Skull & Bones society

Skull & Bones, 9-11, and the Bogus "War on Terror"

by Christopher Bollyn 

September 14, 2003

The Bush administration, which blocked an open inquest into the terrorism of 9-11, has used the terror attacks as its “new Pearl Harbor” to launch costly and unjust wars of aggression.  This raises the obvious question: “Are they complicit?” 

Two years after the terror attacks of 9-11, total secrecy continues to surround the official investigation of the crime. Government officials have exploited the attacks – and the fear they created – to wage a global “war on terrorism” and undermine freedom and prosperity in America. An un-elected president and a cabal of appointed officials, all extreme Zionists, who opposed any open investigation into the attacks have ruthlessly employed them as a pretext to launch long-planned and unjust invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, at great expense to the U.S. taxpayer. 

After President George Walker Bush requested an additional $87 billion from Congress and declared it the “duty” of western nations to assist in “rolling back the terrorist threat to civilization” in Iraq, the Financial Times (FT) of London said Bush’s “rose-tinted and information-deficient analysis should be rejected. 

“To call this a mess is to understate the matter,” FT said about the chaos and violence in Iraq. “It is now beyond reasonable doubt that the present set-up cannot and will not work.” 

WORLD WAR IV 

R. James Woolsey, a former Director of Central Intelligence, calls the war on terror “World War IV” and said recently that “we will be in this war for many years, quite probably for decades.” Woolsey told the Royal Institute of International Affairs that three movements, all Islamic, are “essentially at war with the west, with modernity, with western Europe and the United States and our allies.” The enemies, Woolsey said, are “the fascist” and “anti-Semitic” regimes of Syria, Libya, and Iraq, “the mullahs in Tehran,” and “Al Qaeda and its supporters.” 

For historians, the war on terrorism is the manifestation and realization of the “clash of civilizations” predicted 10 years ago by Yale scholar Samuel Huntington in a much-ballyhooed 1993 article published in the Council on Foreign Relations’ (CFR) prestigious journal Foreign Affairs. (Huntington’s subsequent book was entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.)  What Huntington failed to mention, however, is the most obvious cause for the “clash” between western and Islamic civilizations -- oil.  By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60 percent of the world’s oil production and 95 percent of remaining global oil export capacity, according to Britain’s former environment minister, Michael Meacher. 

“WAR ON TERRORISM IS BOGUS” 

In a recent article entitled “This war on terrorism is bogus” in the Guardian (UK), Meacher suggests that high-level U.S. officials were complicit in the 9-11 attacks and allowed a “new Pearl Harbor” to occur in order to put into effect a “blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana.” The document was drawn up and signed by the leading architects of the war on terrorism in the Bush administration.  The “blueprint” Meacher refers to is a document entitled "Rebuilding America’s Defenses", written in September 2000 by a neo-conservative “think-tank,” the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The PNAC document calls for large increases in the defense budget to transform the U.S. military into a global force. The plan calls for “a substantial American force presence in the Gulf,” among other things, which it says, “transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” 

The people involved in the PNAC, and those for whom it was drawn up, are the leading war hawks of the Bush administration: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, and I. Lewis Libby. The project includes key U.S. supporters of the extreme right-wing Israeli Likud Party, including the Lithuanian-born historian and former dean of Yale, Donald Kagan, and his two sons, Fred and Robert, William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, and the Orthodox Jewish rabbi Dov Solomon Zakheim, the current Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer of the Dept. of Defense. 

Nearly all of the PNAC participants have come out of one of two elite academic institutions: YaleUniversity or John’s Hopkins Nitze School of Advance International Studies. 

Zakheim, whose place of birth is not given in Who’s Who, has strong ties to Britain, where he was educated and lived for many years. Zakheim comes from a Zionist family and his father reportedly grew up in the “same small Polish town as Yitzhak Shamir” and “numbered Menachem Begin among his closest friends.” Begin and Shamir are two of the most extreme Likud leaders in Israeli history. 

Vanity Fair asked, “Is Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz driving U.S. foreign policy?” in a recent article, “Bush’s Brain Trust” by Sam Tanenhaus, which discusses the powerful Zionist trio of White House advisers: Wolfowitz, Kristol, and “the controversial ‘prince of darkness’ Richard Perle.”
“Others warn of a ‘cabal’ or ‘conspiracy’ of mostly Jewish ‘kosher conservatives’ who have ‘hijacked’ the government even as they secretly serve the interests of Israel’s Likud Party,” Tanenhaus wrote. “There are rumors of a ‘shadow government,’ being run from Wolfowitz’s office, which is said to have usurped intelligence operations from the CIA.” 

Perle is one of the founding members of the PNAC. Veteran journalist John Pilger wrote about Perle: “I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan, and when he spoke about ‘total war’, I mistakenly dismissed him as mad,” Pilger wrote. “He recently used the term again in describing America's ‘war on terror’. ‘No stages,’ he said. ‘This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now.’” 

“A POLITICAL MYTH” 

The “global war on terrorism,” Meacher says, “has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda – the U.S. goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project.”  The “conventional explanation,” that the United States retaliated against the Taliban regime and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan because of the 9-11 attacks and then extended the war against terrorism to Iraq, “does not fit all the facts,” Meacher wrote. “The truth may be a great deal murkier."  

"It is clear the U.S. authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9-11,” Meacher wrote, despite the fact “that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the U.S. of the 9-11 attacks.”  Meacher cites the former U.S. federal prosecutor, John Loftus, who said: “The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9-11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defense of incompetence.”  Were U.S. air security operations “deliberately stood down on September 11?” Meacher asks. “If so, why, and on whose authority?” 

Meacher lists documented evidence that the FBI and high officials in the Bush administration actually prevented the capture of known terrorists. As whistle-blowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (Dec. 19, 2002) – FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. 

“None of this assembled evidence,” Meacher wrote, “is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.  The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint,” Meacher says. “From this it seems that the so-called ‘war on terrorism’ is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider U.S. strategic geopolitical objectives.” 

Meacher’s comments are noteworthy because they are the first time a member of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet has openly questioned the validity of the “war on terrorism” and suggested that high officials in the U.S. government were in some way complicit in the 9-11 attacks.  Meacher’s observations lend credence to the conclusions of researchers like Walter E. Davis, PhD, at KentStateUniversity, who recently published a paper with 22 points which, he says, “suggest that the most plausible explanation of events is that the Bush administration was complicit in the terrorist attacks. 

“This should be a national and international scandal,” Davis wrote. “What is being discovered will shock many people, which is one of the reasons for deliberate corporate media cover-up.” 

POISONING PEACE 

The Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq is counter-productive, according to Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-WV): “Our military action in Iraq has forged a caldron of contempt for America, a dangerous brew that may poison the efforts of peace throughout the Middle East and result in the rapid invigoration of worldwide terrorism,” Byrd wrote in the Washington Post on August 26. 

“As so many warned this administration before it launched its misguided war on Iraq, there is evidence that our crackdown in Iraq is likely to convince 1,000 new Bin Ladens to plan other horrors,” Byrd told the Senate on May 21, “Instead of damaging the terrorists, we have given them new fuel for their fury.” 

A day after the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad was bombed, Jessica Stern of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government wrote in the New York Times: “America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one.” 

THE ARCHITECTURAL LEVEL 

If officials of the Bush administration were complicit in the attacks, as Davis and Meacher suggest, there would have to be a secret network that connects the planners at the highest levels of government. There are a few secret organizations to which key high-level government officials belong, for example, the Council on Foreign Relations and The Order of Skull and Bones of Yale University. President George H.W. Bush is a member of both. Among fellow “Bonesmen” the elder Bush is known as “Magog.” 

Several of the highest U.S. officials are members of organizations connected to foreign intelligence agencies, such as the British-based Royal Institute of International Affairs and the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS). Dr. James G. Roche, for example, the civilian secretary of the U.S. Air Force and Army belongs to the IISS. Roche was the man in charge of the U.S. Air Force and its strategic air defense systems on September 11, 2001. 

THE ILLUMINATI

In his booklet 9-11: The Great Illusion, George Humphrey says “the Illuminati” were behind the terror attacks and have used fear to push forward their New World Order agenda. “The events of 9-11 were the classic set up using the Hegelian principle,” Humphrey says, of creating a Thesis and Anti-thesis conflict in order to produce a Synthesis, which results in the desired outcome for the highest-level planners. 

Speaking to the nation on September 7, President Bush implied that a permanent change in American society had resulted from the terror attacks of 9-11: “And for America,” Bush said, “there will be no going back to the era before September the 11th, 2001 – to false comfort in a dangerous world.” 

“The Illuminati have been organized for centuries, and have control of our economy, culture, and political organizations,” Humphrey wrote. “They are behind a vast majority of the wars and revolutions, and are behind the events of September 11.” Humphrey, however, does not name the suspected “Illuminati” culprits. 

SKULL & BONES 

If the “war against terrorism” is indeed creating more terror, and if the same people and agencies have actually supported both sides of the so-called “war,” it can be said that the Hegelian principle is being applied. 

The Bush administration’s current foes in the “war on terrorism” were once good friends. George W. Bush and the Bin Laden family have been friends and business partners. The Bin Laden family financed Bush’s first business enterprise. This connection and the history of covert U.S. assistance for the Moslem resistance fighters in Afghanistan after the Soviet occupation and the criminal regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq suggest the Hegelian principle has been used by the highest-level planners to create the “war on terror.” 

A detailed explanation of how the Anglo-American Establishment has employed the Hegelian principle to influence American society and guide U.S. foreign policy during the 20th Century is described in detail in the late Antony C. Sutton’s book, America’s Secret Establishment, which focuses on the most powerful of Yale University’s secret senior-year societies: The Order of Skull & Bones. Sutton’s book is unique in its analysis of the political influence of “The Order” and provides the names of the organization’s membership from its creation at Yale in 1833 until 1985.

President George W. Bush, his father, and his grandfather, Prescott Sheldon Bush, were all “tapped” to be among the 15 “Bonesmen” during their final year at Yale. No fewer than 6 members of the Bush family, 9 from the Cheney clan, and 15 from the Walker’s have been inducted into this most secretive of Yale’s senior societies. It is important to note that, unlike other college fraternities, Yale’s senior societies are geared to post-collegiate life.  According to Sutton and others, “The Order” has controlled YaleUniversity for over 100 years and is a “decision-making core” at the center of a network that includes the Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg, and The Trilateral Commission. “A secret society within a secret society” is how Sutton described the role of The Order. 

Already in 1873, Yale scholars reported that Skull & Bones “have obtained control of Yale.” Since 1871, the Yale Presidency has been “almost a fiefdom for The Order,” according to Sutton. 

The Order is also said to exercise great influence within the CIA.  “Yale has influenced the CIA more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion,” Gaddis Smith, professor of history at Yale, said. And “Bonesmen” are foremost among the “spooks” at the agency, according to Smith. President George H.W. Bush (Director of Central Intelligence 1976-77) is one of many “Bonesmen” to have held senior positions at the CIA.

“The synthesis sought by the Establishment is called the New World Order,” Sutton wrote in 1984. The elder Bush first articulated the need for “a new world order” as he waged war against Iraq in 1991. 

“In the Hegelian system conflict is essential,” Sutton wrote. “This conflict of opposites is essential to bring about change. Today this process can be identified…where 'change' is promoted and 'conflict management' is termed the means to bring about this change.” 

“Historically, operations of The Order have concentrated on society, how to change society in a specific manner towards a specific goal: a New World Order,” Sutton wrote in the early 1980’s. “The activities of The Order are directed towards changing our society, changing the world, to bring about a New World Order,” he wrote. “This will be a planned order with heavily restricted individual freedom, without Constitutional protection, without national boundaries or cultural distinction.” 

The Order of Skull & Bones is “the elite of the elite” of Yale’s secret societies. At any given time some 600 members of The Order are probably alive. Skull & Bones and Yale’s other secret societies serve as “recruiting grounds” for the highest levels of government, intelligence, law, and finance. 

I asked Alexandra Robbins, author of Secrets of the Tomb, a recent book about Skull & Bones, if she thought “The Order” has an inordinate amount of influence within the U.S. government or the intelligence agencies.  “Four out of the nine current presidential candidates are Yalies,” Robbins said. “Three of them are Yale secret society men. I think that says a lot.”  Presidential candidate Sen. John Forbes Kerry is also a “Bonesman.” The third is likely to be Sen. Joseph Lieberman. 

“Skull & Bones is not simply a microcosmic subset of a wider American elite, it is the top of the pile and in the driver’s seat,” Andrei Navrozov, Yale graduate and author of The Gingerbread Race, wrote. “These people run the country,” he said. “They are responsible for what goes on. They should be known so they can be held to account.” 

“The ritual is not just silly,” Navrozov says about the Skull & Bones secret and bizarre initiation ritual, which involves a symbolic death and rebirth as a “Knight” of The Order. “It is like a black mass,” he said.  “Not unlike some Masonic ceremonies, it involves a compromising of individual dignity and thereby ensures a Bonesman’s loyalty to his society,” Claire Messud wrote about the Skull & Bones initiation rite in Observer Life Magazine (1994). “This loyalty is fiercely maintained: not one of the 2,289 initiated members of the society has ever spoken of his involvement. 

“Certainly the ‘conspiracy’, inasmuch as there can be imagined to be one, is not that Bonesmen are everywhere in positions of power but that the outside world cannot recognize them as such,” Messud wrote.  “The habit of secrecy and the concept of noblesse oblige of the Knights towards the Barbarians, born in undergraduate days, must of necessity have spilled over into the organizations and mechanisms that the Bonesmen have gone on to inhabit and to master,” Messud wrote. “When the organization mastered has become the entire nation, Navrozov’s paranoia ceases to seem quite as extreme.”

These are a few of the Yale graduates and “Bonesmen” (S&B) who have played key roles in the events of 9-11 and/or the war on terrorism: 

Boren recommended Tenet to President-elect Bill Clinton (Yale) in 1992 to head the administration's transition team on intelligence. In 1995, Clinton named Tenet deputy CIA director and in 1997 appointed him DCI.  In early 2001, Boren called President-elect Bush and urged him to keep Tenet on as CIA director. Boren told Bush to ask his father, which he did, and Tenet was kept as DCI. 

James Harding of the Financial Times reported that Bush speaks with his father on a daily basis. “Their conversations are private,” Harding wrote, “But according to at least one person who knows the former president, the elder Mr. Bush is in a ‘high state of anxiety’ about the situation in Iraq and the possibility that his son could follow in his footsteps and lose his bid for re-election.”

In the book, Bush at War, Woodward presents a rather incredible dialogue, which he claims was the conversation between Boren and Tenet as they had breakfast together in Washington on the morning of 9-11:

"What are you worried about these days?" Boren asked Tenet that morning. "Bin Laden," Tenet replied, referring to terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden, an exiled Saudi who was living in Afghanistan and had developed the worldwide network al Qaeda, Arabic for "the Base." He was convinced that Bin Laden was going to do something big, he said. 

"Oh, George!" Boren said. For the last two years he had been listening to his friend's concerns about Bin Laden. How could one private person without the resources of a foreign government be such a threat? he asked.

 "You don't understand the capabilities and the reach of what they're putting together," Tenet said.

Suddenly, several of Tenet's security guards approached. They were not strolling. They were bolting toward the table.

Uh-oh, Boren thought.

 "Mr. Director," one of them said, "there's a serious problem."

"What is it?" Tenet asked, indicating that it was okay to speak freely.

"The World Trade tower has been attacked."

"This has Bin Laden all over it," Tenet told Boren. "I've got to go."