Dem Bones

From The Boston Globe 2003 06 20:

The Democratic leadership gave Kerry chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations and a charter to dig into the contra-drug connection. . . . The subcommittee published a report in 1989 that concluded the CIA and other US agencies had turned a blind eye to drug trafficking occurring on the fringes of the contra network. In many cases, traffickers were using the same airplanes, airfields, and other resources that the contras were using.

During the investigation, an Oregon businessman claiming CIA ties, Richard Brenneke, whose testimony was taken by Kerry's committee [charged] that Vice President George H. W. Bush's office had sanctioned a contra-drug smuggling operation.
[...]
The committee dropped the Brenneke angle.

Former Air Force intelligence officer Terry Reed says in his book, Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA, that he saw Brenneke at the Mena airport in Arkansas, describing him as "the person responsible for the skid-mounted cargo that was off-loaded into another Rich Mountain [Aviation] hangar." [p. 87]. Reed cites a deposition given by Brennake to the Arkansas Attorney General's office on June 21, 1991 in detailing Brennake's charges re: G. H. W. Bush:

Brenneke would later testify that most of the crates contained weapons and other gear to be used in the training program. He would also say that he found cocaine in some of the crates and while on the ground at Mena, called Donald Gregg, then-Vice President George Bush's chief of staff, and complained about the drugs. He quoted Gregg later as saying that it was none of his business. Brenneke later claimed his role in this affair was that of a money launderer for the Agency, that he worked out of Panama where the flight had originated, and that he had just thumbed a ride on the flight.' [p. 87]

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote about Reed's book for London's Sunday Telegraph 1995 03 26:

Larry Patterson, an Arkansas State Trooper, testified under oath this
month that there were "large quantities of drugs being flown into the Mena Airport."
[...]
The plaintiffs in the suit are Terry and Janis Reed, who claim that they were embroiled in a US covert operation to assist the Nicaraguan Contras between 1983 and 1986. They say that the mission was based in Arkansas, with the alleged active involvement of Governor Clinton.
[...]
In a book published last year, Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA, Terry Reed alleged that he was recruited by Oliver North to help train Contra pilots in aerial supply skills, and to put his machine tool expertise to use developing a clandestine network for the manufacture of untraceable weapons parts.

Reed also claimed to have been present in an ammunition storage bunker outside Little Rock in 1986 when North and other Reagan Administration envoys allegedly met Clinton to discuss the covert operation - and to reprimand the Governor for members of his entourage skimming off money earmarked for national security purposes.

Reed told Kerry Subcommittee staffers about his relations with North, Clinton and Rodrieguez, and Rodrieguez's dealings with Bush:

To no avail, [Reed] had spent three days the previous month [September 1988] in Washington with an attorney for Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations.

There seemed to have been plenty of interest in Washington in the Reeds' story. "It all fits," they were told by subcommittee investigator Jack Blum. "It confirms our suspicions about Felix Rodriguez and what we suspected was really going on. Go back and tell your attorney to draft a proffer (a formal statement). I'm sure that either (Independent Counsel Lawrence) Walsh or Senator Kerry will want to question you under oath.

You'll be hearing from us soon." Trubey drafted the proffer, but there was never a call from Blum, Kerry, Walsh or anyone else. [p. 504]

The eventual Kerry report did get into some connections between the Contras and drug-running. It even mentioned North and Rodrieguez. But no fingers were pointed at Bush or Clinton. The still-important report was buried almost as soon as it was released, and Kerry vocalized no serious objections to the hush-hushing.

Gee, do you think Kerry was covering for fellow Bonesman Poppy Bush?

Gregory Behar of Bones-founded (Henry "Baal" Luce, 1920) Time magazine thought it was a possibility. Until he was told not to, anyway. Again, from Reed's Compromised:

Behar stated that he felt there was strong evidence to prove that Senator John Kerry's investigator, Jack Blum, had actually helped to stymie the Mena investigation.

Blum's job as special counsel to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations was to provide investigative services to Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations and to funnel off pertinent leads he developed during the course of his investigation to Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh's office, which was seeking indictments involving the Iran-Contra affair. Blum had interviewed the Reeds extensively in Washington in 1988.

Behar had confided to Reed that he felt Walsh, probably in concert with Blum, was indeed part of the Iran-Contra cover-up, since Walsh's office had taken no action on Mena. Behar earlier stated that his suspicions stemmed from Walsh's lack of action on the preponderance of credible evidence provided directly to his office by federal, state and county law enforcement agencies, as well as the materials provided him by Arkansas Attorney General Winston Bryant and U.S. Congressman William Alexander concerning the activities at Mena.

Behar, completely reversing his earlier position on the Mena affair, responded, "I'm not convinced there is a cover-up."[p. 629]

Behar's eventual story on Mena was nothing more than a smear job on Reed. (Another major report on Mena, prepared for the Washington Post, was killed at the last minute. (Note: I believe Rivero's information that the editor in question was S&B is incorrect, though he was Yale grad and the Post is heavily tied in with the intelligence community.))

And Reed isn't the only player accusing the Kerry investigation of being less than serious. From Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, we learn the DEA agent Celerino Castillo was all over the activities of Rodrieguez. But Kerry didn't want to know about it:

Castillo was still in the DEA in Central America when Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts launched his probe into allegations of the ClA's involvement in drug running. Despite a parade of witnesses, including convicted drug dealers and associates of Eden Pastora and Manuel Noriega, the Kerry hearings received little attention in the mainstream press. Castillo said in 1997 that he believes it was easy for CIA defenders in the press to discount the Kerry probe because so many of its sources were compromised by their criminal records. "They never brought people like me in to testify. I was the special agent in charge of El Salvador. I did all the investigation, and they never contacted me."[p. 299]

A willingness to keep such skeletons locked in the closet seems to be the most important qualification for the Presidency over the past 23 years.

· Search Libertythink for Skull & Bones

Bones & Ashe
Sunday, January 25, 2004

Sherman Skolnick reported on 2002 09 11:

The FBI/Justice requests to the secret court acting as a type of U.S. District Court under FISA, included:
[. . .]
That the FBI/Justice Department be authorized and empowered to block by forcible and other means any print or electronic news dissemination mentioning of the photo editor, Robert Stevens, of American Media, Inc., Boca Raton, Florida; of Stevens having been murdered by anthrax-by-mail, on or about September, 2001, through the aid, complicity, and connivance of U.S. Government civil/military covert operatives. And any mentioning or dissemination by news and other outlets, that the FBI by closing down the American Media, Inc. headquarters up to date, was thus blocking retrieval of reported pictures and supporting authentication as to George W. Bush in a coffin engaging as a proposed new member of the Skull & Bones Society, in a satanic ritual, in homosexual acts with his reputed male sex-mate who has numerous times visited Bush since that time; such rituals having been conducted at a building called "The Tomb", at Yale University. . . .

Skolnick is a court reporter and reformer of over 40 years, lending credence to his reports coming from the star chamber known as the "FISA Court." (And Stevens' widow is now suing the U.S. government over the military origins of the anthrax that killed her husband.)

An activist in Knoxville. Tennessee posed a question to Skolnick on the yahoo group of a radio show he frequently appears on. From the Filomax list:

QUESTION for Mr Skolnick:

In your series named THE OVERTHROW OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC, you discuss Resident George Bush Jr and Skull & Bones. You say photos were taken during the initiation ceremony, which requires laying nekked in a coffin with the other Skull & Boners. You write that a "prominent US mayor" was photographed in a compromising position with Bush.

Victor Ashe is the former mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee (1988 to December 2003). Ashe is a Skull & Bones alum, and headed the National Mayors Confernce. He was nominated to the board of Fannie Mae S&L by Bush Jr. Ashe has vacationed with the Bush family all his life. . . . Ashe was invited to the White House for dinner in December 2003. . . .

Is Victor Ashe the mayor you are referring to?

PS . . . Mayor Ashe spent $200,000 for a creepy monument to sacrificed victims of 9-11-2001, naming every alleged victim on a black Egyptian obelisk in front of the City County Bldg.

FROM: John Lee; Knoxville, TN
geocities.com/idiotboxwars

President George "Temporary" Bush has even spoken on the record concerning how fabulous he finds Ashe:

I'm also most appreciative of the Mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee . . . I've know Mayor Ashe for years and years and years. And he has done a fabulous job . . . So, Victor, thank you.

Skolnick has also intimated that it was Ashe's funny business with Knoxville's voting machines that gave Tennessee to Bush in 2000.

It turns out Sen. John Kerry was rather close to Ashe at Yale as well. A year ahead of Ashe, Bonesman Kerry would have been among those giving Ashe and the other class of '67 Bonesmen the same kind of initiation Ashe gave Bush. Kerry and Ashe were also both active in the Yale Political Union. From the New York Observer, 1999 10 11:

[New York Gov.] Pataki, however, was in the thick of the university's volatile political life. He rose to be chair of the Yale Political Union's conservative party. The union was where visiting senators and Congressmen spoke to undergraduates and where vehement political debates were held. . .

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts was active in the political union as chair of the liberal party, and so was Yale Daily News political columnist Victor Ashe, now the Mayor of Knoxville, Tenn.

Even back in the days when he was boning around with Ashe, Kerry's fellows in the Order of Death expected him to run for President some day. From The Boston Globe 2003 06 21:

[Kerry] talks often with fellow members of the Skull & Bones society, a conversation that began in 1965, when many Bonesmen assumed Kerry would run for president, and continues as he plots that course.