The Neo-Con Connection:

by Robert A. Sungenis, M.A.

The other day someone sent me a recent article by Deal Hudson. Dated March 9, 2005, it bore the title: “Who Will Win The Catholic Vote?” The following words prefaced the article: “A Catholic Look at Society, Culture and Politics...Deal W. Hudson, Editor...In This Issue: How the Catholic Left and Pro-Abortion Democrats Are Preparing for the 2006 and 2008 Elections.”

Hudson, of course, is a Republican who wants to keep the new surge of Catholics in the Republican party. In order to fight the Catholic left, Hudson identifies ten strategies being used by the opposition. He writes:

“The following is a list of the strategic initiatives being launched by the Catholic left in response to the Republican gains in the Catholic vote (from 37% in '96 Who Will Win The Catholic Vote? By Deal W. Hudson to 47% in '00 to 52% in '04). Some of these efforts are coordinated, but most of them are predictable reactions to the prospect of mass-attending Catholic voters staying in the Republican Party.

Mr. Hudson goes on to list the left’s strategies and how the conservatives should combat them. So far so good. Anyone with a smidgen of moral and theological sensibility knows just how much liberalism and modernism has decimated society. Having no viable alternatives, good Catholics have migrated to the Republican party as a refuge of last resort. But latching on to a political party by default inevitably raises questions as to the independent worthiness of that very party. Have Mr. Hudson and his conservative cronies really earned our vote, or have we been commandeered to an agenda that has as many faults as the left, but merely with different labels?

In the past I would have given Mr. Hudson my undivided attention, but the mere fact that this man has been caught in a quagmire of heinous sexual improprieties and yet is still out in public stumping for the Republican party, made me think of the possibility that we Catholics are being hoodwinked by ideological opportunists. It was Mr. Hudson’s hubris that incited me to do my own investigation into the Republican party and its current crop of leaders.

Mr. Hudson, in case you haven’t heard, was “fired” from his job at Crisis magazine a few months ago when report of his various sexual liaisons surfaced in the news. Among other things, Hudson more or less forced himself on a young college girl, afterward attempting to cover up the incident with $30,000 of hush money. While investigating the allegations, the Crisis board of directors found numerous sexual improprieties in his recent past.

After reading Hudson’s political combat strategies, I began to wonder how this man could still view himself as a moral beacon when his own house is built with nothing but glass, most of which is already shattered. At least Bill Bennett had the courtesy to remove himself from the public eye when his gambling weakness was exposed, but Hudson’s hubris seems to go beyond the pale. But then it dawned on me. Perhaps Hudson’s moral turpitude is typical of many of the Neo-con Republicans with whom he rubs shoulders – they use the moral high-ground as a lure to bring conservative Catholics and Evangelicals to their cause, but in reality they are wolves in sheep’s clothing who are often just as immoral as the liberals they decry. This observation, of course, will take some fleshing out.

The first counter-strategy Mr. Hudson advises in his article is to fight the attempt of the left to “demote the legacy of John Paul II.” Normally, we would see such a statement as a sincere effort to support the pope, but I have discovered this is merely the impression Mr. Hudson and his Neo-con colleagues want to create. They know the quickest way to the average Catholic’s heart is through praise of John Paul II. The reality is that Hudson’s and the Neo-con’s affection for John Paul II is only skin deep, if that much, for while they give lip service to his policies, they just as quickly distance themselves when their views do not match his. The most glaring example is the war in Iraq. John Paul II has stated in no uncertain terms that he is against the invasion of Iraq, yet the Neo-cons pretend they don’t hear him.

Case in point: George Weigel, the well known “papal biographer” who penned the 1999 book: Witness to Hope: John Paul II. Although Weigel purports himself to be a papal loyalist, he drew his line in the sand in early 2003 declaring that he fully supported the Iraq war. One would think that such opposition to the pope would diffuse Weigel’s aura of fidelity, but the biographer had an ingenious way of making his defiance palatable. He chose the USCCB as his whipping boy. In remarks quoted by the National Catholic Reporter, Weigel blasted the entire US bishopric, stating that the Just War doctrine “lives more vigorously...at the higher levels of the Pentagon than...in certain offices at the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops” (NCR 1-31-2003). As the NCR commentator correctly sized it up:

“So why doesn’t Weigel fight the real enemy? For the obvious reason that a certain class of conservative commentators in today’s American Catholic church make their living by interpreting the mind of John Paul, and it is inconvenient when his thinking cuts against the geopolitical agenda of the Bush administration.”

All this, of course, leads to investigating George Weigel a little more closely. Is he really pro-Catholic or is he, similar to Deal Hudson, merely a Neo-con plant set in place to win the Catholic vote? Considering his duplicity between Iraq and the pope, I have little doubt that George Weigel’s first allegiance is to the Neo-con political machine. His rap sheet doesn’t help much either. He is on Crisis’ editorial board, and thus has strong connections to Deal Hudson. He is also an active member of the Project for the New American Century, a Neo-con think-tank that cogitates on ways of advancing America’s present imperialism by means of war, financial pressure and other such mafioso-style intimidations. Other members of this elite group include: William Kristol (chairman), William Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Midge Decter, Steve Forbes, Norman Podhoretz, Ellen Bork, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz – a virtual “Who’s Who” of the Republican war-party in the Bush administration. Here is its notice of conquest as of its opening date June 3, 1997:

“We aim to make the case and rally support for American global leadership. As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world’s preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests”?

Obviously, there is nothing Catholic about these people. The above paragraph is a shining example of America’s imperialistic hubris turned into a civil religion. In truth, this global imperialism is only going to enslave the American people to the ideologues who will take their money and their children and squander them both on the battlefield. Rather than, as John Paul II has consistently told them, seek some means of peaceful co-existence, these political prima donnas are bent on conquest, and the worst part is that they are attempting to use Catholic cover to bring in their Trojan horse.

‘Too judgmental,’ you say? Take note of this: George Weigel is also a member of the United States Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), as of 1992. For those who know the history of the CFR, nothing more need be said. It and the former Trilateral Commission have been trying to shape global politics and geography with the same imperialistic intimidations for the last 30 years. Of the other names listed above, members of the CFR include Midge Decter (1992) and Norman Podhoretz (1992), the latter is the editor emeritus of Commentary, the magazine of the American Jewish Committee which incessantly accuses its anti-Iraq-war critics of “anti-semitism.” Another major player is Michael Novak, one of the principle architects of Crisis magazine. Novak is also on the Council of Foreign Relations (1992). Thus it is no surprise why the National Catholic Reporter predicted what precisely happened:

“As for the pope, the challenge is to spin away inconvenient utterances. Thus when American Catholic pundit Michael Novak arrives in Rome in early February to try to convince the Vatican of the morality of ‘preventive war,’ he will no doubt quote John Paul II approvingly, even if his aim is to draw different conclusions about the use of force in Iraq.”

Concluding, NCR states:

“The Bush-friendly line being toed by Weigel and Novak, in open contrast to what we’re hearing from Rome, reminds us that there is a ‘culture of dissent’ on the right in American Catholicism too. Usually it arises when John Paul challenges America’s prerogatives in commerce or war.”

There’s more. William F. Buckley Jr., who is not shy about advertising his Catholicism, is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as a member of the exclusive and mysterious Skull & Bones society, class of 1950. Last we heard of Skull & Bones, one of their initiatory rites included stamping one’s feet on a picture of the reigning pope. Buckley also has ties with the Central Intelligence Agency, and some have surmised that his present outlet, National Review, is a CIA-funded front.

The Neo-cons are smart. Considering that Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 and almost gained the presidency save the Florida mishap, the Neo-cons were not going to take any chances. Migrating as many Catholics out of the Democratic party as possible was their primary goal, for without them, it was commonly conceded that Kerry would be the next president. Unfortunately, the heinously immoral Democratic platform made it rather easy for the Neo-cons to entice the disillusioned Catholics to their side of the aisle.

But in order to bring the Catholics aboard, the Neo-cons needed to plant their seeds. Deal Hudson is one such seed set up in an innocent-looking Catholic media outlet to shore up the Neo-con agenda. As Paul Likoudis exposed in his September 30, 2004 article, Mr. Hudson, and his employer, Crisis, are on the ‘take’ from the well-endowed Neo-con party line. While in Hudson’s tenure, financial support for Crisis came from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the premier Neo-cons of today who specialize in globalization of American political interests through financial and militaristic means (known in the past as Imperialism). Much of AEI’s income originates from the sale of munitions and armaments. Crisis also receives money from the Morley Publishing Group (of which Hudson is the director), who are in turn supported by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, who specialize in setting up Neo-con think-tanks to enhance Middle East war efforts for the Bush administration. Crisis is also supported by the Carthage Foundation and the John M. Olin Foundation, the latter of which is involved in the sale of arms, and the former of which is controlled by Richard Scaife and funded by the Mellon family, another Neo-con outlet whose Internet site “Newsmax” promotes the war in Iraq as if it were the salvation of mankind.

Regarding the connection between William Kristol and Crisis, Likoudis notes:

“...the Bradley Foundation began funding Crisis magazine just about the same time it began funding Bill Kristol’s Project for the New American Century; and as Kristol and his peers began pushing for war with Iraq, Deal Hudson began persuading Catholics to that disastrous viewpoint. It is perhaps in this light that Hudson’s career should be evaluated.”

William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and one of the leading talking heads of the Neo-con movement seen regularly on Fox’s Sunday morning broadcasts, believes that it is the United States’ job to restructure the Middle East and “supplant dictators” around the world by using “pre-emptive” attacks. In other words, Kristol wants Bush to seek out and destroy anyone who would interfere with the American-Zionist efforts to secure the greater part of the Middle East for their own selfish interests. Kristol is such a war monger that, after the 2004 election, he sought for the ouster of Donald Rumsfeld on the basis that he wasn’t being aggressive enough in the Middle East. Adding fuel to the fire, Lawrence Kaplan, writer for the New Republic, charges that Pat Buchanan’s magazine, The American Conservative, promotes that idea that “President Bush has become a client of...Ariel Sharon and the ‘neoconservative war party,’” and that this is “anti-semitic” (March 24, 2003). And why shouldn’t Buchanan? Listen to the shocking words of Ariel Sharon:

“I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about America. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”

Sharon’s hubris is rather amazing, considering that this tiny nation less in size than New Hampshire and barely 50 years old claims virtual control of the world. Lawrence Kaplan’s colleague, Harvard professor Stanley Hoffman, admits the obvious, stating:

“These analysts look on foreign policy through the lens of one dominant concern: Is it good or bad for Israel? Since that nation’s founding in 1948, these thinkers have never been in very good odor at the State Department, but now they are well ensconced in the Pentagon, around such strategists as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith” [all Jewish members of Bush’s administration].

Richard Perle’s history is revealing as well. In 1970 a federal wiretap heard him discussing classified information from the National Security Council with the Israeli embassy. Not surprisingly, Stephen Isaacs, who wrote Jews and American Politics in 1974, called Perle: “direct Jewish power in behalf of Jewish interests.” The New York Times added in 1983 that Perle had taken enormous payments from an Israeli weapons manufacturer.

These three individuals (Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith), in addition to David Wurmser and Elliott Abrams (son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz), came up again in a February 9, 2003 front-page story of The Washington Post, an article in which Robert Kaiser quotes a senior U.S. official saying: “The Likudniks are really in charge now.” Former Washington Times editor and now United Press International Editor-at-Large, Arnaud de Borchgrave, remarking on what he calls the “Bush-Sharon Doctrine,” states that “Washington’s Likudniks have been in charge of U.S. policy in the Middle East since Bush was sworn into office.” He further states: “The creation of a democratic state in Iraq...was the opening phase of a policy designed to surround Israel with democratic states.” Borchgrave then makes reference to a 1996 paper in which Richard Perle teamed up with Feith and Wurmser to write, on behalf of Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netahyahu: “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” The “Realm,” of course, refers to the Middle East. Mind you, this is about five years before 9/11 and America’s declaration of war on Iraq. They write:

“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – and important Israeli strategic objective in its own right – as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”

Later in 1997, Douglas Feith wrote another paper titled A Strategy for Israel in which he insisted that Israel should force itself into “the areas under Palestinian Authority control” even though “the price in blood would be high.” Concerning the Perle-Feith-Wurmser connection, Buchanan quotes author Michael Lind:

“The radical Zionist right to which Perle and Feith belong is small in number but it has become a significant force in Republican policy-making circles. It is a recent phenomenon, dating back to the late 1970s and 1980s, when many formerly Democratic Jewish intellectual joined the broad Reagan coalition. While many of these hawks speak in public about global crusades for democracy, the chief concern of many such ‘neoconservatives’ is the power and reputation of Israel.”

It is not mere coincidence that, as of this writing, Perle chairs the Defense Policy Board; Feith is an Undersecretary of Defense; and Wurmser is a special assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control (John Bolton). Already in January 1998, four years before 9/11, Elliott Abrams, Bill Bennett, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz wrote to Bill Clinton urging him to speak of the removal of Saddam Hussein as the primary “aim of American foreign policy.” Do we sense an agenda here? In Perle’s new book An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, he demagogues his way through his thesis by claiming that

“There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust...the terrorist threat” puts at risk “our survival as a nation...A radical strain within Islam seeks to overthrow our civilization and remake the nations of the West into Islamic societies, imposing on the whole world its religion and laws.”

This is nothing but fear-mongering rhetoric to incite ethnic hatred against Muslims so that the American public will throw up their hands and give unqualified support to Israel. There is nothing Catholic about it. Never mind that the Jews would like everyone to practice Judaism. Perle is good at making enemies for hire. It is precisely his ‘Israel-first-and-only’ policy that led to the attacks on the World Trade center. We know this because the Arab-Muslim leaders know the motives of their own renegades, and they have told us as much. The reality is, if the Muslims are treated right, they are hardly a threat. Perle’s claim that Islam wishes to force their religion on others is easily countered by taking a good look as history. As Pat Buchanan notes:

“Well, yes. Militant Islam has preached that since the 7th century. But what are the odds the Boys of Tora Bora are going to ‘overthrow our civilization’ and coerce us all to start praying to Mecca five times a day?....Wherever Islamism takes power, it fails...Taken altogether, all 22 Arab nations do not have the GDP of Spain. Without oil, their exports are the size of Finland’s. Not one Arab nation can stand up to Israel, let alone the United States...If death comes to the West it will be because we embraced a culture of death – birth control, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia. Western man is dying as Islamic man migrates north to await his passing and inherit his estate....Fear is what Perle and his co-author David Frum are peddling...we have since discovered, Iraq had no hand in 9/11, no ties to al-Queda, no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, and no place to attack us. Iraq was never ‘the clear and present danger’ the authors insist she was” (The American Conservative, “No End to War,” March 1, 2004, p. 7).

In other words, America has been hoodwinked by the Neo-con/Zionist alliance into having us fight their enemies for them. In this regard, Wolfowitz is especially dangerous. A 1992 memo written by Wolfowitz was eventually leaked from the Pentagon. It contained a bold strategy for what appears to be a plan for world conquest. The paper later became the backbone of American foreign policy in a 33-page “National Security Strategy” issued by George Bush on Sept. 21, 2002. Among other shocking things, the paper declares: “We will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively.” There is nothing wrong, of course, with “self-defense,” but the operative word here is “preemptively.” The rationale for attacking another country is now based on the America’s subjective judgment as to whether said country merely poses a threat to our selfish interests. It further asserts that America must understand its role in “nation-building on a grand scale, and with no exit strategy.”

This information is no secret among the military high-brass. The outspoken General Tommy Franks said, rather frankly: “The U.S. attacked Iraq for the sake of Israel.” Likewise, General Anthony Zinni revealed who is behind the foreign policy of the United States – the Neo-cons Zionists who have hijacked the Bush administration. He states:

“The more I saw, the more I thought that this [war] was the product of the neocons who didn’t understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks...I don’t know where the neocons came from – that was not the platform Bush ran on...Somehow the neocons captured the president....everybody I talk to in Washington has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were trying to do....I think it’s the worst kept secret in Washington” (Interview with CBS).

The cat is out of the bag, we might say, regarding the Bush administrations true motivations in the Iraq war. On the Sunday news program, Meet the Press, Richard Perle was, ironically, ‘pressed’ when Tim Russert flipped the Israel card and asked him: “Can you assure American viewers...that we’re in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel” (2003). Wall Street Journal editor, Max Boot, catching the drift, writes: “Buchananites toss around ‘neoconservative,’ and cite names like Wolfowitz and Cohen, it sounds as if what they really mean is ‘Jewish conservative.’” At the same time, Boot admits that the Israel connection is a “key tenet of neoconservatism” and that George Bush’s strategy “sounds as if it could have come straight out from the pages of Commentary magazine, the neocon bible.” As we noted earlier, Commentary is the monthly magazine of the American Jewish Committee of which Norman Podhoretz (CFR 1992) is its editor emeritus. In this light, Pat Buchanan writes:

“On Sept. 20 [2001], forty neoconservatives sent an open letter to the White House instructing President Bush on how the war on terror must be conducted. Signed by Bennett, Podhoretz, Kirkpatrick, Perle, Kristol and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, the letter was an ultimatum. To retain the signers’ support, the president was told, he must target Hezbollah, and overthrow Saddam. Any failure to attack Iraq, the signers warned Bush ‘will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.’ Here was a cabal of intellectuals telling the Commander-in-Chief, nine days after an attack on America, that if he did not follow their war plans, he would be charged with surrendering to terror. Yet, Hezbollah had nothing to do with 9/11. What had Hezbollah done? Hezbollah had humiliated Israel by driving its army out of Lebanon” (The American Conservative, March 24, 2003, p. 4).

Lebanon, of course, is where Israel should not be, since it is not their country. Yet the blackmail against the President apparently worked. Just a short time ago, March 15, 2005, Bush called for an increased attack on Hezbollah, the enemy of Israel. Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Treasury Secretary, stated:

“Bush’s neocon overlords have Bush where they and Ariel Sharon want him, locked on a course toward wider war, with American troops, supplied by conscription, serving as Israel’s legions...Having surely provoked further uprisings and further acts of terror, Bush will use the violence he provokes to call for more troops and wider incursions to deal with ‘thugs and criminals, who are preventing us from bringing freedom to the Middle East.’ We are bringing fire and destruction to the Middle East, and to ourselves. This is exactly what American evangelicals desire...”

Politics, Religion, Israel and the Seduction of the Catholic Voter Part 2

The Neo-Catholic Connection:

by Robert A. Sungenis, M.A.

Deal Hudson, George Weigel and Michael Novak are not alone in the Catholic connection to the Neo-con agenda. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things magazine, a former liberal Lutheran who has since converted to Catholicism but kept his liberalism, has made a name for his publication by promoting it under the Neo-con flag, and being endorsed in return by many of the prominent war-party ideologues.In a recent advertisement for First Things, various Neo-cons are solicited for their blurbs. Among them are William F. Buckley who writes: “How happy for right reason that Richard John Neuhaus disposes of much talent...”; and Robert L. Bartley, a writer for the Wall Street Journal and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (1992) says: “The time could not be more apt for First Things”; and Mary Ann Glendon, another CFR member (1992): “In my experience, no new magazine since the New York Review of Books has elicited so much interest...” The New York Times called First Things: “The flagship monthly of religious neoconservatism.” Richard Neuhaus then boasts in a four-page flyer that his writers, among others, include: Michael Novak, George Weigel, Midge Decter, Mary Ann Glendon, Bernard Lewis (another CFR member). In turn, Neuhaus has been giving lectures at the American Enterprise Institute, which, as we noted in our last article, specializes in globalization of American political interests through financial and militaristic means, while much of their income originates from the sale of munitions and armaments. Two other Neo-con war-promoters and radio talk-show hosts, Hugh Hewitt and Sean Hannity, have had Neuhaus as their featured guest, with the subject material, of course, focusing on America’s self-justifying invasion of Iraq. Neuhaus’ colleague, Michael Novak, was sent as the Neo-con envoy to Rome in order to persuade John Paul II to sanction the invasion of Iraq, prompting the Vatican to return the favor by telling America it has a Messiah complex and a fixation on materialism. Novak was also a guest on EWTN with Raymond Arroyo, touting the Neo-con agenda in Iraq and further solidifying the Neo-Con/Neo-Catholic alliance. Henry Hyde, noted Catholic from Illinois, took issue with the pope’s assessment of America in a July 2004 Chicago Tribune article. Not surprisingly, Hyde was recently recruited by Deal Hudson to write a financial appeal letter to Crisis subscribers, wherein Hyde touted it as “one of the most influential and important Catholic magazines in America today.”

Neuhaus, perhaps, deserves some consolation for finally realizing that: “There is a lively and legitimate argument about whether, knowing what we know now, this war was justified...” (First Things, Dec. 2004, p. 67). Similarly, William F. Buckley, while stating in an interview with Rush Limbaugh in July 13, 2004: “...with the intelligence we had, it would have been foolish not to attack Iraq...Libya is a good example of the good that came from it,” admitted a few months later: “If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.” This hand-wringing doesn’t go very far unless both Neuhaus and Buckley are willing to tell Mr. Bush, firmly and directly: “Get out of Iraq, and stop threatening the other Arab nations with American Imperialism,” since, in Catholic doctrine, preemptive war is never justified, and thus there is no place for the Neo-con agenda in Catholic thought and practice. Buckley, especially, needs to cease using National Review to brand as “anti-semites” those who don’t agree with the Neo-con party-line.

Other prominent Catholic institutions are tending in the same direction. Ave Maria School of Law, initiated by Dominos Pizza entrepreneur, Tom Monaghan, has on its board of directors James L. Buckley (brother to William F. Buckley, Jr.), who, while sitting on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, is a member of the Skull & Bones society, class of 1944. Kate W. O’Beirne, Washington editor of William Buckley’s National Review, also sits on the Ave Maria board. That Skull & Bones members can infiltrate these Catholic institutions with impunity shows just how far the Neo-con agenda has advanced. Another Ave Maria director is Robert P. George. In March 2005, Crisis had a full-page ad touting the winners of the prestigious “Bradley Prize,” among them being Robert George. This is the same Neo-con outfit that funds Crisis from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which specializes in setting up Neo-con think-tanks to enhance Middle East war efforts for the Bush administration. In addition, George has had several meetings with Bush campaign mastermind, Karl Rove, the man who recognized first that without the Catholic vote Bush would not be in the White House. Unfortunately, Rove is only exploiting gullible Catholics. He is just as immoral as the rest of the bunch. His sexual preferences were recently exposed when in March 2005 reporters saw him enter a gay bar in Washington D.C., and there is much more to tell about Rove. Robert Bork, professor of law at Ave Maria and member of the American Enterprise Institute (a Neo-con war-party group), often collaborates with his wife, Ellen Bork, who has written about a dozen articles for the Project for the New American Century, the same war-party outfit that Kristol, Bennett, J. Bush, Cheney, Podhoretz, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are members. Incidentally, the website of the New American Century contains an article written on September 4, 2000 by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld titled “Rebuilding American Defenses.” In it the authors state that removing Sadaam Hussein was only a minor goal. The main objectives were a) to secure the oil fields of Iraq since they contain the world’s richest reserves; (b) to possess Iraq as a military launch base to the rest of the Middle East; c) to initiate sales of military hardware; (d) to train the military for urban suppression. Mind you, this is an official government document. Catholic bishop John Steinbock called its “using military power for political and economic interests” a threat to “the very future of humanity” (The Sentinel, 4-12-03).

More on Skull and Bones

Skull & Bones, according to the book by Anthony Sutton (a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University from 1968-1973) America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones (1983, 2002), is a secret society that originated at Yale University in 1832 and has been instrumental in instigating many of America’s wars and rumors of wars. For example, Henry Stimson, prominent Skull and Bones member of the Truman administration, prides himself on being the major influence upon Truman, based on his April 25, 1945 memorandum to the president, to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. What we know now, of course, is that Japan had been attempting to surrender for the entire six months prior, but their pleas couldn’t get past the deaf ears of Stimson, the Secretary of War. It is probably no coincidence that Hiroshimi and Nagasaki had the largest Catholic populations in Japan. (The Colonel: The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson 1867-1950 by Godfrey Hodgson, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992 ).

Today there is little difference between Stimson’s policies and the “pre-emptive” war policy of Kristol, Perle, Wolfowitz and the Bush Skull and Bones cartel. It is probably no coincidence that Wolfowitz, appointed as head of the World Bank by George Bush; Michael Chertoff, appointed as secretary of Homeland Security by George Bush, along with Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer who are very active in the Bush administration, all have dual citizenship, with Israel as their second country of allegiance. No one seems to have paid attention to the U.S. Law, section 1448, that prohibits dual citizenship, especially when this duplicity puts them in very powerful governmental positions. In March 2005 the American Free Press reported that Michael Chertoff’s mother, Livia Eisen, was an Israeli national involved with the Mossad. Consequently, unless Chertoff renounces his Israeli citizenship then Israeli law considers him one of its own. To know the extent of Chertoff’s present power one only needs to read the Patriot Act, one of the most abusive stretches of government power against the citizenry ever devised. You can depend upon it that Chertoff will use it for Israel’s interests. Benjamin Chertoff, Michael’s cousin, has spent the last four years trying to stall independent investigative reports on 9/11, which many critiques have begun to compare to Hitler’s burning of the Reichstag building to foment his rise to political power. There is a mountain of evidence that the New World Order tyrants knew of 9/11 long before it happened and that Osama bin Laden is their patsy. There is simply not enough room to demonstrate it in this article.

Robert H. Goldsborough, familiar to many traditional Catholic readers, has investigated Skull and Bones and has concluded that its members seek nothing less than the rise of the New World Order to replace the Christian World Order. Skull and Bones was originally called “The Order” in its 1833 formation under the Russell Trust. Quoting Anthony Sutton, Goldborough writes: “The Order is the core, the inner circle of the conspiracy for change which run the outer circles including The Council on Foreign Relation, the Trilaterals...a terrifying long range conspiracy that seeks to control our lives from cradle to grave...The Order is a Bush family tradition” (Washington Dateline, 7-26-99).

In fact, the Bush family has 8 generations of Skull & Bones inductees, which includes grandfather Prescott Bush, notorious for digging up the skull of the Geranimo, the Indian chieftain, and placing it at Yale. According to the Associated Press, Prescott Bush was “director of a bank seized by the federal government because of its ties to a German industrialist who helped bankroll Adolf Hitler’s rise to power,” leading in 1951 to a $1.5 million kickback from stock invested in slave labor at the internment camp in Auschwitz (The Sentinel, 10-18-2003; Chris Millegan, Fleshing Out Skull and Bones, 2003; Toby Rogers: “How the Bush Family Wealth is Linked to the Jewish Holocaust,” Clamor Magazine, May-June 2002; John Buchanan, The Guardian, 2003). His son, George Herbert Walker Bush (the first president to use the phrase “New World Order”) is a member of Skull and Bones, as is George W. Bush and John Kerry, class of 1968 and 1966, respectively. In fact, Bush and Kerry are distant cousins. That two presidential candidates with the same pedigree could run against each other shows the grip that these anti-Catholic societies have on America. A shining example of the naivety of Catholics appeared in a July 22, 2004 political ad in the Wanderer advising people to vote against Kerry because he “is a graduate of Yale University and a member of the infamous secret society based at Yale, ‘Skull and Bones,’” neglecting to mention, of course, that Bush has a much deeper pedigree than Kerry. For Bush and Kerry to run against each other presents no contradiction to the society, since the same Hegelian dialectic (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) has been the philosophical/political engine of Western culture for the past two hundred years. Hegel’s philosophy is the only way men with opposing designs on controlling the rest of the world can be curtailed from pushing the red button and ending it all. Of course, the same Hegelian dialectic eventually led Skull and Bones to accepting homosexuals (as long as they had high SAT scores), and thus it is no surprise that George Bush seems to have no problem hiring homosexuals for high-level posts in his administration.

A favorite meeting place of Skull and Bones members is the Bohemian Grove in northern California, a 2,700-acre fortress 60 miles north of San Francisco. As the Wall Street Journal reported in July 15, 2004, most people think of the Bohemian Grove as a place for beatnicks to listen to Grateful Dead music and “gab...drink and urinate on trees.” But that’s how good their cover has been since the Grove’s 1872 inception. As of 2000, its underworld machinations were finally exposed. Investigative reporter Alex Jones infiltrated the highly secured compound with video camera in hand. He recorded nothing less than mock human sacrifices by robed and hooded individuals chanting and groveling in demonic ecstacy to a giant statue of an owl. They engage in a ceremony called the “Cremation of Care,” an attempt to rid themselves of their consciences so that they can proceed with world domination unabated by human sympathies. They themselves claim to be worshiping the Canaanite god Molech (Lev 18:21; Jer 32:35). And you thought such things were confined to the Old Testament? The film was distributed by the BBC, since they had financed Jones’ work. The Bohemian Grove should be of interest to us since its members include: William F. Buckley, Warren Buffet, George Bush, Jeb Bush, Jimmy Carter, Richard Cheney, Alan Greenspan, Alexander Haig (also on Advisory Board of Crisis), Jack Kemp, Henry Kissenger, Colin Powell, David Rockefeller, Donald Rumsfeld, Newt Gingrich, Ed Meese, Richard Nixon, Manuel Noriega, Elliot Richardson, Karl Rove, George Schultz, Casper Weinberger and hundreds of other prominent officials we don’t have room to list, both foreign and domestic. To his credit, David Gergen resigned from the Bohemian Grove in “disgust.” Jones possesses a photo of George H. W. Bush and President George W. Bush standing next to the giant owl at the Bohemian Grove. Helmut Schmidt, former chancellor of Germany, in his autobiography, Men in Power, states that although he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (the same as Weigel, Novak, Buckley, et al) and the Trilateral Commission, he maintains that his greatest thrill was performing Druid death-rituals every July 15th at the Bohemian Grove in California in the company of hundreds of other world leaders. Schmidt stated that it is at the Bohemian Grove that major national and international deals are struck between the world leaders.

Having Protestant evangelicals already in their pocket, today’s Neo-cons are desperately seeking Catholics and their voting block to shore up their party’s anticipated victories. As the two faiths are melded together in the Neo-con crucible, naive Catholics have been “Protestantized” as never before. As C. Joseph Doyle has noted: “What we’ve created in the past 30 years is a whole new generation of public Catholics who are cultural Protestants.” Or as Likoudis says:

“The Catholic Church is taking hits from every side of the Protestant power spectrum: from Episcopal bishops claiming the Church is promoting violence against homosexuals, to Pentecostals claiming the Church is a Babylonian mystery cult, to neoconservative Christians claiming the Vatican is a rogue state for opposing the war in Iraq” (The Wanderer, June 10, 2004).

Typical examples of leading Catholic figures who have been ensconced by the Neo-con agenda (or, worse, are mere plants posing as Catholics) are Sean Hannity who, having advertised his stance against the pope’s opposition to the Iraq war, had the temerity to host Protestant Franklin Graham (Billy Graham’s son) on his popular Fox television show, allowing him to chastise the pope. So enamored is Hannity with the Evangelical agenda that his best-selling book, Deliver Us From Evil, contains the Protestant, not Catholic, version of the Our Father on the inside cover. Hannity’s real loyalties were revealed when, after his bellicose rantings against Bill Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinski, he was confronted with an even more sordid tale in the exploits of his Neo-con colleague, Newt Gingrich, a regular commentator on Hannity’s program. Ignoring Gingrich’s improprieties, Hannity continually treated him like a knight in shining armor, much like Rush Limbaugh treats William F. Buckley. All the while Gingrich was committing serial adultery on his second wife during the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. The adulteress was a young Congressional aide. She was also a Catholic who sang as a member of the prestigious choir at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C. Showing no repentance, Gingrich divorced his wife and married the young aide, and the newlywed couple continued to attend the Shrine, now under the protecting arm of the pedophile protector, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. I myself was in Washington at the time to hear her sing the glories of the Christian faith. Hannity also knows the cruel way in which Gingrich treated his first wife, insisting that she come to terms for divorce while she was recovering from cancer surgery in a hospital bedroom. But this is to be expected. Gingrich’s behavior and Hannity’s looking the other way is the convenient morality of the Neo-con political machine. As John Galbraith stated it:

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

Hannity also buys into the same biblical eschatology as Billy and Franklin Graham, which, for most of the last century, has been awash with Puritan millennium-seeking. Their ultimate goal is to prepare the Middle East, particularly Israel, for the Second Coming of Christ who, they think, will soon begin a physical, 1000-year reign from Jerusalem. Naturally, in this eschatological schema the good guys are the Neo-cons, the Evangelicals and the Zionists, while the bad guys are anyone who opposes them, including but not limited to the Arab nations and the world of Islam. Moralist icon, William Bennett, prior to the exposing of his gambling habits, thought nothing of gambling away American lives when on September 12, 2002 in a CNN interview he said so self-righteously that America was “in a struggle between good and evil,” and that “overwhelming force must be used against militant Islam.” Bennett then proceeded to name the nations of his war-mongering fury: Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran and China. As Buchanan writes: “Not, however, Afghanistan, the sanctuary of Osama’s terrorists.” By the way, Bennett is also on the advisory board of Crisis magazine.

Of course, the underworld is not limited to Skull & Bones and the Bohemian Grove. Similar secret societies bent on world conquest have been around for quite a while. We know some of them as the Freemasons, the P2, the Illuminati, and about a dozen other such illustrative names. We need not be naive – big money and man-made philosophies control almost every sector of this world. That’s what the Apostle John tells us in the Apocalypse. This is not, as some try to dismiss it, a “conspiracy” theory. Catholics got a good taste of reality when in the 1970s-80s they saw that many of the prelates they trusted had already succumbed to its power. One very revealing source was a list of Freemasons discovered by Italian police and later sent to Pope John Paul I by Mino Pecorelli, editor of L’ Osservatore Politico (who was soon afterward assassinated, mafioso style). Among the names on the short list of Masons were 121 Catholic prelates, including prominent office holders such as: Augustin Cardinal Bea, Secretary of State to John XXIII and Paul VI; Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, creator of the Novus Ordo mass; Agostino Cacciavillan, Secretary of State, and until very recently, Papal Nuncio to America; Agostino Casaroli, Minister of Foreign Affairs; Achille Lienart, Bishop of Lille, France and designated as “Masonic Grand Master” and very active in slanting Vatican II in the liberal direction; Leo Cardinal Suenens (leader of the Charismatic movement) and Jean Cardinal Villot, the Secretary of State. These names came complete with Masonic code names and numbers. Villot’s name was “Jeanni” with number 041/3 and he was enrolled in the Lodge on August 6, 1966. So vast was Villot’s power and influence that when Paul VI had excommunicated Pasquale Macci for heresy, Villot, after the pope’s death, had Macci reinstated and saw to it that he was elevated to Cardinal. Pio Laghi, Apostolic Nuncio to the United States is also on the list, and it is no coincidence that he is a great friend to the Bush family.

Paul Marcinkus, Director of the Vatican Bank and numerous money laundering schemes, was also on the Freemason list. It was John Paul I’s stated quest to Cardinal Villot to remove Marcinkus and his collaborators, such as Cardinal Baggio (also on the Freemason list). But Villot and company silenced the pope before he could act. All this is common knowledge now, thanks to David Yallop’s book “In God’s Name”; Paul Williams’ book “The Vatican Exposed,” as well as the work of Richard Hammer, Claire Sterling, Nick Tosches and John Cornwell. What we also know is that, immediately after becoming the new pope, John Paul II closed the door on all the internal investigations initiated by John Paul I, and thus it became business as usual at the Vatican. Instead of ousting Marcinkus the pope elevated him, on the third anniversary of John Paul I’s death, to the position of the Pontifical Commission for the State of Vatican City, which is more or less like being its governor. Instead of reporting the misdealings of the Banco Ambrosiano (which was the source for Marcinkus’ money laundering schemes as he defrauded its depositors), John Paul II paid off the creditors with $250 million of the Vatican’s money. When appeals came to the Vatican from the Italian government to help prosecute Marcinkus, John Paul II protected Marcinkus by citing the immunity granted by article 11 of the 1929 Lateran Treaty with Mussolini, as he also did in protecting, Bernard Law, the infamous pedophile shuffler. Cardinals Benelli and Rossi pleaded with the pope to expel Marcinkus but to no avail. It was later discovered that Marcinkus’ money laundering allowed the funneling of $100 million to the Solidarity Trade Union of Poland, a favorite project of the pope’s. Unfortunately, for every Yallop and Williams we can depend upon to expose these historical facts, we have authors such as Carl Bernstein (“His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of Our Time”) and George Weigel (“Witness to Hope: John Paul II”) who refuse to mention them.