David C. Farmer, Trustee vs. Harmon

David C. Farmer, Successor-Trustee vs. Harmon

(Formerly Woo vs. Harmon & Nicholson vs. Harmon)

CV05-00030 DAE KSC

U.S. District Court For the District of Hawaii

Judges: David A. Ezra; Kevin S. Chang

—

DEFENDANT’S WITNESS

COLIN POWELL

Former Secretary of State, United States of America

Date of birth: April 5, 1937

Colin Luther Powell was born in Harlem in 1937. His parents were Jamaican immigrants who stressed the importance of education and personal achievement. Powell grew up in the South Bronx, where he graduated from high school without having formed any definite ambition or direction in life. He entered the City College of New York to study geology and it was there, by his own account, that he found his calling when he joined the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). He became commander of his unit's precision drill team and graduated in 1958 at the top of his ROTC class, with the rank of cadet colonel, the highest rank in the corps.

Powell was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army, and was one of the 16,000 military advisors dispatched to South Vietnam by President Kennedy in 1962. In 1963, Lieutenant Powell was wounded by a punji-stick booby trap while patrolling the Vietnamese border with Laos. He was awarded the Purple Heart, and later that year, the Bronze Star. Powell served a second tour of duty in Vietnam in 1968-69. During this second tour he was injured in a helicopter crash. Despite his own injuries, he managed to rescue his comrades from the burning helicopter and was awarded the Soldier's Medal. In all, he has received 11 military decorations, including the Legion of Merit.

Powell earned an MBA at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and after being promoted to major, won a White House fellowship. Powell was assigned to the Office of Management and Budget during the administration of President Nixon, and here he made a lasting impression on the Director and Deputy Director of the Office: Casper Weinberger and Frank Carlucci. Both of these men were to call on Powell when they served as Secretary of Defense and National Security Advisor, respectively, under President Ronald Reagan.

Powell, now a Colonel, followed his term as White House Fellow with service as a battalion commander in Korea and with a staff job at the Pentagon. After study at the Army War College, he was promoted to Brigadier General and commanded a Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division. In the administration of President Jimmy Carter, Powell was an assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and to the Secretary of Energy. He was promoted to Major General. He again assisted Frank Carlucci at the Defense Department during the transition from the Carter administration to that of Ronald Reagan.

Powell served as assistant commander and deputy commander of infantry divisions in Colorado and Kansas before returning to Washington to become senior military assistant to Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, whom he assisted during the invasion of Grenada and the air strikes against Libya. Powell was called upon to testify before Congress in private session about the covert shipment of American arms to Iran; he was one of only five persons in the Pentagon who knew about the operation. Powell was not implicated in any wrongdoing in the matter.

In 1986, Powell left Washington to serve as commander of the Fifth Corps in Frankfurt, Germany, but was recalled to Washington to serve as deputy to Frank Carlucci, after Carlucci was appointed national security adviser in the wake of the Iranian arms scandal. A year later, Carlucci was appointed Secretary of Defense and Powell, now a Lieutenant General, became the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. In this capacity, he coordinated technical and policy advisers during President Reagan's summit meetings with Soviet President Gorbachev. He was the first African American to serve in this position, as he has been in every office he has held since.

In 1991, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush, Powell became a national figure during the successful Desert Shield and Desert Storm operations which expelled the Iraqi army from Kuwait. General Powell continued as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the first months of the Clinton administration, publicly disagreeing with President Clinton over the President's plan to permit gay men and women to serve in the military, although he eventually accepted a compromise on the issue. Powell retired from the military shortly thereafter and returned to private life.

In 1994, Powell joined former President Carter and Senator Sam Nunn on a last-minute peace-making expedition to Haiti, which resulted in the end of military rule and the peaceful return to power of the elected government of that country.

In his years of military service, General Powell never disclosed his political sympathies; he was registered to vote as an independent. Although he was known to have supported the 1964 campaign of President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, he had served in both Republican and Democratic administrations. In the 1990s, the General's great popularity led many people to urge him to run for President. In 1995 he announced that he had registered as a Republican, and he received a thunderous ovation when he spoke at the Republican convention the following year. Although he did not forswear future political involvement, thus far he has declined to seek elective office. For the rest of the decade, he concentrated on his work with young people as Chairman of America's Promise: the Alliance for Youth.

In 2001, newly elected President George W. Bush appointed Colin Powell to be Secretary of State. To date, this is the highest rank ever held by an African American in the United States government. In his first months in office, Powell won praise for his efficient administration of the State Department, and cordial relations with other governments. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Secretary Powell took a leading role in rallying America's allies for military action in Afghanistan.

It was reported that Powell had serious misgivings about President Bush's subsequent plan to invade Iraq and topple the regime of Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, Powell appeared before the Security Council of the United Nations, where he presented evidence purporting to prove that Iraq had concealed concealing an ongoing weapons development program, in violation of UN resolutions. Powell's testimony was instrumental in persuading many members of the U.S. Congress to support military action against Iraq. Some of this evidence was later discredited, and when American forces no evidence of a weapons program in Iraq, Secretary Powell was subjected to harsh criticism.

Shortly after President Bush's re-election in 2004, Colin Powell stepped down as Secretary of State. Although he has maintained a lower public profile since his resignation, he has voiced nuanced criticism of the conduct of the war in Iraq. Although he denies any further interest in political office, he continues to speak selectively on public affairs.

http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/pow0bio-1

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When not fighting wars, Colin Powell sat on the boards of Gulfstream Aerospace and AOL. Gulfstream makes jets for both Hollywood honchos and foreign governments like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

During his time at AOL, the company merged with Time Warner, and Powell’s stock rose in value by $4 million. At the time, Colin’s son, Michael Powell, had been the only Federal Communications Commission (FCC) member who advocated that the AOL/Time Warner merger go through without question.

Powell’s son has since been named chairman of the FCC by George W. Bush; part of his job is to oversee the activities of AOL/Time Warner.

He will also oversee any regulation of AOL’s monopolistic “instant messaging” technology.

For more, GO TO > > > Flocking With The FCC; Hail to The Chief; The Impeachment of George W. Bush; The Mating of AOL & Time Warner; Nests in the Pentagon; The Rise & Fall of Summit Communications; Vultures of the Sandwich Isles

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From Vultures of the Sandwich Isles:

Posted 2006-08-01 11:39:07 by Karl:

FCC Cronyism Nets Big
Hawaii USF Payoff

$500 million to wire just 5,400 affluent homes

Telecom pundit Gordon Cook points to yet another example of waste in the USF system you pay into via your broadband, landline, and wireless phone bills. The idea is to help fill in the nation's rural telecom black holes, but instead the fund, as this Hawaii Free Press article explores, is sometimes used for political cronyism.

One of the last acts of former FCC chief Mike Powell was to approve a waiver that gave Sandwich Isles Communications in Hawaii $500 million to wire just 5,400 homes. The IP Inferno blog points out that the properties, which already have landlines, could get DSL for $600 or so; instead of the $93,000 per home this project will cost.

The rub: Michael Powell was a Naval Academy classmate of Al Hee, president of the company receiving the $500 million. Another reason critics like Cook argue that FCC statistics aim to show a rosy picture of American broadband, and why the USF system - long rife with fraud - has yet to be either scrapped or reformed by the FCC.

www.dslreports.com/shownews/76911

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NEW DISCOVERY (02/21/08):

February 21, 2008

For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics
Poses Its Own Risk

By JIM RUTENBERG, MARILYN W. THOMPSON, DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
and STEPHEN LABATON, The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

It had been just a decade since an official favor for a friend with regulatory problems had nearly ended Mr. McCain’s political career by ensnaring him in the Keating Five scandal. In the years that followed, he reinvented himself as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.

But the concerns about Mr. McCain’s relationship with Ms. Iseman underscored an enduring paradox of his post-Keating career. Even as he has vowed to hold himself to the highest ethical standards, his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest.

Mr. McCain promised, for example, never to fly directly from Washington to Phoenix, his hometown, to avoid the impression of self-interest because he sponsored a law that opened the route nearly a decade ago. But like other lawmakers, he often flew on the corporate jets of business executives seeking his support, including the media moguls Rupert Murdoch, Michael R. Bloomberg and Lowell W. Paxson, Ms. Iseman’s client. (Last year he voted to end the practice.)

Mr. McCain helped found a nonprofit group to promote his personal battle for tighter campaign finance rules. But he later resigned as its chairman after news reports disclosed that the group was tapping the same kinds of unlimited corporate contributions he opposed, including those from companies seeking his favor. He has criticized the cozy ties between lawmakers and lobbyists, but is relying on corporate lobbyists to donate their time running his presidential race and recently hired a lobbyist to run his Senate office.

“He is essentially an honorable person,” said William P. Cheshire, a friend of Mr. McCain who as editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic defended him during the Keating Five scandal. “But he can be imprudent.”

Mr. Cheshire added, “That imprudence or recklessness may be part of why he was not more astute about the risks he was running with this shady operator,” Charles Keating, whose ties to Mr. McCain and four other lawmakers tainted their reputations in the savings and loan debacle.

During his current campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. McCain has played down his attacks on the corrupting power of money in politics, aware that the stricter regulations he championed are unpopular in his party. When the Senate overhauled lobbying and ethics rules last year, Mr. McCain stayed in the background.

With his nomination this year all but certain, though, he is reminding voters again of his record of reform. His campaign has already begun comparing his credentials with those of Senator Barack Obama, a Democratic contender who has made lobbying and ethics rules a centerpiece of his own pitch to voters.

“I would very much like to think that I have never been a man whose favor can be bought,” Mr. McCain wrote about his Keating experience in his 2002 memoir, “Worth the Fighting For.” “From my earliest youth, I would have considered such a reputation to be the most shameful ignominy imaginable. Yet that is exactly how millions of Americans viewed me for a time, a time that I will forever consider one of the worst experiences of my life.”

A drive to expunge the stain on his reputation in time turned into a zeal to cleanse Washington as well. The episode taught him that “questions of honor are raised as much by appearances as by reality in politics,” he wrote, “and because they incite public distrust they need to be addressed no less directly than we would address evidence of expressly illegal corruption.”...

A Formative Scandal

Mr. McCain started his career like many other aspiring politicians, eagerly courting the wealthy and powerful. A Vietnam war hero and Senate liaison for the Navy, he arrived in Arizona in 1980 after his second marriage, to Cindy Hensley, the heiress to a beer fortune there. He quickly started looking for a Congressional district where he could run.

Mr. Keating, a Phoenix financier and real estate developer, became an early sponsor and, soon, a friend. He was a man of great confidence and daring, Mr. McCain recalled in his memoir. “People like that appeal to me,” he continued. “I have sometimes forgotten that wisdom and a strong sense of public responsibility are much more admirable qualities.”

During Mr. McCain’s four years in the House, Mr. Keating, his family and his business associates contributed heavily to his political campaigns. The banker gave Mr. McCain free rides on his private jet, a violation of Congressional ethics rules (he later said it was an oversight and paid for the trips). They vacationed together in the Bahamas. And in 1986, the year Mr. McCain was elected to the Senate, his wife joined Mr. Keating in investing in an Arizona shopping mall.

Mr. Keating had taken over the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association and used its federally insured deposits to gamble on risky real estate and other investments. He pressed Mr. McCain and other lawmakers to help hold back federal banking regulators.

For years, Mr. McCain complied. At Mr. Keating’s request, he wrote several letters to regulators, introduced legislation and helped secure the nomination of a Keating associate to a banking regulatory board.

By early 1987, though, the thrift was careering toward disaster. Mr. McCain agreed to join several senators, eventually known as the Keating Five, for two private meetings with regulators to urge them to ease up. “Why didn’t I fully grasp the unusual appearance of such a meeting?” Mr. McCain later lamented in his memoir.

When Lincoln went bankrupt in 1989 — one of the biggest collapses of the savings and loan crisis, costing taxpayers $3.4 billion — the Keating Five became infamous. The scandal sent Mr. Keating to prison and ended the careers of three senators, who were censured in 1991 for intervening. Mr. McCain, who had been a less aggressive advocate for Mr. Keating than the others, was reprimanded only for “poor judgment” and was re-elected the next year.

Some people involved think Mr. McCain got off too lightly. William Black, one of the banking regulators the senator met with, argued that Mrs. McCain’s investment with Mr. Keating created an obvious conflict of interest for her husband. (Mr. McCain had said a prenuptial agreement divided the couple’s assets.) He should not be able to “put this behind him,” Mr. Black said. “It sullied his integrity.”

Mr. McCain has since described the episode as a unique humiliation. “If I do not repress the memory, its recollection still provokes a vague but real feeling that I had lost something very important,” he wrote in his memoir. “I still wince thinking about it.”

A New Chosen Cause

After the Republican takeover of the Senate in 1994, Mr. McCain decided to try to put some of the lessons he had learned into law. He started by attacking earmarks, the pet projects that individual lawmakers could insert anonymously into the fine print of giant spending bills, a recipe for corruption. But he quickly moved on to other targets, most notably political fund-raising.

Mr. McCain earned the lasting animosity of many conservatives, who argue that his push for fund-raising restrictions trampled free speech, and of many of his Senate colleagues, who bristled that he was preaching to them so soon after his own repentance. In debates, his party’s leaders challenged him to name a single senator he considered corrupt (he refused).

“We used to joke that each of us was the only one eating alone in our caucus,” said Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, who became Mr. McCain’s partner on campaign finance efforts.

Mr. McCain appeared motivated less by the usual ideas about good governance than by a more visceral disapproval of the gifts, meals and money that influence seekers shower on lawmakers, Mr. Feingold said. “It had to do with his sense of honor,” he said. “He saw this stuff as cheating.”

Mr. McCain made loosening the grip of special interests the central cause of his 2000 presidential campaign, inviting scrutiny of his own ethics. His Republican rival, George W. Bush, accused him of “double talk” for soliciting campaign contributions from companies with interests that came before the powerful Senate commerce committee, of which Mr. McCain was chairman. Mr. Bush’s allies called Mr. McCain “sanctimonious.”

At one point, his campaign invited scores of lobbyists to a fund-raiser at the Willard Hotel in Washington. While Bush supporters stood mocking outside, the McCain team tried to defend his integrity by handing the lobbyists buttons reading “McCain voted against my bill.” Mr. McCain himself skipped the event, an act he later called “cowardly.”

By 2002, he had succeeded in passing the McCain-Feingold Act, which transformed American politics by banning “soft money,” the unlimited donations from corporations, unions and the rich that were funneled through the two political parties to get around previous laws.

One of his efforts, though, seemed self-contradictory. In 2001, he helped found the nonprofit Reform Institute to promote his cause and, in the process, his career. It collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in unlimited donations from companies that lobbied the Senate commerce committee. Mr. McCain initially said he saw no problems with the financing, but he severed his ties to the institute in 2005, complaining of “bad publicity” after news reports of the arrangement.

Like other presidential candidates, he has relied on lobbyists to run his campaigns. Since a cash crunch last summer, several of them — including his campaign manager, Rick Davis, who represented companies before Mr. McCain’s Senate panel — have been working without pay, a gift that could be worth tens of thousands of dollars.

In recent weeks, Mr. McCain has hired another lobbyist, Mark Buse, to run his Senate office. In his case, it was a round trip through the revolving door: Mr. Buse had directed Mr. McCain’s committee staff for seven years before leaving in 2001 to lobby for telecommunications companies.

Mr. McCain’s friends dismiss questions about his ties to lobbyists, arguing that he has too much integrity to let such personal connections influence him.

“Unless he gives you special treatment or takes legislative action against his own views, I don’t think his personal and social relationships matter,” said Charles Black, a friend and campaign adviser who has previously lobbied the senator for aviation, broadcasting and tobacco concerns.

Concerns in a Campaign

Mr. McCain’s confidence in his ability to distinguish personal friendships from compromising connections was at the center of questions advisers raised about Ms. Iseman.

The lobbyist, a partner at the firm Alcalde & Fay, represented telecommunications companies for whom Mr. McCain’s commerce committee was pivotal. Her clients contributed tens of thousands of dollars to his campaigns.

Mr. Black said Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman were friends and nothing more. But in 1999 she began showing up so frequently in his offices and at campaign events that staff members took notice. One recalled asking, “Why is she always around?”

That February, Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman attended a small fund-raising dinner with several clients at the Miami-area home of a cruise-line executive and then flew back to Washington along with a campaign aide on the corporate jet of one of her clients, Paxson Communications. By then, according to two former McCain associates, some of the senator’s advisers had grown so concerned that the relationship had become romantic that they took steps to intervene.

A former campaign adviser described being instructed to keep Ms. Iseman away from the senator at public events, while a Senate aide recalled plans to limit Ms. Iseman’s access to his offices.

In interviews, the two former associates said they joined in a series of confrontations with Mr. McCain, warning him that he was risking his campaign and career. Both said Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman. The two associates, who said they had become disillusioned with the senator, spoke independently of each other and provided details that were corroborated by others.

Separately, a top McCain aide met with Ms. Iseman at Union Station in Washington to ask her to stay away from the senator. John Weaver, a former top strategist and now an informal campaign adviser, said in an e-mail message that he arranged the meeting after “a discussion among the campaign leadership” about her.

“Our political messaging during that time period centered around taking on the special interests and placing the nation’s interests before either personal or special interest,” Mr. Weaver continued. “Ms. Iseman’s involvement in the campaign, it was felt by us, could undermine that effort.”

Mr. Weaver added that the brief conversation was only about “her conduct and what she allegedly had told people, which made its way back to us.” He declined to elaborate.

It is not clear what effect the warnings had; the associates said their concerns receded in the heat of the campaign.

Ms. Iseman acknowledged meeting with Mr. Weaver, but disputed his account.

“I never discussed with him alleged things I had ‘told people,’ that had made their way ‘back to’ him,” she wrote in an e-mail message. She said she never received special treatment from Mr. McCain’s office.

Mr. McCain said that the relationship was not romantic and that he never showed favoritism to Ms. Iseman or her clients. “I have never betrayed the public trust by doing anything like that,” he said. He made the statements in a call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, to complain about the paper’s inquiries.

The senator declined repeated interview requests, beginning in December. He also would not comment about the assertions that he had been confronted about Ms. Iseman, Mr. Black said Wednesday.

Mr. Davis and Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s top strategists in both of his presidential campaigns, disputed accounts from the former associates and aides and said they did not discuss Ms. Iseman with the senator or colleagues.

“I never had any good reason to think that the relationship was anything other than professional, a friendly professional relationship,” Mr. Salter said in an interview.

He and Mr. Davis also said Mr. McCain had frequently denied requests from Ms. Iseman and the companies she represented. In 2006, Mr. McCain sought to break up cable subscription packages, which some of her clients opposed. And his proposals for satellite distribution of local television programs fell short of her clients’ hopes.

The McCain aides said the senator sided with Ms. Iseman’s clients only when their positions hewed to his principles.

A champion of deregulation, Mr. McCain wrote letters in 1998 and 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission urging it to uphold marketing agreements allowing a television company to control two stations in the same city, a crucial issue for Glencairn Ltd., one of Ms. Iseman’s clients. He introduced a bill to create tax incentives for minority ownership of stations; Ms. Iseman represented several businesses seeking such a program. And he twice tried to advance legislation that would permit a company to control television stations in overlapping markets, an important issue for Paxson.

In late 1999, Ms. Iseman asked Mr. McCain’s staff to send a letter to the commission to help Paxson, now Ion Media Networks, on another matter. Mr. Paxson was impatient for F.C.C. approval of a television deal, and Ms. Iseman acknowledged in an e-mail message to The Times that she had sent to Mr. McCain’s staff information for drafting a letter urging a swift decision.

Mr. McCain complied. He sent two letters to the commission, drawing a rare rebuke for interference from its chairman. In an embarrassing turn for the campaign, news reports invoked the Keating scandal, once again raising questions about intervening for a patron.

Mr. McCain’s aides released all of his letters to the F.C.C. to dispel accusations of favoritism, and aides said the campaign had properly accounted for four trips on the Paxson plane. But the campaign did not report the flight with Ms. Iseman. Mr. McCain’s advisers say he was not required to disclose the flight, but ethics lawyers dispute that.

Recalling the Paxson episode in his memoir, Mr. McCain said he was merely trying to push along a slow-moving bureaucracy, but added that he was not surprised by the criticism given his history.

“Any hint that I might have acted to reward a supporter,” he wrote, “would be taken as an egregious act of hypocrisy.”

Statement by McCain

Mr. McCain’s presidential campaign issued the following statement Wednesday night:

“It is a shame that The New York Times has lowered its standards to engage in a hit-and-run smear campaign. John McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election.

“Americans are sick and tired of this kind of gutter politics, and there is nothing in this story to suggest that John McCain has ever violated the principles that have guided his career.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/us/politics/21mccain.html

TALK TO THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWSROOM

* * *

FOR MORE SEE: VULTURES IN THE MEADOWS

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October 12, 1999

THE NEW GLOBAL ORDER

The next Bilderberg meeting

Secret roster, agenda for Washington conference

The secretive Bilderberg society, a group some believe conspires semi-annually to foster global government, will hold a steering committee meeting in Washington next month, WorldNetDaily has learned.

The Nov. 4-5 conference, featuring invited guests such as Vice President Al Gore and presidential candidate John McCain, is scheduled for the Library of Congress in the nation's capital and is sponsored by the American Friends of Bilderberg. The U.S. group is directed by Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Paul Allaire and Richard C. Holbrooke.

Since 1953, the Bilderberg group has convened government, business, academic and journalistic representatives from the U.S., Canada and Europe with the express purpose of exploring the future of the North Atlantic community. The international steering committee includes Conrad Black, publisher of newspapers throughout Canada, the U.S. and the London Telegraph and Jerusalem Post, Vernon Jordan, George Mitchell, Kissinger and Rockefeller.

On the agenda for the November meeting is a panel discussion of the U.S. presidential elections and an exploration of the national security requirements for the 21st century. Among those involved in the discussion of the latter subject will be former U.S. Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, journalist Leslie Gelb and Secretary of Defense William Cohen. McCain, at the special invitation of Kissinger, will speak at breakfast Friday morning and Gore will make a Thursday night dinner address, according to the agenda obtained by WorldNetDaily.

Others making presentations include Rep. Bill Thomas of California, Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, Evan Bayh of Indiana and former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles.

The list of potential invitees to the Washington conference includes the following: Dwayne O. Andreas, Michael H. Armacost, Robert Bartley, Samuel R. Berger, C. Fred Bergsten, Richard Bernstein, James H. Billington, Gen. Charles G. Boyd, Bill Bradley, John H. Bryan, William F. Buckley, William P. Bundy, John H. Chafee, E. Gerald Corrigan, Kenneth W. Dam, Lynne E. Davis, John M. Deutch, Thomas E. Donilon, Theodore L. Eliot Jr., Dianne Feinstein, Martin S. Feldstein, Stanley Fischer, James J. Florio, Lynn Forester, Charles W. Freedman Jr., Stephen Friedman, Thomas Friedman, David Frum, Richard Furland, Orit Gadiesh, Gen. John R. Glavin, David Gergen, Louis V. Gerstner, Paul Gigot, Katherine Graham, Donald Graham, Marc Grossman, Chuck Hagel, Jim Hoagland, James F. Hoge Jr., Mrs. Karen Elliott House, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Peter Jennings, Jems Johnson, Peter Kahn, Nancy Landon Kassebaum, Robert M. Kimmitt, Henry Kravis, William Kristol, Jan Leschly, Winston Lord, Jessica T. Matthews, Charles Mac Mathias, William J. McDonough, George C. McGhee, Richard A. McGinn, Donald F. McHenry, Sam Nunn, Joseph S. Nye Jr., John M. Page Jr., Norman Pearlstine, William J. Perry, Thomas R. Pickering, Gen. Colin Powell, Sir Kieran Prendergast, Larry Pressler, Clyde V. Prestowitz, Steven Rattner, William Rhodes, William Richardson, Sharon Percy Rockefeller, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, Robert Shapiro, George Soros, Lesley Stahl, James B. Steinberg, George Stephanopoulos, Lawrence H. Summers, G. Richard Thornan, Franklin A. Thomas, Alexander J. Trotman, Wiliam Clay Ford Jr., Laura D'Andrea Tyson, Lodewijk J.R. de Vink, Dr. Ezra F. Vogel, Paul A. Volcker, Stanley A. Weiss, John C. Whitehead, Christine Todd Whitman, James D. Wolfensohn and Casimir A. Yost.

The 1999 annual meeting of the Bilderberg group took place in Sintra, Portugal, June 3-6. The November meeting at the Library of Congress is being billed as a special steering committee session.

According to sources which penetrated the high-security meetings in the past, the Bilderberg meetings emphasize a globalist agenda and promote the idea that the notion of national sovereignty is antiquated and regressive.

In 1998, British free-lance journalist Campbell Thomas attempted to cover the conference in Turnberry, Scotland, for the Daily Mail. Thomas began by seeking the opinions of neighbors to the secret meeting being held nearby. One of those was a young woman who told him he was in the hotel's staff quarters and should leave immediately, which he did.

A short while later, two local police officers arrested Thomas, who reportedly remained in custody for eight hours.

Not all journalists are treated quite so harshly, as the guest roster for the November meeting indicates.

www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=17214

(For more on the Bilderbergers, GO TO > > > The Freedom to Sing)

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Colin Powell is expected to testify regarding his business, professional, political and personal relationships with Michael Powell, John McCain, Vicki Iseman, James B. Nicholson, Jim Nicholson, Condoleezza Rice, Robert Dole, Henry Kissinger, Linda Lingle, Bob Awana, Henry Paulson, The Nature Conservancy, The Hawaii Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, The Peregrine Fund, Linda Lingle, Jack Abramoff, Gale Norton, Faye Kurren, Dan Case, Steve Case, AOL-Time Warner, Admiral Thomas Fargo, Robert Kihune, Sandwich Isles Communications, Summit Communications, Walt Disney Co., RAND Corp., Cisco Systems, David Farmer, Steven Guttman, James Duca, Conrad Black, Frank Carlucci, The Carlyle Group, and others to be named upon discovery.