International lawmakers and other world figureheads are deep in discussion near Washington, DC this week at the 2012 Bilderberg Conference. But are members of the exclusive group breaking US law while meeting off the record?
Little is known about what happened at past Bilderberg meetings, let alone this year’s conference near the nation’s capital in Chantilly, Virginia. Over the years, however, some journalists and rogue reporters have either infiltrated the event or learned from insiders about the goings-on of the elusive meeting of the minds. With reports circulating that some of the planet’s most important decisions being birthed at Bilderberg, it isn’t farfetched that maneuvers involving international policy are being put in place this week where people like US Senator John Kerry and World Bank Group President Robert Zoellick are on the guest-list. If that’s indeed the case, though, several American officials could be breaking a long-standing federal law that prohibits exactly that behavior.Under the Logan Act, a US law passed during the infancy of the country by President John Adams, American citizens cannot negotiate with foreign officials without the authorization of the country. According to the text of the Logan Act of 1799, “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”The Bilderberg Conference may have been largely ignored by the media in decades past, but with this year’s gathering garnering perhaps the most attention in recent memory, the actions of elected US officials this time could end up being enough to bring charges against them. Even though Americans have been able to be persecuted under the law since nearly the dawn of the country, they never, in fact have been. For their actions at Bilderberg, US politics might be able to be brought, although there are no records of neither convictions nor prosecutions.The actual conversations that occur at the Bilderberg Conference are cloaked in such secrecy that, often, attendees identified to have been at the gatherings have gone on the record to discount allegations that prove as much. Unless infiltrated fully, what actually occurs behind closed doors remains a mystery to most outside of the exclusive gang of around 150 members, but given news reports from years’ past, international and domestic policy is largely believed to have been crafted at the conference. As RT reported earlier this week, politicians including former presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both attended Bilderberg conferences in the years before being elected to the Oval Office. Tony Blair was on hand at the 1993 gala before becoming prime minister of England in 1997, and the 2008 conference is believed to be the catalyst for that year’s US presidential election: rumors suggest that attendees settling on backing Barack Obama for the Democratic Party nomination at that year’s event, only for contender Hillary Clinton to bow out two days later.Additionally, the website Prison Planet suggests that the European Union’s euro currency was developed by members of the Bilderberg Group and that a 2005 conference focused heavily on how to influence the price of oil in the months that would follow. Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state under US President Richard Nixon, has been a regular attendee of the Bilderberg Conference and is included on a roster of invited members made public this week by the group. For his role in the Vietnam War, he has been attacked by many critics as a war criminal. This year, the agenda is believed to be concentrated around the upcoming US presidential election and who Republican Party candidate Mitt Romney will chose as his running mate. Preliminary reports published in several American outlets speculate that Senator Marco Rubio will be plucked during Bilderberg to be the GOP vice presidential candidate.