Conspiracy realities: the Internet and talk radio abound with ridiculous rumors and falsehoods dealing with conspiracy. Yet, there are many examples of the real thing.

According to New Age guru and spiritualist David Icke, our world is run by (and has been for thousands of years) a secret society of extra-terrestrial reptilians known as the Anunnaki. Mr. Icke, a former national spokesman for Britain's radical Green Party, is a prolific author, whose books, videos and articles propagate a bizarre revisionist history of ancient civilizations, religions, world events, dynasties and famous people.

In Mr. Icke's worldview, the reptilian Anunnaki are shape-shifters who have taken on human form and occupy the top positions of power in politics, business, finance and religion worldwide. Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Bush, Queen Elizabeth, Mikhail Gorbachev and many other current world notables are actually intergalactic reptilians disguised as human beings, says Icke. And so it has been throughout history, in the higher circles of power, going back to pre-Babylonian times.

According to Icke, the Anunnaki invented the world religions, including Christianity; Jesus is a myth and the Bible is an Anunnaki fairy tale concocted to keep humans in a mental prison. World history, says Icke, is the record of one long conspiracy, in which the Anunnaki have ruled for millennia through pharaohs, kings, emperors, Christianity, the Illuminati, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group.

Do people really believe this garish drivel? Unfortunately, many do, as the proliferation of books, Internet Web sites and radio shows dealing with Anunnaki, shape-shitting, shamanism, psychics, UFOs, time travel, and similar far-out topics testify. The problem is that Icke and many others like him have interlaced nonsensical fabrication with genuine fact. The Anunnaki reptilians are fantasy; the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Trilateral Commission and similar organizations of ruling elites are very real. By combining the two, Icke and his ilk serve to discredit others who responsibly attempt to expose the agenda and activities of real conspirators. Perhaps that is his purpose.

There is no need to fret over (or seek excitement in) wacko conspiracy fantasies and disinformation when there is plenty of the real stuff that demands our attention and our utmost efforts to expose and oppose. Here are just a few of the genuine, verifiable, imminent conspiratorial threats to our nation and our liberty, developed in much greater detail in past issues of THE NEW AMERICAN:

Bonesmen, Bilderbergers and the CFR. Regardless of whether a Bush or Kerry ticket takes the White House, the most important national policies will be decided at Pratt House, the New York headquarters of the CFR. Senator Kerry is a longtime CFR member, as are many of his chosen advisers, whom we could expect to take cabinet positions and top-level posts in a Kerry administration. President Bush is not a CFR member, but his father was a CFR director and a member of its sister organization, the Trilateral Commission. More importantly, President Bush selected Dick Cheney (CFR member and former CFR officer) as his vice president and--like Democrat and Republican presidents going back to Franklin Roosevelt--surrounded himself with CFR Insiders (including Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz, Zoellick, Myers, Negroponte, Perle, Feith, et al).

The 2004 U.S. presidential election will feature an amazing coincidence: Both major party candidates are members of an ultra-exclusive, super-secret society, whose members have wielded enormous political and economic power for much of the last century.

Yes, George Bush and John Kerry are both "Bonesmen," members of the Order of Skull and Bones, based at Yale University. When asked by NBC's Tim Russert about their membership in this occult group, Bush and Kerry gave almost identical responses: they both said it was too secret to talk about--period. Mr. Russert and the rest of the elite media lapdogs have left it at that, laughing it off as a non-issue of interest only to the supposed lunatic fringe.

But it is hardly a laughing matter. This is not Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble at the Royal Order of the Water Buffaloes or Jackie Gleason and Art Carney in their fictional Raccoon Lodge. This is one of the highest political offices of one of the most powerful nations on the planet being sold in a closed auction where both bidders are members of the same secret club of high-level power brokers. This would be a major concern if it were any secret club, even one reputedly harmless or benevolent. However, available prima facie evidence indicates that Skull & Bones is anything but harmless or benevolent. (See "Bipartisan Bonesmen," March 8, 2004 issue.)

The same holds true for the Bilderberg Group. Over the past half century, the Bilderberg Group's annual secret confabs have served as the launch pad for many globalist schemes--such as the European Common Market, now the EU--and the fashion runway for relatively unknown politicians who will be boosted to the level of president or prime minister. Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, Olaf Palme (Sweden), Helmut Schmidt (Germany) and Tony Blair (Britain) are but a few who fit that category.

Senator John Kerry is a veteran Bilderberg attendee. Time/CNN reported that he zeroed in on Senator John Edwards as his running mate after Bilderberg veteran Senator John Corzine called and informed him that Edwards had wowed the Bilderberg elite with his speech at this year's Bilderberg retreat in Stresa, Italy. The clincher came a month later, says Time/CNN, at a July 1 "hush-hush meeting" between Kerry and Edwards at the home of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (Bilderberg participant, CFR and Trilateral Commission).

President Bush is not a Bilderberg attendee, but many of his advisers and appointees are: Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Richard Haas, John Bolton, Doug Feith, Henry Kissinger--to name a few. (See "Bilderbergers Celebrate Half a Century of Intrigue, Secrecy," June 28, 2004 issue.)

Building a World Army, In February 1961, the Kennedy State Department, headed by CFR insider Dean Rusk, commissioned MIT Professor Lincoln P. Bloomfield (CFR) to produce a study on how to disarm the U.S. while arming the UN. The resulting classified study, entitled A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations, proposed a global regime that, said Bloomfield, would "be referred to unblushingly as a 'world government.'" According to the study, the nations of the world, including the U.S., would have to be stripped gradually of their military forces, while establishing a UN Army of at least a half million men, backed by UN sea, air and space threes, including nuclear weapons.

However, Bloomfield wrote, it would be almost impossible to get the American people to support such a radical plan without the help of "a crisis, a war, or a brink-of-war situation so grave or commonly menacing that deeply rooted attitudes and practices are sufficiently shaken to open the possibility of a revolution in world political arrangements." He suggested that the envisioned global regime "may be brought into existence as a result of a series of sudden, nasty, and traumatic shocks."

The Bloomfield plan became official policy with the Kennedy administration's Freedom From War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful Worm in 1961 and Blueprint for the Peace Race in 1962. Over the past four decades, CFR members in both Republican and Democrat administrations have taken steps to move this treasonous plan forward.

However, the biggest overt move came this year, with President Bush's proposal to spend over $600 million from the budgets of the Defense and State Departments to launch what he calls the Global Peace Operations Initiative. This radically subversive plan, which has received almost no media coverage, would train, equip and place at the UN's disposal, a 75,000-man army. (See "'Hat in Hand,' on 'Bended Knee,'" June 28, 2004 issue.)

9-11: Repeating the Deadly Pattern. The 9-11 Commission Report, released in July, was an instant best-seller. Like previous reports on the September 11 terrorist attacks, it concluded that the deadly hijacking conspiracy succeeded because of lack of coordination, cooperation and imagination on the part of various federal officials and agencies. The proposed solution: create a bigger, more centralized intelligence bureaucracy.

In her now-famous May 21, 2002 memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller, FBI Special Agent Colleen Rowley detailed how FBI officials in Washington worked to "deliberately sabotage" the efforts of her Minneapolis FBI team's investigation of suspected hijacker Zacarlas Moussaoui. According to Agent Rowley, the field agents bitterly joked that key officials at FBI headquarters "had to be spies or moles ... working for Osama bin Laden." How many times will this be allowed to happen?

In the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, FBI Agent Nancy Floyd was in a similar predicament; the FBI had its own informant, Emad Salem, inside the terrorist cell. The bombing could have been stopped, but Justice Department and FBI headquarters refused to listen to Salem and Floyd. The 1995 OKC bombing saw another repeat; federal officials refused to heed multiple internal forewarnings. All of these "snafus" have been followed by massive cover-ups posing as investigations. (See "9-11: FBI Futility and Failure," January 27, 2003 issue, and "Al-Qaeda's OKC-9/11 Tics," July 26, 2004 issue.)

From OKC to 9-11: Letting Terrorists Run Free. Over the past nine years since 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, THE NEW AMERICAN has published an extensive series of investigative reports compellingly documenting that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols had multiple accomplices in that terrorist attack. Several of those were Middle Eastern terrorists.

The evidence points directly at 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef and Yousef's uncle, 9-11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, as well as several lower-level operatives who are part of a large network of cells that both the Clinton and Bush administrations allowed to roam freely throughout the U.S. Many of them are still operating here, while American citizens daily lose more and more of their freedoms in a phony "War on Terror." (See "Al-Qaeda's OKC-9/11 Ties," July 26, 2004 issue.)

Subsidizing Russian WMDs. Russia agreed, under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), to destroy its declared stockpile of more than 40,000 metric tons of chemical weapons. The CFR brain trust insisted that this only could be done if the U.S. provided massive financial aid to help the Russians with this effort. The U.S. responded, providing over a billion and a half dollars in aid. But, according to an April 2004 report by Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Russia has destroyed only slightly more than one percent of its stockpile and "has no credible plan for destroying the remainder of its nerve gas stockpile."

According to Chairman Hunter, while U.S. taxpayers have been pouring huge sums into this phony WMD destruction program, "Russia has spent billions more on new long-range missiles, advanced nuclear warheads, ballistic missile submarines and massive underground bunkers as well as secret biological and chemical weapon programs." All of this deadly deception has been going on with the full knowledge and connivance of--and cover-up by--top officials in the Clinton and Bush administrations, including Presidents Clinton and Bush.

Many other examples besides those we have listed above could be cited to show the grave danger facing our nation. These terrible things are not just happening because of bungling ineptitude, negligence, misguided idealism or other "plausible" explanations. They are happening because a self-perpetuating cabal of power-mad globalists have seized control of both political parties, and through them have gained a lock-hold on the levers of power at the top levels of our federal government.

The individuals and groups involved in the massive effort to subvert our Constitution and submerge us in a world government are engaged in what we must call--by any reasonable definition--a conspiracy. If we hope to preserve our republic and our freedom, we must expose this criminal cabal by dragging it and all of its foul operations out of the dark shadows and into the bright light of day.