Bilderberg: Coffee klatsch or conspiracy?

Photo by Andrew Harnik, Washington Times

The annual Bilderberg Group meeting ended last week in Chantilly, Va., marked by the largest protests since the meetings were first held in 1954. The protests were led by independent radio/web journalist Alex Jones, often accused of wild conspiracy mongering by the same mainstream media (MSM) organs that have never covered, or even mentioned, the Bilderberg confabs once in 58 years.

That's certainly a curiosity, considering that 140 of the world's most powerful movers and shakers convene to do more than play bridge and frolic in the pool, presumably. If there is a conspiracy involved, it seems to be a conspiracy of silence among the MSM to pretend Bilderberg doesn't even exist.

A general rule about conspiracy theories: They flourish when governments and powerful organizations operate in secrecy, breeding speculation in the absence of any public record of what is really going on. Sometimes that speculation is merely paranoid, and sometimes it's closer to the mark. The cure for paranoid conspiracy theories is the disinfectant of sunlight: Open the books, declassify the files (an estimated 50,000 JFK assassination files are still classified), and at least issue some kind of official report or accounting.

The more suspicious perspective on Bilderberg suggests that it, along with other secretive clubs like the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, and Royal Institute of International Affairs, is trying to engineer a world government. Whether you believe that could be a good thing, or would be evil incarnate, determines whether you define Bilderberg as a conference or a conspiracy.

The European Union was conceived and nurtured into being largely in Bilderberg meetings and the E.U. is supposedly the foundation for other political consolidations that will overcome old patriotisms and animosities to form some kind of global union beyond the U.N. So far, it doesn't seem to be working very well — the whole E.U. looks ready to implode soon.

The era of market globalization has already led to a diminution of national sovereignty as multinational corporations enforced trade regulations that ran roughshod over national labor, environmental and tariff laws, spurring protests like the 1999 Battle of Seattle against the WTO. If a democratically governed people chooses to prohibit GM (genetically modified) crops in their land, that decision should stand without Monsanto and allies dictating otherwise.

Globalization and multinational corporations have given rise to a new “superclass” of billionaires whose main allegiance is to their network of political and business allies over their country of origin (see David Rothkopf's excellent book, “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making”). Rothkopf concludes: “That doesn't mean we need a world government. What it means is that we need multilateral institutions and mechanisms to ensure that the minimum basic protections we expect in our national homes are not undercut while the world's most powerful pursue their narrow self-interests in the no-country's land of the global marketplace.”

And then we have Carroll Quigley, a former Georgetown University professor and Bill Clinton's “mentor” stating in his suppressed 1966 book “Tragedy and Hope”: “... the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.”

That could certainly be construed as a conspiracy of sorts. The Bilderberg conference does release a list of attendees, notable for a preponderance of bankers. This year's list includes some notorious characters: Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary under Clinton and architect of financial deregulation that led to the current crisis; Peter Orszag, Obama's former OMB director and chief consultant to the Central Bank of Iceland before it went bankrupt; William Lynn, former Deputy Secretary of Defense under Bush when the Pentagon “lost” $2.3 trillion; Anatoly Chubais, privatization czar under Boris Yeltsin who oversaw a $240 billion rape of Russia; several Goldman-Sachs executives from around the world; and last but not least, Richard Perle, “Prince of Darkness” and principle driver of the Iraq invasion; and the guest of honor, war criminal Henry Kissinger (see Christopher Hitchen's “The Trial of Henry Kissinger”).

A strong case could be made that an Interpol SWAT team should have descended on the Marriott hotel in Chantilly and arrested a lot of these people. The bottom line is that while most of the world is now reeling under chronic depression, unemployment, austerity and riots, this superclass of “feudalist” capitalism is growing ever richer and more powerful.

The Marriott hotel staff complained to Alex Jones and others that, despite the fabulous wealth of the attendees, they tipped abysmally or not at all. Perhaps more than any expansive screed, that speaks volumes about the Bilderberg crowd.

Some may say that I'm simply bitter because I wasn't invited to the big pow-wow. OK, it's true, dammit, because I was really looking forward to the “Eyes Wide Shut” orgy with all those hot Illuminati babes! This first appeared in the Grand Junction Free Press.

One foot off the slippery slope: NDAA ruled unconstitutional

[NOTE: According to Carl Levin, co-author of the NDAA, the military detention provision was added at the insistence of Presidente Obama]

If the Founding Fathers have been spinning in their graves like centrifuges over recent assaults on the Constitution, their RPMs slowed down a bit last Wednesday when U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest ruled that Section 1021 in the latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), allowing military detention of American citizens without due process, is unconstitutional.

The lawsuit was brought by veteran journalist Chris Hedges, with attorneys Carl Mayer and Bruce Afran doing the heavy lifting without compensation. None thought they had a chance to win, given the juggernaut of military/police state abuses that have rolled over us in the decade since 9/11. But as Hedges said after the verdict, “A stunning and monumental victory… every once in a while the gods smile on the damned.”

The defendants, President Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, had argued that this new NDAA merely codified what the panicked 2001 AUMF (Authorization to Use Military Force) had spawned over the last decade: indefinite military detention, unwarranted searches and seizures, assassination, torture — only now it all could be employed on American soil, against American citizens, however or whenever the president and Pentagon see fit.

Hedges argued that, as a journalist who spent seven years as a correspondent in the Middle East, he interviewed many unsavory characters, including ones that could be designated as our enemies. He noted after the verdict: “The government lawyers, despite being asked five times by the judge to guarantee that we plaintiffs would not be charged under the law for our activities, refused to give any assurances. They did not provide assurances because under the law there were none… We too could be swept away into a black hole.”

But we're not out of the woods yet: The administration could appeal the ruling, and it could go all the way to the Supreme Court, which, given the number of gung-ho Bush appointees on board, could be disastrous.

Unfortunately, the House refused to adopt the earlier bipartisan Smith-Amash amendment that would have repealed the indefinite detention provision. Instead, they adopted the Gohmert amendment, stating that the NDAA will not “deny the writ of habeas corpus or deny any Constitutional rights for persons detained in the United States under the AUMF who are entitled to such rights.”

This is still ambiguous language; Section 1021 states that the military is not “required” to detain American citizens. It does not forbid it. That is enough wiggle room for this president, or any future president, to strip American citizens of their entitled rights via some new Orwellian designation, and start disappearing enemies — of the state, or the party, or his own personal enemies, into the gulag of detention camps built by Halliburton subsidiary KBR (in 2006, the Dept. of Homeland Security awarded KBR a $385 million contract to build these camps for a possible influx of illegal immigrants, or to support the “rapid development of new programs,” whatever that means).

Here's what's at stake: Last week, a database compiled by two university law schools established that, since 1989, over 2,000 convicts had been exonerated for crimes they did not commit.

The average term of imprisonment for these innocent victims: 11 years. That's a lot of wasted life, and a lot of mistakes by our judicial system, with all of its constitutional protections.

But now the Pentagon is going to decide some of these criminal cases with no trial and ensure that many innocent people are not caught in the dragnet? And not abused Abu Ghraib style? How do you prove your innocence from a dungeon? Without lawyers or any due process at all, the DOD is going to do a better job than our imperfect judicial systems have done?

Tell it your gullible uncle. This is a dangerous precedent — one more arrow in the quiver of the “unitary executive” principle, which is to say King George will rule over us once more. Any citizen, Republican, Democrat or third party, who would support such a monstrosity needs a refresher course in the American Constitution, and if that doesn't work, an emigration visa to some seedy banana republic where military juntas and torture dens are routine. They have no place in this Republic, which as the Founding Fathers understood, requires eternal vigilance against control freaks and totalitarians.

As ever, James Madison said it best: “It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”

This first appeared in the Grand Junction Free Press.

Terminator IV: The cyborgs are coming

If you thought “Superman,” “Blade Runner” and the “Terminator” movies were pure fantasy sci-fi with no possible connection to reality, think again: Several new tech developments are bringing “Terminator IV” - the real thing - closer to birth.

First, Dutch scientists have bio-engineered the first bulletproof skin, by inserting a spider gene into a goat, which produces milk that can be spun out and woven into a material 10 times stronger than steel (the tensile strength of a spider web is phenomenal for its minuscule weight). The silk material is then mated with skin cells. Head researcher Jalila Eassaidi of the Forensic Genomics Consortium in the Netherlands stated:

“Imagine a spidersilk vest, capable of catching a bullet - the modern day equivalent of Genghis Khan's vests. (Genghis Khan equipped his soldiers with silk vests to deflect arrows). Now, let's take this one step further: why bother with a vest? Imagine replacing keratin, the protein responsible for the toughness of the human skin, with this spidersilk protein. This is possible by adding the silk producing genes of a spider to the genome of a human, creating a bulletproof human.”

The test video they released showed a .22 bullet, fired from a pistol at about 10 feet, penetrating a paper-thin patch of the silkskin taped onto a block of ballistic gelatin. The skin didn't stop the bullet, but it reduced penetration in the gelatin from about 12 inches to about 2 inches. They'll need some more trials and maybe a denser weave or multiple layers to stop anything larger than a .22, but the test has already demonstrated that this silk Kleenex, basically, is tougher than human skin.

Ms. Eassaidi is probably pitching the big money boys in our Military-Industrial Complex, which through its Mad Scientists department (DARPA) will fund just about anything. (The CIA spent several million dollars on “remote viewing” or ESP research, gleaning enough successes, supposedly, to keep the program operational for over a decade.) Over the last few years, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has funded the creation of an amazing array of eerily lifelike robots by the Boston Dynamics company.

Their first breakthrough, BigDog, was designed as a load carrier in rough terrain like Afghanistan. The robotic donkey can transport 300 pounds over 13 miles on flat ground, climb boulder gardens, jump and leap, and most spookily, recover its balance after being pushed or slipping on an ice sheet with a frantic motion of legs - just like a very athletic dog. With no head, and just the naked skeleton of armatures, joints and hydraulic tubes, it's damn scary to watch - a powerful, brainless beast capable of a lot of mayhem, it seems.

Actually chasing human prey is the mission of DARPA/Boston Dynamic's next creature, the Cheetah-Bot. With design and articulation more like a big cat, and the addition of a rotating head with all kinds of sensors, it's a special-ops hunter that could be diversely weaponized. Put a pair of red lasers shining out of those big eye sockets, and it probably wouldn't need any weapons. Like early Romans fleeing at the first sight of Hannibal's elephants, or the Incans terrorized by the Spanish conquistadors' horses, an enemy unit would probably run peeing and screaming before a herd of such fearsome mechanical animals.

Atlas is their humanoid robot, also headless at present, but capable of running, climbing, and crawling on hands and knees with human-like balance. It's not a leap to imagine advances 10 years down the road producing a Frankenstein monster close to Schwarzenegger's Terminator. Wrap it with the bulletproof skin, and give it a head filled with functioning senses and a brain (brain tissue has already been grafted with microchips, and prosthetic eyes have been developed), and you could have a regiment of bulletproof Supermen, remote-controlled like present-day drones.

Military incentives have spurred a great deal of scientific/technological progress throughout history, but those developments are not always limited to military applications. Boston Dynamics envisions their creations performing in “emergency response, firefighting, advanced agriculture and vehicular travel.” The robots and cyborgs may eventually replace humans for some of the most dangerous and difficult work - such as cleaning up the ongoing mess at Fukushima.

If they can make a basic Model-T version for the consumer, capable of hauling the garbage and mowing the lawn without terrorizing the dog, it just might be a better investment than a new car.

This first appeared in the Grand Junction Free Press.