FT267

A recent email bulletin from Tony Gosling included this: “Bill Clinton is a freemason (I have been shown about 20 photographs of him in his regalia from the age of 21).” [1] Twenty years ago, this kind of claim was difficult to check. These days, you ask Google and you discover that Clinton was a member of a Masonic youth movement, the Order of DeMolay, and, indeed, is a member of the DeMolay Hall of Fame, although he apparently never joined the adult organisation. [2]

So, might Clinton be a secret adult Mason? Given the estimated 50 million dollars the Republicans spent poking through Clinton’s life during the so-called Whitewater affair of the early 1990s, this strikes me as unlikely. Nor is it really intelligible. In the USA (as in Germany), the Masons aren’t a secret organis­ation. Some members even wear lapel pins – I remember the first time I saw one on holiday in the States – and a Masonic Website will take you to the sites of the various Grand Lodges of the USA. [3] Is it any more interesting that Clinton joined a Masonic youth group than if he’d joined the youth movement of – say – the Elks, another of these American fraternal organisations?

Still on the president­ial conspiracy beat, as it were, a recent article by Wayne Madsen [4] details what he calls Obama’s ‘CIA pedigree’. [5] Madsen isn’t exactly a stranger to speculation and the use of undocumented allegations, as his Wiki entry demonstrates, and presents here a fairly confusing jumble of biographical bits and pieces about Obama’s family, not­ably his mother, the late Ann Dunham Soetoro. Amidst the surmise and guilt-by-associat­ion, a handful of facts can be found: Obama’s mother worked for two American organisations which have been fronts for the CIA in its overseas operations, the Ford Foundation and the US Agency for Inter­national Development; and, as has been reported before, Obama himself worked for another one, Business International Corporation, Inc. (BIC) of New York, after his graduation from Columbia University in 1983.

But… in the world of companies used as CIA cover organis­ations, such as The Ford Foundation, USAID and BIC, of necess­ity most of their employees are exactly what they appear to be. If you research Ann Dunham Soetoro, her professional life was exactly what the biography of an anthropologist interested in rural development would look like. The best kind of cover story, Madsen might say. Indeed: but he has no evidence that it was ever, in fact, a cover story.

Still, Madsen, from the left, suggesting that Obama is CIA at least makes a refreshing change from the chorus on the right who think he’s a Communist or even a Russian agent!



Notes
1  A campaigner against secret societies. His website is www.bilderberg.org.
2  www.demolay.org.
3  www.msana.com.
4  Former naval officer who worked for the National Security Agency, and now produces the Wayne Madsen Report.
5  www.opinion-maker.org.