy to form a new empire in the Southwest, with territory to be torn from the U.S.A. and Spanish Mexico. For the ``blue bloods,'' the romantic figure of Aaron Burr was ever afterwards the symbol of British feudal revenge against the American republic.
The Connecticut Tory families hosted the infamous Hartford Convention in 1815, toward the end of the second war between the U.S. and Britain (the War of 1812). Their secessionist propaganda was rendered impotent by America's defensive military victory. This faction then retired from the open political arena, pursuing instead entirely private and covert alliances with the British Empire. The incestuously intermarried Massachusetts and Connecticut families associated themselves with the British East India Company in the criminal opium traffic into China. These families made increased profits as partners and surrogates for the British during the bloody 1839-42 Opium War, the race war of British forces against Chinese defenders.
Samuel and William Huntington Russell were quiet, wary builders of their faction's power. An intimate colleague of opium gangster Samuel Russell wrote this about him:
While he lived, no friend of his would venture to mention his name in print. While in China, he lived for about twenty-five years almost as a hermit, hardly known outside of his factory [the Canton warehouse compound] except by the chosen few who enjoyed his intimacy, and by his good friend, Hoqua [Chinese security director for the British East India Company], but studying commerce in its broadest sense, as well as its minutest details. Returning home with well-earned wealth he lived hospitably in the midst of his family, and a small circle of intimates. Scorning words and pretensions from the bottom of his heart, he was the truest and staunchest of friends; hating notoriety, he could always be absolutely counted on for every good work which did not involve publicity.
The Russells' Skull and Bones Society was the most important of their domestic projects ``which did not involve publicity.''
A police-blotter type review of Russell's organization will show why the secret order, though powerful, was not the unique organ of ``conspiracy'' for the U.S. Eastern Establishment. The following gentlemen were among Russells' partners:
Such persons as John C. Green and A.A. Low, whose names adorn various buildings at Princeton and Columbia Universities, made little attempt to hide the criminal origin of their influential money. Similarly with the Cabots, the Higginsons and the Welds for Harvard. The secret groups at other colleges are analogous and closely related to Yale's Skull and Bones.
Princeton has its ``eating clubs,'' especially Ivy Club and Cottage Club, whose oligarchical tradition runs from Jonathan Edwards and Aaron Burr through the Dulles brothers. At Harvard there is the ultra-blue-blooded Porcelian (known also as the Porc or Pig club); Theodore Roosevelt bragged to the German Kaiser of his membership there; Franklin Roosevelt was a member of the slightly ``lower'' Fly Club.
A few of the early initiates in Skull and Bones went on to careers in obvious defiance of the order's oligarchical character; two such were the scientists Benjamin Silliman, Jr. (Skull and Bones 1837), and William Chauvenet (Skull and Bones 1840). This reflects the continued importance of republican factions at Yale, Harvard and other colleges during the middle three decades of the nineteenth century. Silliman and Chauvenet became enemies of everything Skull and Bones stood for, while the Yale secret group rapidly conformed to the Russells' expectations.
Yale was the northern college favored by southern slaveowning would-be aristocrats. Among Yale's southern students were John C. Calhoun, later the famous South Carolina defender of slavery against nationalism, and Judah P. Benjamin, later Secretary of State for the slaveowners' Confederacy.
Young South Carolinian Joseph Heatly Dulles, whose family bought their slaves with the money from contract-security work for the British conquerors in India, was in a previous secret Yale group, the ``Society of Brothers in Unity.'' At Yale Dulles worked with the Northern secessionists and attached himself to Daniel Lord; their two families clove together in the fashion of a gang. The Lords became powerful Anglo-American Wall Street lawyers, and J.H. Dulles's grandson was the father of Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles.
In 1832-33 Skull and Bones was launched under the Russell pirate flag.
Among the early initiates of the order were Henry Rootes Jackson (S&B 1839), a leader of the 1861 Georgia Secession Convention and post-Civil War president of the Georgia Historical Society (thus the false accounts of the ``good old slavery days'' and the ``bad northern invaders''); John Perkins, Jr. (S&B 1840), chairman of the 1861 Louisiana Secession Convention, who fled abroad for 13 years after the Civil War; and William Taylor Sullivan Barry (S&B 1841), a national leader of the secessionist wing of the Democratic Party during the 1850s, and chairman of the 1861 Mississippi Secession Convention.
Alphonso Taft was a Bonesman alongside William H. Russell in the Class of 1833. As U.S. Attorney General in 1876-77, Alphonso Taft helped organize the backroom settlement of the deadlocked 1876 presidential election. The bargain gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency (1877-81) and withdrew the U.S. troops from the South, where they had been enforcing blacks' rights.
Alphonso's son, William Howard Taft (S&B 1878), was U.S. President from 1909 to 1913. President Taft's son, Robert Alphonso Taft (S&B 1910), was a leading U.S. Senator after World War II; his family's Anglo-Saxon racial/ancestral preoccupation was the disease which crippled Robert Taft's leadership of American nationalist ``conservatives.''
Other pre-Civil War Bonesmen were:
By about the mid-1880s, the Skull and Bones membership roster began to change from its earlier, often ``scholarly,'' coloration; the change reflected the degradation of American political and economic life by imperialist, neo-pagan and racialist ideology.
Irving Fisher (S&B 1888) became the racialist high priest of the economics faculty (Yale professor 1896-1946), and a famous merchant of British Empire propaganda for free trade and reduction of the non-white population. Fisher was founding president of the American Eugenics Society under the financial largesse of Averell Harriman's mother.
Gifford Pinchot (S&B 1889) invented the aristocrats' ``conservation'' movement. He was President Theodore Roosevelt's chief forester, substituting federal land-control in place of Abraham Lincoln's free-land-to-families farm creation program. Pinchot's British Empire activitism included the Psychical Research Society and his vice-presidency of the first International Eugenics Congress in 1912.
Helping Pinchot initiate this century's racialist environmentalism were his cohorts George W. Woodruff (S&B 1889), Teddy Roosevelt's Assistant Attorney General and Acting Interior Secretary; and Henry Solon Graves (S&B 1892), chief U.S. forester 1910-20. Frederick E. Weyerhauser (S&B 1896), owner of vast tracts of American forest, was a follower of Pinchot's movement, while the Weyerhauser family were active collaborators of British-South African super-racist Cecil Rhodes. This family's friendship with President George Bush is a vital factor in the present environmentalist movement.
With Henry L. Stimson (S&B 1888) we come to the Eastern Liberal Establishment which has ruled America during the twentieth century. Stimson was President Taft's Secretary of War (1911-13), and President Herbert Hoover's Secretary of State (1929-33). As Secretary of War (1940-45), this time under President Harry Truman, Stimson pressed Truman to drop the atomic bomb on the Japanese. This decision involved much more than merely ``pragmatic'' military considerations. These Anglophiles, up through George Bush, have opposed the American republic's tradition of alliance with national aspirations in Asia; and they worried that the invention of nuclear energy would too powerfully unsettle the world's toleration for poverty and misery. Both the U.S. and the Atom had better be dreaded, they thought.
The present century owes much of its record of horrors to the influential Anglophile American families which came to dominate and employ the Skull and Bones Society as a political recruiting agency, particularly the Harrimans, Whitneys, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and their lawyers, the Lords and Tafts and Bundys.
The politically aggressive Guaranty Trust Company, run almost entirely by Skull and Bones initiates, was a financial vehicle of these families in the early 1900s. Guaranty Trust's support for the Bolshevik and Nazi revolutions overlapped the more intense endeavors in these fields by the Harrimans, George Walker and Prescott Bush a few blocks away, and in Berlin.
Skull and Bones was dominated from 1913 onward by the circles of Averell Harriman. They displaced remaining traditionalists such as Douglas MacArthur from power in the United States.
For George Bush, the Skull and Bones Society is more than simply the British, as opposed to the American, strategic tradition. It is merged in the family and personal network within which his whole life has been, in a sense, handed to him prepackaged.
During Prescott Bush's student days, the Harriman set at Yale decided that World War I was sufficiently amusing that they ought to get into it as recreation. They formed a special Yale Unit of the Naval Reserve Flying Corps, at the instigation of F. Trubee Davison. Since the United States was not at war, and the Yale students were going to serve Britain, the Yale Unit was privately and lavishly financed by F. Trubee's father, Henry Davison, the senior managing partner at J.P. Morgan and Co. At that time, the Morgan bank was the official financial agency for the British government in the United States. The Yale Unit's leader was amateur pilot Robert A. Lovett. They were based first on Long Island, New York, then in Palm Beach, Florida.
The Yale Unit has been described by Lovett's family and friends in a collective biography of the Harriman set:
Training for the Yale Flying Unit was not exactly boot camp. Davison's father ... helped finance them royally, and newspapers of the day dubbed them ``the millionaires' unit.'' They cut rakish figures, and knew it; though some dismissed them as dilettantes, the hearts of young Long Island belles fluttered at the sight....
[In] Palm Beach ... they ostentatiously pursued a relaxed style. ``They were rolled about in wheel chairs by African slaves amid tropical gardens and coconut palms,'' wrote the unit's historian.... ``For light exercise, they learned to glance at their new wristwatches with an air of easy nonchalance''.... [Lovett] was made chief of the unit's private club, the Wags, whose members started their sentences, ``Being a Wag and therefore a superman''....
Despite the snide comments of those who dismissed them as frivolous rich boys, Lovett's unit proved to be daring and imaginative warriors when they were dispatched for active duty in 1917 with Britain's Royal Naval Air Service.
Lovett was transferred to the U.S. Navy after the U.S. joined Britain in World War I.
The Yale Flying Unit was the glory of Skull and Bones. Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush and their 1917 Bonesmates selected for 1918 membership in the secret order these Yale Flying Unit leaders: Robert Lovett, F. Trubee Davison, Artemus Lamb Gates, and John Martin Vorys. Unit flyers David Sinton Ingalls and F. Trubee's brother, Harry P. Davison (who became Morgan vice chairman), were tapped for the 1920 Skull and Bones.
Lovett did not actually have a senior year at Yale: ``He was tapped for Skull and Bones not on the Old Campus but at a naval station in West Palm Beach; his initiation, instead of being conducted in the `tomb' on High Street, occurred at the headquarters of the Navy's Northern Bombing Group between Dunkirk and Calais.''
Some years later, Averell Harriman gathered Lovett, Prescott Bush and other pets into the utopian oligarchs' community a few miles to the north of Palm Beach, called Jupiter Island (see Chapter 4).
British Empire loyalists flew right from the Yale Unit into U.S. strategymaking positions:
Richard M. Bissell, Jr. was a very important man to the denizens of Jupiter Island.
He graduated from Yale in 1932, the year after the Harrimanites bought the island. Though not in Skull and Bones, Bissell was the younger brother of William Truesdale Bissell, a Bonesman from the class of 1925. Their father, Connecticut insurance executive Richard M. Bissell, Sr., had put the U.S. insurance industry's inside knowledge of all fire-insured industrial plants at the disposal of government planners during World War I.
The senior Bissell, a powerful Yale alumnus, was also the director of the Neuro-Psychiatric Institute of the Hartford Retreat for the Insane; there, in 1904, Yale graduate Clifford Beers underwent mind-destroying treatment which led this mental patient to found the Mental Hygiene Society, a major Yale-based Skull and Bones project. This would evolve into the CIA's cultural engineering effort of the 1950s, the drugs and brainwashing adventure known as ``MK-Ultra.''
Richard M. Bissell, Jr. studied at the London School of Economics in 1932 and 1933, and taught at Yale from 1935 to 1941. He then joined Harriman's entourage in the U.S. government. Bissell was an economist for the Combined Shipping Adjustment Board in 1942-43, while Averell Harriman was the U.S. leader of that board in London.
In 1947 and 1948, Bissell was executive secretary of the ``Harriman Commission,'' otherwise known as the President's Commission on Foreign Aid. When Harriman was the administrator of the Marshall Plan, Bissell was assistant administrator.
Harriman was director of Mutual Security (1951-53), while Bissell was consultant to the director of Mutual Security 1952.
Bissell then joined F. Trubee Davison at the Central Intelligence Agency. When Allen Dulles became CIA Director, Bissell was one of his three aides.
Why could this be of interest to our Floridians? We saw in Chapter 4, that the great anti-Castro covert initiative of 1959-61 was supervised by an awesome array of Harriman agents. We need now add to that assessment only the fact that the detailed management of the invasion of Cuba, and of the assassination planning, and the training of the squads for these jobs, was given into the hands of Richard M. Bissell, Jr.
This 1961 invasion failed. Fidel Castro survived the widely-discussed assassination plots against him. But the initiative succeeded in what was probably its core purpose: to organize a force of multi-use professional assassins.
The Florida-trained killers stayed in business under the leadership of Ted Shackley. They were all around the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. They kept going with the Operation Phoenix mass murder of Vietnamese civilians, with Middle East drug and terrorist programs, and with George Bush's Contra wars in Central America.
Harvey Hollister Bundy (S&B 1909) was Henry L. Stimson's Assistant Secretary of State (1931-33); then he was Stimson's Special Assistant Secretary of War, alongside Assistant Secretary Robert Lovett of Skull and Bones and Brown Brothers Harriman.
Harvey's son William P. Bundy (S&B 1939) was a CIA officer from 1951 to 1961; as a 1960s defense official, he pushed the Harriman- Dulles scheme for a Vietnam war. Harvey's other son, McGeorge Bundy (S&B 1940), co-authored Stimson's memoirs in 1948. As President John Kennedy's Director of National Security, McGeorge Bundy organized the whitewash of the Kennedy assassination, and immediately switched the U.S. policy away from the Kennedy pullout and back toward war in Vietnam.
There was also Henry Luce, a Bonesman of 1920 with David S. Ingalls and Harry Pomeroy. Luce published Time magazine, where his ironically-named ``American Century'' blustering was straight British Empire doctrine: Bury the republics, hail the Anglo-Saxon conquerors.
William Sloane Coffin, tapped for 1949 Skull and Bones by George Bush and his Bone companions, was from a long line of Skull and Bones Coffins. William Sloane Coffin was famous in the Vietnam War protest days as a leader of the left protest against the war. Was the fact that he was an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency embarrassing to William Sloane?
This was no contradiction. His uncle, the Reverend Henry Sloane Coffin (S&B 1897), had also been a ``peace'' agitator, and an oligarchical agent. Uncle Henry was for 20 years president of the Union Theological Seminary, whose board chairman was Prescott Bush's partner Thatcher Brown. In 1937, Henry Coffin and John Foster Dulles led the U.S. delegation to England to found the World Council of Churches, as a ``peace movement'' guided by the pro-Hitler faction in England.
The Coffins have been mainstays of the liberal death lobby, for euthanasia and eugenics. The Coffins outlasted Hitler, arriving into the CIA in the 1950s.
Amory Howe Bradford (S&B 1934) married Carol Warburg Rothschild in 1941. Carol's mother, Carola, was the acknowledged head of the Warburg family in America after World War II. This family had assisted the Harrimans' rise into the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in concert with the Sulzbergers at the New York Times, they had used their American Jewish Committee and B'nai B'rith to protect the Harriman-Bush deals with Hitler. This made it nice for Averell Harriman, just like family, when Amory Howe Bradford worked on the Planning Group of Harriman's NATO secretariat in London, 1951-52. Bradford was meanwhile assistant to the publisher of the New York Times, and went on to become general manager of the Times.
Other modern Bonesmen have been closely tied to George Bush's career.
George Herbert Walker, Jr. (S&B 1927) was the President's uncle and financial angel. In the 1970s he sold G.H. Walker & Co. to White, Weld & Co. and became a director of White, Weld; company heir William Weld, the original federal prosecutor of Lyndon LaRouche and current Massachusetts governor, is an active Bush Republican.
Publisher William F. Buckley (S&B 1950) had a family oil business in Mexico. There Buckley was a close ally to CIA covert operations manager E. Howard Hunt, whose lethal antics were performed under the eyes of Miami Station and Jupiter Island.
David Lyle Boren (S&B 1963) was assistant to the director of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, and a propaganda analyst for the U.S. Information Agency, before graduating from Yale. Thus while he was imbibing the British view at Oxford University (1963-65), Boren was already an Anglo-American intelligence operative, listed in the ``speakers bureau'' of the American embassy in London. David Boren was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1979 and became chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Though a Democrat (who spoke knowingly of the ``parallel government'' operating in Iran-Contra), Boren's Intelligence Committee rulings have been (not unexpectedly) more and more favorable to his ``Patriarch'' in the White House.
Among the traditional artifacts collected and maintained within the High Street Tomb are human remains of various derivations. The following concerns one such set of Skull and Bones.
Geronimo, an Apache faction leader and warrior, led a party of warriors on a raid in 1876, after Apaches were moved to the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona territory. He led other raids against U.S. and Mexican forces well into the 1880s; he was captured and escaped many times.
Geronimo was finally interned at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He became a farmer and joined a Christian congregation. He died at the age of 79 years in 1909, and was buried at Fort Sill. Three-quarters of a century later, his tribesmen raised the question of getting their famous warrior reinterred back in Arizona.
Ned Anderson was Tribal Chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe from 1978 to 1986. This is the story he tells:
Around the fall of 1983, the leader of an Apache group in another section of Arizona said he was interested in having the remains of Geronimo returned to his tribe's custody. Taking up this idea, Anderson said that the remains properly belonged to his group as much as to the other Apaches. After much discussion, several Apache groups met at a kind of summit meeting held at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The army authorities were not favorable to the meeting, and it only occurred through the intervention of the office of the Governor of Oklahoma.
As a result of this meeting, Ned Anderson was written up in the newspapers as an articulate Apache activist. Soon afterwards, in late 1983 or early 1984, a Skull and Bones member contacted Anderson and leaked evidence that Geronimo's remains had long ago been pilfered--by Prescott Bush, George's father. The informant said that in May of 1918, Prescott Bush and five other officers at Fort Sill desecrated the grave of Geronimo. They took turns watching while they robbed the grave, taking items including a skull, some other bones, a horse bit and straps. These prizes were taken back to the Tomb, the home of the Skull and Bones Society at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. They were put into a display case, which members and visitors could easily view upon entry to the building.
The informant provided Anderson with photographs of the stolen remains, and a copy of a Skull and Bones log book in which the 1918 grave robbery had been recorded. The informant said that Skull and Bones members used the pilfered remains in performing some of their Thursday and Sunday night rituals, with Geronimo's skull sitting out on a table in front of them.
Outraged, Anderson traveled to New Haven. He did some investigation on the Yale campus and held numerous discussions, to learn what the Apaches would be up against when they took action, and what type of action would be most fruitful.
Through an attorney, Ned Anderson asked the FBI to move into the case. The attorney conveyed to him the Bureau's response: If he would turn over every scrap of evidence to the FBI, and completely remove himself from the case, they would get involved. He rejected this bargain, since it did not seem likely to lead toward recovery of Geronimo's remains.
Due to his persistence, he was able to arrange a September 1986 Manhattan meeting with Jonathan Bush, George Bush's brother. Jonathan Bush vaguely assured Anderson that he would get what he had come after, and set a followup meeting for the next day. But Bush stalled-- Anderson believes this was to gain time to hide and secure the stolen remains against any possible rescue action.
The Skull and Bones attorney representing the Bush family and managing the case was Endicott Peabody Davison. His father was the F. Trubee Davison mentioned above, who had been president of New York's American Museum of Natural History, and personnel director for the Central Intelligence Agency. The general attitude of this Museum crowd has long been that ``Natives'' should be stuffed and mounted for display to the Fashionable Set.
Finally, after about 11 days, another meeting occurred. A display case was produced, which did in fact match the one in the photograph the informant had given to Ned Anderson. But the skull he was shown was that of a ten-year-old child, and Anderson refused to receive it or to sign a legal document promising to shut up about the matter.
Anderson took his complaint to Arizona Congressmen Morris Udahl and John McCain III, but with no results. George Bush refused Congressman McCain's request that he meet with Anderson.
Anderson wrote to Udahl, enclosing a photograph of the wall case and skull at the ``Tomb,'' showing a black and white photograph of the living Geronimo, which members of the Order had boastfully posted next to their display of his skull. Anderson quoted from a Skull and Bones Society internal history, entitled Continuation of the History of Our Order for the Century Celebration, 17 June 1933, by The Little Devil of D'121.
From the war days [W.W. I] also sprang the mad expedition from the School of Fire at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, that brought to the T[omb] its most spectacular ``crook,'' the skull of Geronimo the terrible, the Indian Chief who had taken forty-nine white scalps. An expedition in late May, 1918, by members of four Clubs [i.e. four graduating-class years of the Society], Xit D.114, Barebones, Caliban and Dingbat, D.115, S'Mike D.116, and Hellbender D.117, planned with great caution since in the words of one of them: ``Six army captains robbing a grave wouldn't look good in the papers.'' The stirring climax was recorded by Hellbender in the Black Book of D.117: ``... The ring of pick on stone and thud of earth on earth alone disturbs the peace of the prairie. An axe pried open the iron door of the tomb, and Pat[riarch] Bush entered and started to dig. We dug in turn, each on relief taking a turn on the road as guards.... Finally Pat[riarch] Ellery James turned up a bridle, soon a saddle horn and rotten leathers followed, then wood and then, at the exact bottom of the small round hole, Pat[riarch] James dug deep and pried out the trophy itself.... We quickly closed the grave, shut the door and sped home to Pat[riarch] Mallon's room, where we cleaned the Bones. Pat[riarch] Mallon sat on the floor liberally applying carbolic acid. The Skull was fairly clean, having only some flesh inside and a little hair. I showered and hit the hay ... a happy man....''@s9
The other grave robber whose name is given, Ellery James, we encountered in Chapter 1--he was to be an usher at Prescott's wedding three years later. And the fellow who applied acid to the stolen skull, burning off the flesh and hair, was Neil Mallon. Years later, Prescott Bush and his partners chose Mallon as chairman of Dresser Industries; Mallon hired Prescott's son, George Bush, for George's first job; and George Bush named his son, Neil Mallon Bush, after the flesh-picker.
In 1988, the Washington Post ran an article, originating from the Establishment-line Arizona Republic, entitled ``Skull for Scandal: Did Bush's Father Rob Geronimo's Grave?'' The article included a small quote from the 1933 Skull and Bones History of Our Order: ``An axe pried open the iron door of the tomb, and ... Bush entered and started to dig....'' and so forth, but neglected to include other names beside Bush.
According to the Washington Post, the document which Bush attorney Endicott Davison tried to get the Apache leader to sign, stipulated that Ned Anderson agreed it would be ``inappropriate for you, me [Jonathan Bush] or anyone in association with us to make or permit any publication in connection with this transaction.'' Anderson called the document ``very insulting to Indians.'' Davison claimed later that the Order's own history book is a hoax, but during the negotiations with Anderson, Bush's attorney demanded Anderson give up his copy of the book.
Bush crony Fitzhugh Green gives the view of the President's backers on this affair, and conveys the arrogant racial attitude typical of Skull and Bones:
``Prescott Bush had a colorful side. In 1988 the press revealed the complaint of an Apache leader about Bush. This was Ned Anderson of San Carlos, Oklahoma [sic], who charged that as a young army officer Bush stole the skull of Indian Chief [sic] Geronimo and had it hung on the wall of Yale's Skull and Bones Club. After exposure of `true facts' by Anderson, and consideration by some representatives in Congress, the issue faded from public sight. Whether or not this alleged skullduggery actually occurred, the mere idea casts the senior Bush in an adventurous light''[emphasis added].
George Bush's crowning as a Bonesman was intensely, personally important to him. These men were tapped for the Class of 1948:
Thomas William Ludlow Ashley
Lucius Horatio Biglow, Jr.
George Herbert Walker Bush
John Erwin Caulkins
William Judkins Clark
William James Connelly, Jr.
George Cook III
David Charles Grimes
Richard Elwood Jenkins
Richard Gerstle Mack
Thomas Wilder Moseley
George Harold Pfau, Jr.
Samuel Sloane Walker, Jr.
Howard Sayre Weaver
Valleau Wilkie, Jr.
Survivors of this 1948 Bones group were interviewed for a 1988 Washington Post campaign profile of George Bush. The members described their continuing intimacy with and financial support for Bush up through his 1980s vice-presidency. Their original sexual togetherness at Yale is stressed:
The relationships that were formed in the ``Tomb'' ... where the Society's meetings took place each Thursday and Sunday night during the academic year, have had a strong place in Bush's life, according to all 11 of his fellow Bonesmen who are still alive.
Several described in detail the ritual in the organization that builds the bonds. Before giving his life history, each member had to spend a Sunday night reviewing his sex life in a talk known in the Tomb as CB, or ``connubial bliss''....
``The first time you review your sex life.... We went all the way around among the 15,'' said Lucius H. Biglow Jr., a retired Seattle attorney. ``That way you get everybody committed to a certain extent.... It was a gradual way of building confidence.''
The sexual histories helped break down the normal defenses of the members, according to several of the members from his class. William J. Connelly, Jr. ... said, ``In Skull and Bones we all stand together, 15 brothers under the skin. [It is] the greatest allegiance in the world.''
Here is our future U.S. President with the other wealthy, amoral young men, excited about their future unlimited power over the ignorant common people, sharing their sex secrets in a mausoleum surrounded by human remains. The excited young men are entirely directed by the ``Patriarchs,'' the cynical alumni financiers who are the legal owners of the Order.
This chart depicts family relationships which were vital to the persons appearing on the chart. At less exalted levels of society, one is supposed to be praised or blamed only according to one's own actions. But in these Yale circles, ``family''--genealogy--is an overwhelming consideration when evaluating individuals. Thus what we present here is more than simply a system of associations. It is a tradition which has operated powerfully on the emotions and judgment of the leaders of Yale University; they have merged their own identities into this tradition.
Lines are directed downwards from parents to their children. A double hyphen--signifies the marriage of the persons on either side.
1) Rev. Nodiah Russell: One of 10 or 12 men who founded Yale University in 1701. Yale Trustee 1701-13. Pastor, First Congregational Church, Middletown, Ct. ca. 1691-1716.
2) Rev. James Pierpont: Most celebrated of the Yale founders. Yale Trustee, 1701-14.
3) William Russell: Yale Trustee 1745-61. Pastor, First Congregational Church, Middletown, Ct. 1716-61.
4) Jonathan Edwards: Graduated Yale 1720. Ultra-Calvinist theologian, president of Princeton University (called then ``College of New Jersey'').
5) Rev. Nodiah Russell: Graduated Yale 1750.
6) Pierpont Edwards (1750-1826): Made Master of Connecticut Masons by the British Army occupying New York in 1783; he administered the estate of the traitor Benedict Arnold.
7) Aaron Burr, Sr.: Graduated yale 1735. President of Princeton University (``College of New Jersey'').
8) Matthew Talcott Russell: Graduated Yale 1769. Deacon of First Congregational Church, Middletown, Ct. for 30 years. Lawyer for the Middletown Russell family. Died ca. 1817.
9) Captain John Russell. Died 1801 or 1802.
10) Henry W. Edwards: Governor of Connecticut 1833, 1835-38. Protector of Samuel Russell's opium-financed enterprises, patron of William Huntington Russell's new secret society, Skull and Bones.
11) Aaron Burr, Jr.: U.S. Vice President 1801-08. Killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. Secession conspirator. Acquitted of treason in 1807, but wanted for murder, he fled to England. Returned to U.S.A. in 1812. Wall Street lawyer, 1812-36. Hero of imperial Anglo- Americans.
12) Theodore Dwight (1764-1846): Law partner of his cousin Aaron Burr, Jr. Secretary of the secessionist Hartford Convention, 1815. He united the Connecticut pro-British party with Massachusetts ``Essex Junto.''
13) Timothy Dwight: Secessionist. President of Yale, 1795-1817.
14) William Huntington Russell (1809-85): Graduated Yale 1833. Founder of Skull and Bones Society (or Russell Trust Association), which came to dominate Yale. Founded prep school for boys, 1836. His secret organization spread in the 1870s to Phillips Academy, the Andover, Massachusetts prep school.
15) Samuel Russell: Born in 1789 in the main ancestral house of the Russell family of Middletown. This house had been owned by the co- founder of Yale, Nodiah Russell (1), and by William Russell (3) and his wife Mary, sister-in-law to Jonathan Edwards.
He became head of the Middletown Russells. He established Russell and Co. in 1823, which by the 1830s superseded Perkins syndicate as largest American opium smuggling organization. His partners included leading Boston families.
He founded the Russell Manufacturing Company, Middletown, in 1837; he was president of Middlesex County Bank. During the formative years of Skull and Bones, the fabulously wealthy Samuel Russell was undisputed king of Middletown.
For the sake of clarity, we have omitted from this chart the ancestral line from Rev. James Pierpont (2) to his great grandson Rev. John Pierpont. Rev. John Pierpont wrote poetry for the pro-British secessionists; he denounced President Thomas Jefferson for saying that Pierpont's New England relatives were ``under the influence of the whore of England.'' Rev. John was an employee of Aaron Burr's family during Burr's western conspiracy. Rev. John's daughter Juliet married Connecticut-born British banker Junius Morgan and gave birth to U.S. financial kingpin John Pierpont Morgan, named for his grandfather Rev. John.
1. Speech at Lewistown, Illinois, August 17, 1858; quoted in James Mellon (editor), The Face of Lincoln (New York: Viking Press, 1979), p. 35.
2. Fitzhugh Green, George Bush: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1989), p. 41.
3. Nicholas King, George Bush: A Biography (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1980), p. 38.
4. Green, op. cit., p. 47.
5. Ibid., p. 48.
6. Among the sources used for this section are:
7. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made--Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, McCloy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), pp. 90-91.
8. Ibid., p. 93.
9. Interview with Ned Anderson, Nov. 6, 1991.
10. Quoted in Ned Anderson to Anton Chaitkin, Dec. 2, 1991, in possession of the authors.
11. Article by Paul Brinkley-Rogers of the Arizona Republic, in the Washington Post, Oct. 1, 1988.
12. Green, op. cit., p. 50.
13. Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus, ``Bush Opened Up To Secret Yale Society,'' Washington Post, Aug. 7, 1988.
http://www.tarpley.net/bush7.htm
http://www.ctrl.org/essay1/index.html
The story begins at Yale, where three threads of American social history -- espionage, drug smuggling and secret societies -- intertwine into one.
Elihu Yale was born near Boston, educated in London, and served with the British East India Company, eventually becoming governor of Fort Saint George, Madras, in 1687. He amassed a great fortune from trade and returned to England in 1699. Yale became known as quite a philanthropist; upon receiving a request from the Collegiate School in Connecticut, he sent a donation and a gift of books. After subsequent bequests, Cotton Mather suggested the school be named Yale College, in 1718.
A statue of Nathan Hale stands on Old Campus at Yale University. There is a copy of that statue in front of the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yet another stands in front of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts (where George H.W. Bush ('48) went to prep school and joined a secret society at age twelve).
Nathan Hale, along with three other Yale graduates, was a member of the "Culper Ring," one of America's first intelligence operations. Established by George Washington, it was successful throughout the Revolutionary War. Nathan was the only operative to be ferreted out by the British, and after speaking his famous regrets, he was hanged in 1776. Ever since the founding of the Republic, the relationship between Yale and the "Intelligence Community" has been unique.
In 1823, Samuel Russell established Russell and Company for the purpose of acquiring opium in Turkey and smuggling it to China. Russell and Company merged with the Perkins (Boston) syndicate in 1830 and became the primary American opium smuggler. Many of the great American and European fortunes were built on the "China"(opium) trade.
One of Russell and Company's Chief of Operations in Canton was Warren Delano, Jr., grandfather of Franklin Roosevelt. Other Russell partners included John Cleve Green (who financed Princeton), Abiel Low (who financed construction of Columbia), Joseph Coolidge and the Perkins, Sturgis and Forbes families. (Coolidge's son organized the United Fruit company, and his grandson, Archibald C. Coolidge, was a co-founder of the Council on Foreign Relations.)
William Huntington Russell ('33), Samuel's cousin, studied in Germany from 1831-32. Germany was a hotbed of new ideas. The "scientific method" was being applied to all forms of human endeavor. Prussia, which blamed the defeat of its forces by Napoleon in 1806 on soldiers only thinking about themselves in the stress of battle, took the principles set forth by John Locke and Jean Rosseau and created a new educational system. Johan Fitche, in his "Address to the German People," declared that the children would be taken over by the State and told what to think and how to think it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel took over Fitche's chair at the University Of Berlin in 1817, and was a professor there until his death in 1831. Hegel was the culmination of the German idealistic philosophy school of Immanuel Kant.
To Hegel, our world is a world of reason. The state is Absolute Reason and the citizen can only become free by worship and obedience to the state. Hegel called the state the "march of God in the world" and the "final end". This final end, Hegel said, "has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state." Both fascism and communism have their philosophical roots in Hegellianism. Hegellian philosophy was very much in vogue during William Russell's time in Germany.
When Russell returned to Yale in 1832, he formed a senior society with Alphonso Taft ('33). According to information acquired from a break-in to the "tomb" (the Skull and Bones meeting hall) in 1876, "Bones is a chapter of a corps in a German University.... General Russell, its founder, was in Germany before his Senior Year and formed a warm friendship with a leading member of a German society. He brought back with him to college, authority to found a chapter here." So class valedictorian William H. Russell, along with fourteen others, became the founding members of "The Order of Scull and Bones," later changed to "The Order of Skull and Bones".
The secretive Order of Skull and Bones exists only at Yale. Fifteen juniors are "tapped" each year by the seniors to be initiated into next year's group. Some say each initiate is given $15,000 and a grandfather clock. Far from being a campus fun-house, the group is geared more toward the success of its members in the post-collegiate world.
The family names on the Skull and Bones roster roll off the tongue like an elite party list -- Lord, Whitney, Taft, Jay, Bundy, Harriman, Weyerhaeuser, Pinchot, Rockefeller, Goodyear, Sloane, Stimson, Phelps, Perkins, Pillsbury, Kellogg, Vanderbilt, Bush, Lovett and so on.
William Russell went on to become a general and a state legislator in Connecticut. Alphonso Taft was appointed U.S. Attorney General, Secretary of War (a post many "Bonesmen" have held), Ambassador to Austria, and Ambassador to Russia (another post held by many "Bonesmen"). His son, William Howard Taft ('87), is the only man to be both President of the United States and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
The Order flourished from the very beginning in spite of occasional squalls of controversy. There was dissension from some professors, who didn't like its secrecy and exclusiveness. And there was backlash from students, showing concern about the influence "Bones" was having over Yale finances and the favoritism shown to "Bonesmen."
In October of 1873, Volume 1, Number 1, of The Iconoclast was published in New Haven. It was only published once and was one of very few openly published articles on the Order of Skull and Bones.
From The Iconoclast:
"We speak through a new publication. because the college press is closed to those who dare to openly mention 'Bones'....
"Out of every class Skull and Bones takes its men. They have gone out into the world and have become, in many instances, leaders in society. They have obtained control of Yale. Its business is performed by them. Money paid to the college must pass into their hands, and be subject to their will. No doubt they are worthy men in themselves, but the many, whom they looked down upon while in college, cannot so far forget as to give money freely into their hands. Men in Wall Street complain that the college comes straight to them for help, instead of asking each graduate for his share. The reason is found in a remark made by one of Yale's and America's first men: 'Few will give but Bones men and they care far more for their society than they do for the college....'
"Year by year the deadly evil is growing. The society was never as obnoxious to the college as it is today, and it is just this ill-feeling that shuts the pockets of non-members. Never before has it shown such arrogance and self-fancied superiority. It grasps the College Press and endeavors to rule it all. It does not deign to show its credentials, but clutches at power with the silence of conscious guilt.
"To tell the good which Yale College has done would be well nigh impossible. To tell the good she might do would be yet more difficult. The question, then, is reduced to this -- on the one hand lies a source of incalculable good -- on the other a society guilty of serious and far-reaching crimes. It is Yale College against Skull and Bones!! We ask all men, as a question of right, which should be allowed to live?"
At first, the society held its meetings in hired halls. Then in 1856, the "tomb", a vine-covered, windowless, brown-stone hall was constructed, where to this day the "Bonesmen" hold their "strange, occultish" initiation rites and meet each Thursday and Sunday.
On September 29, 1876, a group calling itself "The Order of File and Claw" broke into the Skull and Bones' holy of holies. In the "tomb" they found lodge-room 324 "fitted up in black velvet, even the walls being covered with the material." Upstairs was lodge-room 322, "the 'sanctum sanctorium' of the temple... furnished in red velvet" with a pentagram on the wall. In the hall are "pictures of the founders of Bones at Yale, and of members of the Society in Germany, when the chapter was established here in 1832." The raiding party found another interesting scene in the parlor next to room 322.
From "The Fall Of Skull And Bones":
"On the west wall, hung among other pictures, an old engraving representing an open burial vault, in which, on a stone slab, rest four human skulls, grouped about a fools cap and bells, an open book, several mathematical instruments, a beggar's scrip, and a royal crown. On the arched wall above the vault are the explanatory words, in Roman letters, 'We War Der Thor, Wer Weiser, Wer Bettler Oder, Kaiser?' and below the vault is engraved, in German characters, the sentence; 'Ob Arm, Ob Beich, im Tode gleich.'
The picture is accompanied by a card on which is written, 'From the German Chapter. Presented by D. C. Gilman of D. 50'."
Daniel Coit Gilman ('52), along with two other "Bonesmen," formed a troika which still influences American life today. Soon after their initiation in Skull and Bones, Daniel Gilman, Timothy Dwight ('49) and Andrew Dickinson White ('53) went to study philosophy in Europe at the University of Berlin. Gilman returned from Europe and incorporated Skull and Bones as Russell Trust, in 1856, with himself as Treasurer and William H. Russell as President. He spent the next fourteen years in New Haven consolidating the order's power.
Gilman was appointed Librarian at Yale in 1858. Through shrewd political maneuvering, he acquired funding for Yale's science departments (Sheffield Scientific School) and was able to get the Morrill Land Bill introduced in Congress, passed and finally signed by President Lincoln, after being vetoed by President Buchanan.
This bill, "donating public-lands for State College for agriculture and sciences", is now known as the Land Grant College Act. Yale was the first school in America to get the federal land scrip and quickly grabbed all of Connecticut's share at the time. Pleased by the acquisitions, Yale made Gilman a Professor of Physical Geography.
Daniel was the first President of the University of California. He also helped found, and was the first president of, John Hopkins.
Gilman was first president of the Carnegie Institution and involved in the founding of the Peabody, Slater and Russell Sage Foundations.
His buddy, Andrew D. White, was the first president of Cornell University (which received all of New York's share of the Land Grant College Act), U.S. Minister to Russia, U.S. Ambassador to Berlin and first president of the American Historical Association. White was also Chairman of the American delegation to the first Hague Conference in 1899, which established an international judiciary.
Timothy Dwight, a professor at Yale Divinity School, was installed as president of Yale in 1886. All presidents since, have been either "Bonesmen" or directly tied to the Order and its interests.
The Daniel/Gilman/White trio was also responsible for the founding of the American Economic Association, the American Chemical Society and the American Psychological Association. Through their influences on John Dewey and Horace Mann, this trio continues to have an enormous impact on education today.
In his book "America's Secret Establishment," Antony Sutton outlined the Order of Skull and Bones' ability to establish vertical and horizontal "chains of influence" that ensured the continuity of their conspiratorial schemes.
The Whitney-Stimson-Bundy links represent the "vertical chain".
W. C. Whitney ('63), who married Flora Payne (of the Standard Oil Payne dynasty), was Secretary of the Navy. His attorney was a man named Elihu Root. Root hired Henry Stimson ('88), out of law school. Stimson took over from Root as Secretary of War in 1911, appointed by fellow Bonesman William Howard Taft. Stimson later became Coolidge's Governor-General of the Philippine Islands, Hoover's Secretary of State, and Secretary of War during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.
Hollister Bundy ('09) was Stimson's special assistant and point man in the Pentagon for the Manhattan Project. His two sons, also members of Skull and Bones, were William Bundy ('39) and McGeorge Bundy ('40) -- both very active in governmental and foundation affairs.
The two brothers, from their positions in the CIA, the Department of Defense and the State Department, and as Special Assistants to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, exercised significant impact on the flow of information and intelligence during the Vietnam "War."
William Bundy went on to be editor of Foreign Affairs, the influential quarterly of the Council on Foreign Affairs (CFR). McGeorge became president of the Ford Foundation.
Another interesting group of "Bonesmen" is the Harriman/Bush crowd. Averil Harriman ('13), "Elder Statesman" of the Democratic Party, and his brother Roland Harriman ('17) were very active members. In fact, four of Roland's fellow "Bonesmen" from the class of 1917 were directors of Brown Brothers, Harriman, including Prescott Bush ('17), George Bush's dad.
Since the turn of the century, two investment bank firms -- Guaranty Trust and Brown Brothers, Harriman -- were both dominated by members of Skull and Bones. These two firms were heavily involved in the financing of Communism and Hitler's regime.
Bonesman share an affinity for the Hegellian ideas of the historical dialectic, which dictates the use of controlled conflict - - thesis versus anti-thesis -- to create a pre-determined synthesis. A synthesis of their making and design, where the state is absolute and individuals are granted their freedoms based on their obedience to the state -- a New World Order.
Funding and political maneuvering on the part of "Bonesmen" and their allies helped the Bolsheviks prevail in Russia. In defiance of federal laws, the cabal financed industries, established banks and developed oil and mineral deposits in the fledgling U.S.S.R.
Later, Averil Harriman, as minister to Great Britain in charge of Lend-Lease for Britain and Russia, was responsible for shipping entire factories into Russia. According to some researchers, Harriman also oversaw the transfer of nuclear secrets, plutonium and U. S. dollar printing plates to the U.S.S.R.
In 1932, the Union Banking Corporation of New York City had enlisted four directors from the ('17) cell and two Nazi bankers associated with Fritz Thyssen, who had been financing Hitler since 1924.
From "George Bush; The Unauthorized Biography":
"President Franklin Roosevelt's Alien Property Custodian, Leo T. Crowley, signed Vesting Order Number 248 [11/17/42] seizing the property of Prescott Bush under the Trading with Enemy Act. The order, published in obscure government record books and kept out of the news, Note #4 explained nothing about the Nazis involved; only that the Union Banking Corporation was run for the 'Thyssen family' of 'Germany and/or Hungary' -- 'nationals ... of a designated enemy country.'
"By deciding that Prescott Bush and the other directors of the Union Banking Corporation were legally 'front men for the Nazis', the government avoided the more important historical issue: In what way 'were Hitler's Nazis themselves hired, armed, and instructed by' the New York and London clique of which Prescott Bush was an executive manager? ...
"4. New York Times, December 16, 1944, ran a five-paragraph page 25 article on actions of the New York State Banking Department. Only the last sentence refers to the Nazi bank, as follows: 'The Union Banking Corporation, 39 Broadway, New York, has received authority to change its principal place of business to 120 Broadway.'
"The Times omitted the fact that the Union Banking Corporation had been seized by the government for trading with the enemy, and the fact that 120 Broadway was the address of the government's Alien Property Custodian."
After the war, Prescott went on to become a U. S. Senator from Connecticut and favorite golfing partner of President Eisenhower. Prescott claims responsibility for getting Nixon into politics and takes personal credit for bringing Dick on board as Ike's running mate in 1952.
There were so many "Yalies" in the OSS that Yale's drinking tune, the "Whiffenpoof Song", became an "unofficial" song of the OSS. Many in the OSS were "Bonesmen" or belonged to the other Yale senior societies.
Robert Lovett ('18), Harriman's childhood friend, had been tapped into Skull & Bones by Prescott Bush's cell of '17 and was a director at Brown Brothers, Harriman.
Again, from "George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography":
"On October 22, 1945, Secretary of War Robert Patterson created the Lovett Committee, chaired by Robert A. Lovett, to advise the government on the post-World War II organization of U.S. intelligence activities.... The new agency would 'consult' with the armed forces, but it must be the sole collecting agency in the field of foreign espionage and counterespionage. The new agency should have an independent budget, and its appropriations should be granted by Congress without public hearings. Lovett appeared before the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy on November 14, 1945.... Lovett pressed for a virtual resumption of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS).... The CIA was established in 1947 according to the prescription of Robert Lovett, of Jupiter Island."
Gaddis Smith, a history professor at Yale, said, "Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion." And "Bonesman" have been foremost among the "spooks" building the CIA's "haunted house."
F. Trubee Davison ('18) was Director of Personnel at the CIA in the early years. Some of the other "Bonesmen" connected with the intelligence community are:
Sloane Coffin, Jr. ('49)
V. Van Dine ('49)
James Buckley ('44)
Bill Buckley ('50)
Hugh Cunnigham ('34)
Hugh Wilson ('09)
Reuben Holden ('40)
Charles R. Walker ('16)
Yale's 'unofficial' Secretary of War, Robert D. French ('10)
Archibald MacLiesh ('15)
Dino Pionzio ('50), CIA Deputy Chief of Station during Allende overthrow
William and McGeorge Bundy
Richard A. Moore ('3?)
Senator David Boren ('63)
Senator John Kerry ('66)
...and, of course, George Herbert Walker Bush. Bush tapped Coffin, who tapped Buckley.
Henry Luce ('20), Time-Life
John Thomas Daniels ('14), founder Archer Daniels Midland
Gifford Pinchot ('89), President Theodore Roosevelt's chief forester
Frederick E. Weyerhaeuser ('96)
Harold Stanley ('08), founder of Morgan Stanley, investment banker
Alfred Cowles ('13), Cowles Communication
Henry P. Davison ('20), senior partner Morgan Guaranty Trust
Thomas Cochran ('04) Morgan partner
Senator John Heinz ('31)
Pierre Jay ('92), first chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
George Herbert Walker, Jr. ('27), financier and co-founder of the NY Mets
Artemus Gates ('18), President of New York Trust Company, Union Pacific, TIME, Boeing Company
William Draper III (50), the Defense Department, UN and Import-Export Bank
Dean Witter, Jr.('44), investment banker
Senator Jonathan Bingham ('36)
Potter Stewart ('36), Supreme Court Justice
Senator John Chaffe ('47)
Harry Payne Whitney ('94), husband of Gertrude Vanderbilt, investment banker
Russell W. Davenport ('23), editor Fortune Magazine, created Fortune 500 list
Evan G. Galbraith ('50), Ambassador to France and Managing Director of Morgan Stanley
Richard Gow ('55), president Zapata Oil
Amory Howe Bradford ('34), husband of Carol Warburg Rothschild and general manager for the New York Times
C. E. Lord ('49), Comptroller of the Currency
Winston Lord ('59), Chairman of CFR, Ambassador to China and assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton administration
Ever since Nixon re-established America's political relationship with China, many of our ambassadors to that country have been Bonesmen, including George Bush, the first Chief U. S. Liaison Officer to the Peoples Republic of China.
Why all this interest in China? Well, China, among other things, is one of the largest producers and users of opiates in the world.
For a while, in the 1800s, the Yankee Clippers in Connecticut and Massachusetts were the fastest ships on the ocean. Speed was crucial to the opium trade; whoever made the trip from Turkey/India to Macao/Hong Kong/Shanghai first got the most for their goods.
During the Opium Wars, the U.S. chose to stand on the sidelines and cheer for the English and French, knowing that treaty obligations would bring the U.S. a share in the spoils. Russell and Company was at times the only trading house operating in Canton and used the opportunity to developed strong commercial ties and handsome profits.
Powerful national interests were behind the drug trade, because American traders were badly in need of some article the Chinese would buy, since by this time the seal breeding grounds had been nearly wiped out. If the Chinese had not bought opium from Americans, then United States imports of silk, porcelain and tea would have to paid in precious coin, which was in short supply. In 1843, when the Port of Shanghai was opened, Russell and Co. was one of its earliest traders.
In 1903, Yale Divinity School set up a program of schools and hospitals in China. Mao Zedong was among the staff. During the intrigues of China in the 1930s and '40s, American intelligence called upon the resources of "Yale in China", and George Bush's cousin and fellow "Bonesman" Reuben Holden.
After stints as UN Ambassador and Chairman of the Republican National Committee for the beleaguered Richard Nixon, George Bush was sent to look after the "China trade". The Bush family is still very much involved in the economic activities of "Red" China.
Many researchers contend that George Bush has been with CIA since the early 1950s, and that one of his jobs was to consolidate and co-ordinate the worldwide narcotics industry, the largest industry on Earth. Some say that one of the reasons behind the Vietnam "Police Action" was a cover for the consolidation of the "Golden Triangle".
Before the Vietnam "War", the Golden Triangle was run by French Intelligence and Corsican mobsters. After the French bailed out and America moved in, the triangle was run by U.S. intelligence, with aid from Sicilian mobsters. This narcotics network is well documented in "The Politics of Heroin in S. E. Asia" by Alfred McCoy, "The Great Heroin Coup" by Henrik Kruger and "Double-Cross" by Sam and Chuck Giancana.
Vice-President George Bush, as Chairman of President Reagan's cabinet-level working group and as Director of the National Narcotics Interdiction System, was the highest U. S. governmental official involved in the "war on drugs".
Frances Mullen, Jr., former head of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), called Bush's efforts "an intellectual fraud" and "a liability rather than an asset". Soon after these statements, Mullen resigned and the resultant General Accounting Office (GAO) report was buried.
In July, 1985, the suppressed GAO paper reported that there were "no benefits from the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System, directed by George Bush. In fact, the overall effect was to encourage supply...."
Monika Jensen-Stevenson, a "60 Minutes" producer, quit her job after the CBS news program refused to air the story she had uncovered relating to the covert drug trade. Her book, "Kiss The Boys Goodbye", details how our intelligence community used the apparatus of the POW/MIA governmental agencies as a cover for the trafficking of opiates from the "Golden Triangle".
President Reagan appointed Reform Party founder and Texas billionaire Ross Perot to the President's Advisory Council on Foreign Intelligence. Reagan made Perot a special presidential investigator, looking into America's POW and MIAs from the Vietnam "War".
Ross took the job to heart and spent considerable time and money in pursuit of the quest. He was given special clearance and access. He asked questions and interviewed everyone he could find.
From "Kiss The Boys Goodbye":
"Relations between Bush and Perot had gone downhill ever since the Vice-President had asked Ross Perot how his POW/ MIA investigations were going.
'Well, George, I go in looking for prisoners,' said Perot, 'but I spend all my time discovering the government has been moving drugs around the world and is involved in illegal arms deals.... I can't get at the prisoners because of the corruption among our own people.'
"This ended Perot's official access to the highly classified files as a one-man presidential investigator. 'I have been instructed to cease and desist,' he had informed the families of missing men early in 1987."
The wholesale importation of cocaine into the U.S. during "Iran/Contra" is also well documented. George Bush, is known "to be in the loop" with many of the players keeping in contact directly with his office.
Also, there has been much speculation as to the use of the off-shore rigs, pipelines and other assets of Zapata Offshore being used for narcotic trans-shipments.
Narcotics such as cocaine and heroin cannot be manufactured without the precursor chemicals. One of the largest makers of these precursor chemicals is the Eli Lilly Company of Indianapolis, Indiana. The Quayle family is a large stockholder, and George Bush has been on the Board of Directors. Eli Lilly is also the company that first synthesized LSD for the CIA.
Rodney Stich's book "Defrauding America" tells of a "deep-cover CIA officer" assigned to a counter-intelligence unit, code-named Pegasus. This unit "had tape-recordings of plans to assassinate Kennedy" from a tap on the phone of J. Edgar Hoover. The people on the tapes were "[Nelson] Rockefeller, Allen Dulles, [Lyndon] Johnson of Texas, George Bush and J. Edgar Hoover."
Could George Bush be involved in the JFK assassination?
In 1963, Bush was living in Houston, busily carrying out his duties as president of the Zapata Offshore oil company. He denied the existence of a note sent by the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover to "Mr. George Bush of the CIA." When news of the note surfaced, the CIA first said they never commented on employment questions, but later relented said yes, a "George Bush" was mentioned in the note, but that it was "another" George Bush, not the man who took office in the White House in 1988.
Some intrepid reporters tracked down the "other" George Bush and discovered that he was just a lowly clerk who had shuffled papers for the CIA for about six months. He never received any interagency messages from anybody at the FBI, let alone the Queen Mary.
It is also worth noting that a CIA code word for Bay of Pigs was Operation Zapata, and that two of the support vessels were named Barbara and Houston.
Many say that George Bush was high up on the CIA ladder at the time, running proprietorial vehicles and placed in a position of command, responsible for many of the Cubans recruited into "service" at the time. All through the Iran-Contra affair, Felix Rodriguez, the man who captured and had Che Guevara killed for the CIA, always seemed to call Bush's office first.
From The Realist (Summer, 1991):
"Bush was working with the now-famous CIA agent, Felix Rodriguez, recruiting right-wing Cuban exiles for the invasion of Cuba. It was Bush's CIA job to organize the Cuban community in Miami for the invasion.... A newly discovered FBI document reveals that George Bush was directly involved in the 1963 murder of President John Kennedy. The document places marksmen by the CIA. Bush at that time lived in Texas. Hopping from Houston to Miami weekly, Bush spent 1960 and '61 recruiting Cubans in Miami for the invasion....
"George Bush claims he never worked for the CIA until he was appointed Director by former Warren Commission director and then president Jerry Ford in 1976. Logic suggests that is highly unlikely. Of course, Bush has a company duty to deny being in the CIA. The CIA is a secret organization. No one ever admits to being a member. The truth is that Bush has been a top CIA official since before the 1961 invasion of Cuba, working with Felix Rodriguez. Bush may deny his actual role in the CIA in 1959, but there are records in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that expose Bush's role..."
On the Watergate tapes, June 23, 1972, referred to in the media as the 'smoking gun' conversation, Nixon and his Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, were discussing how to stop the FBI investigation into the CIA Watergate burglary. They were worried that the investigation would expose their connection to 'the Bay of Pigs thing.' Haldeman, in his book "The Ends of Power", reveals that Nixon always used code words when talking about the 1963 murder of JFK. Haldeman said Nixon would always refer to the assassination as 'the Bay of Pigs'.
On that transcript we find Nixon discussing the role of George Bush's partner, Robert Mosbacher, as one of the Texas fundraisers for Nixon. On the tapes Nixon keeps referring to the 'Cubans' and the 'Texans.' The 'Texans' were Bush, Mosbacher and Baker. This is another direct link between Bush and evidence linking Nixon and Bush to the Kennedy assassination."
So, why would an intelligence agency/secret society want to smuggle drugs and assassinate JFK?
Well, they make a lot of money, and they garner intelligence assets through their participation. There's also the rationale that the world is a seamy and unseemly place, and if you're going to be the 'big boy' on the block, you better know what's going on. And what better way of knowing than by running it yourself? There are also some who theorize that the covert drug trade fits with plans to destabilize American families and society. Through demoralizing and fracturing the body politic, they can impose their will using psychological warfare and the political alchemy of the Hegellian dialectic.
James Shelby Downard's article, "Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism ," an underground classic, links American historical events with a wild, numerological, grand occult plan "to turn us into cybernetic mystery zombies". The assassination of JFK, this article contends, was the performance of a public occult ritual called The Killing of the King, designed as a mass-trauma, mind-control assault against our U.S. national body-politic.
During Operation Sunrise, Operation Blowback, Operation Paperclip and others, thousands of Nazi scientists, researchers and administrators were brought to the United States after World War II. Many were "smuggled" into the country against direct, written, orders from President Harry S. Truman.
Project Monarch was the resumption of a mind-control project called Marionette Programming, which started in Nazi Germany. The basic component of the Monarch Program is the sophisticated manipulation of the mind, using extreme trauma to induce Multiple Personality Disorder.
Mr. Downward feels that the perpetrators purposefully murdered JFK in such a way as to affect our National identity and cohesiveness -- to fracture America's soul. Even the blatancy of their conspiracy was designed to show "their superiority" and "our futility".
There have been studies that show a correlation between the JFK assassination and the rise in violence in society, distrust of government and other extensions of social ills.
In 1785, a bolt of lightning struck a courier en route to Paris from Frankfort-on-the-Main. A tract written by Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati, "Original Shift in Days of Illuminations," was recovered from the dead messenger, containing the secret society's long-range plan for "The New World Order through world revolution".
The Bavarian Government outlawed the society and in 1787 published the details of The Illuminati conspiracy in "The Original Writings of the Order and Sect of the Illuminati."
In Adam Weishaupt's own words:
"By this plan, we shall direct all mankind in this manner. And, by the simplest means, we shall set all in motion and in flames. The occupations must be so allotted and contrived that we may, in secret, influence all political transactions."
There is disagreement among scholars as to whether or not the Illuminati survived its banishment. Nevertheless, the group had been quite successful in attracting members and had allied itself with the extensive Masonic networks.
The Illuminati was publicly founded May 1, 1776 at the University of Ingolstadt by Weishaupt, Professor of Canon Law. It was a very "learned" society; Weishaupt drew the earliest members of his new order from among his students.
On December 5, 1776, students at William and Mary College founded a secret society, Phi Beta Kappa. A second chapter was formed, at Yale, in 1780. The anti-Masonic movement in the United States during the 1820s held groups such as Phi Beta Kappa in a bad light. Because of pressure, the society went public. This is noted by some researchers as the direct cause of the appearance of Yale's Order of Skull and Bones.
In "The Cyclopedia Of Fraternities", a genealogical chart of general Greek-Letter college fraternities in the United States, shows Phi Beta Kappa as "the parent of all the fraternal systems in [American] higher education." There is only one "side" lineal descendant: the Yale chapter of 1780. The line then continues to Skull and Bones in 1832, and on through the other "only at Yale" senior societies, Scroll & Key and Wolf's Head.
Phi Beta Kappa is the "first three Greek letters, for 'Philosophia Biou Kubernetes' or 'Love of wisdom, the helmsman of life'." A skull homophone is scull, a quick, gliding boat and part of Skull & Bones first nomenclature.
John Robison, a professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh University in Scotland and a member of a Freemason Lodge, said that he was asked to join the Illuminati. After study, he concluded the purposes of the Illuminati were not for him.
In 1798, he published a book called "Proofs Of A Conspiracy":
"An association has been formed for the express purpose of rooting out all the religious establishments and overturning all the existing governments.... the leaders would rule the World with uncontrollable power, while all the rest would be employed as tools of the ambition of their unknown superiors."
"Proofs of A Conspiracy" was sent to George Washington. Responding to the sender of the book with a letter, the president said he was aware the Illuminati were in America. He felt that the Illuminati had "diabolical tenets" and that their object was "a separation of the People from their government."
In "Proofs Of A Conspiracy", Robison printed the ceremony of initiation of the "Regent degree" in Illuminism. In it "a skeleton is pointed out to him [the initiate], at the feet of which are laid a crown and a sword. He is asked 'whether that is the skeleton of a king, nobleman or a beggar.' As he cannot decide, the president of the meeting says to him, 'The character of being a man is the only one that is importance'".
This is, essentially, the same as the writing in the Skull & Bones "tomb":
"Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, Bettler oder Kaiser? Ob Arm, ob Reich, im Tode gleich."
Which reads:
"Who was the fool, who the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all's the same in death."
When a person is initiated into Skull & Bones, they are given a new name, similar to the practice of the Illuminati. And many recorded Illuminati members can be shown to have contact and/or strong influences with many of the professors that taught "Bonesmen" in Berlin.
When a secret society conspires against the sovereignty of a king, they need to organize, raise funds, make their plans operational, and hopefully bring them to fruition.
Could we have in the United States a secret society that has used the "National Security State" as a cover for their nefarious plans?
"That September [1951], Robert Lovett replaced Marshall as secretary of defense. Meanwhile, Harriman was named director of the Mutual Security Agency, making him the U.S. chief of the Anglo-American military alliance. By now, Brown Brothers, Harriman was everything but commander-in-chief.
"A central focus of the Harriman security regime in Washington (1950-53) was the organization of covert operations and 'psychological warfare.' Harriman, together with his lawyers and business partners, Allen and John Foster Dulles, wanted the government's secret services to conduct extensive propaganda campaigns and mass-psychology experiments within the U.S.A., and paramilitary campaigns abroad....
"The Harriman security regime created the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) in 1951. The man appointed director of the PSB [was] Gordon Gray.... Gordon's brother, R.J. Reynolds chairman Bowman Gray Jr., was also a naval intelligence officer, known around Washington as the 'founder of operational intelligence.' Gordon Gray became a close friend and political ally of Prescott Bush; and Gray's son became for Prescott's son, George, his lawyer and the shield of his covert policy."
So you have the Whitney/Stimson/Bundy clan and the Harriman/Bush boys wielding a tremendous amount of influence on the political, economic and social affairs of America and the world. Then you have Prescott Bush's buddy Richard Nixon as an activist vice-president. Then, a nation-chilling assassination, some time under LBJ with the Bundy boys keeping things in line, then Nixon as President with "Bonesmen" aides Ray Price ('51) and Richard A. Moore. Some time out for a Trilateralist-Democrat-patsy president, followed by Prescott's son as an activist vice-president under Reagan. Next, we get a Skull and Bones president who declares a "New World Order" while beating up on his business partner, Saddam Hussein.
After twelve years of Republican administrations, Bush passes the reins to his drug smuggling buddy from Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who studied at Yale Law School. According to some researchers, Clinton was recruited as a CIA operative while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Could this be the "old Hegallian historical dialectic process"?
Will we get another failed Democratic administration? A scandal as disgraceful as Nixon's fall? When Robert P. Johnson (William Barr) told Clinton in a bunker in Arkansas that "you are our fair-haired boy, but you do have competition for the job you seek. We would never put all our eggs in one basket. You and your state have been our greatest asset.... Mr. Casey wanted me to pass on to you, that unless you fuck up and do something stupid, you are number one on our short list for shot at the job you always wanted."
So, you have William Casey -- CIA Director, George Bush's campaign manager and Sovereign Knight of Malta -- speaking through the proxy of George Bush's last Attorney General to George's rival in the 1992 federal elections. Is it all just a show and sham for U.S. hoi polloi?
Perhaps so, if there exists the type of control over the electoral process as told by Mae Brussell and the suppressed book "VoteScam," written by Jim and Ken Collier:
"...Your vote and mine may now be a meaningless bit of energy directed by preprogrammed computers-which can be fixed to select certain pre-ordained candidates and leave no footprints or paper trail.
"In short, computers are covertly stealing your vote.
"--For almost three decades the American vote has been subject to government-sponsored electronic theft.
"--The vote has been stolen from you by a cartel of federal "national security" bureaucrats, who include higher-ups in the Central Intelligence Agency, political party leaders, Congressmen, co-opted journalists -- and the owners and managers -- of the major Establishment news media, who have decided in concert that how America's votes are counted, by whom they are counted and how the results are verified and delivered to the public is, as one of them put it, 'Not a proper area of inquiry.'
"--By means of an unofficial private corporation named News Election Service (NES), the Establishment press has actual physical control of the counting and dissemination of the vote, and it refuses to let the public know how it is done."
Is the American electorate subjected to cyclic propaganda, pre-selected candidates and winners, and psychological warfare to alienate Americans from the institutions established to serve them by the Constitution? Are the Democratic and Republican National Parties used for a Hegellian experiment in controlled conflict?
Pamela Churchill Harriman, Averil's wife, is one of the Democratic Party's biggest fund-raisers. She once gave Bill a job as director of her "PAM PAC" when he was defeated for governor in 1980. Bill paid her back by appointing her as Ambassador to France.
Another Harriman/Bush friend, Eugene Stetson ('34), was an assistant manager for Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers, Harriman's New York office. He organized the H. Smith Richardson Foundation. The foundation, in the late 1950s, participated in the MKULTRA, the CIA's domestic covert psychological warfare operation. The Richardson Foundation helped to finance the testing of psychotropic drugs, including LSD, at Bridgewater Hospital in Massachusetts, the center of some of the most brutal MK-ULTRA experiments.
During the Iran-Contra operations, the H. Smith Richardson Foundation was a "private donors steering committee," working with the National Security Council to co-ordinate the Office of Public Diplomacy. This was an effort to propagandize in favor of and run cover for the Iran-Contra operations, and to coordinate published attacks on opponents of the program.
The H. Smith Richardson Foundation also runs the Center for Creative Leadership at Langley to "train leaders of the CIA," as well as another center near Greensboro, North Carolina, that trains CIA and Secret Service Agents. Almost everyone who achieves the military rank of general also gets this training.
This is just the tip of an iceberg. You also have eugenics and population control, suppressed history and technology, yearly retreats, profitable partnerships with brutal dictators, deals with "terrorists", the involvement of the Knights of Malta, war- mongering and profiteering, mind-control, secret societies for teens, ritual magic and more -- all spinning the dark threads in the web of conspiracy that our spinning blue ball has gotten caught in.
We've got a whole new crop of "Bonesmen" coming up, including George H.W. Bush's son George W. Bush ('68), Governor of Texas.
When Don Schollander ('68), the Olympic gold-medalist and only known Skull and Bones member living in Portland, was contacted by Willamette Week reporter John Schrang regarding his involvement in the Order, he said, "It's really something I can't talk about."
Not wouldn't, but "couldn't".
In wake of Antony Sutton's first ground-breaking exposes of the Order, the Sterling Library at Yale has refused to allow any other researchers access to the Russell Trust papers.
Daniel Gilman, like most Bonesmen, makes no mention of Skull & Bones or the Russell Trust in his memoirs or biographies.
So, are we all just 'fodder" for a secret society with satanic overtones that is attempting to form a one world government with themselves at the helm? Or is the Order of Skull and Bones just a bunch of frat boys from Yale? Wanna bet your future on it?
"George Bush; The Unauthorized Biography"
Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin
ftp://tezcat.com/patriot
"Two Faces of George Bush"
By Anthony C. Sutton
Wiswell Ruffin House 1988
"George Bush: An Intimate Portrait"
By Fitzhugh Green
Hippocrene Books
"The Immaculate Deception: The Bush Crime Family Exposed"
By Russell S. Bowen (ret. Brigadier General, U. S. Army)
America West Publishers 1991
"Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA -- How the Presidency was Co-opted
by the CIA"
By Terry Reed & John Cummings
Spi Books 1994
"The Mafia, C.I.A. & George Bush: Corruption, Greed and Abuse of Power
in the Nation's Highest Office -- The Untold Story Of America's Greatest
Financial Debacle"
By Pete Brewton
SPI Books 1992
"The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan
Era"
By Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott & Jane Hunter
South End Press 1987
"October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald
Reagan"
By Gary Slick
Times Books , Random House 1991
"The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History"
Editors - Peter Kornbluh & Malcom Byrne
The New Press 1993
"For Operation Zapata - The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-63"
By Michael R. Beschloss
Edward Burlingame Books 1991
"La Batalla de Giron"
By Quintin Pino Machado
La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales 1983
This source quotes one ship as the "Barbara J." According to Quintin Pino Machado, the "Houston" had been given the new name of "Aguja" (Swordfish) and the "Barbara" that of "Barracuda" for the purposes of this operation.
"Bay of Pigs, The Untold Story"
By Peter Wyden
Simon and Schuster 1979
This book also mentions the "Barbara J."
"An Introduction to the Order"
By Anthony Sutton
Veritas publishing 1988
"America's Secret Establishment: An introduction to The Order of Skull &
Bones"
By Anthony Sutton
Liberty House 1986
"A Brief History of the Skull & Bones Society at Yale University"
By John Lawerence
Private Paper 1991
"The Last Secrets of Skull and Bones"
By Ron Rosenbaum
Esquire Magazine, September, 1977
"Yale Society Resists Peeks Into Its Crypt"
By David W. Dunlap
New York Times, 11/4/88
"Skull and Bones -- Bush's Boy's Club"
By Peggy Alder-Robohm (researcher)
Covert Action Quarterly No. 33 (Winter 1990)
"Skeleton in His Closet"
By John Schrag
Willamette Week, September 19-25, 1991
"The Cyclopedia Of Fraternities"
By Albert Stevens, ed.
E. B. Treat and Company 1907
"The Philosophy of Right (1821)"
"The Philosophy of History"
By Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Great Books, Encyclopedia Brittanica 1952
"Life of the Party: The Biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward
Harriman"
By Christopher Ogden
Little and Brown and Company 1994
"Who's Who of the Elite"
By Robert Gaylon Ross, Sr.
RIE 1995
"Youth from Every Quarter: A Bicentennial History Of Phillips Academy,
Andover"
By Frederick S. Allis, Jr.
Phillips Academy 1979
"The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made"
By Walter Issacson & Evan Thomas
Simon & Schuster, Touchstone Books 1988
"Born of the Blood"
By John Robison
"Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare"
By Michael Hoffman II
Wiswell Ruffin House 1989/1992
"The Occult Conspiracy: Secret Societies -- Their Influence and Power in
World History"
By Michael Howard
Destiny Books 1989
"The Sword and the Grail: Of The Grail and the Templars and a True Discovery
of America"
By Andrew Sinclair
Crown Publishers 1992
"Cloak & Gown: Scholars of the Secret War, 1939-1961"
By Robin W. Winks
William Morrow, Quill Edition 1987
"OSS: The Secret History of America's First Central Intelligence Agency"
By R. Harris Smith
University of California 1972
"Defrauding America: A Pattern Of Related Scandals -- Dirty Secrets Of The
CIA And Other Government Operations"
By Rodney Stich
Diablo Western Press 1993
"The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the U.S. and the
World"
By Fletcher Prouty
Prentice Hall 1973
"The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money & the CIA"
By Jonathan Kwitney
Norton 1987
"Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover"
By Anthony Summers
Pocket Star Books 1993/1994
"Kiss The Boy's Goodbye: How The United States Betrayed It's Own POWs In
Vietnam"
By Monika Jensen Stevens & William Stevenson
Plume 1991
"The Chinese Opium Wars"
By Jack Breeching
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1975
"Dope, Inc.: The Book that Drove Kissenger Crazy"
By the Editors of Executive Intelligence Review
Executive Intelligence Review 1992
"The Proper Bostonians"
By Cleveland Amory
E. P. Dutton 1947
"The Politics of Heroin in S.E. Asia"
By Alfred McCoy
Harper & Row 1991
"The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism"
By Henrik Kruger
South End Press 1980
"Double Cross: The Explosive, Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled
America"
By Sam & Chuck Giancana
Warner Books 1992
"The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War"
By Peter Dale Scott
Bobbs-Merril 1972
"The Soong Dynasty"
By Sterling Seagrave
Harper & Row, Perennial Library 1986
"America's Secret Aristocracy"
By Stephen Bingham
Berkley Books 1990
"The Big White Lie: The Deep Cover Operation that Exposed the CIA Sabotage
of the Drug War"
By Michael Levine
Thunder's Mouth Press 1993
"Agency of Fear"
By Edward Jay Epstein
Verso 1990
"Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration's Secret War in
Nicaragua, the Illegal Bombs Pipeline, and the Contra Drug Connection"
By Leslie Cockburn
Little Brown 1987
"The Guns 'n' Drugs Reader"
By various authors
Prevailing Winds Research 1991
"Contrabandista!"
By Evert Clark & Nicholas Hoorock
Preger 1973
"Blacklisted News, Secret History: from Chicago, '68 to 1984"
By The New Yippie Book Collective
Bleecker Publishing 1983
"Storming Heaven: LSD and The American Dream"
By Jay Stevens
Harper Row 1987
"Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas & Hidden History"
By Jim Kieth, ed.
Feral House 1993
"The Role of Richard Nixon and George Bush in the Assassination of President
Kennedy"
By Paul Kangas
The Realist, Summer 1991
"Treason For My Daily Bread"
By Mikhail Lebedev
Vallancey Press 1977
"Hired To Kill Oswald And Prevent The Assassination Of JFK: Richard Case
Nagell Is -- The Man Who Knew Too Much"
By Dick Russell
Carroll & Graf 1992
The Torbitt Document: "Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal" (1970)
By William Torbitt (David Copeland?)
Prevailing Winds Research 1991
"Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic Fascist Networks
and Their Effect on U. S. Cold War Politics"
By Russ Bellant
South End Press 1989,1990,1991
"The Borman Brotherhood"
By William Stevenson
HBJ 1973 NY
"American Swastika: The Shocking Story of Nazi Collaborators in Our Midst
from 1933 to the Present Day"
By Charles Higham
Doubleday and Co, 1985
"Operation Sunrise"
By Bradley F. Smith & Elena Agarossi
Basic Books 1979
"Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientist and Project
Paperclip, 1945 to 1990"
By Linda Hunt
St. Martin's Press, 1991
"Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot
1933-1949"
By Charles Higham
Delacorte Press 1983
"Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution"
By Antony Sutton
Arlington House 1974
"Conspiracy, Mind Control & The New World Order: A Nation Of Sheep"
By William Lederer
W.W. Norton 1961
"Who Rules America? A Century of Invisible Government"
By John McConaughy
Longmans, Green and Co. 1934
"New World Order: The Ancient Plan of Secret Societies"
By William Still
Huntington House 1990
"Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time"
By Carroll Quigley
Macmillan Company 1966
"The Secret life of Ronald Reagan"
By Larry Flynt & Donald Freed
Prevailing Winds Research 1991
"Architects Of Conspiracy: An Intriguing History"
By William P. Hoar
Western Islands 1984
"Trance Formation Of America"
By Cathy O'Brien & Mark Phillips
Global Trance Formation Info Ltd. 1995
"Casebook On Alternative 3: UFO's Secret Societies and World Control"
By Jim Keith
Illuminet Press 1994
"Millennium: Peace, Promises, and the Day They Take Our Money Away"
By Tex Marrs
Living Truth Publishers 1990
"The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska"
By John DeCamp
AWT, Inc. 1992
"Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes: From JFK to the CIA Terrorist
Connection"
By Jonathan Vankin
Paragon House 1992 Dell edt
"Witness To A Century"
By George Seldes
Ballantine Books 1987
"The Power Elite"
By C. Wright Mills
Oxford University Press 1956
http://www.ctrl.org/essay1/index.html
http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/story.asp?ID=4136
This column ran on page 1 in the 4/23/01 edition of The New York Observer.
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 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.
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!"
http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/story.asp?ID=4136
From http://www.ctrl.org
[The following is from a "white paper" written for Japanese readership. The
views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of ctrl.org or
its editors]
George Bush, Skull & Bones and the New World Order
Paul Goldstein
Jeffrey Steinberg
George Bush, Skull & Bones and the New World Order
A New American View -- International Edition White Paper
April 1991
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction .............................ii
The Order of Skull & Bones.......... ......2
Initiation and Ritual......................7
The Spartan Model ........................10
Henry Stimson: Master Bonesman............13
Stimson's Kindergarten and the Cold War...16
Vietnam: The Bonesmen's Debacle.......... 19
Bush in Profile...........................23
The Order's Network.......................25
The New World Order.......................28
The Persian Gulf War......................31
Implications for Japan ...................34
Bibliography..............................38
Some Prominent Members....................39
Selected Quotations.......................43
Introduction
This special report is intended to assist the Japanese audience in more fully
understanding the present policies of the United States under the administration
of President George Bush. It explains the thinking behind America's military
adventure in the Persian Gulf and its current attitudes toward the Middle
East region.
In so doing, we provide a glimpse into the most powerful organization in
America--the Order of Skull & Bones. This secret fraternity is based
at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where many of the leading members
of the U.S. government and the American intelligence community received their
formal education. The Order, as it is referred to by its members, is a bastion
of White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) culture, which is at the core of the
American 20th century outlook.
The reader will learn that President George Herbert Walker Bush's concept
of the New World Order is an old idea, one which has its origins in the
philosophy and beliefs of the secret Skull & Bones fraternity. Today
in particular, this is the prevailing outlook of the U.S. government, many
of whose most influential members, like the president himself, are part of
the Skull & Bones network. These men seek to recreate the American imperium
of the immediate post-World War II period, an era which President Bush frequently
refers to as "the American Century."
The powerful men of Skull & Bones genuinely believe that they have a
strategic and moral "right" to control world affairs. Consequently, they
take upon themselves the authority to crush any rivalrous threat to U.S.
imperial leadership, whether by current allies, such as Japan, Germany or
Great Britain, or by Cold War adversaries, like the Soviet Union. The members
of the Order, due to their narrow WASP upbringing, view with particular suspicion
the maneuverings of Zionist Israel and its affluent, influential lobby in
the United States.
Bush, his fellow Bonesmen and their like-thinking elitist allies in the American
Establishment see themselves as New World Order warriors, an American samurai
caste of sorts, whose mission is restoring American greatness. They intend
to utilize the institutional networks of the U.S. government and key private
agencies, such as the New York Council on Foreign Relations, to advance their
purpose.
The Skull & Bones members believe in the idea of "constructive chaos."
By keeping their true policy intentions secret, by constantly sending out
mixed signals on all critical policy issues, they consciously seek to sow
confusion among both their nominal "friends" and "enemies" alike.
The fulcrum for the policy of constructive chaos is, at present, the Middle
East situation. Although U.S. military action in the region has for the time
being subsided, America's military power will remain a critical determinant
in the future of that vital zone of conflict. American military power is
aimed at securing undisputed control over the vast reservoir of oil -- not
at necessarily fostering any permanent alignment of local states or combinations
of regional interests.
If President George Bush and his fellow true believers are successful, the
United States will be first among equals in the New World Order. This is
their goal. It is also the quest of the Bonesmen of the Order of Skull &
Bones -- America's warrior aristocracy.
THE ORDER OF SKULL & BONES
Skull & Bones was founded at Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut in
1832. It is the oldest and most prestigious of Yale's seven secret societies.
Among the others are: Scroll & Key, Book & Snake, Wolf's Head, Eliahu,
and Berzelius. These fraternities serve as a recruiting ground for young
men destined for careers in government, law, finance and other influential
sectors of American life. Skull & Bones is the elite of the elite among
these secret societies. Only Scroll & Key can claim a near equal influence
on American affairs over the past 160 years.
Unlike the Greek fraternities on most other American university campuses,
Skull & Bones and its similar secret societies exist exclusively at Yale.
They are not part of any nationwide public association. The other elite Ivy
League colleges, Harvard and Princeton have similar exclusive secret societies.
Yet, even among these few universities, the secret societies of Yale -- led
by Skull & Bones -- are unchallenged in their influence on American political
affairs.
According to some accounts, the Skull & Bones secret society at Yale
has an underground affiliation with two other societies which were simultaneously
founded at two other locations. The number "322" that appears under the skull
and crossbones on the Order's emblem is believed to indicate the year of
its founding -- 1832 -- and the fact that it is the second lodge within an
international system. By some accounts, the lodge holding the number "1"
is in Germany and the lodge numbered "3" is based at another American
college.
Since its founding, Skull & Bones has only inducted about 2,500 members.
At any given time, only about 600 or so members of the Order are alive. This
small number underscores the tremendous concentration of power in the hands
of its members.
If the members of Skull & Bones were to select a Hall of Fame from among
their own elite ranks, some of the people whose names would almost certainly
appear at the top of the list would be:
* Alphonso Taft, a founding member of the Order who served as the Secretary
of War under President Rutherford B. Hayes (1876-1880).
* William Howard Taft, the only man to ever serve as both the President of
and Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
* Henry Lewis Stimson, partner in the Wall Street law firm of Root and Stimson,
Secretary of War under President Taft (1908-1912), Governor General of the
Philippines (1926-1928), Secretary of State under President Herbert Hoover
(1929-1933) and Secretary of War under Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt
and Harry S. Truman (1940-1946).
* Averell Harriman, investment banker with Brown Brothers Harriman, director
of the Lend-Lease program of the U.S. State Department (1941-1942), U.S.
Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1943-1946), Governor of New York, Under Secretary
of State for Asia (1961-1963), and presidential secret envoy to Soviet leaders
Stalin, Krushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov.
* Robert Lovett, partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, Assistant Secretary
of War for Air (1941-1945), Deputy Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Defense
(1950), leading member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations.
* Harold Stanley, investment banker, founder of Morgan Stanley.
* Robert A. Taft, United States Senator (1938-1950).
* Prescott Bush, investment banker and partner in Brown Brothers Harriman,
United States Senator from Connecticut, father of George Herbert Walker Bush
* George Herbert Walker Bush, United States Congressman (1964-1970), Chairman
of the Republican National Committee, United States Ambassador to the United
Nations, first American Diplomatic Liaison to the Peoples Republic of China,
Director of the Central Intelligence Ageney (1975-1977). Vice President of
the United States (1980-1988), President of the United States (1988- ).
* John Thomas Daniels, agro-industrialist, founder of Archer Daniels Midland.
* Hugh Wilson, foreign service officer, Counselor to Japan (1911- 1921),
U.S. Minister to Switzerland (1924-1927), Assistant Secretary of State
(1937-1938). Ambassador to Germany 1938), Special Assistant to the Secretary
of State (1939-1941), Office of Strategic Services (1941-1945)
The members of the Order of Skull & Bones, true to their firm belief
in "constructive confusion," have intentionally allowed a series of conflicting
mythologies to spring up about the origins and history of their secret
fraternity. According to one version of the Order's founding, it was an outgrowth
of an earlier British or Scottish freemasonic grouping first established
at All Soul's College at Oxford University in the late 17th century. Another
version of the history of Skull & Bones is that it grew out of the German
"nationalistic" secret .societies of the early 19th century. Still a third
explanation is that Skull & Bones is an uniquely American institution
which adopted some of the rituals of European freemasonry, but molded these
rituals and beliefs into a new form.
Regardless of these conflicting accounts, it can be stated with certainty
that the Order was first established on the Yale campus in 1832 It was officially
incorporated only in 1856 under the name Russell Trust Association. According
to virtually all the available biographical data on its early members, the
money required to sustain the secret order's campus affairs and its broader
role in placing its members into key positions of influence upon their graduation
from Yale, derived from the opium trade in the Far East. That trade was set
up by the British East India Company and was flourishing by the time the
Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783 ending the American War for Independence.
The East India Company during this period was controlled by the Baring Brothers
Bank (Toward the closing decades of the 17th century, the British House of
Rothschild would supplant the Baring Brothers as the controlling financial
interests in the China opium trade.
Through the sponsorship of the Barings and also the Rothschilds, a number
of leading New England families, some of whom had sided with Great Britain
during the American Revolution, were brought into the opium trade as junior
partners. These merchant families ran fleets of clipper ships and became
in many cases fabulously wealthy as the result of their association with
the British East India Company. Among these key New England merchant families
were: Cabot, Coolidge, Forbes, Higginson, Sturgis, Lodge, Lowell, Perkins
and Russell.
These New England merchant families founded the United Fruit Company and
the Bank of Boston. The founding families of Skull & Bones included the
Russell and Perkins families, Over several generations, however, all these
families heavily intermarried and became, in effect, one extended power
grouping.
William Huntington Russell incorporated Skull & Bones as the Russell
Trust Association. Throughout the 20th century, the Russell Trust Association
listed the New York City headquarters of Brown Brothers Harriman as its
address.
Russell was valedictorian of his class at Yale in 1833. He and his Skull
& Bones comrades considered themselves to be a special elite among the
merchant banking and Puritan pilgrim elite of Yale. They took the Puritan
beliefs of the early New England settlers, that they were "elected by God,"
and pre-ordained to rule North America.
The founding of Yale College in 1701 pre-dates the American Revolution by
several generations. Many of the founders of Yale were righteous men of the
Puritan heritage who devoutly believed in God and country. Some of these
patriotic souls later made up the core of Benjamin Franklin's political coalition
which ultimately broke with the mother country, Great Britain. Many graduates
of Yale were active in the American Revolution and the founding of the United
States.
Two critics of the Order, historian Antony Sutton and investigative journalist
Ron Rosenbaum (himself a Yale graduate), both concluded that Skull &
Bones has degenerated since its founding and has taken on more of the occult
and ritualistic trappings of the majority of European freemasonic and Illuminati
secret societies. Sutton charges that the Order is secretly known among its
initiates as the "Brotherhood of Death" and has become an evil instrument
in the hands of America's secret power elite. Rosenbaum claims that the society's
Germanic origins are inherently wicked and pre-Nazi.
In a long 1977 article in Esquire magazine, Rosenbaum charged that the Skull
& Bones building on the Yale campus houses remnants from Hitler's private
collection of silver. While these stories cannot be dismissed out of hand,
it must be noted that authors Rosenbaum and Sutton may be biased. As a young
Jewish student at Yale, Rosenbaum was almost automatically excluded on religious
grounds from the inner sanctum of the campus's secret societies. Sutton,
a British-born eccentric historian, proudly admits his strong British biases,
frequently citing philosopher John Stuart Mill as the spiritual mentor in
his book on the Order.
Despite the possible personal biases in these two accounts of the history
of the Order of Skull & Bones, it must be acknowledged that the membership
of the society has tended over generations to converge upon a small group
of New England families who have intermarried and then sponsored their sons
and nephews into the Order. This kind of inbreeding always tends to produce
narrow-mindedness and prejudice against outsiders, which can be a serious
shortcoming, particularly among individuals responsible for charting the
course of a nation as powerful as the United States.
It can be documented by comparing the family charts of the early Bonesmen
that there is today a core group of no more than 20 to 30 families who form
the nucleus of the Order. The majority are old-line Puritan families who
came to North America in the very first wave of settlers in the 17th century.
Among these prominent families are: Whitney, Lord, Phelps. Wadsworth, Allen,
Bundy, Adams, Stimson, Taft, Gilman and Perkins. A second group of families
in the Skull & Bones core earned fabulous fortunes during the 18th and
19th centuries and thus won a rite of passage into the New England elite,
even though they were not among the earliest settlers. The leading Skull
& Bones families in this second category are: Harriman, Rockefeller,
Payne, Davison, Pillsbury and Weyerhauser.
A few of the Jewish banking families who made their way from Germany to the
United States during the 18th and l9th centuries were eventually granted
limited access to the WASP inner sanctums. Some families, like the Schiff,
Warburg, Guggenheim and Meyer families, were unofficially designated as
intermediaries between the New England WASPs and their cousins in London.
This was especially true after the Rothschild interests supplanted the Anglican
Baring group as the most powerful financial cabal in the City of London.
Some of these German Jewish families became so absorbed into the WASP or
Anglican society that they eventually converted from Judaism to Protestantism
and were gradually ostracized from the Jewish aristocracy.
The WASP families, however, never saw the prominent Jewish investment banking
families of America as equals. The Jews were considered politically and
culturally different by the WASPs, and have never been accepted into the
latter's inner circle. For the most part, these Jewish merchant bankers are
viewed with suspicion and distrust by the members of the Order. Moreover,
the Jewish fraternal societies, such as B'nai B'rith, were formed out of
the British-based Scottish Rite Freemasonry. Their sponsors in America, the
Rothschilds and the Cecil Rhodes Trust (also known as the British Round Table
Group), are connected with the British Foreign Office and its secret intelligence
apparatus.
INITIATION AND RITUAL
To be initiated into the Order of Skull & Bones, one must endure a ritual
of selection called "tapping". It is conducted by 15 senior classmen of Yale
University who make up the current membership of the secret society. They
select 15 members of the junior class to be the Bonesmen the following year.
Historically, Skull & Bones kept blacks, Jews and all other non-WASPs
from its ranks. Within the last 30 years, however, token members from these
groups have been occasionally selected to join. Thus, in the most recent
list of initiates to the Order, there is one Yalie with a Jewish surname
and even one with a Chinese name. According to author Rosenbaum, in recent
years, the Order has inducted members of homosexual rights groups on the
campus into its ranks.
Among the criterion for selection -- apart from family ties to the order,
which has always been an important factor -- is what is referred to by historians
and members as the "Three Ordeals." These ordeals are intended to measure
the prospective Bonesman's ability to "make it" in the world beyond the
university campus.
The first ordeal is boarding school. The overwhelming majority of Bonesmen,
given their wealthy blueblood family pedigrees, attend one of the prestigious
New England preparatory schools, i.e, private high schools. (Whereas a large
number of the most elite of the Harvard University students attend Groton,
a school with close ties to the Anglican-Episcopal Church, where they receive
a thoroughly Anglophilic education, the preferred prep schools for the future
Bonesmen are the two Puritan Calvinist-sponsored Phillips Academies.)
The second of the ordeals is that of nature. The prospective Bonesmen are
judged on their skills as outdoorsmen. Hunting in the New England countryside
or, better yet, traveling to distant locations like Africa, the jungles of
South America or even the American badlands of the Plains states, is a
prerequisite for admission to the Spartan elite ranks of the Order.
The third of the ordeals is war. The experience of combat during wartime
is considered to be of special significance for the Bonesmen, who see themselves
as the elite of the New England WASP warrior caste. Many Yale Bonesmen of
President George Bush's generation, as the result of the outbreak of World
War II, went directly from prep school into the military service prior to
their entering Yale. For a majority of Bonesmen, the preferred military service
has historically been with the U.S. Navy. During World II the Naval air corp
was a particularly important track for future Bones initiates. In peacetime,
participation at Yale in military officer's training is desirable but not
essential. The commitment to enter some branch of the military upon graduation
is viewed with favor.
After the formal selection of the next group of prospective Bonesmen, there
is an invitation followed by a formal initiation ceremony. First the 15 senior
class members who are the members of the Order select a group of junior class
members who are to be "tapped" for Skull & Bones. A group of Bonesmen
proceed to the dormitory room of the "tappee." Upon reaching the door, they
pound loudly. When the prospective member opens the door, a Bonesman will
tap him on the shoulder and yell, "Skull and Bones: Do you accept?" If the
candidate accepts, a message wrapped with a black ribbon sealed by black
wax with the skull and crossbones emblem and the mystical Bones number 322
is handed to the "tappee." The message appoints a time and a place for the
candidate to appear on initiation night. Candidates are instructed to wear
no metal objects or clothing.
According to a 1940 Skull & Bones document, the initiation ceremony involves
the following kinds of things: "New man placed in coffin -- carried into
central part of building. New man chanted over and reborn into society. Removed
from coffin and given robes with symbols on it. A bone with his name on it
is tossed into the bone heap at the start of every meeting."
Within the Skull & Bones Crypt, also known as "the Tomb," there is what
is referred to as a "sacred room" with the number 322, On the arched wall
about the vault entrance is inscribed in German: "Who was the fool, who was
the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all's the same in
death."
This quotation from a German Freemasonic ritual remains a source of controversy
surrounding the origins of Skull & Bones. It is one of the bits of "evidence"
cited by some of the Order's most ardent critics that the group is "Nazi
like" and singularly "Germanic". In fact, the rituals of the Order are very
much like the rituals employed by Scottish and English freemasonic lodges.
Some of the mystery and confusion surrounding these occult symbols and rituals
is intentionally fostered by the Order itself. Among the principles taught
to the members of the Yale secret society are the value of ambiguity and
secrecy. These values are not taught as part of a purely mystical or occult
quasi-religion. They are taught as valuable tools to be applied by the Bonesmen
when they leave the insulated environment of the Yale campus and become officials
of government, the intelligence community, the military or the private
sector.
A careful study of the often confusing and self-contradictory behavior and
public statements of President Bush and his closest advisers throughout the
months of the Persian Gulf crisis of last year and war that followed offers
a valuable example of how ambiguity and secrecy are applied by Bonesmen.
For the initiates of the Order, the question of whether secrecy and ambiguity
are used for the purpose of accomplishing "good" or "evil" is of secondary
importance. Secrecy and ambiguity are essential instruments for wielding
power. The effective wielding of power is one of the overarching goals of
all Bonesmen. The secret ties built up during the Bonesmen's senior year
of active membership in the Order are maintained for life. Those ties link
each Bonesman to every other initiate, especially to those initiates who
were members of the Order in the same year.
Thus, every member of Skull & Bones is, in real and practical terms,
part of a small elite group of young Yale graduates -- most from wealthy
and powerful WASP families -- who enter the world of politics, business,
finance, intelligence or education and who proceed to make their mark on
the world.
According to several sources, President George Bush to this day frequently
consults with several of his fellow Yale Bonesmen, and has, on occasion,
called upon Skull & Bones members to carry out secret diplomatic missions
for the White House.
THE SPARTAN MODEL
These rites of passage into the upper ranks of the WASP Establishment are
capped by the experience the Bonesmen go through in their final year at Yale
-- the year in which they actively participate in the Order. For the vast
majority of the initiates, the process of inculcation with the ideas of WASP
supremacy, an American Calvinist version of what British imperialist writer
Rudyard Kipling called the "White Man's Burden," began at prep school.
According to the biographical accounts of a number of the leading Bonesmen,
the prep school experience is paramount. At prep school, intellectual pursuits
are encouraged, but special emphasis is also placed on athletic performance.
Future Yale Bonesmen are expected to excel in some team sport, such as baseball
and football, both American inventions. (Members of Skull & Bones were
involved in the development of both games.) Team sports supposedly prepare
the future Bonesman to accept leadership responsibility, and more importantly,
teach him to "respect the rules of the game."
According to one biographer, when George Bush was a Yale undergraduate he
was a member of the university baseball team. Although he was apparently
not a very good baseball player, he eventually became captain of the Yale
team. One day during the Yale baseball season, he excitedly visited his mother
to proudly proclaim that he had hit his first home run. She reportedly looked
back at him with patrician coolness, and asked, "Yes, George, but did your
team win the game?"
The particular emphasis on team sports during the prep school and Yale years
is, according to several historians, part of the Spartan training that is
so essential to the Skull & Bones philosophy. In the world of Skull &
Bones, one of the greatest virtues is the ability to steer the nation into
war and to successfully prosecute the war.
To the Bonesmen, the use of military power is a natural and essential corollary
to political power. The Bonesmen are taught that, although ideas have their
place, to truly transform history, military force is almost always required.
Critics of the Order have pointed out that this philosophy of power and the
imperial use of military force comes straight from the chronicles of the
Roman Empire -- especially the Roman Empire during its phase of decline and
collapse.
The criticism may prove to be most prophetically true of the current generation
of Bonesmen who are leading the United States under the presidency of George
Bush. During the final phase of the Roman Empire, legions were deployed out
around the world to conquer and subjugate vast territories, while back in
Rome, there was a breakdown, a crisis in which the entire social and cultural
fabric of the early Roman republic was eroding and giving way to something
akin to the drug, rock-sex counterculture of today. The Roman imperial policy
of attempting to gloss over the decadence at home by engaging in constant
wars of expansion led ultimately to the total collapse of Rome.
In this regard, the Spartan-Roman imperial outlook of the American WASP warrior
caste, exemplified by Skull & Bones, cannot be precisely compared to
the Japanese samurai code of Bushido. The Japanese Bushido code emphasized
honor among the warriors and presumed a fundamentally moral or ethical vision
of the world.
No such emphasis on morality and honor exists in the code of Skull &
Bones. On the contrary, the Skull & Bones philosophy, according to several
of its most astute critics and historians, emphasizes the "double-cross system."
The "double-cross" is symbolically represented by the crossbones on the emblem
of the Order. According to this philosophy, anyone who is not an initiate
is inferior, and can be lied to and manipulated to further the power of the
WASP Establishment. To the extent that Japanese leaders view their American
WASP counterparts as men of honor whose word is sacred and whose intentions
are presumed to be virtuous, they will miss the fundamental character of
the American imperium. This is of special importance today, with a leading
member of the Skull & Bones system occupying the White House.
Skull & Bones philosophy first manifested itself at the American national
political level in the late l9th century. At that time, the men of the Order
adopted all the critical features of the British imperial system, especially
the belief in the Anglo Saxon God-given right to rule over all the other
races. Even countries like Japan, which were never colonial possessions of
the Anglo-American combination, were viewed as inferior nations to be treated
no differently from the colonies in Africa, India or Latin America.
In 1898, President William McKinley, one of the last of the American presidents
to manifest any of the early republican (anti-British imperialism) traditions
of the Founding Fathers, was under enormous pressure from the Skull &
Bones-led American imperialists. Eventually, he went to war against Spain
to "free" Cuba and seize the Philippines. This was the first time that the
United States entered a war through devious manipulation and purely in order
to expand its territories. It marked the beginning of a new epoch in American
history which would forever alter the vision of the United States. It was
the first evidence that the men of the Order were at the helm of the ship
of state.
President McKinley's capitulation to the WASP warriors would prove to be
fatal to himself and, some would say, for his country, too. The Spanish-American
War of 1898 catapulted the Skull & Bones crowd into a position of dominance
within the Republican Party. At the 1900 party presidential nominating
convention, McKinley was forced to accept Teddy Roosevelt as his vice
presidential running mate. The McKinley-Roosevelt slate was swept into office,
in part as the result of the jingoist climate built up by the just-concluded
Spanish-American War. Those circumstances were not all that different from
the mood that prevails in America in the aftermath of the Gulf War of 1991.
Within months of his inauguration of 1901, President McKinley was assassinated
by an anarchist while traveling through Buffalo, New York. Thus, Teddy Roosevelt
became president, and the Order of Skull & Bones for the first time moved
into the White House. Roosevelt surrounded himself with Bonesmen. His successor
in 1908, William Howard Taft, was himself a second generation member of Skull
& Bones.
HENRY STIMSON: MASTER BONESMAN
According to a January 1991 article by the Washington syndicated columnists
Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, when President George Bush was making his
final decision to use military force to crush Saddam Hussein and decimate
Iraq, he spent most of the Christmas holidays closeted at Camp David reading
a newly published biography of one of his true heroes, fellow Skull &
Bones initiate Henry Stimson. While most White House advisers thought that
the gulf crisis would be ultimately resolved through diplomacy, unbeknownst
to them, President Bush had already decided on the use of devastating military
force -- regardless of what measures the world community or the Iraqi leaders
took to avert war. Intimate Bush advisers described the president as being
in a "mesmerized" state of mind as he walked around the presidential retreat
in the Maryland mountains with his Stimson biography, "The Colonel: The Life
and Wars of Henry Stimson," under his arm at all times.
Indeed, for most contemporary Bonesmen, Henry Lewis Stimson, the quintessential
WASP warrior, was the very personification of the Order's full ascent to
power during the period of World War II.
A member of the Order's class of 1888, Stimson served seven U.S. presidents:
Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft (a fellow Bonesman), Woodrow Wilson,
Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S Truman.
As the Secretary of War under FDR and Truman, Stimson oversaw the Manhattan
Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Stimson personally decided on the
use of that devastating weapon against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Years earlier, as the chairman of the American delegation at the
London Naval Conference and as Secretary of State under President Hoover
(1929-1933), Stimson had played a pivotal role in restricting the size of
the Japanese Imperial Navy. He would be an architect of the FDR 's
administration's economic provocations against Japan which ultimately helped
induce Japan into the attack at Pearl Harbor, thus bringing the United States
formally into World War II. And Stimson was also ultimately responsible for
the FDR administration's decision to intern the Nisei (Japanese-Americans)
after Pearl Harbor.
Yet, it was also Stimson who ordered American bombers to refrain from attacking
the old Japanese imperial capital of Kyoto, a city rich in religious and
historical tradition and artifacts. And, according to at least one of Stimson's
biographers, it was also "the Colonel" who decided at the close of the war
that the Japanese emperor should not be deposed. His sensitivity to Japanese
culture and the importance of allowing Japan to retain honor even in defeat
is widely to his close adviser, Joseph Grew, a longtime U.S. ambassador to
Japan and an accomplished historian. Whether this report of Stimson's involvement
in the decision to maintain the emperor is accurate or whether it underplays
the role of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the fact remains certain that Stimson
was the key policymaker overseeing the postwar occupations of both Japan
and Germany.
To fully understand President George Bush's attitudes and policies toward
Japan, one must first appreciate the overarching influence that Stimson had
on the current occupant of the White House.
According to his British biographer Geofrey Hodgson, Stimson's membership
in Skull & Bones was "the most important educational experience in his
life." Unlike most of his fellow Bonesmen, Stimson earned his membership
solely on the basis of his achievements at Yale -- not through family money.
His parents were not wealthy, although his forefathers did come to America
as early Puritan colonists. But Stimson made up for his lack of financial
credentials by his fierce competitive spirit. As he himself put it, the "idea
of a struggle for prizes, so to speak, has always been one of the fundamental
elements of my mind, and I can hardly conceive of what my feelings would
be if I ever was put in a position or situation in life where there are no
prizes to struggle for."
Although Stimson did not come from classic blueblood background, he married
into wealth and power. His wife, Mabel White, came from a prominent Establishment
family with longstanding ties to the Order. Thus, upon graduation from law
school, Stimson became a partner in the law firm of Eliahu Root, President
Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of War.
Although Stimson and Roosevelt would have a falling out in later years, early
on Roosevelt and Root provided "the Colonel" with the critical sponsorship
and training required to succeed in the world of Establishment politics.
According to Stimson's biographers, Roosevelt would frequently taunt the
young Bonesman about the fact that he, unlike the president, had never been
in the military or fought in any wars. (Roosevelt had resigned as Under Secretary
of the Navy to go off and fight in the Spanish-American War.) Thus, at the
ripe old age of 44, Stimson joined the Army during World War I and served
in the American Expeditionary Force in Europe.
Among the other lasting interests that Roosevelt would pass on to Stimson
was his deep passion for the Pacific. Roosevelt was convinced that America's
imperial destiny was dependent upon its domination of the Pacific Ocean and
the Far East. The Spanish-American War, which marked the beginning of America's
imperial phase -- and the virtual abandonment of the republican principles
upon which the nation had been founded -- began the U.S. colonial occupation
of the Philippines, which would continue through half of the next century.
Ultimately, Stimson would himself serve as the American Governor General
of the islands.
In 1900, Roosevelt wrote to Stimson: "Our people are neither craven nor
weaklings, as we face the future high of heart and confident of soul, eager
to do the great work of a great power... wish to see the United States the
dominant power on the Pacific Ocean."
STIMSON'S KINDERGARTEN AND THE COLD WAR
Henry Stimson's towering influence on George Bush and many other current
members and like-thinking allies of the Order was based not only on "the
Colonel's" lifetime of achievements. It was also rooted in the fact that
Stimson used the World War II period to groom a successor generation of young
WASP warriors who would dominate American policymaking during the Cold War
and beyond. Although not every member of what came to be known as the "Stimson's
Kindergarten" was a member of Skull & Bones, or even a Yale graduate,
many were. All were inculcated with the Skull & Bones philosophy and
methodology of wielding power. It is through this alliance and patronage
system that the influence of the Order has been extended far beyond its small
membership roster.
Among the leading members of the "Stimson Kindergarten" were:
* John J. McCloy, who was Assistant Secretary of War and later served as
the High Commissioner for Germany during the postwar occupation.
* Robert Lovett, a member of Skull & Bones and a partner in the Order's
preeminent Wall Street investment house Brown Brothers Harriman. He became
Stimson's Assistant Secretary of War (Air Section). Lovett remained an
influential policymaker through the presidency of John F. Kennedy.
* Harvey Bundy, another Bonesman, who became Stimson's special assistant
at the War Department. Harvey Bundy's two sons, McGeorge and William, fresh
out of Yale University and Skull & Bones, joined their father on Stimson's
personal staff. McGeorge Bundy would co-author Stimson's memoirs In Active
Service in Peace and War.
* Dean Acheson, Assistant Secretary of State, Yale graduate (he was not a
member of the Order, but, rather, of one of the other Yale secret societies,
Scroll Key) and senior policy adviser to FDR and Truman, who ultimately made
him Secretary of State.
* Gen. George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the armed forces during World
War II and later Truman's Secretary of State.
This group of high-powered policymakers of World War II and immediate post
war period were known as the "Stimson-Marshall-Acheson Circle." They shaped
America's Cold War containment policy against the Soviet Union and Communist
China, including the involvement of the United States in the Korean War.
It was also this group which, for better or worse, directed the postwar
reconstruction programs in Germany and Japan.
Another influential member of Skull & Bones, Averell Harriman, was personally
responsible for the sacking of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. It was Harriman, a
banker, intriguer and former American Ambassador to Moscow, who convinced
President Truman to fire MacArthur.
The predominant role that Averell Harriman would play over the course of
40 years of postwar American policymaking underscores the fact that not all
leading members of Skull & Bones share the identical policy outlook.
While some members of the Stimson inner circle were critical of Harriman,
whom they considered to be too personally ambitious (he was also a liberal
imperial Democrat in a secret fraternity dominated historically by moderate
Republicans), Harriman nevertheless stands out as one of the Order's most
active figures. The fact that he was a business partner and social intimate
throughout his adult life of fellow Bonesman and Republican Sen. Prescott
Bush Sr., the father of the current president underscores that point.
Henry Stimson died in 1950, leaving behind a core group of political offspring
led by members of his old secret society, Skull & Bones. In the final
years of his life he was involved in helping to shape a number of postwar
government agencies which would become bastions of power and influence for
the Order for years to come. Through this active role in shaping the key
institutions of the Cold War era, Stimson was able to establish a continuity
of power that would more than compensate for the fact that no single figure
among his "kindergarten" emerged as a clear successor, and that several,
like McGeorge Bundy, would prove ultimately to be rather disappointing
students.
The National Security Act of 1947 transformed Stimson's old War Department
into the Department of Defense, a sprawling civilian bureaucracy which would
in future years house many of the most important members of the Order. Robert
Lovett, for example, would become the Secretary of Defense in 1950. The 1947
act also established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as the permanent
successor to the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In the early
1950s, the State Department's Office of Policy Coordination was merged into
the CIA, giving the secret agency total control of America's clandestine
operations. The National Security Agency (NSA) also was established, under
the direction of the Department of Defense, vastly expanding America's signal
intelligence capability.
Of all these agencies of the Cold War era, the CIA would stand out as a singular
power center for Yale University alumni in general and Skull & Bones
initiates in particular. The term "spooks," the well-known CIA term for a
clandestine operator, was originally Yale campus argot for a secret society
member. According to a recently published article in the Covert Action
Information Bulletin, there is reportedly a "Bones club" within the CIA which
helps promote the intelligence careers of members of the Yale secret
society.
It should be pointed out that bureaucratic standing is not a real measure
of power within the CIA. Very often, individuals in relatively insignificant
positions within the organizational chart wield tremendous clout and maintain
access to the most sensitive information and policy. Thus, for example, the
present U.S. Ambassador to Beijing, James Lilley, a member of Skull &
Bones and a career CIA man, is being suggested to replace William Webster
as Director of Central Intelligence. For Lilley to step in as director of
CIA would at this moment represent a demotion for the senior field operator.
It is, however, a demotion he might accept as a personal favor to fellow
Bonesman and longtime intimate pal George Bush.
The predominance of Yale graduates inside the CIA is also a part of the Stimson
legacy. During World War II, many Yale students and even several leading
faculty members entered the OSS. The X-2 Branch of OSS, the counterintelligence
unit, was dominated by Yale students, as well as Yale English Literature
professor Norman Holmes Pearson. One of the Yale men in X-2, James Jesus
Angleton, went on to a legendary career as director of the CIA's
counterintelligence staff.
Yale Skull & Bonesman and Stimson "Kindergartener" William Bundy assumed
a senior post at CIA during the 1950s, as did Yale graduates Richard Bissell
and Cord Meyer and Yale professor Sherman Kent.
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
disastrous 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 Sta
es. 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&Mac220;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."
http://www.infowars.com/print/Secret_societies/kerry_bush_sb.htm
President Bush: Politics. I mean, this is—you know, if you close your eyes and listen carefully to what you just said, it sounds like the year 2000 all over again.Russert: You were both in Skull and Bones, the secret society.
President Bush: It's so secret we can't talk about it.
http://www.jfkmurdersolved.com/bush.htm
"My senior year, I joined Skull & Bones, a secret society, so secret, I can't say anything more."George W. Bush, President of the United States
http://www.ciajfk.com/home4.html
http://www.davidicke.net/tellthetruth/coverups/bronfmanbush.html
http://www.angelfire.com/ky/ohwhy/Bush.html
http://www.hereinreality.com/familyvalues.html
http://www.lizmichael.com/bushykno.htm
http://forums.alternet.org/guest/motet?show+-ugYR2t+-chjz+Currents+908+1
http://www.jrryan.cc/poetry/what_know.htm
http://www.sumeria.net/politics/kennedy.html
http://www.russellmangum.com/bushworks/skulls.htm
The discrepancy between the kind of society many Germans thought they were building and the reality of the horror of the Third Reich presents one of the most intriguing questions of our age. "How could it -- the Holocaust -- have happened in a modern, industrialized, educated nation?
http://www.canoncitydailyrecord.com/Speaking%20Out/Fly%20Skull%20and%20Bones%20over%20White%20House%202-23-04.htm
To the editor:George Bush Jr. belongs to a secret society called Skull and Bones. This conjures up the image of the flag used by pirates on the seas: A black flag with a white skull and crossed bones.
The fact this club is extremely secret should alert people to the possibility that devious plans for the world may be being plotted. Bush was never elected, but appointed by the Supreme Court of which seven of the nine judges are fellow republicans.
Now, Vice President Dick Cheney has gone duck hunting with Supreme Court Judge Scalia, even though Cheney has a case coming up before the Supreme Court. Clearly a conflict of interest.
If the Skulls and Bones' agenda is to reduce the citizens of other countries to skull and bones, they are definitely succeeding. Maybe a Skull and Bones flag would be more appropriate flying over the White House than the American flag.
Terri Campbell,
Cañon City
http://www.rense.com/general48/deathead.htm
http://www.etherzone.com/2003/sees062503.shtml
Since 1973, the SCP has been a frontline ministry confronting the occult and explaining why they are making an impact on our society. http://www.scp-inc.org/
New Book all about the Skulls http://www.secretsofthetomb.com/
Dmoz directory entry on the skulls http://dmoz.org/Society/Organizations/Student/Fraternities_and_Sororities/Local_Groups/Yale_University/Skull_and_Bones/Opposing_Views/
Comprehensive S&B info http://megspace.com/politics/important/
More proof of Bush family membership - The Washington Post: Feb 24th 2000 George W. Was 'Skulls and Bones' Member at Yale http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28930-2000Feb24.html
Background to Skull and Bones http://www.dcia.com/skull.html
New York Observer investigation http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=2511
The investigation continues http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=2943
Rites of initiation http://www.americanfreedomnews.com/afn_articles/bones.htm
Skull and Bones video http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/popoff/DailyNews/010423harris_video_popoff/index.html
Esquire article http://www.freedomdomain.com/secretsocieties/skull02.html
Background To The Skull and Bones http://www.wealth4freedom.com/truth/3/skullandbones.htm
Information on Antony Sutton http://trineday.com/sutton-memorial/
Buy Sutton's book on the Skull and Bones here http://ctrl.org/sutton/index1.html
'America's Secret Establishment, an introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones' published by Liberty House
Press, Billings, Montana in 1986 is available priced £28.75 from Bloomfield Books, 26 Meadow Lane, Sudbury,
Suffolk, England, CO10 2TD. Telephone 0044 (0)1787 376374.
The Last Secrets of Skull and Bones, Ron Rosenbaum, Esquire magazine, September 1977.
New book on Skull & Bones out. (September 2002)
Alexandra Robbins, 'Secrets of the Tomb' 240 pages, Little Brown &
Company; ISBN: 0316720917; 1st edition (September 2002)
Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2002 21:05:53 -0800 (PST)
From: staff-app@dmoz.org
To: tony@gaia.org
Subject: Open Directory application - gozza
Cc: admin@dmoz.org (Open Directory Project)
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