Like the case for the Iraq war. Perhaps it was at the 2002 conference in Chantilly, Virginia, that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's fate was sealed. Tucker says to appease Europeans who opposed the invasion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld assured Bilderberg that the invasion would not come until the following year, 2003.
But led by the Washington Post, the entire Western mainstream media was predicting that the US invasion of Iraq would come in the late summer or early fall of 2002.
According to Tucker, "Jimmy Lee Hoagland, associate editor and columnist at the Post, has escorted his publisher to Bilderberg for years. He had to hear Rumsfeld's assurances. But he let his own newspaper continue with the 'late summer or early fall' prediction, knowing it was wrong."
The invasion indeed came in 2003.
SILENCE OF THE HACKS
Most people, even the very well-read, are unaware of the group's existence. That's because members are sworn to secrecy and those invited for their annual spring-time conferences are asked to keep things under the radar.
Curiously, for nearly six decades no mainstream media outlet, barring the UK's Guardian (since 2008), has considered these gatherings of the rich and powerful to be newsworthy, when a trip by any one of them individually would surely make headlines.
The media's complete silence about this year's Bilderberg conference, should give you an idea of the cover-up. Bill Gates makes news when he goes abroad for a routine malaria conference. And here he is at a secret conclave in Switzerland and the hacks are silent.
Leading newspapers and TV networks that thump their chests as protectors and practitioners of free speech, are conspicuously absent at these conferences.
To be sure, the top editors are there. Bilderberg has, at one time or another, had representatives of all major US and European newspapers and network news outlets attend meetings. These media people are invited on the condition that they promise to report nothing.
The hacks certainly don't seem to mind. For them clinking champagne glasses with former American presidents, Wall Street insiders and effete European royalty is a heady experience.
IT'S ABOUT CONTROL
In June 1991 at their meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany, David Rockefeller argued for "supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers, which is surely preferable to the national auto determination practiced in past centuries".
Journalist Bill Moyers spoke about the power of David Rockefeller in a 1980 TV documentary, The Secret Government: "David Rockefeller is the most conspicuous representative today of the ruling class, a multinational fraternity of men who shape the global economy and manage the flow of its capital. Private citizen David Rockefeller is accorded privileges of a head of state. He is untouched by customs or passport offices and hardly pauses for traffic lights."
"Rockefeller's strategy," writes author Will Banyan in his book The Proud Internationalist, "also reveals something fundamental about wealth and power: it does not matter how much money one has. Unless it is employed to capture and control those organizations that produce the ideas and the policies that guide governments and the people who eventually serve in them, the real power of a great fortune will never be realized."
This is exactly what Gordon Gekko tells a young trader who accuses him of always being money-minded, in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps: "You just don't get it do you? It's never about the money, it's about the game between people."
Indeed, it's about control.
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