This article appears in the October 7, 2005 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Cheneygate!

by Jeffrey Steinberg

A political hurricane, as devastating as Katrina, has struck the Bush-Cheney Administration. A string of long-simmering criminal probes, targetting top White House officials and key Congressional allies, has hit all at once, and the right-wing Republican juggernaut of dirty money and political corruption is now on the chopping block.

Asked on Sept. 30 to comment on the series of devastating blows delivered to the Bush-Cheney-Tom DeLay apparatus during the last week of September, Lyndon LaRouche said that "beyond the specifics of the individual instances of crime and sleaze that are now apparently being brought to account, we are seeing an overall reaction to the breakdown of the functioning of our government. The reaction is coming from various places within and around the U.S. governing institutions. In each separate instance, the instinct is the same: We cannot go on any longer with this corrupt, incompetent Bush-Cheney regime. This Administration is no damned good. The House of Representatives is not functioning, because the Republican leadership around Tom DeLay is too busy stealing everything that is not nailed down. Crooks were robbing us blind, and people just said, 'We've had enough,' and took action."

LaRouche went on to emphasize, "This is not a conspiracy against Bush and Cheney. This is a lawful reaction to the chaos and breakdown of governmental functioning that we've seen from the Cheney and DeLay crowd. And now, Mama is standing in the middle of the kitchen, smashing all the dishes. It is not orderly, but it is a long-simmering reaction that has just exploded. And none too soon. With the global financial system in a state of terminal collapse, neither the United States nor the rest of the world can survive much more of this Bush-Cheney fiasco. Plenty of people realize that, in times of crisis, we need leadership from the Executive Branch, from the White House. And Cheney and Bush were leading us straight to Hell."

Cheney's Week From Hell While the Vice President was recovering from surgery for his heart condition, and contemplating his next moves towards war and dictatorship, he was confronted with a series of shocks:

On Sept. 28, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was indicted by a Travis County, Texas grand jury on charges that he conspired to illegally launder $190,000 in corporate money, through the Republican National Committee, to Texas GOP legislative candidates, in violation of state election laws. Under the rules of the Republican House Caucus, he was forced to resign from the Republican House leadership. Immediately upon his resignation, a closed-door brawl erupted among House Republicans over who would be DeLay's interim successor. This reflected long-developing fault lines within the House Republican Caucus, which the DeLay indictment finally cracked.

DeLay's own legal difficulties are complicated by criminal indictments and ongoing criminal probes against right-wing lobbyist and key DeLay financier, Jack Abramoff (see accompanying article). The same week that DeLay was indicted, murder conspiracy charges were filed against three Gambino organized crime family hitmen, for the assassination of Gus Boulis, the former owner of SunCruz, a casino cruise ship line that Abramoff and partners took over without ever paying Boulis for the sale. It is that SunCruz scam that led to the Abramoff indictment in Florida several months ago. Abramoff faces a string of other criminal probes into tens of millions of dollars that he siphoned off from Indian tribes, to bankroll DeLay and his other political cronies. As EIR has revealed, Abramoff and DeLay were at the center of a right-wing fundraising and lobbying apparatus that implicates other leading GOP operatives, including former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed and anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist.

Next, former Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin announced, through his lawyer Plato Cacheris, that he had reached a plea agreement with Federal prosecutors, meaning he will testify as a cooperating witness against the neo-conservative Pentagon apparatus and "Mr. AIPAC," Steven Rosen. Franklin was indicted earlier this year by a Federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va. for passing classified Pentagon material to American Israel Political Affairs Committee officials Rosen and Keith Weissman, and to officials of the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

The Franklin case goes to the heart of the neo-con apparatus embedded in the office of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld—centered around Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith. While both Wolfowitz and Feith have left their Defense Department posts, the legacy of their neo-con "permanent war/permanent regime-change" dogmas lives on in the form of ongoing plans, currently being pushed from Dick Cheney's White House offices, for military actions against Syria and Iran. Sources close to the FBI say that Feith, who was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy and Franklin's boss, is a prime suspect in the ongoing probe of an Israeli espionage triangle, implicating Israeli think-tanks, AIPAC, and American national security officials.

The most devastating personal blow to Cheney, however, came on Sept. 29, when New York Times reporter Judith Miller reached an agreement with independent counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, to appear before a Federal grand jury probing the Valerie Plame leak. Miller had been jailed this Summer for contempt of court, after she refused to testify about her ties to I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the chief of staff and chief national security aide to Cheney.

EIR was the first publication to report that the leaking of the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame to syndicated columnist Robert Novak and others had been run out of Cheney's office, by Libby and other staffers, including John Hannah. Valerie Plame is the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose February 2002 mission, on behalf of the CIA, to Niger, discredited reports that Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy uranium from that African state. EIR revealed that in mid-March 2003, Cheney aides met to launch a "Get Joe Wilson" campaign, to silence opposition to the Iraq War.

In striking the deal that got her out of jail, Judith Miller named Libby as the person who revealed Valerie Plame's identity to her.

A Triple Header Upon learning about Miller's comments and her scheduled testimony before Fitzgerald's Federal grand jury, LaRouche said: "This is devastating for Cheney and company for three reasons. First, the issue of the leak per se. Libby is now implicated in the original media leak of the identity of Valerie Plame. That is a crime all by itself. Second, is the issue of the coverup. Here, Libby and others are implicated in perjury, obstruction of justice, and a whole second category of crimes—all related to the coverup. And is anyone going to believe that Libby did this on his own, without consulting with his boss, Dick Cheney? I don't think so."

"And then," LaRouche continued, "there is the third issue, and that is the role of our current acting United Nations Ambassador John Bolton in all of this. We know that Judith Miller and Bolton were close confidants, both involved as key assets of the White House Iraq Group. And the WHIG has been at the dead center of the Fitzgerald probe from the outset. Are we about to see our UN Ambassador sent packing? Let's hope so."

"I suspect," LaRouche concluded, "that some people within the institutions see the Valerie Plame case as a perfect opportunity to get Bolton out of that UN post."

The Washington Post's Threat Not everyone views the looming demise of the Cheney-Bush White House as good news. Even as the walls were closing in on Dick Cheney, the Washington Post, the unofficial voice of the Synarchist financier establishment in the nation's capital, ran a warning op-ed by chief political commentator Jim Hoagland on Sept. 29, demanding that someone step forward to read Bush the riot act, to avoid the collapse of his Presidency.

Hoagland wrote: "Bush's floundering since he was caught off base and off guard by Hurricane Katrina strips the veil from a broad pattern of recurrent inattention to the duties of governance, of misplaced loyalty to incompetent subordinates, and a crippling refusal to look back at and learn from mistakes." In a not-so-veiled reference to Bush and Cheney's leading critics, including LaRouche, Hoagland continued, "I take no pleasure from that harsh assessment. I have never shared the unreasoning conviction of many of his more partisan opponents that Bush as a national leader is illegitimate, moronic, or both. He isn't."

Nice try, Mr. Hoagland, but the Bush-Cheney ship is sinking like the Titanic, and a re-shuffling of the deck chairs is a little too late.

June 28, 2003

http://www.counterpunch.org/brown06282003.html

Tom Delay's New World Order

"I Am the Government"

By JON BROWN

The story I heard goes like this: Tom DeLay lights up a stogie in a restaurant, and a waiter comes over and says, "I'm sorry, sir, but this is a government building, and no smoking is permitted." To which Mr. DeLay, House majority leader extraordinaire, if I may resort to Freedom English in honor of Tom's until now secret admiration of Gustave Flaubert, barks, "I am the government."

That got me thinking. It's interesting to learn that Tom DeLay is the government. I didn't know that. So I looked in the Constitution and didn't find any mention of him. It must be an outdated edition. All it talked about was a government of we, the people.

Now some say the Constitution has always been sort of sly about what it means by "people." Used to be "people" meant no women, coloreds, or white guys without property need apply. But people has always been, as far as I can tell, you know, plural? So I looked that up too, and the dictionary said "people" still means no less than two persons. Like I said, it must be an old edition I'm using.

But then, I'm always mixing up kinds of words. For instance, take when people say life is unfair. Usually they say that when they want to explain why the deal they got is so much better than somebody else's. "Can I have some?" "No." "How come?" "Because." "But that's not fair?" "Who said life is fair?" Or sometimes it's because it just looks like too much work to do anything about it, especially when the guys with the remote have guns or worse, like Fox News. It's hard to argue with that.

Now when I hear "life's unfair," I get a funny look on my face, like I don't understand, but it's not because I disagree. Yeah, life's unfair, yessir, I'm with you on that. But I get that look because the way I see it, so what? Life's about adverbs, not adjectives. (Footnote: For those of you who sleeped through English, "unfair" is an adjective. I know that because I looked it up. But then, maybe the book I used was an outdated edition.) Okay, so life's unfair. How unfair is it? That's where adverbs come in. It's not about what kind; it's about how much.

So since I'm people, as far as I know, I can see why Tom DeLay might think fair is he gets everything, because legally, as the only guy mentioned in the Constitution, he's entitled to it, and everybody else gets secondhand smoke. That's only fair. It's democratic too. After all, as the entire government, he does represent a majority. Since democracy's what makes us free, it's our civic duty to uphold it against foes foreign and domestic by letting old Tom flick his cigar ash in our ears.

We've just got to trust him to do the right thing. When he came to this job of being the whole government and all he brought along years of on-the-job experience as a pest control technician to help with his work. What that taught him is the most reliable way to exterminate is to burn the house down. It's simple: no house, no problem. That's the sort of common sense Tom brings to Washington.

And now he's taking it to Iraq too. Take looting. That's how a country ought to run. You blow up and burn down and strip away what other folks took decades and centuries to build up and take it home with ya, first come, first served. That's what makes people productive. They've gotta be, because there's nothing left. Once they've got their values set right, they can come by and friends of Tom's can sell them back the stuff they took from them. That's free enterprise, which I thought must be in the Constitution, the way Tom's friends talk about it so highly, but I couldn't find it there. But again, it must be that old edition of mine.

Looks like I'm gonna have to invest in some up-to-date reading material, which I will do, once I find a job again. I'd borrow what I need from the library except it closed. The city hasn't got any money, so it asked the state, but the state has no money, so it asked Tom DeLay, but he's got no money either. He gave it all back to the taxpayers, he said. But since I'm not making any money I got none back. So I asked if maybe he could lend me some on account, but he said no, it's against his principles to support loafers, and besides, he's already borrowed all he can to pay his friends to bring democracy to Iraq, so how could I be so selfish to ask for some for myself?

I felt pretty bad about that, but he said that's okay. Just have faith in Jesus and everything'll work out fine. He sounded kind of choked up when he said that, because I could hear a sort of snorting every couple of words, and I would've asked him if he was all right if he hadn't hung up so quick. He is the government, after all, so I wouldn't want to cause him any troubles. He's depending on us to give him our support by minding our own business. So maybe I won't need to put out for that new Constitution anyway. Since it's about Tom DeLay, it's not really any of my business.

Jon Brown can be reached at: dogen@mindspring.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/abboushi1111.html

November 11, 2002

Cartoons and the Messianic Age
Tom and Jerry and Jerry

by TARIF ABBOUSHI

In the venerable cartoon, the protagonists' conflicting agendas define the epitome of cat-and-mouse rivalry: simple survival for the mouse while the cat relentlessly tries to gobble him up. On rare occasions, as when both find themselves evicted from the house, they set aside their differences and pool their cunning for as long as it takes to reclaim the common right of residence, whereupon the old enmity is inevitably resumed. Today's alliance between the American theological-political landscape's most curious of bedfellows--" evangelical Christians and Zionist Jews"-- is a case of life imitating the cartoon.

During a speech to Baptist pastors in Texas earlier this year, U.S. House of Representatives majority whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) averred that only Christianity offers a "a viable, reasonable definitive answer" to life's key questions. He predictably expressed no such sentiment last April when he addressed a Washington conference of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The half-dozen standing ovations he received on that occasion were for his various expressions of unconditional support for Zionism, such as his quip about touring "udea and Samaria" and seeing no occupation, "only Israel."

If silence is a sign of assent, then Mr. DeLay was true to form when he withheld public comment about the invective that marked this year's Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis. Florida Rev. Jerry Vines chose the occasion to slur Islam by proclaiming that the Prophet Muhammad's matrimony with a 9-year-old girl made him a "demon-possessed pedophile." Another American evangelical stalwart, Jerry Falwell, subsequently appeared to delight in endorsing Vines' right to his opinion in front of a national U.S. audience on CNN's Crossfire.

If the practice of dredging up minutiae from centuries-old holy text to discredit individuals or devotees of a faith is kosher, it would surely behoove the orthodoxy among AIPAC's ranks to start an early preparation of their defenses, rather than wait until the confluence of the AIPAC and evangelical agendas has run its course. For should his jab at Islamic sensibilities be a measure of his method, orthodox Jews must dread the day when Rev. Vines tosses aside the Koran and reaches instead for the Talmud, considered to be the basis of religious authority in Orthodox Judaism. One can only wonder if Vines will be as outspokenly intolerant of the Talmud's sanctioning of sex with a child as long as the child is less than nine years old, or of its proviso that a Jew may marry a three-year-old girl. And what will be the evangelical reaction to the Talmudic assertion that Jesus Christ is boiling in hot excrement in hell? Might such revelations strain the alliance?

Probably not, for as far as the evangelicals are concerned the agenda reigns supreme. Their support of Zionism is not based on feelings of empathy for Jews. It is, rather, a manifestation of their fixation on Christian theology's pre-conditions for the return of the Messiah: Restoration of the State of Israel, Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem, and the re-building of the Temple. To that point, evangelical Christians and Zionist Jews are complementary voices in the same choir. It is in the expectation of what happens next that the unity of purpose ends.

Judaism teaches that the coming of the Hebrew Messiah will usher in the Olam Ha-Ba (the World to Come), commonly referred to in English as the "Messianic Age", the time when all people will recognize the Jewish God as the only true God, and the Jewish religion as the only true religion. For the evangelicals, the return of the Christian Messiah signifies the time when the Jews will convert en masse to Christianity, or perish. Given that there is no place for Jews (let alone Muslims) in the heaven of Tom Delay, Jerry Vines and Jerry Falwell, can the Zionist-evangelical alliance withstand the riving force of such inherently divergent interpretations of the endgame?

Do mice convert to cats?

Tarif Abboushi lives in Houston, Texas. He can be reached at tabboushi@aol.com

This article appears in the January 16, 2004 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Mannikin: The Making of Tom DeLay

by Tony Papert

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2004/3102delay_mannkin.html 

This is republished from a just-released pamphlet of Lyndon LaRouche's political committee, LaRouche in 2004, entitled Children of Satan II: The Beast-Men. The pamphlet is the second edition of the LaRouche campaign's Children of Satan: Ignoble Liars Behind Bush's No-Exit War, in mass circulation since May 2003.

The snakelike cast of Tom DeLay's eyes can be disconcerting, can't it?—Somewhat as though you had pulled open a long-hidden door, only to start at finding a pair of lidless eyes staring directly back into your own. Intently,—but with just what intent?

"Close that door," you say? "Enough for now."

Very well—don't "go there." But if you don't, remember never to make a judgement of Tom DeLay, since you refuse to look at what he really is. From that point on, anything you may say will only be tossed onto the scrapheap of impotent, self-righteous moralizing, and instantly forgotten.

Our creative genius, the American intelligence agent Edgar Allan Poe, the Poe of "Maelzel's Chess-Player," and "The Case of Marie Roget," had quite another approach. Where you find horror here, Poe would walk directly up to, into, and through the horror. For what is horror, after all?—a question which must occur to the reader of Poe's tales. Horror may simply be a representation of the mental barrier which seeks to block your path to a required creative (and loving) insight, somewhat like the wall of fire through which Dante had to pass to enter Paradise.

Viewed in that way, the mummy's mask, glaring at you incomprehensibly, is not in itself the horror, but only a distraction. The real horror is in the question: Just what sort of a creature would choose just that ghoulish mask for its disguise? And just what does it see right now, as it looks out at me from behind it?

Peeking out furtively through the reptilian mask, Poe would immediately have sensed eyes moist with shame, pain, and confusion. Inside the scarecrow effigy, there huddles the diminutive figure of an abused child, or, more exactly, of a young boy sadistically maltreated by an alcoholic, and almost certainly a bipolar, father, Charles DeLay. Tom and both of his brothers followed Charles DeLay into alcoholism. Tom was already grown up before he learned to control his stuttering by taking a course in auctioneering, but the stuttering would come back whenever he was under emotional pressure.

It is often noted that we make some of life's worst mistakes while still too young to know what we are doing. So it was with the DeLay boys' (and their sister's) choice of father.

Tom DeLay has long made the care and protection of abused children a special cause. His outburst to Washington, D.C., city officials on their alleged mishandling of a child-abuse case in 2000, showed that he regarded himself, now in his 50s, as an abused child still. As paraphrased by an admiring participant, DeLay said that "children are beaten, battered, burned, sodomized, and bruised! I would like for us to treat each of you like that, and not respond to you for a while, and see how you feel."

But, this is no "simple" case of bipolar disorder imposed by father on son, so ugly and so commonplace (even while each particular case is also special and different). The flaws which young Tom DeLay carried within himself from boyhood, later became tools in the hands of psychological technicians, to remold Tom DeLay the "grown-up" Congressman, into the compound creature we see today. Psychological engineering has been at work, analogous to the days-long vivisections, performed without anesthesia, by which H.G. Wells' fictional Dr. Moreau transformed beasts into man-beasts.

The "before," a crippled, but reachable neurotic. The "after," a hopeless manufactured psychotic. The transition, the brainwashing, can be dated approximately to the period 1985-91.

Earlier, when DeLay had served in the Texas state legislature from 1978 to 1984, as one former Texas colleague, Democratic legislator Debra Danburg, says, "When he used to go to the microphone—and he didn't very often—people would start chanting 'De-lay, De-lay,' because we knew it was usually just a waste of time." For, as Peter Perl wrote in the Washington Post Magazine of May 13, 2001, "DeLay had a reputation in Austin less as a lawmaker than as a partygoer and playboy known as 'Hot Tub Tom.' " Although married, "he roomed with other fun-loving male legislators at a condo they dubbed 'Macho Manor.' "

Similarly, as a freshman Congressman in Washington in 1985-86, DeLay was considered a lightweight, a joke, and the "roach-exterminator Congressman"—having earlier run pest-control companies in Texas. He tells that in those years, he used to stay out drinking every night until the bars closed. What a different man, in so many respects, from the Tom DeLay who today glories in the nicknames "the Hammer," "the Exterminator," and "the Meanest Man in Congress."

Credit the change to one of the most secretive and most powerful organizations in Washington, one which flaunts, behind closed doors, its access to the powerful of many countries, while at the same time it lacks officers, organizations, and indeed even a name. Absent a name, it is called by some, the "Fellowship," by others, the "Foundation," but by members, usually the "Family." Only two functions are ever seen aboveground by the public: the National Prayer Breakfasts, and former Watergate figure Chuck Colson and his Prison Fellowship Ministries.

The account of his induction that DeLay himself has allowed to be publicly circulated, describes how he was taken in hand by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), an important "Family" member, in 1985; that Wolf showed DeLay a religious videotape and convinced him of the futility of his life. DeLay says he was soon broken down and weeping.

But because this particular zombie-factory, the "Family," is only the subsidiary of a subsidiary, we must first get a look at the parent company.

Synarchy in America The "Family" is a tentacle of the Synarchist movement. which was founded by Britain's Lord Shelburne at the time of the American Revolution, both to destroy the United States, and to prevent the propagation of the American idea to Europe and the rest of the globe. The chosen instrument of this movement was, and is, terrorism against the American Intellectual Tradition.

The Spanish Inquisition played and still plays a central role for the Synarchy, because one of Synarchism's intellectual authors, the Savoyard noble and diplomat Joseph de Maistre (1754-1821), based his conception of the Synarchist "Beast-Man," on the role of such Spanish Grand Inquisitors as the Dominican Tomas de Torquemada. The Beast-Man was the leader capable and ready for whatever unimaginably enormous crime. Thus, the precedent for Hitler's genocide against the Jews, was the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, which Torquemada forced on King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. Never before then had presumed Christians conducted such a genocide. Nor was this done in the course of war, but against those who were then, and had been for centuries their peaceable neighbors.

In this sense, the late Sir Isaiah Berlin was quite right to choose Joseph de Maistre as "the first fascist." And it is no coincidence that Poe's famous tale, "The Pit and the Pendulum," takes place in the Inquisition's central prison/fortress at Toledo, and at a then-recent, datable historic moment. This was no mere choice of a "horrible" theme; quite the contrary. For the reasons given here, the actual Spanish Inquisition was central to Poe's collaborators in American Intelligence, among them the diplomat and great writer Washington Irving, and Irving's collaborator, the leading historian William H. Prescott.

In the 1930s, the American branch of Synarchy centered on the pro-Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco alliance between the Ku Klux Klan-descended Nashville Agrarian movement, and the anti-Renaissance, pro-Roman Empire, pro-Spanish Inquisition "Catholic" movement known as the Distributists. Both these movements were sponsored and promoted by the British Fabian "Round Tables" associated with H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Sidney Webb, and company.

After the second World War, the movement was funded and promoted here, notoriously, by the family of William F. Buckley, in conjunction with the circle of Nazi ideologue Leo Strauss. The "Catholic" Janus-face, which recruited DeLay associates Senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum, now centers in a network of institutions led by the Buckley and Hapsburg-family dominated Christendom College of Front Royal, Va., and the University of Dallas. Christendom's ideological dominance of the Church's Arlington Diocese, and its influence over so-called "conservative" thinking in our capital, is typified by Nazi-like Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, and Nazi-Communist spy Robert Hanssen.

This "Catholic" wing is intertwined with the Ku Klux Klan revivalists associated with the League of the South, Southern Partisan and Southern Patriot magazines, and Buckleyite conservative think-tanks such as the Rockford Institute and the Heritage Foundation, as well as with the Straussian cult,—notably the "West Coast" wing centered at California's Claremont Institute.

The outlook of the Agrarian-Distributist movement, is as follows: The United States, and the idea of a community of principle among sovereign nation-states as prescribed by John Quincy Adams' Monroe Doctrine, is the greatest evil on Earth, being the most advanced manifestation of the Platonic Christian idea, that man shares in the cognitive capability of the Creator, and has a mission, therefore, to provide for the General Welfare of himself and his posterity, by creating nations which foster scientific and cultural progress to that end. This idea is vilified by Southern Agrarian John Crowe Ransom and the others as the "half-man, half-god" Jesus Christ, as the "American Heresy," the "heresy of nationalism," the chaos of sovereignty, and in myriad other ways.

To this idea of man, they counterpose those qualities, such as appetite, which man shares with the beasts. Poet and literary critic Ransom insisted that the purpose of literature and art is to focus man's cognition on those animal, rather than human, qualities. His lifelong friend, William Yandell Elliott, the Harvard professor and mentor of such Utopian foreign policy figures as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, and McGeorge Bundy, preaches that myths and legends should be "employed to condition people as you train animals, as you train a dog."

The Synarchists insist that thus bestialized man must be dominated by the terror "god" of the "Family," and of Joseph de Maistre, what Ransom calls the "God of Thunder," which British Catholic rightist ideologue Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) specifically identifies as the "god" of the Roman Pantheon. This is the "god" which man's reason can never comprehend, and which it is a great sin to attempt to comprehend, who terrorizes and destroys man at his will. It is the god of the Spanish Inquisition, which insists, as Ignatius Loyola put it, that, if he says black is white and white is black, they are.

Belloc and the Distributists insist, with Maistre earlier, that the Catholic Church is not the Church of Christ, but, rather the Cult of the Roman Empire. In his Great Heresies, Belloc went so far as to insist that it is a heresy to question the alleged "Donation of Constantine," whereby that Roman Emperor supposedly made the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, heir to the world-empire of the Caesars,—even though it might be a forgery. Maistre likewise insisted on the authority of that "Donation," even if forged, in his Letters on the Pope. Thus, there could be no sovereign governments, because all were subject to the Pope as emperor.

In Orthodoxy, Belloc's co-thinker G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) described Christ as an object compatible with the "Family's" "faith," but, one which Christians would properly recognize as a different figure. Chesterton called Christ "an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy: a being who often acted like an angry god.... Morally [He] is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter.... We cannot even explain it by calling such a being insane."

Napoleon's career as Jacobin terrorist, and then the Beast-Man of France and of all Europe, was shaped by Joseph de Maistre, for instance in his Considerations on France. In his own 1932 biography of Napoleon, Chesterton's other half, Belloc, likewise promoted Napoleon as a "Thunder God" model for the 1930s re-establishment of a united "Christian" Europe under the Fascists. There, he characterized Napoleon with phrases like "Lightning in the Hills," "rolls of thunder on thunder," and "sharp elbows of lightning." Belloc's description of Napoleon's mission, which he was then entrusting to the Fascists, was, "He would have caught up again the undying Augustan tradition, the inheritance of the Caesars, the legacy of Rome to our race," and cured "that disruption among the members of a common stock in culture, no part of which can live without the rest, that chaos of separate conflicting sovereignties which had for three centuries [i.e., since the Renaissance founding of the nation-state by Louis XI] grown more and more perilous, threatening the destruction of our whole society."

Despite the Distributists' appeal to "Christian Orthodoxy," their movement, like the "Family," is non-denominational. Ransom concludes his God Without Thunder with an appeal to members of all sects: "With whatever religious institution a modern man may be connected, let him try to turn it back towards orthodoxy. Let him insist on a virile and concrete God, and accept no Principle as a substitute. Let him restore to God the thunder. Let him resist the usurpation of the Godhead by the soft modern version of the Christ."

As a matter of fact, "Distributism" was launched by a magazine, New Age, which was financed by the Fabian socialist Sidney Webb, and edited by the Theosophist A.R. Orage. In its pages, the works of Chesterton and Belloc appeared side by side with those of the Fabians including the Webbs, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells, and mystics, notoriously including the 20th Century's leading Satanist, Aleister Crowley. Unlike the professed "Christian" Distributists and Agrarians, and the "Family's" theocratic cronies today, Crowley correctly identified his "god" as Satan, and himself as "The Great Beast."

The 'Family' Now, the "Family" exists to recruit notables into the Synarchy, especially officials of the U.S. and other governments, as far as we can tell. These are recruited into various levels, of which the brainwashed zombie Tom DeLay represents only one.

The depth of the secrecy with which the "Family" surrounds itself is such that we would know rather little about it, but for the fact that free-lance writer Jeffrey Sharlet responded to an invitation to attend a sort of training camp in its posh Arlington, Virginia compound at the end of 24th Street North, in Spring 2002. Afterwards, he described it in Harper's of March 2003, and also in an interview with Guerrilla News Network (on www.alternet.org), on June 13, 2003. Although Sharlet did not join the "Family's" training program under any false auspices, he was, nevertheless, predictably threatened after his article appeared. It is well worth reading in full.

Important points of Sharlet's account can be corroborated and fleshed-out with the aid of the voluminous writings of former Watergate figure Charles B. "Chuck" Colson, now head of the "Family" subsidiary, Prison Fellowship Ministries (PFM). (Note that DeLay has also taught a course on "The Theology of Chuck Colson," in his church in his hometown of Sugarland, Texas.) PFM is the closest that the secretive "Family" comes to a publicly acknowledged organization, just as Colson is the closest it comes to a publicly acknowledged leader who is himself a public figure. PFM depends upon webs of contractual agreements with U.S. and some foreign prisons, which provide it with government funds and even money from prisoners themselves, as well as ensuring massive prison recruitment. For that reason, it cannot exist in secret in the same way that the rest of the "Family" does.

As a "Family" trainee, Sharlet had to participate in a special form of basketball, "bump," invented by the "Family." It seems the true objective of the game was for players to hit and jostle each other with basketballs and their bodies, so as to "face your anger" and then abandon it. The trainees prayed to be "nothing." They were there to learn to "soften to authority," to crush their "inner rebel." Anything had to be crushed, which stood in the way of blind, instant, wholehearted obedience.

And indeed, a look at almost any of Chuck Colson's writings, will disclose that he also, always and everywhere reduces faith, hope, Christian love (or agape), and any and all other virtue, to the one sole coin of blind "obedience."

The "covenant" of which the "Family" leaders speak continually, is therefore a "covenant" of absolute obedience,—"to Jesus," they will add,—but let's examine that further.

Sharlet is reporting on a visit by the "Family's" supreme leader, Doug Coe.

"Two or three agree, and they pray? They can do anything. Agree. Agreement. What's that mean?" Doug looked at me. "You're a writer. What does that mean?"

I remembered Paul's letter to the Philippians, which we had begun to memorize. Fulfill ye my joy, that ye be likeminded.

"Unity," I said. "Agreement means unity." Doug didn't smile. "Yes," he said. "Total unity. Two, or three, become one. Do you know," he asked, "that there's another word for that?"

No one spoke.

"It's called a covenant. Two, or three, agree? They can do anything. A covenant is ... powerful. Can you think of anyone who made a covenant with his friends?"

We all knew the answer to this, having heard his name invoked numerous times in this context. Andrew from Australia, sitting beside Doug, cleared his throat: "Hitler."

"Yes," Doug said. "Yes, Hitler made a covenant. The Mafia makes a covenant. It is such a very powerful thing. Two, or three, agree."

On another occasion, Doug Coe's son and heir apparent, David Coe, taught the trainees what might be called the Gospel according to Genghis Khan.

He walked to the National Geographic map of the world mounted on the wall.

"You guys know about Genghis Khan?" he asked. "Genghis was a man with a vision. He conquered"—David stood on the couch under the map, tracing, with his hand, half the northern hemisphere—"nearly everything. He devastated nearly everything. His enemies? He beheaded them." David swiped a finger across his throat. "Dop, dop, dop, dop."

David explained that when Genghis entered a defeated city he would call in the local headman and have him stuffed into a crate. Over the crate would be spread a tablecloth, and on the tablecloth would be spread a wonderful meal. "And then, while the man suffocated, Genghis ate, and he didn't even hear the man's screams." David still stood on the couch, a finger in the air. "Do you know what that means?" He was thinking of Christ's parable of the wineskins. "You can't pour new into old," David said, returning to his chair. "We elect our leaders. Jesus elects his."

He reached over and squeezed the arm of a brother. "Isn't that great?" David said. "That's the way everything in life happens. If you're a person known to be around Jesus, you can go and do anything. And that's who you guys are. When you leave here, you're not only going to know the value of Jesus, you're going to know the people who rule the world. It's about vision. 'Get your vision straight, then relate.' Talk to the people who rule the world, and help them obey. Obey Him. If I obey Him myself, I help others do the same. You know why? Because I become a warning. We become a warning. We warn everybody that the future king is coming. Not just of this country or that, but of the world." Then he pointed at the map, toward the Khan's vast, reclaimable empire.

One thinks of the e-mailed memo of DeLay press secretary Michael Scanlon, relative to DeLay's effort to impeach President Clinton: "This whole thing about not kicking someone when they are down is bullshit. Not only do you kick him—you kick him until he passes out—then beat him over the head with a baseball bat—then roll him up in an old rug—and throw him off a cliff into the pounding surf below."

In a later interview with Guerrilla News Network, Sharlet reported that many of the cultists loved German Synarchist thinker Friedrich Nietzsche, and thought him fascinating.

The "Family's" "Jesus" is not only, or even primarily, interested in religious matters, but even in details of Social Security and highway legislation. That is to say that he has very definite opinions, and therefore orders, concerning much of the legislation DeLay's office deals with.

Sharlet reports that the "Family" rejects the designation of "Christian" for themselves and their acolytes. He passes on various tortured rationales for this, but the reality is simpler: In fact, they are anything but Christians. No Synarchist is a Christian.

Official founder Abraham Vereide began the process of dissolving the whole structure of the "Family" in 1966. What remains is similar to the small-cell structure of the Martinist and Synarchist secret organizations of the 18th and 19th Centuries. As a "Family" member, all that you should know, is the leader of your own cell, and its six to eight other members. A document called "Our Common Agreement as a Core Group," defined the "core group," or "cell," as a "publicly invisible but privately identifiable group of companions." When Sharlet asked to what organization a donation check might be made, he was told there was none; money was raised on a "man-to-man" basis.

Yet the "Family" still runs the very public National Prayer Breakfasts, featuring the President and other top U.S. and foreign notables. Behind the scenes also, it is continually hosting top politicians. Former Attorney General Edwin Meese led a weekly prayer breakfast at the Cedars mansion, in the Arlington compound, while Sharlet was there. Former President George H.W. Bush had been there on several occasions, as had every President, or so Sharlet was told. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda was a frequent participant. At 133 C Street S.E., in Washington, the "Family" operates a townhouse for U.S. Congressmen. Eight Congressmen—Nevada Republican Senator John Ensign, and seven U.S. Representatives—were living there during Sharlet's internship. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Congressmen who have lived there include John Elias Baldacci (D-Me.), Ed Bryant (R-Tenn.), Mike Doyle (R-Pa.), and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.). A fuller list of associated names accompanies this article.

Are all of the men mentioned here, and in the accompanying list, "Family" zombies like Tom DeLay? Of course not. Some probably know little about it, while others support it to varying extents with varying degrees of knowledge. Others are members; still others are leaders. But all the lists of members and leaders are secret.

Yet think what the "Family's" ability to produce a President of the United States or other top politicians, as if on demand, does for their brainwashing prowess. One thinks of Mephistopheles' ability to produce Alexander of Macedon and Helen of Troy, for his dupe, Dr. Faustus, in Marlowe's great play. It allows them to intimate to their dupes, that they secretly control the whole world! In the suggestible frame of mind induced by their brainwashing, the dupes will believe it.

Other elements of the brainwashing program can be learned from DeLay's and Colson's accounts, and also correlated with the "Twelve Steps" of Alcoholics Anonymous, which AA inherited from Frank Buchman's "Oxford Groups Movement," later called "Moral Rearmament"—which latter, in turn, was later reorganized into the "Rev." Sun Myung Moon's cult. Alcoholics Anonymous has special relevance for DeLay's case, because of the way that movement focussed its efforts on "Bowery bum" types, especially in its early years in the 1930s.

The "Family" specializes in recruiting men at a low point of despair: Colson, for instance, faced jail for Watergate offenses. He writes pitiably about how, for him, a highly successful, upwardly mobile lawyer, a man at the very pinnacle of power as a top adviser to the President, for him, being sent to prison was his "greatest humiliation," his "most abject failure." He wrote that he had "lost everything I thought made Chuck Colson a great guy."

First, then, in the program comes "conviction of sin," what AA co-founder William Griffiths Wilson called "deflation at depth." The brainwashing victim must be convinced he is worthless. As Colson writes, "Victory comes through defeat; healing through brokenness." Next, he is persuaded to give up all attempt to use his reason, or to control his life and his destiny; he has only made a hopeless mess of it all; he must resign it all to "God." A humiliating private confession to the cell leader or AA "sponsor," is followed by some sort of humiliating confession before a group. And, so on; the rest may be found in these and other sources.

What Now? The result of the brainwashing of Tom DeLay, taken together with the criminal apparatus and other capabilities which were then made available to him by the zombie's masters, combined with the effects of Vice President Cheney's virtual coup since Sept. 11, 2001, has been to subject the whole U.S. House of Representatives to the unconstrained power of a secret and unaccountable Synarchist (i.e., fascist) cult.

Before concluding this article by considering some of those aspects of that much more important matter, let me note that DeLay's own psychopathology has been badly aggravated by the "Family's" abuse of him since 1985. His father Charles DeLay died in 1988, and since that time, Tom DeLay has totally severed relations with his mother, both his brothers, and his sister. In the mid-1990s, DeLay conducted an all-out vendetta against Jacqueline Blankenship, the wife of a former business partner, attempting to deny her the ability to get any employment in Fort Bend County, which he represents in Congress, and where they both live. His actions towards Mrs. Blankenship were so bizarre, that none of his friends could defend them, and instead refuse to discuss the matter at all. His crazy outburst at Washington, D.C., city officials in 2000 or 2001 was summarized above. It is possible that Tom DeLay is now able to better control his drinking binges, but, if so, the "dry alcoholic" of today, is far sicker than the old drunk was, in most or in all other respects.

The "Family" enabled Tom DeLay to form the network of Political Action Committees known as "DeLay, Inc.," the money machine which gives DeLay a stranglehold over Republican Congressional campaign financing. It did this by linking him up with Jack Abramoff, who was then, and still is, the leading private lobbyist for so-called American Indian gambling casinos. In 1985, Abramoff chaired Oliver North's Citizens for America, tasked to attract wealthy private funders for the Central American "Contra" adventures. Abramoff then founded the International Freedom Foundation (IFF), a secret U.S.-British-Israeli propaganda bureau for South Africa's military forces. IFF and Abramoff worked with the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), itself closely linked, first to Buchman's Moral Rearmament, and then to the "Reverend" Moon and Col. Bo Hi Pak. South African rightist Rabbi Daniel Lapin, whom Abramoff funds to run a Jewish alliance with Pat Robertson and Christian Zionists, introduced Jack to Tom DeLay.

Ever since, Abramoff has been DeLay's chief financier, fundraising tactician, and chief manager of DeLay's lucrative and important links to lobbyists such as Enron.

In 1989, when DeLay ran the campaign of Edward Madigan for Republican (Minority) Whip against the rising Newt Gingrich, DeLay's man lost a close race. But DeLay then got himself elected chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a House Conservative vehicle which he ran in conjunction with Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition. (The Fellowship created televangelist Robertson, who was originally a playboy, and first began speaking in tongues and exchanging prophecies under the guidance of Fellowship master-trainer Harald Bredesen.)

With the Republican 1994 takeover, DeLay was elected Majority Whip.

Later, DeLay created a new Republican Party instrument called the Values Action Team, to bring Christian Zionist functionaries into directly running the House of Representatives. DeLay placed then-freshman Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Pitts as chair of this inside-outside leadership coordination. Joe is a Fellowship core member, who has conducted orientation at the Arlington headquarters, "The Cedars" mansion, for potential cult recruits.

The power exercised within the Congress by Vice President Cheney, who presides over the Senate, is closely coordinated with DeLay and his "Family." Aided by senior Synarchist figure George Shultz, Cheney ran all aspects of the transition to power of the Bush-Cheney Administration in 2000-01. Cheney's liaison man in charge of arranging the new Administration's relations with Congress was David Gribbin—a noted bigshot at the Fellowship cult's Cedars mansion. Previously Gribbin was chief lobbyist for Halliburton Corporation under CEO Cheney, and Chief of Staff for Defense Secretary Cheney.

Sources: On Tom DeLay's life: Peter Perl, in the Washington Post Magazine, May 13, 2001. On the "Family," Jeffrey Sharlett, as noted above. On Tom DeLay's life, his career, and many other matters covered: published and unpublished research by Anton Chaitkin. On Synarchy in America: published and unpublished work by Stanley Ezrol.

BY MICHAEL MASSING, The Nation

June 10, 2002

On May 2 the Senate, in a vote of 94 to 2, and the House, 352 to 21, expressed unqualified support for Israel in its recent military actions against the Palestinians. The resolutions were so strong that the Bush Administration--hardly a slouch when it comes to supporting Israel--attempted to soften its language so as to have more room in getting peace talks going. But its pleas were rejected, and members of Congress from Joe Lieberman to Tom DeLay competed to heap praise on Ariel Sharon and disdain on Yasir Arafat. Reporting on the vote, the New York Times noted that one of the few dissenters, Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, "suggested that many senators were after campaign contributions."

Aside from that brief reference, however, the Times made no mention of the role that money, or lobbying in general, may have played in the lopsided vote. More specifically, the Times made no mention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It's a remarkable oversight. AIPAC is widely regarded as the most powerful foreign-policy lobby in Washington. Its 60,000 members shower millions of dollars on hundreds of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. It also maintains a network of wealthy and influential citizens around the country, whom it can regularly mobilize to support its main goal, which is making sure there is "no daylight" between the policies of Israel and of the United States.

So, when Congress votes so decisively in support of Israel, it's no accident. Yet, surveying US newspaper coverage of the Middle East in recent months, I found next to nothing about AIPAC and its influence. The one account of any substance appeared in the Washington Post, in late April. Reporting on AIPAC's annual conference, correspondent Mike Allen noted that the attendees included half the Senate, ninety members of the House and thirteen senior Administration officials, including White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who drew a standing ovation when he declared in Hebrew, "The people of Israel live." Showing its "clout," Allen wrote, AIPAC held "a lively roll call of the hundreds of dignitaries, with individual cheers for each." Even this article, however, failed to probe beneath the surface and examine the lobbying and fundraising techniques AIPAC uses to lock up support in Congress.

AIPAC is not the only pro-Israel organization to escape scrutiny. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, though little known to the general public, has tremendous influence in Washington, especially with the executive branch. Based in New York, the conference is supposed to give voice to the fifty-two Jewish organizations that sit on its board, but in reality it tends to reflect the views of its executive vice chairman, Malcolm Hoenlein. Hoenlein has long had close ties to Israel's Likud Party. In the 1990s he helped raise money for settlers' groups on the West Bank, and today he regularly refers to that region as "Judea and Samaria," a biblically inspired catch phrase used by conservatives to justify the presence of Jewish settlers there. A skilled and articulate operative, Hoenlein uses his access to the State Department, Pentagon and National Security Council to push for a strong Israel. He's so effective at it that the Jewish newspaper the Forward, in its annual list of the fifty most important American Jews, has ranked Hoenlein first.

Hoenlein showed his organizing skills in April, when he helped convene the large pro-Israel rally on Capitol Hill. While the event itself was widely covered, Hoenlein, and the conference, remained invisible. An informal survey of recent coverage turned up not a single in-depth piece about Hoenlein and how he has used the Presidents Conference to keep the Bush Administration from putting too much pressure on the Sharon government.

Why the blackout? For one thing, reporting on these groups is not easy. AIPAC's power makes potential sources reluctant to discuss the organization on the record, and employees who leave it usually sign pledges of silence. AIPAC officials themselves rarely give interviews, and the organization even resists divulging its board of directors. Journalists, meanwhile, are often loath to write about the influence of organized Jewry. Throughout the Arab world, the "Jewish lobby" is seen as the root of all evil in the Middle East, and many reporters and editors--especially Jewish ones--worry about feeding such stereotypes.

In the end, though, the main obstacle to covering these groups is fear. Jewish organizations are quick to detect bias in the coverage of the Middle East, and quick to complain about it. That's especially true of late. As the Forward observed in late April, "rooting out perceived anti-Israel bias in the media has become for many American Jews the most direct and emotional outlet for connecting with the conflict 6,000 miles away." Recently, an estimated 1,000 subscribers to the Los Angeles Times suspended home delivery for a day to protest what they considered the paper's pro-Palestinian coverage. The Chicago Tribune, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Miami Herald have all been hit by similar protests, and NPR has received thousands of e-mails complaining about its reports from the Middle East.

Do such protests have an effect? Consider the recent experience of the New York Times. On May 6 the paper ran two photographs of a pro-Israel parade in Manhattan. Both showed the parade in the background and anti-Israel protesters prominently in the foreground. The paper, which for weeks has been threatened with a boycott by Jewish readers, was deluged with protests. On May 7 the Times ran an abject apology. That caused much consternation in the newsroom, with some reporters and editors feeling that the paper had buckled before an influential constituency. "It's very intimidating," said a correspondent at another large daily who is familiar with the incident. Newspapers, he added, are "afraid" of organizations like AIPAC and the Presidents Conference. "The pressure from these groups is relentless. Editors would just as soon not touch them."

Needless to say, US support for Israel is the product of many factors--Israel's status as the sole democracy in the Middle East, its value as a US strategic ally and widespread horror over Palestinian suicide bombers. But the power of the pro-Israel lobby is an important element as well. Indeed, it's impossible to understand the Bush Administration's tender treatment of the Sharon government without taking into account the influence of groups like AIPAC. Isn't it time they were exposed to the daylight?

Copyright 2002 The Nation

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