I found this video clip (“Julian Assange: ‘Orwellian horror’ of Google Glass, & in bed with state dept (FULL INTERVIEW) “) fascinating. For Julian to bring up the Council on Foreign Relations in an interview, as though it were an organization familiar to everyone, was rare enough, but to make the tie to the State Department took it to another level:
“Alright, so what happens, Eric Schmidt, you know this Google senior executives come to see me. Eric Schmidt and 3 other people. I don’t think too much about the 3 other people at the time, and we have this interesting conversation which is documented in the book. And then, a little bit later, I need to speak to the most senior person in the State Department. Hillary is the most senior person. And so we try to arrange that call, and for people who maybe are not familiar with these things, you know if you get your PA to try and arrange something with someone else’s PA in some big departments, actually you can get up pretty high pretty quick. And there was this Doctor Strangelove moment where the State Department is saying, ‘Who wants to talk to Hillary? Julian Assange? Are you…I mean come on, is it really Julian Assange? How can we prove that it’s Julian? How can you prove that it’s Julian Assange?’ Etc. Etc.
And so we start progressing up the levels. And then we get a statement that there will be a call back, which is not unsurprising, to check, etc. And we do get communications back, but we get them through a back channel: from one of my other staff members who had arranged the Schmidt visit. The visit by Google. He got the call. And he got the call from Eric Schmidt’s then-girlfriend, Lisa Shields, who doesn’t work, normally, for the State Department. She’s the chief of communications for the Council on Foreign Relations. So the call came in: ‘Julian wants to talk to Hillary’. Okay, but we need to make a back channel in the State Department. Who do we know that?… ‘Oh, that’s right, you know, Lisa Shields was just out there because she, you know, we were told all about it. So get Lisa to be the back channel’. So, there we have a circumstance where the senior executive of Google was literally in bed with the State Department”
— Julian Assange
Someone could say that Julian is making up the story, and that that kind of thing wouldn’t happen. Fair enough.
Yet, here is a clip of Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton saying she gets instructions from the CFR regarding what she should be doing, and what she should think about the future:
“We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.”
— Hillary Clinton
And for those who think it’s just a bunch of Democrats who get together, Dick Cheney tells about his long-time, and apparently partly-secret, involvement with the CFR:
“It’s good to be back at the Council on Foreign Relations. As Pete mentioned, I’ve been a member for a long time and was actually a director for some period of time. I never mentioned that when I was campaigning for re-election back home in Wyoming.”
-— Dick Cheney
The membership roster shows Cheney, along with Bill and Chelsea Clinton as members:
http://www.cfr.org/about/membership/roster.html?letter=C
Interestingly, George H. W. Bush isn’t listed in the roster, but he shows up as a former director, along with notable figures like George Soros, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller and others:
http://www.cfr.org/about/history/cfr/appendix.html
