Defendario wrote:

ORIGINAL POSTLIST RESTORED

Wasn't my intent to trim the groups. My client does that automatically, and
I forgot to change it before I posted.

Hatto von Aquitanien wrote:

http://cbn2.tripod.com/JohnKerry.html

Interesting.

That's the tip of the iceberg. It didn't even cross my mind that
Iran-Contra had to do with Iran and hence the current prelude to invasion.

<quote>
http://www.tarpley.net/bush7.htm
Observers of Skull and Bones, apologists and critics alike, have accepted
various deceptive notions about the order. There are two outstanding, among
these falsehoods:

1) that it is essentially an American group, an assembly of wealthy, elite
``patriots''; it is in fact, an agency for British Empire penetration and
subversion of the American republic; and

2) that it is somehow the unique center of conspiratorial control over the
United States. This misconception is certainly understandable, given the
rather astonishing number of powerful, historically important and
grotesquely anti-human individuals, who have come out of Skull and Bones.
But there are in fact congruent organizations at other Ivy League colleges,
which reflect, as does Skull and Bones, the over-arching oligarchical power
of several heavily intermarried financier families.

The mistaken, speculative notions may be corrected by examining the history
of Skull and Bones, viewed within the reality of the American Eastern
Establishment.

Skull and Bones--the Russell Trust Association--was first established among
the class graduating from Yale in 1833. Its founder was William Huntington
Russell of Middletown, Connecticut. The Russell family was the master of
incalculable wealth derived from the largest U.S. criminal organization of
the nineteenth century: Russell and Company, the great opium syndicate.

There was at that time a deep suspicion of, and national revulsion against,
freemasonry and secret organizations in the United States, fostered in
particular by the anti-masonic writings of former U.S. President John
Quincy Adams. Adams stressed that those who take oaths to politically
powerful international secret societies cannot be depended on for loyalty
to a democratic republic.

But the Russells were protected as part of the multiply-intermarried
grouping of families then ruling Connecticut (see accompanying chart). The
blood-proud members of the Russell, Pierpont, Edwards, Burr, Griswold, Day,
Alsop and Hubbard families were prominent in the pro-British party within
the state. Many of their sons would be among the members chosen for the
Skull and Bones Society over the years.

The background to Skull and Bones is a story of Opium and Empire, and a
bitter struggle for political control over the new U.S. republic.

Samuel Russell, second cousin to Bones founder William H., established
Russell and Company in 1823. Its business was to acquire opium from Turkey
and smuggle it into China, where it was strictly prohibited, under the
armed protection of the British Empire.

The prior, predominant American gang in this field had been the syndicate
created by Thomas Handasyd Perkins of Newburyport, Massachusetts, an
aggregation of the self-styled ``blue bloods'' or Brahmins of Boston's
north shore. Forced out of the lucrative African slave trade by U.S. law
and Caribbean slave revolts, leaders of the Cabot, Lowell, Higginson,
Forbes, Cushing and Sturgis families had married Perkins siblings and
children. The Perkins opium syndicate made the fortune and established the
power of these families. By the 1830s, the Russells had bought out the
Perkins syndicate and made Connecticut the primary center of the U.S. opium
racket. Massachusetts families (Coolidge, Sturgis, Forbes and Delano)
joined Connecticut (Alsop) and New York (Low) smuggler-millionaires under
the Russell auspices.
</quote>