The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (16 page)

A hundred years ago, a good case could have been made for the thesis that “Britannia Rules” (with Cecil Rhodes’s
Society of the Elect
as chief cheerleader), but today Britain barely scrapes membership of the G7. As with all “unified field” conspiracies LaRouche resorts to an entirely instrumentalist view of politics, by which one person pulls a lever and the world alters course: Lizzie Windsor requests MI5 to create four lovable mop heads from Liverpool, drug culture ruins the teenagers of the US.

The LaRouchites might be more convincing if they got the details correct. The title held by the Prince of Wales that gives the club its name is Lord of the Isles not Prince of. And if the Club of the Isles actually exists anywhere outside La-la-la-Roucheland it is doubtless yet another talking shop for the great and the good.

Further Reading

Joan Veon,
Prince Charles: The Sustainable Prince
, 1997

“The True Story Behind the Fall of the House of Windsor”,
EIR
Special Report, September 1997

KURT COBAIN

When Nirvana’s lead singer Kurt Cobain exited the world on 5 April 1994 his mother exclaimed, “Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club, I told him not to join that stupid club.” Mrs Wendy O’Connor meant that her son had joined Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix on rock ’n’ roll’s list of twenty-seven-year-old suicides.

But did Cobain commit suicide? Within a week of Cobain’s death at his Lake Washington house, Seattle journalist Richard Lee hosted a show unambiguously entitled “Kurt Cobain Was Murdered”, claiming that there were discrepancies and facts difficult to reconcile with a verdict of suicide.

Kurt Donald Cobain was, admittedly, given to depression and his family had a history of suicide. Cobain himself apparently deliberately overdosed on Rohypnol and champagne earlier in 1994 while in Rome. Bandmate Krist Novoselic considered Cobain “quiet” and “estranged” in the period before his death. Cobain was also under intense financial and professional pressure, having walked out on a $9.5 million contract to headline the Lollapalooza festival.

Against this, psychologists at the rehab centre Cobain visited a week before his demise, thought he seemed far from suicidal. Neither was the “suicide note” found near his body full of the usual darknesses of such missives, and contained the statement: “I have it good, very good and I’m grateful.” The last four lines of the note appear to have been written by another hand, while Cobain’s body contained so much heroin –
three times
the lethal 225 mgs dose – he would have been comatose and unable to hold a gun. His body also contained significant and incapacitating amounts of diazepam (Valium). On studying the autopsy report, Canadian toxicologist and chemist Roger Lewis concluded in an article entitled “Dead Men Don’t Pull Triggers”: “Thus, in contrast with the ‘official’ verdict of suicide by shotgun, the scientific facts point to a series of events which probably included a massive, lethal ‘hot shot’ dose of heroin and a benzodiazepine administered to Cobain, which would have either immediately rendered him incapacitated in a comatose state or killed him instantly.”

There’s more. No legible fingerprints were on the pen used to write the note or on the Remington shotgun used, suggesting that both had been wiped clean. Cobain’s hands, according to Seattle police reports, were free of gunpowder residue. And who fills a Remington 20 gauge shotgun with three cartridges for a suicide shot to the head, when only one is needed? And who uses their Seafirst credit card twice after their death, as timed by the medical examiner. If Cobain was murdered, whodunnit? An LA private dick by the name of Tom Grant was hired by Cobain’s wife, Courtney Love, to track Cobain’s credit card. Love’s strange behaviour, however, soon convinced Grant that
she
orchestrated Cobain’s homicide. Her motive was financial. Cobain was about to divorce Love; since ex-Mrs Cobain would get nothing in Cobain’s will, she had her husband “suicided”. Supporting evidence for Grant’s accusation came from British documentary maker Nick Broomfield, who interviewed Eldon Hoke (a.k.a. “El Duce”) a member of LA punk band the Mentors, who alleged that Love had offered him $50,000 to kill Kurt Cobain. El Duce expanded on his claim to a newspaper, saying that Love had pulled up outside the Rock Shop at 1644 Wilcox Avenue, Hollywood, and the following conversation ensued:

Love:
“El, I need a favour of you. My old man’s been a real asshole lately, I need you to blow his fucking head off.”

El Duce:
“Are you serious?”

Love:
“Yeah, I’ll give you $50,000 to blow his fucking head off.”

El Duce:
“I’m serious if you are.”

Love:
“Where can I reach you?”

El Duce:
“You can reach me here.”

The manager of the shop, Karush Sepedjian, overheard the conversation, and agreed with El Duce’s version of it. When asked, “Did Love offer you money to kill Cobain?” with a lie detector strapped to his arm El Duce passed with a 99.7 per cent certainty. El Duce rejected Love’s offer. Further attempts to interview El Duce proved impossible; he was run over by a train in 1997, so adding fuel to the conspiracy fire. Nonetheless PI Grant fingered, to his own satisfaction, the man who did take up Courtney Love’s murderous proposal. Grant named the killer as Michael Dewitt. The claim is still up on Grant’s website www. cobaincase.com: “After several months of intensive investigation, including dozens of taped interviews with Cobain’s closest friends and family members, I reached the conclusion that Courtney Love and Michael Dewitt (the male nanny who lived at the Cobain residence) were involved in a conspiracy that resulted in the murder of Kurt Cobain.”

Grant’s investigation also led him to believe that the Lake Washington shooting was Love–Dewitt’s second homicide attempt, and that Cobain’s drug and alcohol OD in Rome was a masked murder attempt by the same duo. (According to Grant, Cobain was not a user of Rohypnol, the “date rape” drug.) Gumshoe Grant believes that the proof of Love and Dewitt’s guilt is their unwillingness to sue him for defamation: “As I predicted when I first began speaking out [about Cobain’s homicide], no legal action has been taken against myself or anyone in the media who have covered this story.”

Unhappily for Courtney Love, her first husband, James Moreland, weighed into the controversy, telling a British newspaper: “It wasn’t long before I became a battered husband … She would go mad for no reason, and hit me time and time again … Once she threatened to pay someone £150 to beat me up because I didn’t agree with her about something.”

Pointed questions also began to be asked of the coroner in the case, Dr Hartshorne, because of a conflict of interest. He knew Cobain and Love, and was known to party with the latter.

Despite the welter of evidence and allegations, the Seattle PD has so far refused to re-open the case on Cobain’s death. Perhaps they should.

Further Reading

Nick Broomfield,
Kurt and Courtney
, 1998 (film)

Ian Halperin and Max Wallace,
Who Killed Kurt Cobain? The Mysterious Death of an Icon
, 1999

www.cobaincase.com

www.justiceforkurt.com

CODEX ALIMENTARIUS

Latin for “Food Code” the Codex Alimentarius is a quango formed by the World Health Authority and the US Food and Agriculture Organization in 1963, with the aim of “protecting health of the consumers and ensuring fair trade practices in the food trade, and promoting coordination of all food standards work undertaken by international governmental and nongovernmental organizations”. Put another way, the work of the CA is to ensure that your turkey twizzler is not full of additives, has been prepared properly and is accurately labelled.

Sounds like a good idea? Not according to libertarians and alternative practitioners, who allege that Codex Alimentarius, far from being independent and “voluntary” as described, is in the hands of Big Pharma, food multinationals, agribusiness, government officials and seeks to do down local producers, organic farmers and, especially, manufacturers and sellers of vitamins – and then some. A press release from Alliance for Natural Health states:

The WTO (World Trade Organization) is a global commercial police that ensures countries are required to purchase from transnational corporations in favour of their own locally produced goods, in the name of “lowering trade barriers”.

This WHO/WTO joint effort called CODEX is in the process of wiping out local supplement companies and natural health care practices, to bring in more drug based medicines, in what is euphemistically known as “creating a level playing field”, while primarily giving the public a misleading impression that someone in the World Health Organisation (WHO) is looking after its health and safety.

The frontline for anti-Codex campaigners is the humble vitamin supplement, since the Codex supposedly seeks the banning of dietary supplements for prophylactic or therapeutic use, and the classification of common foods such as peppermint and garlic as drugs, and the requirement of prescriptions for anything but the lowest potencies of vitamins. All new dietary supplements would be banned until Codex-tested. And that is where big business enters the picture: since testing is expensive, few small-scale manufacturers (runs the argument) could afford to have their products tested, so leaving the field open to the corporate colossi in the food and drink game.

Inevitably, any global regulatory body will attract charges that it is the pawn of the
New World Order
and sure enough Jon King on www.consciousape.com states “Big Brother and the New World Order (not to mention the Carlyle Group) [is] taking away your health as of April 2011.” “Taking away your health” in the Codex conspiracy can equate to depopulation of the Third World, since the NWO wishes to rid the globe of useless “hungry mouths”. At the very least, think NWO-observers, the Codex is not truly voluntary and supersedes domestic laws, meaning weakening of sovereignty.

It’s a funny old world, the conspiracy world. Because, guess what? There is a conspiracy theory that the “Codex conspiracy” is a conspiracy. Some say that the Codex scale is all fanned up by organic foodies, homeopaths and herbalists for financial reasons. Since their products are starting to become regulated and studied by science, they are making up conspiracy theories about the nice people at Codex who simply want to make sure any and every food is safe for your body.

The verdict: Big Nanny is alive and well and living in Codex HQ in Rome. Whether the CA is the puppet of interest groups or no, it is a bureaucracy in need of democracy.