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FTR #1107: This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
FTR #1108: This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
“The Seagraves have uncovered one of the Biggest Secrets of the Twentieth Century”–Iris Chang, quoted on the front cover of Gold Warriors.
Introduction: Late last year (2019), the city of San Jose (California) opened a park dedicated to the memory of the late author Iris Chang.
These broadcasts update and supplement discussion of Iris Chang’s alleged “suicide,” highlighted in FTR #509. Of particular significance is the fact that the Golden Lily loot and the decisive political and economic factors stemming from the material covered in Gold Warriors, the other books by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, and Ms. Chang’s The Rape of Nanking, have enormous and ongoing significance.
(FTR #‘s 427, 428, 446, 451, 501, 509, 688, 689 deal with the subject of the Golden Lily program successfully implemented by the Japanese to loot Asia. That loot was merged with Nazi gold, became the Black Eagle Trust, which not only financed Cold War covert operations but underwrote much of the post-war global economy. Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos recovered a tremendous amount of the Golden Lily loot, some of which was shared with the Japanese, some with the U.S. and much of it kept by Marcos. The Marcos “Black Gold” figures prominently in the deep politics surrounding the death of Ms. Chang.)
In November of 2004, author and investigator Iris Chang was found dead of an allegedly self-inflicted gunshot wound. This program examines the circumstances surrounding her death.
In her landmark book The Rape of Nanking, Ms. Chang documented the Japanese atrocities which gave that occupation its name. The rape of Nanking saw the beginning of the Japanese Golden Lily program, which yielded the spectacular looted wealth and postwar economic and political intrigue documented in the Seagraves’ incisive text Gold Warriors.
The Rape of Nanking, drew much hostile reaction from the Japanese right and related forces: “. . . . At the same time, torrents of hate mail came in, Brett [her husband] said. ‘Iris is sensitive, but she got charged up,’ he recalled. ‘When anybody questioned the validity of what she wrote, she would respond with overwhelming evidence to back it up. She’s very much a perfectionist. It was hard for her not to react every single time.’ Most of the attacks came from Japanese ultranationalists. ‘We saw cartoons where she was portrayed as this woman with a great big mouth,’ Brett said. ‘She got used to the fact that there is a Web site called ‘Iris Chang and Her Lies.’ She would just laugh.’ But friends say Iris began to voice concerns for her safety. She believed her phone was tapped. She described finding threatening notes on her car. She said she was confronted by a man who said, ‘You will NOT continue writing this.’ She used a post office box, never her home address, for mail. ‘There are a fair number of people who don’t take kindly to what she wrote in The Rape of Nanking.’ Brett said, ‘so she’s always been very, very private about our family life.’ . . . .”
(As we have seen in–among other programs–FTR #‘s 813, 905, 969, 970, the Japanese “ultranationalists” were put right back in power by the American occupation forces, as the Seagraves document in Gold Warriors, as well as The Yamato Dynasty.)
At the time of her death, Ms. Chang was researching a book chronicling the experiences of survivors of the Bataan Death March—the brutal persecution of American POW’s captured in the siege of Bataan in the Philippines during World War II. Many of the survivors were shipped to Japan to work as slave laborers for major Japanese corporations.
Many of these corporations have had profound connections with their American transnational counterparts, and were the beneficiaries of American investment capital in the run-up to World War II. More importantly, many of these corporations are a principal element of the US/Japanese commercial relationship today.
Lawsuits in California targeted those Japanese corporations for compensation for the slave labor wrung from the Battaan POWs. The State Department sided with the Japanese and Judge Vaughn Walker ruled against the Bataan survivors.
Perhaps most importantly, in-depth coverage of the Bataan Death March would uncover the Black Eagle Trust and the fundamental role in post-World War II American and Japanese politics of the vast wealth looted by Japan during World War II. That purloined “black gold” is inextricably linked with U.S. covert operations and is at the epicenter of postwar Japanese power politics and economy.
In addition to the Rape of Nanking and the Bataan Death March survivors, Ms. Chang’s research cut across some deep political dynamics connected to then-President George W. Bush’s administration and his business dealings.
George W. Bush:
- Was using U.S. Naval forces to secure Japanese war gold from the Philippines for his personal blind trust, as well as shoring up American gold reserves.
- Was deeply involved with Harken Energy, which may well have been a corporate front for the acquisition and recycling of Golden Lily loot and Bormann money.
- Was heir to a deep political heritage involving, among others, the family of William Stamps Farish, the head of Standard Oil of New Jersey during the time it manifested its cartel agreements with I.G. Farben. Dubya benefited from his father’s legacy of involvement with the milieu of Douglas MacArthur. George H.W. Bush’s deep political connections in the Philippines include the involvement of both Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Trump and GOP trickster Roger Stone with Ferdinand Marcos while the dictator was involved with the recovery of Golden Lily loot.
- Served as a director of Harken when the head of the firm was Alan Quasha, son of William Quasha, an attorney for the CIA-linked Nugan Hand Bank, a focal point of AFA #25. William had been Alien Property custodian in the Philippines under Douglas MacArthur, which placed him in a position to greatly influence the “Alien Property” placed there by the Japanese under Golden Lily.
There is evidence to suggest that Ms. Chang’s death may have resulted from mind control, administered to neutralize her as a threat to those clandestine economic and national security relationships that have governed US/Japanese affairs in the postwar period. Ms. Chang had received threats ever since the publication of her landmark text The Rape of Nanking.
(For more about the government’s mind control programs, see, among other broadcasts, AFA #‘s 5–7. Key parts of that AFA series are excerpted in FTR #‘s 974, 975, 976, 977.)
She appears to have been under surveillance, and her “suicide” note alleged that a suspicious internment in a psychiatric hospital may have been initiated at the instigation of the elements opposed to a ruffling of the Japanese/US feathers. In addition to threatening to expose a dominant factor in U.S. covert operations, a key element in the postwar American and global economy, Ms. Chang’s investigation of Japanese war crimes was an irritant to the Japanese establishment that had thrived on the gold and other wealth looted from occupied countries since World War II.
Ms. Chang’s “suicide” note read, in part: “. . . .There are aspects of my experience in Louisville that I will never understand. . . . . I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the CIA or some other organization I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me. Days before I left for Louisville I had a deep foreboding about my safety. I sensed suddenly threats to my own life: an eerie feeling that I was being followed in the streets, the white van parked outside my house, damaged mail arriving at my P.O. Box. I believe my detention at Norton Hospital was the government’s attempt to discredit me. . . .”
At the conclusion of the program, we review Rita Katz’s experiences after she helped break the investigation into the SAAR network that became known as Operation Green Quest. That investigation overlapped George W. Bush’s firm Harken Energy. Note the similarity between Iris Chang’s experiences and those of Rita Katz. ” . . . . White vans and SUV’s with dark windows appeared near all the homes of the SAAR investigators. All agents, some of whom were very experienced with surveillance, knew they were being followed. So was I. I felt that I was being followed everywhere and watched at home, in the supermarket, on the way to work . . . and for what? . Now—I was being watched 24/7. It’s a terrible sensation to know that you have no privacy. . . . and no security. That strange clicking of the phones that wasn’t there before. . . the oh-so-crudely opened mail at home in the office. . . and the same man I spied in my neighborhood supermarket, who was also on the train I took to Washington a week ago. . . Life can be miserable when you know that someone’s always breathing down your neck. . . .”
In conversations with friends, Ms. Chang noted that her problems were “external,” not in her head. She also felt she was being “recruited” to become a “Manchurian Candidate” for the CIA–i.e. being subjected to mind control. ” . . . . in her last year she became paranoid about everything from viruses attacking her computer to attempts by the government to “recruit” her, a la The Manchurian Candidate. . . . .”
Program Highlights Include: The alleged role of Japanese war criminal Tsuji Masanobu in aiding the Marcos gold recoveries in the Philippines; the role of Tsuji Masanobu in implementing the Bataan Death March; William Stamps Farish III’s stewardship of Dubya’s blind trust, for which Philippines war gold was apparently being sought; William Stamps Farish (II) and his stewardship of Standard Oil of New Jersey, when it collaborated with I.G. Farben; George H.W. Bush’s association with the descendants of American corporate figures who collaborated with the Third Reich.
1a. The program examines the vicious reaction of Japanese ultranationalists and others to Iris Chang’s book—The Rape of Nanking. Note the hostility with which her work was met. Was this hostility carried to another level?
A detail about the physical circumstances surrounding Iris’s “suicide” suggests–strongly–that she did not pull the trigger herself. Her body was discovered by a Santa Clara County Water District Employee.
Someone who had fired a .45 caliber black powder weapon into her mouth would be unlikely to have her hands crossed in her lap and with the revolver on her left leg. This sounds like it may well an arranged crime scene. ” . . . . He noticed condensation on the windows, peered inside and saw Iris in the driver’s seat with her hands crossed in her lap. The revolver lay on her left leg. Her head rested against the window. . . .”
. . . At the same time, torrents of hate mail came in, Brett [her husband] said. “Iris is sensitive, but she got charged up,” he recalled. “When anybody questioned the validity of what she wrote, she would respond with overwhelming evidence to back it up. She’s very much a perfectionist. It was hard for her not to react every single time.” Most of the attacks came from Japanese ultranationalists. ‘We saw cartoons where she was portrayed as this woman with a great big mouth,’ Brett said. ‘She got used to the fact that there is a Web site called ‘Iris Chang and Her Lies.’ She would just laugh.”
But friends say Iris began to voice concerns for her safety. She believed her phone was tapped. She described finding threatening notes on her car. She said she was confronted by a man who said, ‘You will NOT continue writing this.’ She used a post office box, never her home address, for mail. “There are a fair number of people who don’t take kindly to what she wrote in The Rape of Nanking.” Brett said, “so she’s always been very, very private about our family life.” . . . .
. . . . Among her many television appearances was a memorable evening on “Nightline,” where she was the only Asian and the only woman among a panel of China experts. “To see her on TV, defending Rape of Nanking so fiercely and so fearlessly—I just sat down, stopped, in awe,” said Helen Zia, author of Asian-American Dreams: Emergence of an American People and co-author Wen-Ho Lee, of My Country Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused.”
“Iris truly had no fear. You could see it in the steadiness of her voice and in her persistence,” Zia recalled. “She would just say, matter-of-factly, ‘Japan is lying and here’s why.”’ Later Iris challenged the Japanese ambassador to a debate on the ‘MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour’ on PBS. After the ambassador spoke of events in Nanking, Iris turned to the moderator and said: “I didn’t hear an apology.” [This would NOT have been well received by the Japanese political and national security establishments, who would never have countenanced a government official being taken to task by a Chinese woman–D.E.]
. . . . He noticed condensation on the windows, peered inside and saw Iris in the driver’s seat with her hands crossed in her lap. The revolver lay on her left leg. . . .
1b. Iris turned her attention to another subject connected to Japanese atrocities from World War II—the Bataan Death March. Some of the American soldiers captured after the Japanese invasion of the Philippines were forced to work as slave laborers for some of the major Japanese corporations. As will be seen below, class action lawsuits and other attempts at gaining belated compensation for these unfortunate POWs was met with fierce opposition from the US State Department!! Remember that Iris Chang was cutting across these same lines of political power.
As Ms. Chang was investigating the story of the Death Marchers, she made the acquaintance of a colonel, who elicited fear in this otherwise dauntless individual. The colonel checked her into a psychiatric hospital, where she was put on a cycle of psychiatric drugs. Was she subjected to some sort of mind control? Did that have something to do with her death? Was she programmed to commit suicide?
Iris’s suicide note betrayed fear of retribution for her research. She felt that her internment in the psychiatric hospital may have somehow been part of that retribution. As noted below, she felt the CIA or some similar type of institution may have been involved in the activities conducted against her.
Iris’s suicide note betrayed fear of retribution for her research. She felt that her internment in the psychiatric hospital may have somehow been part of that retribution. As noted below, she felt the CIA or some similar type of institution may have been involved in the activities conducted against her.
. . . But soon she found herself drawn to a subject just as dark. Iris Chang rang the doorbell on Ed Martel’s front porch in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on December 4, 2003. It’s a date he won’t forget. “She sat down and cross-examined me like a district attorney for five solid hours,” said Martel, 86, one of the last remaining survivors of the Bataan Death March of World War II. His daughter, Maddy, remembered the day well, too. “We set out a very big lunch—meat trays and sandwiches and desserts,” she said. “My dad was so excited that she was doing this, and so honored.”
Months earlier, Iris had seized on a letter in her “book ideas” file about a Midwestern pocket of Bataan survivors, all members of two tank battalions. “They drop so fast,” the letter had read. The correspondent was Sgt. Anthony Meldahl, a supply sergeant with the Ohio National Guard who had admired Iris’ work. Meldahl was now urging Iris to join his oral-history project. She did, and, starting in November 2003, would make four trips to meet with Bataan vets—in Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky. Each time, Iris swept into town and conducted four or five intensive interviews in as many days. “She was like a battalion commander,” Meldahl said.
“It’s amazing when you watch Iris do research,“Brett said. “She would go into a town—and with Tony Meldahl’s help, it was even better. She would have a team of three vets and their children and their wives. Iris would be interviewing them, somebody else would be filming them, somebody else would be photocopying records, and somebody would be sending documents down to UPS. And Iris would buy lunch and dinner for everybody, and they all thought it was great.”
“These people wanted their story told for a long, long time, and they knew that because Iris had success as an author, she’d be able to do a very good job,” Brett said. Ed Martel’s story began on Dec. 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor was still smoldering when Japanese planes bombed the Philippines” Bataan Peninsula, where Martel was stationed with a National Guard tank battalion. With few rations, little ammunition and no reinforcements, 70,000 American and Filipino troops held off the Japanese for months. When the American general surrendered on April 9, the Japanese forced the troops to walk 65 miles through sweltering jungle. Some 8,000 died on the notorious “death march.” Those who survived spent the rest of the war in a bleak prison camp; some were shipped to Japan as slave laborers. [Emphasis added.] Once the Allies won the war, the story was forgotten. It had been the largest U.S. Army surrender in history.
“It’s baffling to me that the U.S. today has so little knowledge of the four months we held out,” Martel told The Chronicle by telephone from his home in Wisconsin. “We marvel at how America turned their backs on us.” Martel was slightly hard of hearing, but his memory was crisp. He recalled telling Iris about the worst of his Bataan experiences. “Iris asked me to tell about atrocities,’ he said. “Twice I broke down and had to leave the room.”
. . . “I knew Iris was not right,” her mother said. “She couldn’t eat or drink. She was very depressed.” She asked if Iris had any friends there she could call for help. One of the veterans—a colonel she had planned to meet in Louisville—came to the hotel. Smith said the colonel spent only a short time with her. “She was afraid of him when he showed up,” Smith said. “But he spoke to her mother on the phone and told Iris, “Your mom is on the phone, so it’s OK.” That afternoon, she checked herself in to Norton Psychiatric Hospital in Louisville, with help from the colonel. Through a third party, the colonel declined to be interviewed. “First they gave her an antipsychotic, to stabilize her,” her mother said. “For three days they gave her medication, the first time in her life.” (The family would not name specific drugs.) . . .
. . . Then she wrote a suicide note—addressed to her parents, Brett and her brother—followed by a lengthy revision. The first draft said: “When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day—but by the minute. [Emphasis added.] It is far better that you remember me as I was—in my heyday as a best-selling author—than the wild-eyed wreck who returned from Louisville . . . Each breath is becoming difficult for me to take—the anxiety can be compared to drowning in an open sea. I know that my actions will transfer some of this pain to others, indeed those who love me the most. Please forgive me. Forgive me because I cannot forgive myself.”
In the final version, she added: “There are aspects of my experience in Louisville that I will never understand. Deep down I suspect that you may have more answers about this than I do. I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the CIA or some other organization I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me. . . .
“Days before I left for Louisville I had a deep foreboding about my safety. I sensed suddenly threats to my own life: an eerie feeling that I was being followed in the streets, the white van parked outside my house, damaged mail arriving at my P.O. Box. I believe my detention at Norton Hospital was the government’s attempt to discredit me. “I had considered running away, but I will never be able to escape from myself and my thoughts. I am doing this because I am too weak to withstand the years of pain and agony ahead.”
After Iris Chang’s Oldsmobile was found off Highway 17 on Tuesday morning, Nov. 9, the California Highway Patrol was called to the scene. The Highway Patrol then called the Santa Clara Sheriff’s homicide unit and detective Sgt. Dean Baker, a 33-year veteran, took over the investigation. “There is an aspect of paranoia in the majority of suicides.” Baker said. ’ A lot of people—depending on how disturbed they are—feel that people are plotting against them.”
2. Despite the dismissal of Iris’s fears as “paranoia,” there is reason to believe her fears were justified. In a phone call to an old friend from college, Iris noted that her family and friends thought her problems were “in her head”—“internal”—but that they were real, i.e. “external.”
“How ‘Iris Chang’ Became a Verb” by Paula Kamen; Salon.com.
. . . The months passed, and I got involved in my own projects. A few weeks ago, a mutual friend e‑mailed me that Iris was trying to reach me, and that she had been sick for the past few months. Then, on Saturday, Nov. 6, my cellphone rang. When I heard the tone of Iris’ voice, I excused myself from the friends I was visiting and stood outside in their yard for privacy. The bounce in her voice was totally gone. Instead, it was sad and totally drained, as if she were making a huge effort just to talk to me. I remembered that she recently had been sick.
She said, “I just wanted to let you know that in case something should happen to me, you should always know that you’ve been a good friend.” Over the next hour, I stumbled to ask her about what had happened. She talked about her overwhelming fears and anxieties, including being unable to face the magnitude—and the controversial nature—of the stories that she had uncovered. Her current vaguely described problems were “external,” she kept repeating, a result of her controversial research. They weren’t a result of the “internal,” that is, they weren’t all in her head. I asked her about what others in her life thought about the cause of this apparent depression. She paused and said, “They think it’s internal.”
3. Iris was worried about viruses attacking her computer and about being turned into a “Manchurian candidate” by the government. The latter suggests that she may indeed have been subjected to mind control.
“What Happened to Iris Chang?” by Kerry Reid; Chicago Reader; 11/1/2007.
. . . . Among other things, the compulsively well-organized Chang began losing credit cards every couple of weeks, according to Douglas, and in her last year she became paranoid about everything from viruses attacking her computer to attempts by the government to “recruit” her, a la The Manchurian Candidate. . . .
4. The Rape of Nanking–the subject of Iris Chang’s best-selling, nonfiction book, saw the beginning of the Golden Lily operation. Note that Prince Takeda, was in charge of Golden Lily operations in the Philippines, as well as Prince Chichibu (in overall charge of Golden Lily).
. . . . In the Rape of Nanking that followed, some 300,000 defenseless civilians were slain by Japanese troops, between 20,000 and 80,000 women of all ages were raped repeatedly, including children, adolescent girls, and grandmothers, many of them disemboweled in the process. Men, women and children were subjected to acts of such barbarism that the world recoiled in horror. Thousands of men were roped together and machine-gunned, or doused with gasoline and set afire. Others were used for bayonet practice, or to practice beheading, in a sporting competition to see which officer could behead the greatest number that day. Weeks passed while atrocities continued, streets and alleys piled high with corpses. Unlike previous mass atrocities, done out of sight, these were witnessed by hundreds of Westerners including diplomats, doctors and missionaries, some of whom smuggled out photographic evidence.
It was at this point that Golden Lily came into existence.
When the Japanese Army swarmed down the China Coast in 1937, crossed the Yangtze, and moved westward to Nanking, so many units were involved across such a broad front that there was danger of Japan’s ruling elite losing control of the financial side of conquest, as rival commanders competed for spoils. How could you keep army or navy officers from side-tracking gold bullion and priceless art works, not to mention smaller scale theft by soldiers? At the same time, groups of yakuza were moving through newly occupied areas, conducting their own reign of terror. To keep everything under strict control at the highest level, the Imperial General Headquarters created Golden Lily (kin no yuri) named after one of Hirohito’s poems. This was to be a palace organization of Japan’s top financial minds and specialists in all forms of treasure including cultural and religious antiquities, supported by accountants, bookkeepers, shipping experts, and units of the army and navy, all overseen by princes of the blood. When China was milked by Golden Lily, the army would hold the cow, while princes skimmed the cream. This organization was put directly under the command of the emperor’s brother, Prince Chichibu. We know the date because the Imperial General Headquarters itself was only set up in the imperial palace in Tokyo in November 1937, just as the Rape of Nanking was commencing. . . . The Imperial Army already had a number of Special Service Units, among them intelligence teams specializing in different kinds of cultural and financial espionage, and secret service agents like General Doihara, outside the ordinary command structure. These were reassigned to Golden Lily, giving it the resources needed to find treasure of all kinds, from the sublime to the most prosaic.
In Nanking, the first wave of Golden Lily helpers were kempeitai [the Japanese intelligence service]. Special kempeitai units moved through the city seizing all government assets, blowing open bank vaults, breaking into and emptying homes of wealthy families of whatever gold, gemstones, jewelry, artworks, and currency could be found. Nanking had been rich for over a thousand years. Many wealthy and prominent Chinese had mansions in town, and estates in the surrounding countryside. This was not the only time Nanking was ransacked by conquerors, but it was by far the most deliberate, meticulous, and systematic. At least 6,ooo metric tons of gold are reported to have been amassed by the kempeitai during this first pass. Historical research into looting shows that what is officially reported typically is only a tiny fraction of what is actually stolen. Also looted were many of the small biscuit bars that individual Chinese prefer to hoard, along with small platinum ingots, diamonds, rubies and sapphires, small works of art, and antiquities. These were taken from private homes and from tombs vandalized by the army in the countryside. Remorselessly thorough, the Japanese hammered the teeth out of corpses to extract gold fillings. . . .
. . . . A number of other princes joined Golden Lily at this stage, spending the war enriching Japan, rather than participating in less glamorous and dangerous combat assignments. Aside from Prince Asaka [the Emperor’s uncle and in charge of the Rape of Nanking–D.E.], we know Prince Chichibu and Prince Takeda were at Nanking because both later confided to friends that they had horrific nightmares from witnessing atrocities. . . .
5a. Next, the program sets forth the details of some class action lawsuits against major Japanese corporations. These lawsuits aimed at securing financial compensation for POW’s used as slave laborers by the major Japanese entities. Note that some of these POW’s were survivors of the Bataan Death March—the men whose plight was being investigated and publicized by Iris Chang!!
. . . .Since 1999, more than thirty lawsuits have been filed in California courts by survivors of the Bataan Death March and other POW’s who were forced to provide slave labor for Japanese companies. [Emphasis added.] They were focused in California because the state legislature had extended the period when such claims could be filed. The U.S. government then had the cases transferred to a federal court in San Francisco, where most of these suits then were rejected in September 2000 by Federal Judge Vaughn Walker. Judge Walker said they were ‘barred’ by the terms of the 1951 Peace Treaty, the same stonewalling used by Tokyo and Washington.
Hard as it may be to believe, the State Department argued on the side of Japanese corporations in these cases. Walker summed up his decision by stating that the San Francisco Peace Treaty had ‘exchanged full compensation of plaintiffs for a future peace. History has vindicated the wisdom of that bargain.”
. . . Some fought back. In March 2001, U.S. Congressmen Mike Honda (D‑San Jose) and Dana Rohrabacher (R.-Huntington Beach) introduced a bill, ‘Justice for Prisoners of War Act’ before the U.S. Congress. The bill had strong bipartisan support and by August 2002 had 228 co-signers including House whips for both parties. Honda’s bill called for ‘clarification of the wording of the 1951 Peace Treaty between Japan and the United States’ to keep the State Department from deviously interfering in victims’ lawsuits. . . .
. . . . “If this bill became law, it could open a window for compensation to POWs who were forced to perform slave labor for Japanese companies like Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo, which are among the richest on earth. The bill would remove a key legal barrier [Article 26—D.E.] used in Judge Walker’s rejection of the slave-labor lawsuits. . . .
. . . . Judge Walker, possibly under considerable pressure, sided with the State Department and ruled that Article 26 cannot be invoked by private citizens, but only by their government. The Honda-Rohrabacher bill would get around that bizarre ruling by having Congress act for the victims. The State Department’s unelected bureaucrats, aghast at the temerity of America’s elected lawmakers, realized that Honda’s bill cannot be thrown out by the exercise of political pressure over federal judges. Instead, State took the high moral ground by claiming that passage of Honda’s bill ‘would be an act of extreme bad faith.’ Bad faith toward Japan’s biggest corporations and its extraordinarily corrupt and incompetent LDP bosses. . . .
5b. More about the politics surrounding compensation to the Bataan Death Marchers:
. . . . The Department of State and Department of Justice are using Article 14 of the 1951 peace treaty to prevent POWs and other victims from suing immensely rich Japanese corporations such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo. At U.S. Senate hearings in June 2000, chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah challenged State and Justice attorneys about the legitimacy of their claim that the 1951 Peace Treaty canceled all rights of victims. “You mean our federal government can just say, ‘To hell with you, Bataan Death Marchers, and you people who were mistreated, we’re just going to waive all your rights. . . .’ Constitutionally, can our government take away the rights of individual citizens just because they put it in a treaty . . . .? We’re not asking the Japanese government to pay. We’re asking the companies that did the acts to pay, some of these companies are multi-billion-dollar companies today.”
Despite such impassioned appeals, on September 21, 2000, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker ruled against American POWs and other slave laborers. Walker dismissed their suits, saying it was dangerous to upset the diplomatic alliance that existed between America and Japan since the end of the war. . . .
6. The key Japanese operative who facilitated Ferdinand Marcos’s Golden Lily recoveries was a man who used the pseudonym “Ishihara,” a pseudonym which was as common as “Smith” in English.
The Seagraves opine that “Ishihara” may well have been Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, a war criminal who was involved with the Philippine Golden Lily operations. Among Masanobu’s assignments had been a central role in the Bataan Death March.
. . . . One Japanese source told us Ishihara might be the notorious Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, reviled for the Sook Ching massacres of ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, and for eating an Allied pilot’s liver. After Sook Ching, he was sent to Manila as troubleshooter with the rank of “Imperial Inspector General.” True to form, Tsuji became a key figure responsible for the Bataan Death March when he bypassed mild-mannered General Homma and urged field officers to murder Allied prisoners during the march. When he was in areas controlled by the Imperial Navy, Tsuji had the navy rank of captain. In areas controlled by the army, he changed uniforms and became a colonel. Although he made frequent trips to Tokyo by plane the next two years, and put in appearances at Guadalcanal and other battles, he is said to have spent most of 1943 and 1944 in Luzon working with Kodama and keeping an eye on Golden Lily treasure sites in and around Manila. Late in 1944, Tsuji moved to Burma and Siam, and was in Bangkok in August 1945 when Japan surrendered, eluding capture. . . .
6. With Iris Chang’s work on the Rape of Nanking and the Bataan Death March cut across the Golden Lily-related operations at a time that newly inaugurated President George W. Bush was reported to be using the U.S. Navy to recover gold from the Philippines vaults.
. . . . In March 2001, only weeks into the new Bush Administration, two U.S. Navy ships arrived in the Philippines carrying teams of SEAL commandos. According to a source at the U.S. Embassy, they were sent to the Philippines to recover gold as part of a plan to enlarge America’s reserves. This gold, the embassy source said, would come from two places:–New excavations of Yamashita Gold vaults, and the purchase (at a deep discount) of Japanese loot already recovered and held in private vaults by wealthy Filipinos. One of the two ships sailed on to Mindanao to take on a load of bullion the embassy source said was owned by the family of the new president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. President Bush, the source said, was “being aggressive”.
The buzz among gold hunters in Luzon was that associates of President Bush and his family were privately in the market to buy some of the bullion still being recovered from Golden Lily sites. One of the names being dropped by goldbugs in Manila was that of East Texas oil billionaire William Stamps Farish, an intimate friend and fishing companion of the Bush family. Will Farish, who raises horses in Kentucky and is board chairman of Churchill Downs where the Kentucky Derby is staged, had just been nominated by President Bush to be America’s new ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, where he was a personal friend of Queen Elizabeth. The buzz had special resonance because Will Farish is said to be the manager of President Bush’s blind trust. . . .
7a. Highlighting the deep politics of which the Bush family is a part and across which Iris Chang’s research cut, the broadcast details the role of William S. Farish II in fulfilling the cartel agreements between Standard Oil of New Jersey and I.G. Farben.
. . . .In early March 1942, a special Senate committee began public hearings on cartel agreements between U.S. and German firms. Before long, William S. Farish, the chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, had pleaded no contest to charges of criminal conspiracy between his company and I.G. Farben. In keeping with cartel agreements, Standard had withheld from U.S. authorities information on the production of artificial rubber. . . .
7b. Next, the program presents review of material from FTR #511 about the cartel agreements between Standard Oil of New Jersey and I.G. Farben. These agreements were fundamental to the success of the Nazi war machine in World War II. William Stamps Farish II helped reinforce these agreements. He was the father of William Stamps Farish III, in charge of Dubya’s blind trust. William Stamps Farish II was the grandnephew of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy.
7c. Reprising another excerpt from FTR #511, we note the roles of Brigadier General William Draper as both an executive with Dillon, Read & Co. who facilitated Wall Street investment in German heavy industry and as chief of the economics division of the occupation government of Germany after World War II. He helped to frustrate attempts to neutralize the big German firms which had backed Hitler.
8. Illustrating American oligarchy (and the influence of the Bormann network inextricably linked with it), the program notes that many of the descendants of businessmen who had helped forge the firms that drove Nazi industry served in, or as advisers to, the administration of George H.W. Bush.
. . . . In any event, a surprising number of the descendants of men who had dealt with Germany—William S. Farish III, William Draper III, and Joseph Verner Reed Jr. (grandson of Remington Arms chairman Samuel Pryor, earlier a director of both UBC and American Ship and Commerce)–turned up as close personal advisers or high-level appointees in the George H.W. Bush administration. . . .
9a. On March of 2002, the Operation Green Quest raids exposed profound connections between the GOP and its operatives Grover Norquist and Karl Rove. In early April of that year, Talat Othman–a close friend and political adviser to both Georges Bush and a man who gave a Muslim benediction at the GOP convention that year interceded on behalf of the targets of Operation Green Quest.
Othman was a director of Harken Energy, one of George W. Bush’s corporate involvements and one which was critical to his rise to being governor of Texas and President.
Harken Energy, itself, appears to have been a laundering vehicle for Philippines Golden Lily wealth, among other sources of ill-gotten gains. Operation Green Quest was covered up, in part, by then head of the F.B.I., Robert Mueller.
We next undertake an exploration of the Philippine deep political and economic involvement of George H.W. and George W. Bush and their links to the Golden Lily dynamics. NEVER forget that Iris Chang’s “suicide” took place as she was working on her Bataan Death March book, which cut across the lines of deep political power that embraced the seated President.
In September of 1986, as oil prices continued to collapse and W.’s previous financial savior, the Cincinnati-based Spectrum 7 Energy, was itself failing, along came the Dallas-based Harken, a comparatively little-known independent oil and gas company, riding to the rescue. Harken snapped up Spectrum, put W. on its board, and gave him a handsome compensation package. In return, W. was allowed to go about his business–which at the time meant playing a crucial role in his father’s presidential campaign. But the Harken assist didn’t just benefit Poppy’s political fortunes. Profits from W.’s subsequent sale of Harken stock would jack up his own political career. The Harken deal ultimately made it possible for him to become part owner and highly visible “managing director” of the popular Texas Rangers baseball tam–a position that would enhance his modest resume as a candidate for governor a few years later. Thus, the laresse of the figures behind Harken played a key role in George W. Bush’s quick march to the Presidency.
Virtually everyone who has looked at Harken over the years agrees that it is some strange kind of corporate beast, like a newly discovered species of manatee. The company’s books have never made any sense to outsiders–which might have had something to do with the fact that the only people who seemed to make any money were the insiders. In 1991 Time proclaimed Harken “one of the most mysterious and eccentric outfits ever to drill for oil.”
The Harken story reads at times like the stuff of an airport bookstore thriller. One finds figures associated with BCCI, gold caches, and an alphabet soup of secret societies appearing at critical junctures to bail out Harken . . . .
9b. Next, we examine the Bush family’s involvement with:
- The intelligence community during World War II, the Philippines, and the milieu of Douglas MacArthur, including MacArthur’s widow, who contributed to W.‘s first Congressional campaign. (In FTR #448, we noted that Douglas MacArthur married the daughter of key Morgan partner and financier of domestic fascist organizations Edward Stotesbury.)
- The MacArthur involvement with Philippine gold and the Golden Lily treasure.
- The Marcos regime’s recovery of, and use of, Golden Lily loot.
- The genesis of Nugan Hand bank attorney William Quasha with MacArthur’s postwar administration. (We have covered the Nugan Hand Bank in, among other programs, AFA #25.)
- MacArthur appointed William Quasha as Alien Property administrator. Japanese war gold was considered Alien Property.
Poppy Bush himself doesn’t talk much about the Philippines, but he too did service there. Among other things, he participated in numerous bombing runs over the islands when they were in Japanese hands–including Manila Harbor as part of MacArthur’s effort to retake the territory.
And, of course there was his intelligence work. As noted in chapter 2, on his way to the Pacific, Poppy stopped off at Pearl Harbor for some face time with officers assigned to the Joint Intelligence Center for the Pacific Ocean Areas (JICPOA). The early incarnation of JICOA was headed by Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter, who would after the war become the director of the CIA. JICPOA remains little known and little discussed, but it was a crucial development in wartime intelligence, and played a key role in Admiral Chester Nimitz’s successful island-hopping campaign, of which Bush was a part.
Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in July 1942 to replace a previous intelligence system that was deemed ineffective. General MacArthur, however, barred the OSS from operating in the Philippines so that battleground was pretty much his own show.
Thus, Bush became part of a joint intelligence effort coordinated with MacArthur’s command. The association with the Bush circle would date back to the days when Douglas MacArthur was a young man and his mother contacted E.H. Harriman, father of Prescott’s future business partnrs, to ask the railroad tycoon to give her son a job. Years later, when Poppy Bush became U.N. ambassador, he took an apartment next to Mrs. Douglas MacArthur, and in 1978, the widow contributed to W.’s Midland Texas congressional campaign. . . .
. . . . Even before Douglas MacArthur commanded U.S. troops in the country, he had major holdings in the largest Philippine gold mine. MacArthur’s staff officer, Major General Courtney Whitney, had been an executive of several gold mining companies before the war.
Besides the indigenous gold, a great fortune in gold booty was . . . . buried in the Philippines, seized by the Japanese as they plundered one East Asian country after another. . . . Several journalists, who have spent combined decades on the Philippines gold story, assert that the cache was actually seized by American forces under MacArthur and that its very existence is a sensitive secret. . . .
. . . . At the end of the war, MacArthur appointed William Quasha as alien property administrator “Alien property” would have included anything of value captured by the Japanese. . . .
. . . . Authors Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave contend . . . . that the United States did locate the Japanese gold and used it to fund anti-Communist operations the world over. Investigators in the Philippines have said that the gold was stashed in bank vaults in forty-two countries. Some of the money was used in Japan, to quickly reestablish the ruling clique, and a pro‑U.S. ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party. MacArthur oversaw the postwar occupation of Japan. The administrator of the . . . . M Fund that secretly channeled these monies to Tokyo was none other than Poppy Bush friend and CIA officer Alfred C. Ulmer. . . .
9c. Note that among the “Poppy” Bush entourage who worked with Marcos during the time he was recovering Golden Lily gold were Trump campaign manager, EU Association Agreement running dog and Hapsburg Group lynchpin Paul Manafort, as well as Roger Stone, another Trump campaign soldier.
. . . . Poppy Bush and Ferdinand Marcos cultivated a relationship of mutual appreciation. “We love your adherence to democratic principles,” Poppy gushed during a visit to Manila in 1981. Marcos knew how to play the anti-Communist card, and like nearly all U.S. leaders, Poppy avidly helped prop up the dictator. A number of Poppy’s lieutenants, including Lee Atwater, Paul Manafort and the notorious “dirty trickster” Roger Stone (no relation to Robert G. Stone Jr.) did political consulting for Marcos. Ed Rollins, the manage of the Reagan-Bush 1984 reelection campaign, admitted that a top Filipino politician illegally delivered ten million dollars in cash from Marcos to Reagan’s 1984 campaign, though he declined to name him.
Poppy also is known to have personally urged Ferdinand Marcos to invest money in the United States. Imelda has claimed that Poppy urged her husband to put “his” funds into something that Imelda knew only as the Communist Takeover Fund. That suggests that gold in the Philippines has long been seen as a funding vehicle for off-the-books intelligence, covert operations, weapons trafficking, and even coups–plus protection money that Maracos felt he had to pay. . . .
. . . . If all this gold was going somewhere, we have to ask: Was some of it going into Harken Energy, where George W. Bush was deeply involved? Certainly, Alan Quasha had a relationship with his father that somewhat paralleled that of W. and Poppy’s.
Having remained in the Philippines after the war, William Quasha eventually attained the rarefied status as the only American licensed to practice law there. He also picked up some intriguing clients, including the CIA-tied Nugan Hand Bank. . . .
. . . . He was well-off and well connected with capital sources. In the final days of the Marcos reign, after nearly all the expatriates had abandoned him, Quasha continued to stick by his man, leading the American Chamber of Commerce to condemn his “partisan approach.”
He also may have been a Marcos money man, just as Phil Kendrick had heard. Philippine investigators seeking to track the billions Marcos had embezzled from the Philippine treasury or obtained as bribes found that most of the money had been moved overseas through intermediaries. . . .
. . . . During the years William Quasha was living in Manila and conducting his law practice, his son Alan attended Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School–even studying in years that overlapped W.’s time there. Then Alan Quasha set up a law practice specializing in the alchemy of corporate restructuring. News reports have characterized his approach to acquiring companies on the cheap as bottom-feeding, and noted that the provenance of the funding was not always clear. Additionally, at the time of the Harken purchase, Poppy Bush, a former CIA director, was vice president, with the portfolio for managing covert operations–an empire that was undergirded by laundered intelligence funds.
When Alan Quasha took control of Harken in 1983, he was essentially an unknown and a small-timer. Several years later, he appeared to be on top of the world. Did gold, and/or Marcos’s billions have anything to do with this? . . . .
9c. The second program concludes with material covered in FTR #569. Rita’s associates in Green Quest were investigated and harassed by the FBI. In FTR#310 (recorded in July of 2001) Mr. Emory hypothesized that Robert Mueller was appointed head of the FBI in order to safeguard the Bush administration’s links with the milieu of the BCCI and George W. Bush’s business links to the Bin Laden family.
Mueller, considered a mentor to fired FBI director James Comey, comes by his Deep State (and possibly Bormann) credentials through a “consummate” lineage. He is the grand-nephew of former CIA deputy director Richard Bissell. Wife Ann Cabell Standish is the granddaughter of former CIA deputy director General Charles Cabell. (Charles’ brother Earl was the mayor of Dallas on Nov 22 1963). JFK fired both men, along with director Allen Dulles following the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
The inconvenient GOP ethnic/Green Quest connection cited in FTR #s 356, 357, 454 may well explain the FBI’s and CIA’s hostile interest in the investigators of Operation Green Quest.
Note that the FBI gave more documents to Zacarias Moussaoui for his defense than to the Green Quest investigators.
. . . . For two months after the raids I didn’t hear a word from Green Quest. Then one day Mark suddenly called and asked to see me. ‘Why?’ I said cynically. ‘Your investigation is over. You don’t need me anymore.’ He understood. ‘Please don’t be cross,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t talk to you. I too was under investigation. I was being followed, my phones were tapped, and I was questioned. I was miserable. They gave me a very hard time. Please don’t give any more grief. I don’t deserve it.’ What was this, I thought, another rerun of the story with John Canfield? What’s wrong with these people who keep investigating the investigators? ‘If you don’t believe me,’ he continued, ‘talk to the U.S. attorney you worked with. He’ll tell you. He and everyone else on the team were under investigation.’ Mark, I knew, was not a guy to make something like that up. But I was curious, and I called the U.S. attorney to get his take. I didn’t press him too, much, because the whole thing was—and probably still is—under investigation. But he did verify everything Mark had told me. Practically everyone involved with the SAAR investigation had been under surveillance. The FBI was among the agencies conducting that investigation.
. . . . For two months after the raids I didn’t hear a word from Green Quest. Then one day Mark suddenly called and asked to see me. ‘Why?’ I said cynically. ‘Your investigation is over. You don’t need me anymore.’ He understood. ‘Please don’t be cross,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t talk to you. I too was under investigation. I was being followed, my phones were tapped, and I was questioned. I was miserable. They gave me a very hard time. Please don’t give any more grief. I don’t deserve it.’ What was this, I thought, another rerun of the story with John Canfield? What’s wrong with these people who keep investigating the investigators? ‘If you don’t believe me,’ he continued, ‘talk to the U.S. attorney you worked with. He’ll tell you. He and everyone else on the team were under investigation.’ Mark, I knew, was not a guy to make something like that up. But I was curious, and I called the U.S. attorney to get his take. I didn’t press him too, much, because the whole thing was—and probably still is—under investigation. But he did verify everything Mark had told me. Practically everyone involved with the SAAR investigation had been under surveillance. The FBI was among the agencies conducting that investigation.
Now, as I write these lines, the FBI is trying to take over the investigation altogether. Once again, a replay of the story with Sami al-Arian and with John Canfield. The FBI claims that Customs and Green Quest were rightfully the ones to initiate the investigation, when it seemed to be about money laundering. But now that it’s become a terrorism-related matter, Customs is incapable, you see, of dealing with it. Isn’t that peachy? Judging by what the FBI did with other investigations, if it indeed succeeds in taking over the SAAR probe, we can all kiss this investigation good-bye. How many terrorism-related successes can the FBI take the credit for? Not too many, that’s for sure.
Yet the FBI wasn’t the worst part in that sticky affair. The CIA was. The CIA was investigating me and the SAAR investigators from Green Quest and Customs. The CIA and the FBI investigated everyone who had anything to do with the SAAR investigation. White vans and SUV’s with dark windows appeared near all the homes of the SAAR investigators. All agents, some of whom were very experienced with surveillance, knew they were being followed. So was I. I felt that I was being followed everywhere and watched at home, in the supermarket, on the way to work . . . and for what? . Now—I was being watched 24/7. It’s a terrible sensation to know that you have no privacy. . . . and no security. That strange clicking of the phones that wasn’t there before. . . the oh-so-crudely opened mail at home in the office. . . and the same man I spied in my neighborhood supermarket, who was also on the train I took to Washington a week ago. . . Life can be miserable when you know that someone’s always breathing down your neck. . . .
“He noticed condensation on the windows, peered inside and saw Iris in the driver’s seat **with her hands crossed** in her lap.”
Source: https://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Historian-Iris-Chang-won-many-battles-The-war-2679354.php
I am not certain of the physics involved here, but it seems unlikely at best, that after shooting herself, her hands would be “crossed in her lap.”
@The Gary Webb Experience–
Good catch! I overlooked that. If that detail is accurate, it suggests the distinct possibility that someone else pulled the trigger.
The physical evidence is indeed suspicious.
Thanks so much for this!
Best,
Dave
Here, here Dave. The Mind control as nuclear weapon analogy is indeed an essential concept to grasp. If you’re familiar with the work of Paul Virilio and his idea of the three bombs:
1. Nuclear Bomb
2. Information Bomb
3. Genetic Bomb
...we need to upgrade that for 2020, and take it a necessary step further to include
4. Religious/Spiritual Fanaticism Bomb (including the New Age / Corporate Cult!)
5. The Mind Control Bomb (Revolution in Military Affairs)
6. The Climate/ Weather Warfare/ GeoEngineering Bomb
Cheers,
Jim