off at the last minute.
In
Unless the propeller and wheelhouse were among the cosmetic changes made to the
Robin Gardiner,
Steve Hall and Bruce Beveridge,
Trilateral Commission
The Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973 by banking titan David Rockefeller as an invitation-only think-tank. Rockefeller had the bucks, the organizational skills and the contacts, but the Trilateral Commission’s philosophy was provided by Columbia university professor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of
Membership of the Trilateral Commission was limited to 300 (later expanded to 450), and early participants included
For a supposed “secret society”, the Trilateral Commission is disappointingly open: its membership can be viewed at its website, www.trilateral.org/. Meetings are held
So is the Trilateral Commission, as feared by the American far right, the executive board of the New World Order? The Commission does not have its hands on the surreptitious levers of global power for a simple reason: there aren’t any. International politics and economics are more complex than the instrumentalist philosophy of far-right conspiracists realize.
Indeed, focusing on the Trilateral Commission’s international agenda-setting carries the risk of blindness to its interesting role in the US. One early member of the Commission was a down-home Southern Democrat by the name of Jimmy Carter. According to former Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, the Trilateral Commission eased Carter into the White House in 1973 by mobilizing “the money power of the Wall Street bankers, the intellectual influence of the academic community… and the media controllers”. With Mr Carter to Washington went fellow Trilateralists Walter Mondale as V.P. and old Zbigniew Brzezinski as National Security Advisor. Anthony C. Sutton and Patrick M. Wood, authors of
Carter, Mondale and Brzezinski weren’t the only Trilateralists to get their feet in the door of the Carter administration: Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Director Paul Warnke of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Undersecretary of the Treasury Anthony Solomon, Undersecretary of Economic Affairs Richard Cooper and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke were among nearly 20 Trilateralists to hold prominent positions in the government. Then Carter selected banker Paul Volcker to head the American Federal Reserve; Volcker was the chair of the North American branch of the Trilateral Commission. So dominating were the Trilateralists that even the normally supine Beltway press took notice, with the
Being in power enabled pet projects of the Commission to come to pass. One will serve in evidence. A 1975 Commission task-force paper,
Of course, the Trilateral Commission can’t be all-powerful, since it was unable to stop Jimmy Carter from being electorally ejected from the White House. As consolation, the Commission found another good ol’ Southern Democrat to join their ranks. Few Americans then knew his name, but they would later.
Bill Clinton.
Jim Marrs,
James Perloff,
Anthony C. Sutton and Patrick M. Wood,
Twa Flight 800
At 8.31 on 17 July 1996, 12 minutes after take-off from New York’s JFK airport, a catastrophic explosion caused TWA Flight 800 to disintegrate over the Atlantic. All 212 passengers and 18 crew aboard the Boeing 747– 131 were killed.
After 90 per cent of the plane’s remains were dredged from the Atlantic, an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the explosion had been caused by an electrical short circuit near the centre wing fuel tank. The NTSB issued 15 safety recommendations, mostly covering fuel tank and wiring-related issues, notably the development and installation of fuel inerting systems. “The 230 men, women and children on board TWA800,” said the NTSB, “lost their lives not as result of a bomb or missile or some other nefarious act but the result of a tragic accident.”