‘One’s Nostrils Never Quite Adjust’
A review of Daniel Estulin’s “Shadow Masters”
![[Image: img-resized.png]](http://commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/style_images/1/img-resized.png)
Reduced: 91% of original size [ 560 x 348 ] - Click to view full image
![[Image: hall_of_mirrors.jpg]](http://ursispaltenstein.ch/blog/images/uploads_img/hall_of_mirrors.jpg)
Daniel Estulin, the author of "The True Story of the Bilderberg Group", sets a high bar for himself in the preface to “Shadow Masters” when he talks about “How many zeroes [on the check through which you will ‘sell out’] is one’s freedom worth?”, and when he reminds us that America was born of a defiant rejection of the British Empire. He then starts on the path toward the clarity in the prologue when he explains the phrase from a Bilderberg report about “demand destruction” and the expense of war: “The people will lose their homes, their equity, their savings and their real money. Somebody else will come in behind them and stealthily buy it all back for pennies”, he wrote a year ago, which certainly brings us current to the mortgage mess meltdown of late 2010. And then he notes that “Ignorant people, uninformed people, can not participate competently in self-government", that widespread cultural literacy is an important factor in the struggle between those who want to develop human minds and those who don’t. Estulin’s book develops our cultural literacy.
Quoting F. William Engdahl, “The problem for the US power elites around Wall Street and in Washington is the fact that they are no in the deepest financial crisis of their history.” They have lost the Mandate of Heaven. “The domestic developments toward the creation of an abusive police state with deprivation of Constitutional rights to its citizens, the arbitrary exercise of power by non-elected officials … stealing trillion dollar sums from taxpayers without their consent” demonstrates this to the world.” They are increasingly desperate to maintain control of a global parasitical empire.”
Quoting Jeff Gates: “When manipulated beliefs displace facts, the rule of law degenerates into a faith-based parody of self-governance. To protect the informed consent essential to freedom requires that those waging war on the public’s shared mindset become transparent so that those complicit can be made apparent.”
One of the first tantalizing tidbits from the “wilderness of mirrors” dangled before the reader in the shared drive for transparency is the reference on page 35 to the Italian press coverage of the Florida-based Incident Management Group, one partner of whom is a former FBI/Secret Service expert in “forensic hypnosis”, another veteran from “Scotland Yard”, and a third from Kroll Associates, the renowned [sic] security company “with extremely close ties to the CIA”, critically involved in the savings and loan crisis of the 80’s, the tracking of Colombian drug cartels, private military contracting in Iraq, and which was responsible for security elements at the World Trade Center on 9/11.
[For more on Kroll, see http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sh...highlight=Kroll ]
Speaking of the Deep Politics Forum, note that David Guyatt’s work is noted and footnoted on page 45 in the context of Estulin’s description of the looting of Russia. It was this description and, in particular, the six-point contribution of Sergei Glayzyev noted on page 51 that made me sit up and take deep notice: if you replace the word Russian with the word American, you would have a tale remarkably parallel to that of the financial troubles facing America.
Also of note, not unfamiliar to those who have studied some deep politics and read Peter Dale Scott’s “The Global Drug Meta-Group” [ see http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/articl...l-drug.htm ], is the mid-December 1999 meeting in Azeribaijan and the training and equipping of the mujahadeen to engage in jihad in Chechnya and against Russia and its southern frontiers, including Afghanistan, in order to “become master” [of the energy supply]. Also covered is Bill Clinton’s role, along with the IMG, in the rescue and crowning of Boris Yeltsin.
Another tantalizing tidbit in the hall of mirrors is Estulin’s briefest note that Interpol, staffed now by agents from British, American and Israeli intelligence, as well as the KGB and East German Stasi, dates back to discussions in 1914 with Prince Albert of Monaco and its eventual formation in Vienna in 1923, as organized by the House of Rothschild. Chapter Two ends with a major introduction to one Edmond Safra (go ahead and do your own research on the man and his death), which alerted Estulin “to the sheer scope” of what he was on to. Specifically, in the “hall of mirrors” that is international finance, he notes the $4.8 billion IMF loan formed under “account No, 999091 at the US Federal Reserve Bank” on 8/14/08 that should have been transferred to the Central Bank of Russia but which ended up in Safra’s Republic National Bank of New York. Pages 64-72 alone are worth the price of admission unless you are already deeply conversant with the field of criminal money laundering.
“US and European banks launder between $500 billion and $1 trillion of international criminal proceeds each year, half in the US alone. Without this illegal money, the US economy would collapse “Without the dirty money, the US economy external accounts would be totally unsustainable, living standards would plummet, the dollar would weaken, the available investment and loan capital would shrink, and Washington would not be able to sustain its global empire.”
Chapter Three is devoted to the Bilderberg war in Kosovo, certainly an eye opener to me since I was among the sleeping and complacent during that era (or at least pre-occupied with parenting). The next tidbit from the hall of mirrors is Heinz Kissinger’s reference to illegal kidnapping in the 1996 Bilderberger conference as “snatch squads” (which may have even filtered into the culture since the abduction of children is referred distastefully as a “snatching”). Today, of course, the right of extrajudicial kidnap, torture, indefinite detention and even murder has been assumed by the President of the United States, perhaps not dissimilar to Voltaire’s Le droit du seigneur.
Another mirror in the hall belongs to Military Professional Resources, Inc., one of those infamous military contractors whose information can and ought to be researched. They arise in “Shadow Masters"' discussion of the Kosovo Liberation Army whose framework was devised in a Bilderberger forum in 1996 in Ontario attended by William Perry (US SecDef), the Queen of Spain, Lord Carrington, George Soros, Richard Holbrooke, George Stephanopoulos, Vice President Gore, Heinz the Omnipresent Kissinger and David Rockefeller. See pages 89-90. Page 91 begins the section on the Kosovo Protection Corps, Madeline Albright, Wesley Clark, and Ossama bin Laden. See http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO310B.html .
Reduced: 59% of original size [ 864 x 659 ] - Click to view full image
![[Image: clark.jpg]](http://www.mbruce.addr.com/clark.jpg)
From Left to Right:
Hashim Thaci, Head of the KLA, closely linked to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda. Hashim Thaci had ordered political assassinations directed against the Party of Ibrahim Rugova. Thaci was a protégé of Madeleine Albright (see photo below).
Bernard Kouchner, Head of United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) in Kosovo (July 1999- January 2001), instrumental in elevating the KLA to UN status.
General Michael Jackson, Commander of KFOR Troops in Kosovo.
General Agim Ceku, Military Commander of the KPC, investigated by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) "for alleged war crimes committed against ethnic Serbs in Croatia between 1993 and 1995." ( AFP 13 Oct 1999)
General Wesley Clark, NATO Supreme Commander.
![[Image: albrightthaci.jpg]](http://www.btinternet.com/%7Enlpwessex/images/albrightthaci.jpg)
Page 93 brings the story right back into the world of international trade in opium and the route from the Golden Crescent in Pakistan and Afghanistan through Kosova and Albania, notes Michael Ruppert’s book “Crossing The Rubicon”, and his article on CIA, drugs and Wall Street (found at http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciad.../dontblink.html ).
“If you are Goldman-Sachs, arranging the deal, and you can borrow laundered drug money at five per cent or a bank's money at ten per cent, where are you going to go? Remember that since the cost of capital is lower using laundered drug money you are now able to outbid all the other competitors because your total payback stays the same. Does this actually happen? In 1998 the Russians asked for only $18 billion to save their entire economy. With $440 billion a year moving around how could it not happen?”
“The drug trade now has power because it is underwriting the investments of the largest corporations in the world. It underwrites politicians. It has hooked the gringos on Wall Street whose own children sometimes die from its drugs. Wall Street cannot afford to let the drug barons fall.”
“Remember - The National Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA, was written by Wall Street lawyer and banker Clark Clifford. Clark Clifford is the man who brought the CIA backed drug bank BCCI into the United States. Allen Dulles who virtually designed the CIA and served as its Director, and his brother John Foster who was Eisenhower's Secretary of State, were Wall Street lawyers from the firm Sullivan and Cromwell. Dwight Eisenhower's personal liaison with the CIA was none other than Nelson Rockefeller. William Casey was Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Richard Nixon. Former CIA Directors from William Raborn to William Webster to Robert Gates to James Woolsey to John Deutch all sit or have sat on the Boards of the largest, richest and most powerful companies in America.”
“It strains credulity”, says Estulin on page 97, to think that the highest levels of Her Majesty’s Government, if not Her Majesty herself, were ignorant of why the Redcoats were being sacrificed [to control the Khyber Pass]. Unfortunately, humankind has not changed one iota and what drove them to kill then still keeps millions dying in distant lands for the benefit of a small, privileged group of world rulers.”
On Page 98, Estulin introduced me (and perhaps you) to the International Crisis Group, “a high level Brussels-based think tank supported by financier and regular Bilderberg attendee, George Soros.(Schwartz György)” and which includes Zbigniew Brzezinski, Wesley Clark, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Solarz (“the Israel lobby’s chief legislative tactician on Capitol Hill”. [The latter three, of course, were also signatory to the PNAC.] See www.crisisgroup.org
Pages 97ff are dominantly focused on the plundering of mineral wealth in Kosovo, the United Nation’ mission there and its role, along with that of Bernard Kouchner (a regular at every Bilderberg conference, where left and right are merely “techniques of deception and control”), former French minister of health, founders of Medecins sans Frontiere[, “whose mandate was to channel humanitarian aid under UN auspices … in providing support to Kosovo’s terrorist paramilitary army”, and who, as Special Representative of the UN Secretary General, issued an edict to “administer movable and immovable property”….
Soros’ Foundation for an Open Society, now also active in the Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, South Ossetia, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, is described as active with ‘a nod and a wink from the US State Department’ to bring down foreign governments that are ‘bad for business’, to seize a nation’s assets, and even get thanked for [its] benevolence”. [ See http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/TAL307A.html ]
Page 103 coughs up another useful definition from within our world of mirrors: “Disinformation is not just lying. It is expected to serve as a subtle means of inducing another government to do what one wants it to do, or to frighten or bluff a foreign government [or the culturally-illiterate populace] into inaction or making concessions.”
![[Image: 06wire-rainier1_184.jpg]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/04/06/international/06wire-rainier1_184.jpg)
At the top of the fourth chapter (“The Underbelly of Business-as-Usual”), on page 109, John Jiggens is quoted as noting Alfred McCoy’s observation of the natural affinity between criminals and spies because of “their interest in the ‘clandestine arts’. Criminals give spies a covert network for political assassinations, smuggling and intimidation while the criminals gained protection for their rackets from their powerful allies, enabling them to openly flaunt the laws”. [Don’t forget to vote this Tuesday.] There are interesting allusions as well in footnote 6 to James Robert Strauss, some fellow or operation code-named Amadeus, and Albert V. Carone.
Estulin references Carl Trocki’s “Opium, Empire, and the Global Political Economy”, as well as Mike Ruppert and the explanations of narco-dollars and narco-states by Catherine Austin Fitts, the accumulation of wealth and power through the old opium trade of the British and American brahmins, and the many historical links between Wall Street and the CIA (think Clifford, Helms, Dulles and Bill Casey, among others). {See "Thick as Thieves"} You can’t hide hundreds of billions of dollars in a mattress, notes Estulin, and then he quotes Ruppert (but the color emphasis is mine): “The money moves so quickly that, unless one were in control of the computer systems that handle it, or the software that manages it, it would be impossible to trace.”
Chapter Five will not be covered in detail. [I have to leave you something to read, yes?] It is Estulin’s case study covering one Victor Bout, the infamous Merchant of Death(?). It is the meat of the book at 75 pages. [The connective tissue is the 100 pages of photos and documents at the back of the book.] In it, you will read about Lee Scott Wolosky, Richard Chicakli, Leonid Minin [see pages 148-150], Marc Rich (the focus of Clinton’s controversial parting pardon) [see pages 150-152], Miles Copeland, and Andrew Smulian [page 192ff], represented by Friedman Kaplan Seiler & Adelman. Asks Estulin: ‘Why would a powerful Wall Street firm defend the interests of someone who is by most reports a penniless, low-life gunrunner accused of providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization?’ He provides the answer, if it doesn’t occur to you.
Chapter Five, I must note, has some juicy tidbits:
“…n a real world, …governments have the diplomatic, financial and intelligence clout to eliminate the elements that threaten their sovereignty and the rule of law… unless, of course, they are being used as an extension of a far-sighted agenda from behind the scenes at some of the most prestigious think tanks and foundations.”
“… I was unwilling to buy the notion that for over a decade, a Victor Bout remained a step ahead of the supposedly helpless United States Government, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, Interpol and their hundred-billion-dollar budgets, with Total Information Awareness and Echelon’s global spy system. Why are we being led down the path? Could the Bouts and the bid Laden’s [and Whitey Bulger?] be the extensions of someone else’s hidden agenda….?
“What are the moral consequences of freedom?”
“I could smell it. In this business, one’s nostrils never quite adjust. Instead, they develop a kind of hypersensitivity – to the innumerable variations of the basic rotten smell.”
Estulin’s book is also the first place I’ve heard mention of the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/icij/ .
Speaking of the media, Page 174-175 has five paragraphs that are an exemplary if short and introductory description of the CFR/Bilderberg domination of the news media and “phantom journalism” as you will read anywhere. Couples that with slices of the epilogue and the seven paragraphs on war and propaganda, the Tavistock Institute, Lippmann and Bernays found on Page 215-217 and you have a leg up on cultural literacy. See also page 293 (in the photos and documents section) that annotates the relationships and timing between CFR and Bilderberg and the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the relationship to corporate domination with Royal Dutch Shell as the case in point. With regard to US politicians’ involvement, Estulin points to the Logan Act, passed in 1799 and last amended in 1994, which forbids American citizens from communicating with officials of foreign governments or their agents without authority of the government. He notes that, in the case of Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry, he had authority from Clinton but then asks “why then is the citizenry, which is after all supposedly the sovereign power, kept in the dark about American officials’ participation in this ongoing international institution?”
“Shadow Masters” is a good tale of how journalists are used to set background and sell “legend”, a good tale of how foundations are used to create those publications. “Without a doubt, I was seeing [in his chapter on “Nuclear Gamesmanship”] a discernible pattern of news management being accomplished through a disingenuously-thought-out and nuanced media operation using overt and covert psychological subversion complementary to the Shadow Masters’ long-ranged agenda.”
I won’t comment, without further corroborative reading, on the content of that chapter on “Nuclear Gamesmanship” but see http://just-another-inside-job.blogspot.co...les-soviet.html .
From the book (pages 200-201):
"Competing nation-state propaganda and psychological warfare operations tell us black is white and white is black, these lies and misdirections create gray areas, the operative realm of the Shadow Masters. For when governments operate in extreme secrecy, allowing their intelligence agencies to operate with impunity and beyond oversight, then the noble ideals of statecraft may be hijacked by the Men Behind the Curtain, playing nation-states against each other in a Hegelian dance of conflict and resolution.
The terrorist attacks on American soil in 2001 were nurtured by a far greater menace than simple blind hatred acted out by Islamist insurgents from their Afghani and Pakistani hideouts. These acts come from behind the two-dimensional landscape of opposing sides presented daily by the pundits and talking heads. These shadow plays disrupt our lives with blatant corruption, loaded agendas, and continually spin us from one “crisis” to another. This aberration, like a hidden monster, drives many acts, whether ushered from rightwing Christian fundamentalist groups, oil company board rooms, Wahhabi mosques, lobbying firms and think tanks in Washington and New York, private banks in the emirates of the Persian Gulf, Hasidic-run “blood diamond” centers in Europe and New York, or arms depots of the former Warsaw Pact.
This sinister influence is confirmed by an epic number of “coincidences”, and documented connections, among the CIA, the United Nations, the DEA, the FBI, Interpol, Christian fundamentalists and Russian-Israeli mob interests. The engine driving many world-changing events is not ideology, not religion not politics and certainly not patriotism. And money does seem to motivate many players – willing pawns of those who lust for control of humanity’s future.
Once any large-scale military venture, be it “legitimate” or terrorist, acquires significant funding, greed will compete to supply its needs."
Estulin has exemplified his fellow Russian writer in cultivating a curiosity that is an “insubordination in its highest form”.
A review of Daniel Estulin’s “Shadow Masters”
Reduced: 91% of original size [ 560 x 348 ] - Click to view full imageDaniel Estulin, the author of "The True Story of the Bilderberg Group", sets a high bar for himself in the preface to “Shadow Masters” when he talks about “How many zeroes [on the check through which you will ‘sell out’] is one’s freedom worth?”, and when he reminds us that America was born of a defiant rejection of the British Empire. He then starts on the path toward the clarity in the prologue when he explains the phrase from a Bilderberg report about “demand destruction” and the expense of war: “The people will lose their homes, their equity, their savings and their real money. Somebody else will come in behind them and stealthily buy it all back for pennies”, he wrote a year ago, which certainly brings us current to the mortgage mess meltdown of late 2010. And then he notes that “Ignorant people, uninformed people, can not participate competently in self-government", that widespread cultural literacy is an important factor in the struggle between those who want to develop human minds and those who don’t. Estulin’s book develops our cultural literacy.
Quoting F. William Engdahl, “The problem for the US power elites around Wall Street and in Washington is the fact that they are no in the deepest financial crisis of their history.” They have lost the Mandate of Heaven. “The domestic developments toward the creation of an abusive police state with deprivation of Constitutional rights to its citizens, the arbitrary exercise of power by non-elected officials … stealing trillion dollar sums from taxpayers without their consent” demonstrates this to the world.” They are increasingly desperate to maintain control of a global parasitical empire.”
Quoting Jeff Gates: “When manipulated beliefs displace facts, the rule of law degenerates into a faith-based parody of self-governance. To protect the informed consent essential to freedom requires that those waging war on the public’s shared mindset become transparent so that those complicit can be made apparent.”
One of the first tantalizing tidbits from the “wilderness of mirrors” dangled before the reader in the shared drive for transparency is the reference on page 35 to the Italian press coverage of the Florida-based Incident Management Group, one partner of whom is a former FBI/Secret Service expert in “forensic hypnosis”, another veteran from “Scotland Yard”, and a third from Kroll Associates, the renowned [sic] security company “with extremely close ties to the CIA”, critically involved in the savings and loan crisis of the 80’s, the tracking of Colombian drug cartels, private military contracting in Iraq, and which was responsible for security elements at the World Trade Center on 9/11.
[For more on Kroll, see http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sh...highlight=Kroll ]
Speaking of the Deep Politics Forum, note that David Guyatt’s work is noted and footnoted on page 45 in the context of Estulin’s description of the looting of Russia. It was this description and, in particular, the six-point contribution of Sergei Glayzyev noted on page 51 that made me sit up and take deep notice: if you replace the word Russian with the word American, you would have a tale remarkably parallel to that of the financial troubles facing America.
Also of note, not unfamiliar to those who have studied some deep politics and read Peter Dale Scott’s “The Global Drug Meta-Group” [ see http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/articl...l-drug.htm ], is the mid-December 1999 meeting in Azeribaijan and the training and equipping of the mujahadeen to engage in jihad in Chechnya and against Russia and its southern frontiers, including Afghanistan, in order to “become master” [of the energy supply]. Also covered is Bill Clinton’s role, along with the IMG, in the rescue and crowning of Boris Yeltsin.
Another tantalizing tidbit in the hall of mirrors is Estulin’s briefest note that Interpol, staffed now by agents from British, American and Israeli intelligence, as well as the KGB and East German Stasi, dates back to discussions in 1914 with Prince Albert of Monaco and its eventual formation in Vienna in 1923, as organized by the House of Rothschild. Chapter Two ends with a major introduction to one Edmond Safra (go ahead and do your own research on the man and his death), which alerted Estulin “to the sheer scope” of what he was on to. Specifically, in the “hall of mirrors” that is international finance, he notes the $4.8 billion IMF loan formed under “account No, 999091 at the US Federal Reserve Bank” on 8/14/08 that should have been transferred to the Central Bank of Russia but which ended up in Safra’s Republic National Bank of New York. Pages 64-72 alone are worth the price of admission unless you are already deeply conversant with the field of criminal money laundering.
“US and European banks launder between $500 billion and $1 trillion of international criminal proceeds each year, half in the US alone. Without this illegal money, the US economy would collapse “Without the dirty money, the US economy external accounts would be totally unsustainable, living standards would plummet, the dollar would weaken, the available investment and loan capital would shrink, and Washington would not be able to sustain its global empire.”
Chapter Three is devoted to the Bilderberg war in Kosovo, certainly an eye opener to me since I was among the sleeping and complacent during that era (or at least pre-occupied with parenting). The next tidbit from the hall of mirrors is Heinz Kissinger’s reference to illegal kidnapping in the 1996 Bilderberger conference as “snatch squads” (which may have even filtered into the culture since the abduction of children is referred distastefully as a “snatching”). Today, of course, the right of extrajudicial kidnap, torture, indefinite detention and even murder has been assumed by the President of the United States, perhaps not dissimilar to Voltaire’s Le droit du seigneur.
Another mirror in the hall belongs to Military Professional Resources, Inc., one of those infamous military contractors whose information can and ought to be researched. They arise in “Shadow Masters"' discussion of the Kosovo Liberation Army whose framework was devised in a Bilderberger forum in 1996 in Ontario attended by William Perry (US SecDef), the Queen of Spain, Lord Carrington, George Soros, Richard Holbrooke, George Stephanopoulos, Vice President Gore, Heinz the Omnipresent Kissinger and David Rockefeller. See pages 89-90. Page 91 begins the section on the Kosovo Protection Corps, Madeline Albright, Wesley Clark, and Ossama bin Laden. See http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO310B.html .
Reduced: 59% of original size [ 864 x 659 ] - Click to view full image From Left to Right:
Hashim Thaci, Head of the KLA, closely linked to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda. Hashim Thaci had ordered political assassinations directed against the Party of Ibrahim Rugova. Thaci was a protégé of Madeleine Albright (see photo below).
Bernard Kouchner, Head of United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) in Kosovo (July 1999- January 2001), instrumental in elevating the KLA to UN status.
General Michael Jackson, Commander of KFOR Troops in Kosovo.
General Agim Ceku, Military Commander of the KPC, investigated by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) "for alleged war crimes committed against ethnic Serbs in Croatia between 1993 and 1995." ( AFP 13 Oct 1999)
General Wesley Clark, NATO Supreme Commander.
Page 93 brings the story right back into the world of international trade in opium and the route from the Golden Crescent in Pakistan and Afghanistan through Kosova and Albania, notes Michael Ruppert’s book “Crossing The Rubicon”, and his article on CIA, drugs and Wall Street (found at http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciad.../dontblink.html ).
“If you are Goldman-Sachs, arranging the deal, and you can borrow laundered drug money at five per cent or a bank's money at ten per cent, where are you going to go? Remember that since the cost of capital is lower using laundered drug money you are now able to outbid all the other competitors because your total payback stays the same. Does this actually happen? In 1998 the Russians asked for only $18 billion to save their entire economy. With $440 billion a year moving around how could it not happen?”
“The drug trade now has power because it is underwriting the investments of the largest corporations in the world. It underwrites politicians. It has hooked the gringos on Wall Street whose own children sometimes die from its drugs. Wall Street cannot afford to let the drug barons fall.”
“Remember - The National Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA, was written by Wall Street lawyer and banker Clark Clifford. Clark Clifford is the man who brought the CIA backed drug bank BCCI into the United States. Allen Dulles who virtually designed the CIA and served as its Director, and his brother John Foster who was Eisenhower's Secretary of State, were Wall Street lawyers from the firm Sullivan and Cromwell. Dwight Eisenhower's personal liaison with the CIA was none other than Nelson Rockefeller. William Casey was Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Richard Nixon. Former CIA Directors from William Raborn to William Webster to Robert Gates to James Woolsey to John Deutch all sit or have sat on the Boards of the largest, richest and most powerful companies in America.”
“It strains credulity”, says Estulin on page 97, to think that the highest levels of Her Majesty’s Government, if not Her Majesty herself, were ignorant of why the Redcoats were being sacrificed [to control the Khyber Pass]. Unfortunately, humankind has not changed one iota and what drove them to kill then still keeps millions dying in distant lands for the benefit of a small, privileged group of world rulers.”
On Page 98, Estulin introduced me (and perhaps you) to the International Crisis Group, “a high level Brussels-based think tank supported by financier and regular Bilderberg attendee, George Soros.(Schwartz György)” and which includes Zbigniew Brzezinski, Wesley Clark, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Solarz (“the Israel lobby’s chief legislative tactician on Capitol Hill”. [The latter three, of course, were also signatory to the PNAC.] See www.crisisgroup.org
Pages 97ff are dominantly focused on the plundering of mineral wealth in Kosovo, the United Nation’ mission there and its role, along with that of Bernard Kouchner (a regular at every Bilderberg conference, where left and right are merely “techniques of deception and control”), former French minister of health, founders of Medecins sans Frontiere[, “whose mandate was to channel humanitarian aid under UN auspices … in providing support to Kosovo’s terrorist paramilitary army”, and who, as Special Representative of the UN Secretary General, issued an edict to “administer movable and immovable property”….
Soros’ Foundation for an Open Society, now also active in the Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, South Ossetia, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, is described as active with ‘a nod and a wink from the US State Department’ to bring down foreign governments that are ‘bad for business’, to seize a nation’s assets, and even get thanked for [its] benevolence”. [ See http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/TAL307A.html ]
Page 103 coughs up another useful definition from within our world of mirrors: “Disinformation is not just lying. It is expected to serve as a subtle means of inducing another government to do what one wants it to do, or to frighten or bluff a foreign government [or the culturally-illiterate populace] into inaction or making concessions.”
At the top of the fourth chapter (“The Underbelly of Business-as-Usual”), on page 109, John Jiggens is quoted as noting Alfred McCoy’s observation of the natural affinity between criminals and spies because of “their interest in the ‘clandestine arts’. Criminals give spies a covert network for political assassinations, smuggling and intimidation while the criminals gained protection for their rackets from their powerful allies, enabling them to openly flaunt the laws”. [Don’t forget to vote this Tuesday.] There are interesting allusions as well in footnote 6 to James Robert Strauss, some fellow or operation code-named Amadeus, and Albert V. Carone.
Estulin references Carl Trocki’s “Opium, Empire, and the Global Political Economy”, as well as Mike Ruppert and the explanations of narco-dollars and narco-states by Catherine Austin Fitts, the accumulation of wealth and power through the old opium trade of the British and American brahmins, and the many historical links between Wall Street and the CIA (think Clifford, Helms, Dulles and Bill Casey, among others). {See "Thick as Thieves"} You can’t hide hundreds of billions of dollars in a mattress, notes Estulin, and then he quotes Ruppert (but the color emphasis is mine): “The money moves so quickly that, unless one were in control of the computer systems that handle it, or the software that manages it, it would be impossible to trace.”
Chapter Five will not be covered in detail. [I have to leave you something to read, yes?] It is Estulin’s case study covering one Victor Bout, the infamous Merchant of Death(?). It is the meat of the book at 75 pages. [The connective tissue is the 100 pages of photos and documents at the back of the book.] In it, you will read about Lee Scott Wolosky, Richard Chicakli, Leonid Minin [see pages 148-150], Marc Rich (the focus of Clinton’s controversial parting pardon) [see pages 150-152], Miles Copeland, and Andrew Smulian [page 192ff], represented by Friedman Kaplan Seiler & Adelman. Asks Estulin: ‘Why would a powerful Wall Street firm defend the interests of someone who is by most reports a penniless, low-life gunrunner accused of providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization?’ He provides the answer, if it doesn’t occur to you.
Chapter Five, I must note, has some juicy tidbits:
“…n a real world, …governments have the diplomatic, financial and intelligence clout to eliminate the elements that threaten their sovereignty and the rule of law… unless, of course, they are being used as an extension of a far-sighted agenda from behind the scenes at some of the most prestigious think tanks and foundations.”
“… I was unwilling to buy the notion that for over a decade, a Victor Bout remained a step ahead of the supposedly helpless United States Government, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, Interpol and their hundred-billion-dollar budgets, with Total Information Awareness and Echelon’s global spy system. Why are we being led down the path? Could the Bouts and the bid Laden’s [and Whitey Bulger?] be the extensions of someone else’s hidden agenda….?
“What are the moral consequences of freedom?”
“I could smell it. In this business, one’s nostrils never quite adjust. Instead, they develop a kind of hypersensitivity – to the innumerable variations of the basic rotten smell.”
Estulin’s book is also the first place I’ve heard mention of the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/icij/ .
Speaking of the media, Page 174-175 has five paragraphs that are an exemplary if short and introductory description of the CFR/Bilderberg domination of the news media and “phantom journalism” as you will read anywhere. Couples that with slices of the epilogue and the seven paragraphs on war and propaganda, the Tavistock Institute, Lippmann and Bernays found on Page 215-217 and you have a leg up on cultural literacy. See also page 293 (in the photos and documents section) that annotates the relationships and timing between CFR and Bilderberg and the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the relationship to corporate domination with Royal Dutch Shell as the case in point. With regard to US politicians’ involvement, Estulin points to the Logan Act, passed in 1799 and last amended in 1994, which forbids American citizens from communicating with officials of foreign governments or their agents without authority of the government. He notes that, in the case of Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry, he had authority from Clinton but then asks “why then is the citizenry, which is after all supposedly the sovereign power, kept in the dark about American officials’ participation in this ongoing international institution?”
“Shadow Masters” is a good tale of how journalists are used to set background and sell “legend”, a good tale of how foundations are used to create those publications. “Without a doubt, I was seeing [in his chapter on “Nuclear Gamesmanship”] a discernible pattern of news management being accomplished through a disingenuously-thought-out and nuanced media operation using overt and covert psychological subversion complementary to the Shadow Masters’ long-ranged agenda.”
I won’t comment, without further corroborative reading, on the content of that chapter on “Nuclear Gamesmanship” but see http://just-another-inside-job.blogspot.co...les-soviet.html .
From the book (pages 200-201):
"Competing nation-state propaganda and psychological warfare operations tell us black is white and white is black, these lies and misdirections create gray areas, the operative realm of the Shadow Masters. For when governments operate in extreme secrecy, allowing their intelligence agencies to operate with impunity and beyond oversight, then the noble ideals of statecraft may be hijacked by the Men Behind the Curtain, playing nation-states against each other in a Hegelian dance of conflict and resolution.
The terrorist attacks on American soil in 2001 were nurtured by a far greater menace than simple blind hatred acted out by Islamist insurgents from their Afghani and Pakistani hideouts. These acts come from behind the two-dimensional landscape of opposing sides presented daily by the pundits and talking heads. These shadow plays disrupt our lives with blatant corruption, loaded agendas, and continually spin us from one “crisis” to another. This aberration, like a hidden monster, drives many acts, whether ushered from rightwing Christian fundamentalist groups, oil company board rooms, Wahhabi mosques, lobbying firms and think tanks in Washington and New York, private banks in the emirates of the Persian Gulf, Hasidic-run “blood diamond” centers in Europe and New York, or arms depots of the former Warsaw Pact.
This sinister influence is confirmed by an epic number of “coincidences”, and documented connections, among the CIA, the United Nations, the DEA, the FBI, Interpol, Christian fundamentalists and Russian-Israeli mob interests. The engine driving many world-changing events is not ideology, not religion not politics and certainly not patriotism. And money does seem to motivate many players – willing pawns of those who lust for control of humanity’s future.
Once any large-scale military venture, be it “legitimate” or terrorist, acquires significant funding, greed will compete to supply its needs."
Estulin has exemplified his fellow Russian writer in cultivating a curiosity that is an “insubordination in its highest form”.
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"
