Dean Henderson: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Chapter 1 – Part VII -- The Trilateral Commission

The Trilateral Commission

Posted on 08/06/2016 | 6 Comments

(Excerpted from Chapter 1: David Rockefeller & the Shah of Iran: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)

While people celebrated the Shah’s demise in Tehran, Zbigniew Brzezinski was on his way to Kuwait City for a meeting with Kuwaiti Emir Jaber al-Sabah, Saudi officials and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

It was agreed that Hussein’s Republican Guard would invade oil-rich Khuzistan and amputate it from the rest of Iran.  Oil prices had just begun to stabilize when Iraq launched its first salvo, sending spot futures through the roof.

Bzrezinski co-founded the Trilateral Commission (TC) in 1973 with David Rockefeller.  The concept was hatched at the Rockefeller Pocontico Hills, NY estate in July 1972.  Rockefeller served as the group’s first chairman. One of its largest financial supporters is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.  All eight North American representatives present at the founding meeting were also members of the secretive Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).  The stated purpose of TC was to form a triad of global influence consisting of North America, Western Europe and Japan.

The TC published The Crisis of Democracy in 1975.  One of its authors, Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, is a prominent writer for the CFR publication Foreign Affairs.  Huntington, intellectual darling of the global elite, argued that America needed “a greater degree of moderation in democracy”. The TC paper suggested that leaders with “expertise, seniority, experience and special talents” were needed to “override the claims of democracy”.

More recently Huntington has been pushing his “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, which argues that war between the West and Islamic nations is inevitable.  US foreign policy seems to follow it as a blueprint and it is working.

The Carter White House was loaded with Trilateralists. Huntington was coordinator of security planning.  In keeping with his derisive view of democracy, Huntington, with help from Brezinski, prepared Presidential Memorandum 32 which led to the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is to take the lead role in imposing martial law should the US Constitution suddenly need to be suspended.

In early 1977 the Washington Post ran a story on the TC in which the paper worried, “But here is the unsettling thing about the Trilateral Commission.  The President-elect (Carter) is a member.  So is Vice-President-elect Walter Mondale.  So are the new Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury, Cyrus R. Vance, Harold Brown and W. Michael Blumenthal.  So is Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is a former Trilateral Director and Carter’s National Security Adviser, also a bunch of others who will make foreign policy for America in the next four years.”

Suspicion of the TC grew across the political spectrum.  From the left, author Holly Sklar wrote disparagingly of the group in her book Trilaterals over Washington…  From the right, the late-Senator and Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, in his book With No Apologies, warned, “David Rockefeller’s newest international cabal (the Trilateral Commission)…is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States.”

Public distrust of the group increased. In 1980, the American Legion national convention passed Resolution 773, which called for a congressional investigation of the Trilateral Commission and its predecessor the Council on Foreign Relations.  The following year the Veterans of Foreign War (VFW) adopted a similar resolution.  Congressman Larry McDonald introduced these resolutions, but Congress did not pass them.  On September 1, 1983 McDonald, a long-time critic of the global elite, was a passenger on Korean Airlines 007 when it was allegedly shot down by the Soviets.

Brzezinski was the architect of the concept of “rapid reaction forces”, which he argued the US now needed to police the Persian Gulf region in the absence of a friendly Iran.  President Carter made clear in his 1980 State of the Union speech that he would not hesitate to use Brzezinski’s brainchild in the Gulf region, warning “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States, and such an attempt will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Carter made good on his threat that same year when he used a rapid reaction Delta Force to attempt a helicopter rescue of the Iranian hostages in an ill-fated operation known as Desert One.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker is current Chairman of the Trilateral Commission.  Current Fed Chairman Allen Greenspan is a member of the TC as were Clinton Administration officials William Cohen, Bruce Babbitt, Strobe Talbott, Stephen Bosworth, Donna Shalala and Thomas Foley.  Clinton himself was a member while Vice-President Gore was a CFR member.

During the 1980 presidential campaign Ronald Reagan blasted Trilateral Commission influence over both the Carter White House and the rival Bush campaign, vowing to investigate the TC if elected.  Reagan won the election. On March 30, 1981 he was shot by John Hinckley Jr.

Hinckley was portrayed as a deranged loner who shot Reagan to “impress Jodie Foster”.  But Hinckley was no Salvation Army panhandler.  Former Dean of the University of Montana Journalism Deaprtment Nathaniel Blumberg wrote a book called The Afternoon of March 30…, in which he examines Hinckley’s connections to the Bush family.  Hinckley’s father was a Texas oilman and a close friend and fundraiser for TC and CFR member George Bush Sr.  The Hinckley’s were also cozy with the H. L. Hunt family and Texas Governor John Connally.

On January 23, 1981 Scott Hinckley met with Neil Bush, son of George Sr., at his home after Hinckley’s Vanderbilt Oil Company had received notice of an audit by the Department of Energy.  On March 30th, Hinckley was told by Energy that they had uncovered pricing violations at Vanderbilt for the years 1977-1980.  Penalties were threatened. Just over an hour after Hinckley’s meeting with Bush ended, President Reagan was shot by Hinckley’s brother John Jr.  That night Scott Hinckley scheduled a dinner with Neil Bush.  Neil Bush was working at Amoco, which after becoming BP Amoco tapped Zbigniew Brzezinski for its board of directors.

The judge at the Hinckley trial was Barrington D. Parker who had presided over the sham trial of Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier’s murderers.  When CIA Director Richard Helms was caught lying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about CIA funding of the 1973 Chilean coup that overthrew the democratically-elected Salvador Allende, it was Parker who gave Helms a 2-year suspended sentence and a paltry $2,000 fine.  That night Helms’ spook buddies met at a Washington, DC country club to celebrate.  In May 2001 President George W. Bush nominated Parker for a Federal Appeals Court appointment.

John Hinckley had been arrested on weapons charges in Nashville in 1977 when President Carter happened to be in town.  But Hinckley walked and wasn’t even put on an FBI watch list.  The day he shot Reagan, a mysterious woman made several calls to Hinckley’s hotel room.  The Sunday night before Reagan was shot, Vice President George Bush Sr., who would have taken over as President had Reagan died, addressed the TC.  Reagan, for his part, never mentioned the Trilateral Commission again.

When President George Bush Jr. took office he began threatening the Iranians again, branding them, along with Iraq and North Korea, part of an “axis of evil”.  In 2003 the US invaded Iraq.  By 2007, already bogged down in a powerful Iraqi insurgency, the US sent an extra aircraft carrier group to the Persian Gulf as it ratcheted up its bellicose rhetoric towards Iran.

Dean Henderson is the author of five books:Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve, Stickin’ it to the Matrix & The Federal Reserve Cartel.  You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @www.hendersonlefthook.wordpress.com