Do You Want Fries With Your Bilderberger?

The BBC chose to mark this weeks 59th meeting of the Bilderberg Group , held in St Moritz this year, with a magazine article asking "Why do people believe in Cabals?"

On the one hand this could be interpreted as the usual dismissive pat-piece, striving to label anyone with an interest in what is going on behind the closed doors of the conference centre as a conspiracy theory fantasist, either wide-eyed and credulous half-wits filled with fevered speculation, or fanatically frothing at the mouth with barely concealed anti-Semitic hatred and paranoia.

On the other hand you might chose to read the article, which was the only actual reference to the Bilderberg meeting I could find on the entire BBC news site, as a cunningly concealed satire, parodying itself and answering its own rhetorical question with the unspoken answer: "perhaps people believe in cabals because groups like Bilderberg insist on meeting every year without publishing an agenda, confirming exactly who was in attendance or what was decided upon, and without letting any representatives from the global news media inside to have a look!"

The Bilderberg Group have been meeting since 1954 but it is only in the last ten years or so that it has passed out of the realm of myth and become something that, although still secret, is publicly acknowledged to exist outside the seedy web pages of the conspiracists. The journalist Jon Ronson was the first to introduce me to the topic, with his excellent book "Them: Adventures with Extremists" (Picador 2001), and the rise of the bloggosphere and the alternative media have done much to raise Bilderberg up into slightly more mainstream discourse. Charlie Skelton of The Guardian has been reporting back this week, ankle deep in muddy water, on what snippets of information he can glean by camping-out outside the conference centre in Switzerland.

A full "official" list of this years attendees was published here, but as ever there have been surprise last minute guests, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Anders Rasmussen, the Secretary General of NATO. As you can see the list includes our own George Osborne, attending in his official capacity as Chancellor of the Exchequer, once again rubbing shoulders with Lord Mandelson, although not aboard a Russian oligarch's yacht this time.

So the man in charge of the British economy has met with high ranking politicians from Europe and the US, with heads of state and top members of international organisations like the European Council, and with senior members of half the major banks and corporations in the western world, during the biggest financial crisis in world history, against the backdrop of widespread revolution in the Arab Spring, and we are supposed to believe that they were not in fact doing business?

It is vaguely possible, I suppose, that all those hugely powerful and influential men and women were gathered together in one place just for some kind of rich-fuckers jamboree, to eat big dinners, drink nice wine, maybe have a sauna and enquire politely after each others families, golf handicaps or if they are going anywhere nice on holiday this year. Game of "bingo" anyone? It is also possible, however, that they were meeting in absolute privacy, to discuss and make decisions on matters of vital global importance, completely outside the scrutiny of the media, and without having to report any of it back to the people who voted them into their positions of power and influence in the first place, whether they be the electorate of one nation state or another, or the shareholders of an international corporation.

Personally, I do not think it is even remotely possible for so many of that calibre of people to gather together in one place without talking "shop", and when the "shop" in question includes some of the most powerful governmental and economic institutions on the planet, Bilderberg meetings highlight a fundamental flaw in our concept of democracy. We elect people to make decisions for us, and we should expect those people to make those decisions in light of what we want, of what is in our best interests and, most importantly, in an open and transparent way so that we can properly judge what they are doing and whose interests they are actually representing. When our elected leaders, the people who set our social, economic and military policies meet in secret with the representatives of the wealthiest people on Earth, you can not help but worry that it is a bad day for democracy.

Realistically, the news media should be going absolutely mental over their exclusion from the conference. If 140 of the worlds foremost footballers and pop stars were meeting together in the same hotel for a weekend, the place would be an all singing, all dancing, three-ring media feeding frenzy; the G20 and G8 summits are huge events in the global media calendar with embedded journos, live interviews and press releases galore, but Bilderberg is almost completely dismissed by the mass-media, and anyone with the temerity to wonder what exactly they are up to in there is treated as if they have just donned a turquoise track-suit and claimed to be the son of god-head.

I must point out that I do not think it is physically possible for any one group to secretly "control the world" in the way that the most rampant of conspiracy theories suggest, I would even go so far as to suggest it is wishful thinking on their part, that they somehow find more comfort in the idea of someone evil being in control, than they do in the frightening possibility that no-one is actually in control.

On the other hand, the idea that various groups with common interests may align with each other in an ATTEMPT control the world, or at least to exert enough influence over it to ensure they stay ahead of all the other groups who also wish to control the world, feels like simple common sense to me, and Bilderberg looks very much like the Annual General Meeting of one such group. If Bilderberg genuinely is a harmless social club, that in no way works to subvert the democratic process of decision making, then all they have to do to dispel the "myth" that they are in some way an elite cabal ruling us in secret, and setting policy that suits their interests rather than the interests of vote casting masses, is open their doors to full public scrutiny.

Or at least publish the minutes.

And until they do I will continue to feel absolutely zero embarrassment in suspecting they are up to no good.

And The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret

Candid views of world leaders, the US uses its Diplomats to spy on the UN and other countries, the Israelis and the Saudis both wanted America to bomb Iran in 2010, Vladimir Putin is Batman, David Cameron and George Osborne are “lightweights” and “Thatcher’s Children”, Russia is run by the mafia, China is losing patience with North Korea, Pakistan is sponsoring terrorist organisations and is suspected of leaking nuclear material, the UK co-operated with the US in helping them evade the most difficult questions in the Chilcot enquiry into the Iraq war and in avoiding the ban on the use of cluster bombs...

For those who may have missed it, perhaps because they have suffered a brain trauma and have been in a coma for the past week, the latest release from WikiLeaks hit the fan on Sunday night and governments, institutions and high profile individuals world-wide are now quite heavily splattered in its contents. This release, following hot on the heels of the Afghan war diaries and Iraqi War Log, features over a quarter of a million diplomatic cables, confidential communications leaked from 250 US Embassies around the globe, which reveal the secret workings of the United States relationship with the rest of the world.

Understandably enough, the Americans are not at all impressed at having their dirty linen aired in public. Parallels have been drawn between the WikiLeaks release and the September 11^th attacks. Peter King, a Congressman for New York wasted no time in calling upon the Attorney General to have WikiLeaks designated as a terrorist organisation, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton described the release as an “attack on the international community”, Republican presidential nominee hopefuls Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee called for WikiLeaks director Julian Assange to be “hunted down” and for the source of the leaked documents to be tried for treason and executed, there have been calls for Assange to be assassinated, employees of the US State Department have been instructed not to read WikiLeaks, US newspapers have been accused of colluding with their government to censor the leaked documents as presented to the public, while President Obama is busily re-writing the Espionage Act in a desperate attempt to find something with which Assange can be charged.

Meanwhile, those with a taste for conspiracy theory, from President Ahmadinejad of Iran to the 9/11 Truth brigade have dismissed the leaks as CIA/Mossad/Illuminati psychological warfare. Obviously!

The British press split fairly evenly between those describing the release as a major threat to international security (the BBC, ITN, Sky News, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail) and those less hysterical commentators who saw it as a huge embarrassment to the United States, and to anyone else who has been named and shamed in the release (The Guardian, The Times, The Independent). Either way, the mainstream media have all been quite happily digging through the cables as they have been released, falling over themselves to report on each juicy revelation as it breaks, whilst simultaneously attacking and condemning WikiLeaks, presumably for showing them how to do their job.

Whether for or against, most people agree that the implications of what WikiLeaks has done are staggering. Revolutionary, in fact! Many have argued that International relations as we know it, cannot continue in a world where sensitive diplomatic negotiations can be made available to the global public at the click of a mouse.

My feeling on this is that, like it or not, they are going to have to get used it. The Official Secrets Act, and its equivalents around the world, has become the latest victim of a genuine technological revolution - the invention of the internet.

The Obscene Publications Act was the first to bite the dust, made irrelevant by the deluge of pornography freely available online. Next to come under attack were the laws governing intellectual property and copyright, and anyone who has downloaded a movie or shared their music collection online for free, has been participating in a war against the private ownership of information, a war most reliable commentators agree that the music, movie and publishing industry are eventually destined to lose.

With the launch of WikiLeaks in 2006, a new front has been opened in the war, and this time it’s political.

There have always been whistle-blowers, those who leak secret information that they are privy to, not to gain tactical advantage over an enemy, not to make a ton of money, but because they believe it to be in the public interest. Without whistle-blowers within the tobacco industry, how many more years would have passed before the public became fully aware of the detrimental effects of smoking? The internet is perhaps the single most powerful tool that humanity has developed so far, and in the hands of the whistle-blower, the truth can finally run all the way around the world before the censors have even got their boots on.

This is a truth that the governments of the world are going to have to adapt to, and quickly; the question is how will they react? Will they move towards greater transparency and openness in government, as the current American and British Governments at least promised to do whilst running for office, or will they try and turn the whole world into China?

My suspicion is that, if the fight over digital rights management is anything to go by, they will most probably try the latter, implementing increasingly draconian and totalitarian measures to curb the free availability of information, there is a Cyber security bill currently simmering away in the background of the US legislature that allegedly provides for a kill switch, the ability to turn the internet off.

The war of the geeks is ON, and personally, I think it’s about time.

We know that in recent years we have been told some absolute whoppers by our Governments, I wish for instance that there had been a WikiLeaks in 2002 and 2003, when the case for the war in Iraq was being made. We also know that our Governments have been obsessed with holding us under an ever increasing level of scrutiny, our emails can be read, our telephone calls can be monitored, we can be forced to pass through naked body scanners at airports, there was the recent push for a national ID card scheme with an accompanying database, and the British people are now amongst the most spied upon population on the planet with over 4.3 million security cameras watching our every move. In such an environment, I think it is only fair that we hold our Governments under an equivalent level of surveillance, and WikiLeaks may just fit the bill.

So don’t believe for a second that you have heard the last from WikiLeaks, and if you were thinking that the American Government have been taking a disproportionate amount of the flack don’t worry, in a recent interview with Forbes Magazine Julian Assange revealed that their next major release, due sometime in the new year, will focus on the private sector, on a major American bank in particular, and with everything that has happened in the world of international finance lately - it promises to be juicy!