London Independent: Conspiracy theorists join the world’s elite

David Usborne
London Independent
June 3, 2012

There are things going on at the Bilderberg conference in Virginia today that most of us will never learn about, such as who among the attendees got the sole presidential suite at the host hotel, a faux Georgian Marriott? Was it the Queen of the Netherlands, the president of the World Bank, the executive chairman of Google – or perhaps Henry Kissinger?

More urgent is to discover what they and the other 140-odd participants have been talking about at the three-day gathering that ends tonight. For some consider Bilderberg a cabal of the planet’s most devilish financiers, industrialists and power brokers whose missions, they assert, include choosing the next US president (or, at least, vice) and forming a clandestine world government.

Maybe Ken Clarke, an alleged proponent of openness, will tell us when he comes home with the other Britons who received an invitation, such as Douglas Flint, group chairman of HSBC, Marcus Agius, head of Barclays, and Lord Mandelson. If we are lucky, they will conjure solutions to the euro crisis and violence in Syria – after all, Bassma Kodmani, who sits on the Syrian National Council, is taking part.

A cross between Davos and an Ivy League/Oxbridge reunion, Bilderberg has been going strong since its first annual shindig in a Dutch hotel – the Bilderberg – in 1954. That meeting “grew out of the concern expressed by leading citizens on both sides of the Atlantic that Western Europe and North America were not working together as closely as they should on common problems of critical importance,” the website says.