Former Nato Secretary-General Admits Bilderberg Sets Global Policy
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, June 7, 2010
Former NATO Secretary-General and Bilderberg member Willy Claes has confounded claims by debunkers that the secret organization which met in Sitges Spain over the last few days does not set policy, admitting during a Belgian radio interview that Bilderberg attendees are mandated to implement decisions that are formulated during the annual conference of power brokers.
In a radio interview reported on by the Belgian news website www.zonnewind.be, Claes told host Koen Fillet that Bilderberg does indeed decide policy for the coming year. Claes would certainly be in a position to know, being a two-time Bilderberg attendee as well as the eighth Secretary General of NATO from 1994 until 1995.
Claes said that Bilderberg guests are normally given around 10 minutes of talk time, after which a report is compiled of their presentation.
“The participants are then obviously considered to use this report in setting their policies in the environments in which they affect,” stated Claes, according to the translated text.
The host asked Claes to repeat this astounding admission, before Claes went on to explain that no two guest are allowed to sit next to each other more than once at Bilderberg, to enable the maximum exchange of views on important subjects.
A Dutch-speaking reader sent us the article and confirms that the translation is accurate. This represents a solid confirmation of what we already knew through witnessing Bilderberg’s leaked agenda later play out in the real world time after time – that the elitist organization does verbally set global policy in a completely undemocratic and illegal manner.
However, despite Claes, who personally attended the 1994 Bilderberg meeting in Helsinki when he was Belgium’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, confirming the obvious that Bilderberg does manufacture a consensus amongst its participants, which is then implemented as policy in the real world, during the past few days numerous debunkers have claimed that Bilderberg is just a talking shop that has no impact on the global stage.
Iain Hollingshead of the London Telegraph wrote a sophomoric piece in which he dismissed Bilderberg as “a group of willy-waggling old men comparing their security details and dreaming of past glories,” which is a complete misnomer seeing as Bilderberg is routinely attended by active Presidents and Prime Ministers very much in power and very much in a position to have an impact on current events, such as Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who attended this year’s conference with his country on the verge of becoming the next Greece.
Hollingshead claims that because the group is becoming more well known, its allure is on the wane, but fails to mention that this is because of the fine work of activists and real journalists who have spent decades trying to get the castrated corporate media to report on the event while people like Hollingshead either made childish jokes about the whole issue or even denied the very existence of Bilderberg.
One such “skeptic” is Chip Berlet, who works for a group called the Political Research Associates, which is funded in part by the Ford Foundation, founded by Edsel Ford, the son of the notorious Henry Ford, who received awards from Hitler for funding the Nazi war machine with slave labor, which somewhat taints the PRA’s stated objectives, which are apparently to track conspiracy theories and the the right-wing while “advancing an open, democratic, and pluralistic society”.
The Ford Foundation is little more than an attack dog which transnational elitists use, through its offshoots like PRA, to demonize any criticism of their agenda as extremist and anti-semitic, which is quite rich considering the history of the corporation.
Berlet himself has made a career out of characterizing the idea that powerful people might get together and discuss ways of expanding their power as a belief of the lunatic fringe.
Little surprise therefore that towards the end of Berlet’s appearance on Russia Today, in which he stumbles through a broken record of excuses claiming Bilderberg has no power, he invokes the tired old cliche that anyone who expresses concern about 200 powerful men gathering in secret with no democratic oversight whatsoever behind a wall of security is probably a closet racist.
Berlet claims the American Free Press was founded by “one of the biggest anti-semitic, neo-fascist conspiracy theorists in the world,” which coincidentally is also a pretty apt description of the man who founded the company that now pays Berlet via the Ford Foundation funding PRA receives to spew his propaganda – Henry Ford – one of Hitler’s biggest supporters.
Watch the clip.
Berlet demonizes the notion that the Bilderberg Group has any influence over world affairs or is working towards a new world order as “a lot of malarkey,” and “a hoax carried out by people who believe in an elaborate fairy tale about how power is exercised in the world”.
He then completely contradicts himself by admitting “they talk over policy” but then claims “the organization itself has no power” before stating, “The policies that are formulated don’t hold any power within the nation that people who go to the meeting….they go back to their country and say hey I heard this at the Bilderberger meeting what do you think? And the national assembly or the powerful people say I think that’s a lot of malarkey take it back and shove it someplace, so this idea that this is a plot that is carried out to 30 or 40 countries and implemented is baloney.”
Really? So according to Berlet, the Prime Minister of Spain, his Secretary General, and the Queen of Spain, all of whom attended the Bilderberg meeting this past weekend, go back home and are then told to “shove” whatever they discussed at Bilderberg by “the powerful people”. These are the powerful people! These are the people who run the country. Presumably, Berlet believes there are powerful people above the Prime Minister and the Queen of Spain who tell them what to do, which sounds like an even bigger conspiracy theory than the one he is attempting to debunk.
Of course in reality, Berlet knows that the most powerful people in the world attend Bilderberg and he is either completely ignorant or deliberately lying by claiming that Bilderberg has no impact on policy.
Merely on the face of it the claim that Bilderberg does not have an influence on policy is patently ridiculous. This would be akin to claiming that a four-day gathering of 200 MLB officials would have no impact on the future of baseball. Despite the fact that many politicians shunned Bilderberg this year because of the group’s increasing notoriety as a furtive and insidious front for anti-democratic elitists, just take a look at the list of powerful individuals who did attend.
Top CEO’s like Bill Gates of Microsoft and Eric Schmidt of Google, top bankers like Marcus Agius of Barclays and Peter Sutherland of Goldman Sachs, don’t meet with national Presidents, Prime Ministers, big newspaper owners, members of the European Parliament and officials in the U.S. government to talk about tiddlywinks. They don’t get together for four days and surround themselves with a security ring of steel to discuss the weather or American Idol – they’re at Bilderberg to come to a consensus and then to implement it in their respective spheres of influence, just as Claes confirms in the radio interview.
Using bluff and slimy semantics, apologists like Berlet imply that just because no treaties or laws are signed at Bilderberg, that the group has no power. In reality, Bilderberg sets the global consensus for the agenda that is subsequently implemented in the host countries of the Bilderberg members, a process that holds even more power than signing an individual treaty. Bilderberg sets the consensus for a whole gamut of policy areas, from oil, to the environment, to wars, to the economy.
This is confirmed not only by former NATO Secretary-General and Bilderberg member Willy Claes in the radio interview we covered earlier, but it is manifestly evident in the policies that have later come to pass after being formulated at Bilderberg.
Indeed, Bilderberg chairman Étienne Davignon last year bragged about how the Euro single currency was a brainchild of the Bilderberg Group.
“A meeting in June in Europe of the Bilderberg Group- an informal club of leading politicians, businessmen and thinkers chaired by Mr. Davignon- could also ‘improve understanding’ on future action, in the same way it helped create the Euro in the 1990s, he said,” reported the EU Observer in March 2009.
The foundations for the EU and ultimately the Euro single currency were laid by the secretive Bilderberg Group in the mid-1950’s. Bilderberg’s own leaked documents prove that the agenda to create a European common market and a single currency was formulated by Bilderberg in 1955.
As we first reported in 2003, a BBC investigative team were allowed to access Bilderberg files which confirmed that the EU and the Euro were the brainchild of Bilderberg
The summary report of the 1955 Bilderberg meeting which took place from September 23-25 1955 at the Grand Hotel Sonnenbichl in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany, talks of the “Pressing need to bring the German people, together with the other peoples of Europe, into a common market.”
The document also outlines the plan, “To arrive in the shortest possible time at the highest degree of integration, beginning with a common European market.”
Just two years later, in 1957, the first incarnation of the European Economic Community (EEC) was born, which comprised of a single market between Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. The EEC gradually enlarged over the next few decades until it became the European Community, one of the three pillars of the European Union, which was officially created in 1993.
The 1955 Bilderberg summary outlines a consensus that, “It might be better to proceed through the development of a common market by treaty rather than by the creation of new high authorities.” The EEC was duly created via the Treaty of Rome, which was signed on 25 March 1957.
Debunkers like Berlet will probably still try and claim that the idea of a common European market was floating around in the early 1950’s and that Bilderberg were merely debating contemporary political ideas.
However, the same cannot be said for the single European currency, which wasn’t even introduced in the form of notes and coins until January 2002, having been first codified in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. The documents prove that Bilderberg members were pushing for its introduction nearly 40 years earlier.
“A European speaker expressed concern about the need to achieve a common currency, and indicated that in his view this necessarily implied the creation of a central political authority,” states the summary document.
True to form, the single European currency, the Euro, was not introduced until after the creation of a central political authority – the EU itself.
The document also stresses, “The necessity to bring the German people into a common European market as quickly as possible,” adding that the future was in danger without a “United Europe”.
These proven examples of Bilderberg formulating some of the biggest policies of the 20th century do not even come from leaks obtained by journalists from within the meetings, they come directly from the mouth of Bilderberg’s chairman and Bilderberg’s own internal documents.
However, leaks from inside the meetings uncovered by independent journalists have also proven routinely accurate in confirming that Bilderberg has a massive impact on policy decisions.
In spring 2002, when war hawks in the Bush administration were pushing for a summer invasion of Iraq, Bilderbergers expressed their desire for a delay and the attack was not launched until March the following year.
In 2006, journalists who got leaked information from inside Bilderberg predicted that the U.S. housing market would be allowed to soar before the bubble was cruelly popped, which is exactly what transpired.
In June 2008, we learned that Bilderberg were creating the conditions for a financial calamity, which is exactly what began a few months later with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Bilderberg has habitually flexed its muscles in establishing its role as kingmaker. The organization routinely selects presidential candidates as well as running mates and prime ministers.
Despite widespread expectation that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair would be announced as the first European Union President, the former Prime Minister of Belgium, Herman Van Rompuy, was picked for the role just days after he attended a Bilderberg Group dinner meeting.
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were both groomed by the secretive organization in the early 1990’s before rising to prominence.
Barack Obama’s running mate Joe Biden was selected by Bilderberg luminary James A. Johnson, and John Kerry’s 2004 running mate John Edwards was also anointed by the group after he gave a glowing speech at the conference in 2004. Bilderberg attendees even broke house rules to applaud Edwards at the end of a speech he gave to the elitists about American politics. The choice of Edwards was shocking to media pundits who had fully expected Dick Gephardt to secure the position. The New York Post even reported that Gephardt had been chosen and “Kerry-Gephardt” stickers were being placed on campaign vehicles before being removed when Edwards was announced as Kerry’s number two.
A 2008 Portuguese newspaper report highlighted the fact that Pedro Santana Lopes and Jose Socrates attended the 2004 meeting in Stresa, Italy before both going on to become Prime Minster of Portugal.
Several key geopolitical decisions were made at the 2008 Bilderberg meeting in Washington DC, again emphasizing the fact that the confab is far more than an informal get-together.
As we reported at the time, Bilderberg were concerned that the price of oil was accelerating too fast after it hit $150 a barrel and wanted to ensure that “oil prices would probably begin to decline”. This is exactly what happened in the latter half of 2008 as oil again sunk below $50 a barrel. We were initially able to predict the rapid rise in oil prices in 2005 when oil was at $40, because Bilderberg had called for prices to rise during that year’s meeting in Munich. During the conference in Germany, Henry Kissinger told his fellow attendees that the elite had resolved to ensure that oil prices would double over the course of the next 12-24 months, which is exactly what happened.
Also at the 2008 meeting, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice formalized plans to sign a treaty on installing a U.S. radar base in the Czech Republic with Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg.
Rice was joined at the meeting by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who reportedly encouraged EU globalists to get behind an attack on Iran. Low and behold, days later the EU threatened Iran with sanctions if it did not suspend its nuclear enrichment program. For the first time, the majority of Bilderberg members expressed their support for an attack on Iran during this year’s meeting in Sitges.
There was also widespread speculation that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s “secret meeting,” which was accomplished with the aid of cloak and dagger tactics like locking journalists on an airplane to keep them from tracking the two down, took place at the 2008 Bilderberg meeting in DC.
So as we can see, there are a plethora of examples of Bilderberg setting a consensus on a particular policy area which later comes to pass at both the national and international levels. To claim otherwise is to be completely ignorant of the manifestly provable fact that Bilderberg has immense power in setting agreements on policy and exercises that power on a regular basis.
In light of this, Berlet and Hollingshead are either shoddy journalists who have done no research whatsoever and are merely phoning it in, or they are being paid to deliberately spew biased and completely inaccurate information by the establishment they work for in a futile attempt to convince people that Bilderberg has no power, presumably in an effort to halt growing numbers of protesters who descend on Bilderberg each year, whom Bilderberg members now class as a “threat” to their agenda and secrecy.
Simranjeet Singh 