George Magazine was created in 1995 by John F. Kennedy Jr. To say that it was controversial would be an understatement. It was the cross of two genres that never met — culture and politics. To say it wasn't well received at the time would be an understatement. In fact, Spy Magazine had this to say along with comments of John F. Kennedy, Jr. being a chest hair prostitute:
Did John F. Kennedy Jr. know all along that his magazine about the sexiness of Politics could never survive in the nineties? If so, then for what thrillingly sinister reasons did the World's Sexiest Man try to edit the thing?
If as some historians suggest, Americans renew their passion for politics every 30 years," John Kennedy Jr. began his Editor's Letter in the first issue of George two years ago, "perhaps this reawakening is due less to changes of heart than to changes in how the elected communicate to the electorate." If you have no idea what he's talking about, he was trying to compare his new, giddy magazine about politics and celebrities to the television event that elected his father President over a creepier, sweatier candidate thirty years earlier. If you have no idea why anybody would want to launch a magazine about politics and glamour in the first place, though, given that politics these days is anything but glamorous, then you're not alone. But you know what? It's something you might want to start thinking about.
Google Books: Spy Magazine: Poster Boy for Poster-Boy Behavior. March 1998. pp. 30–38.
It was criticized as being no substance and all glamour.
"What finally happened," according to one staffer, "was that they ceased trying to define what George was and just focused on getting the f***ing magazine out," scrambling for celebrities "with tits" as often as possible to put on the cover and then trying to figure out what that person had to do with politics. After a while, the truth became inescapable: George was running out of subject matter.
Google Books: Spy Magazine: Poster Boy for Poster-Boy Behavior. March 1998. pp. 30–38.
Spy Magazine might have been wrong in their criticism of John F. Kennedy Jr. and his vision. Or perhaps they didn't understand the evolution of the political landscape at the time. Where they offer criticism, I would say George Magazine was perhaps revolutionary. It was ahead of its time and knew exactly the direction politics was headed.
Unfortunately that vision died with John F. Kennedy Jr. when his plane went down in 1999. After bleeding millions, the magazine ceased publication in 2001 just two years after his death.
Putting a long-awaited end to a rather bizarre chapter of publishing history, Hachette Filipacchi Magazines will close George magazine, the six-year-old politics and celebrity title founded by the late John F. Kennedy Jr.
Hachette CEO Jack Kliger notified the magazine’s staff in a meeting held late yesterday afternoon.
"While I have been enthusiastic about George and remain so, the reality of today’s magazine business is that we cannot make George work economically," said Kliger in a statement. "Advertiser support has not been forthcoming. The recent softening of the market has only compounded George’s situation."
The February issue has been cancelled in favor of a special commemorative March issue containing interviews Kennedy conducted for George. The commemorative issue, which will be George’s last, is thought to be an attempt to replicate the success of the special memorial issue that was published following Kennedy’s death.
George’s demise has been anticipated for so long, now that it’s finally here it comes as something of a shock. Neither Kennedy nor his successor ever solved the problem at the heart of George: They never figured out how to explain the magazine to skeptical media buyers, who shied away from advertising in a magazine that appeared to be neither fish nor fowl.
Critics, too, questioned George’s frequently awkward juxtaposition of Washington and Hollywood. Kennedy’s premise that the worlds of politics and entertainment were merging was intriguing, but all too often it boiled down to empty-headed rock stars and movie actors trying to articulate their positions on gun control or school vouchers.
Under Kennedy, the magazine emphasized the glamour side of the equation, resulting in political coverage that was decidedly lacking in heft. The editor’s death in July 1999 left the fate of George in the hands of newly-installed Hachette CEO Jack Kliger.
It would have been easy enough to fold it, given Kennedy’s deep involvement and the magazine’s continuing losses totaling millions of dollars annually. But Kliger chose not to after Kennedy’s death prompted a surge of consumer interest in the magazine, capped by newsstand sales of 400,000 for the JFK Jr. tribute issue. Encouraged, Kliger opted to buy out the Kennedy family’s stake in George, giving Hachette full ownership of the magazine, and pledged to invest $10 million in the title.
Internet Archive: Media Life Magazine: Hachette Delivers Death Ax to George
Clarification
To be clear, we are not talking about the current iteration of George Magazine under Gene Ho. We are also not talking about George Magazine that is associated with the hacker group Anonymous. (Mad respect to their Bloodlines of the Elites series.) We are talking about George Magazine that existed between 1995 and 2001.
So what does George Magazine and John F. Kennedy Jr. have to do with Saddam Hussein?
Saddam Hussein's Background
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was the fifth president of Iraq between 1979 to 2003. He joined the Ba'ath Party in 1957 and helped participate in the CIA sanctioned plot to assassinate the Iraqi prime minister ʿAbd al-Karīm Qāsim in 1959. Saddam fled to Syria and then Egypt only to return to Iraq and spend some time in an Iraqi prison for his role in the assassination attempt. He eventually escaped from prison and took over the Ba'ath Party.
You have all heard the old saying. If at first you don't succeed, try... try again. Well, Saddam Hussein took this to heart. A second coup was attempted. This time it was successful in 1963. Saddam rose in power and control to eventually take over the presidency in 1979.
It was the CIA's favourite coup. "We really had the T's crossed on what was happening," says James Critchfield, the head of the agency in the Middle East which organised it. "We regarded it as a great victory."
Iraqis have less happy memories of the day in 1963 when the Iraqi army rose in revolt. It was a coup which shaped the history of Iraq and much of the Middle East for the rest of the century. It started Saddam Hussein on his climb to power. Never again did his family and his political party wholly lose their grip on Iraq, despite wars and massacres in which more than one million Iraqis, Kurds and Iranians were killed.
Iraqis have always suspected that the coup was engineered by the CIA in much the same way that the agency had restored to power the Shah of Iran in 1953. The difference in Iraq was that the overthrow of the existing government was far bloodier. After General Abdel Karim Kassem, the country's populist leader for five years, surrendered he was summarily tried in a studio in Baghdad radio station, tied to a chair and shot dead.
Now fresh evidence has emerged that popular Iraqi suspicions were correct. In a new book* Said Aburish, a writer on Arab political affairs, has gathered details of how the coup against Gen Kassem was organised and fine-tuned by the CIA. "We came to power on a CIA train," said Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Minister of the Interior of the regime which replaced Gen Kassem.
The CIA also played a central role in preparing the death lists of those who were to be eliminated after the coup by squads from the Ba'ath party. Mr Aburish says that he believes 5,000 were killed of whom he has collected the names of 600, including many doctors, lawyers, teachers and professors who formed the educated elite of Iraq.
The death lists were drawn up in CIA stations across the Middle East with the help of Iraqi exiles. In Egypt the agency was helped by an Egyptian intelligence officer who got much of his information from Saddam Hussein living in exile in Cairo. But Mr Aburish says: "The American agent who produced the longest list was William McHale, who operated under the cover of a news correspondent for the Beirut bureau of Time [magazine]."
Independent: Revealed: how the West set Saddam on the bloody road to power
What followed next would be a series of wars starting with an attack on Iran's oil fields and devolving into the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 until 1988, which included actions by the US and Great Britain in the form of a 4 day air strike during Operation Desert Fox. Then in 1990, Saddam Hussein turned its gaze on to Kuwait. This turned into the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
During this time, the United Nations stepped in several times and sanctioned Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Rumors of weapons of mass destruction were floating around between world powers. This culminated in the Iraq War in 2003 until his capture at the end of the year during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
In 2005, Saddam Hussein went on trial. He was finally convicted in 2006. The verdict? Saddam Hussein was convicted of crimes against humanity and was sentenced to death by hanging.
US Involvement and WMDs
In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq’s war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein’s military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.
The intelligence included imagery and maps about Iranian troop movements, as well as the locations of Iranian logistics facilities and details about Iranian air defenses. The Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S. satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence. These attacks helped to tilt the war in Iraq’s favor and bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they ensured that the Reagan administration’s long-standing policy of securing an Iraqi victory would succeed. But they were also the last in a series of chemical strikes stretching back several years that the Reagan administration knew about and didn’t disclose.
Foreign Policy: Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran
The US has always been involved in the Middle East. Why? It is all about the oil. And if helping a dictator commit crimes against humanity helped line Washington pockets? So be it.
U.S. officials have long denied acquiescing to Iraqi chemical attacks, insisting that Hussein’s government never announced he was going to use the weapons. But retired Air Force Col. Rick Francona, who was a military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, paints a different picture.
“The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn’t have to. We already knew,” he told Foreign Policy.
By 1988, U.S. intelligence was flowing freely to Hussein’s military. That March, Iraq launched a nerve gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in northern Iraq.
Foreign Policy: Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran
There is definitely more to this part of the story. But that isn't the focus here. Let's get back to Saddam Hussein, John F. Kennedy Jr., and George Magazine. For now, just be aware that Saddam Hussein has always been a puppet. He was a puppet of the CIA. He was also a puppet of the Carlyle Group through Saudi oil interests.
But being a puppet wasn't without its perks. Saddam Hussein was rich. How rich? Massively rich. On the low end, it was estimated he was worth $2 billion. However, some estimated that he was worth as much as $40 billion. In 1999, Saddam Hussein was ranked 7th on Forbes richest heads of state in the world at an estimated net worth of $6 billion.
He wasn't just rich though. He was smart. Saddam Hussein knew to hide his wealth in order to prevent it from being stolen. But this maneuver didn't stop his death in 2006. Where did he hide it though?
Hatchette
On April 15, 2004 a press release regarding Saddam Hussein was published by the US Treasury Department titled Treasury Designates Front Companies, Corrupt Officials Controlled by Saddam Hussein’s Regime. It stated:
In a joint effort with the United Kingdom, the U.S. Department of the Treasury today designated a worldwide group of front companies and individuals that were procuring weapons, skimming funds, operating for the Iraqi Intelligence Service, and doing business in support of the fallen Saddam Hussein regime.
“We are unmasking the financial façade of the former Iraqi regime. Hussein and his cronies used a global network of agents and businesses to pilfer from the Iraqi people and to underwrite their tyranny,” said Juan Zarate, the Treasury Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes.
Today’s action is against eight front companies of the former Iraqi regime and five associated individuals. The United States is submitting the names of these companies and individuals to the United Nations with the recommendation they be listed by the 1518 Committee under U.N. Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1483. Today’s action is taken pursuant to Executive Order 13315. Three of these front companies and one of the individuals were previously designated by the Treasury Department.
In it eight companies were listed. Remember how I said it was all about the money and the oil?
AL-WASEL AND BABEL GENERAL TRADING LLC
Information available to the U.S. indicates Al Wasel and Babel was controlled by, and acted for or on behalf of, senior officials of the former Iraqi regime, including Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Hikmat Mizban Ibrahim al-Azzawi. Al-Azzawi has been named by the United Nations as a senior official of the former Iraq regime on the list established pursuant to UNSCR 1483.
Much of this information was developed during an investigation by U.S. authorities on Al Wasel and Babel’s attempts to procure a sophisticated surface-to-air missile system for Iraq.
Other information developed by the U.S. Government indicates Al Wasel and Babel played a key role in the former Iraqi regime’s schemes to obtain illicit kickbacks on goods purchased through the U.N. Oil-for-Food (OFF) Program.
You can skim over the document to see the full statement put out by the US Treasury. But there is another company I want to highlight here — Montana Management Inc. Saddam Hussein had to hide all that money somewhere. This is one such place that it was hidden.
MONTANA MANAGEMENT, INC.
Khalaf Al-Dulaymi, also associated with Midco Financial, was a principal of Montana Management, which reportedly owned substantial shares of stock in one or more French firms on behalf of senior officials of the former Iraqi regime.
The name is a misnomer. The company actually doesn't have anything to do with Montana. It was based in the country of Panama. If you are wondering where the name Montana Management came from, it was rumored and widely reported that Saddam Hussein's favorite movie was Scarface. In this movie Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino, would launder money through a company called... wait for it... Montana Management Company.
That being said, Montana Management Inc. did indeed own substantial shares of stock in several French firms, some of those shares had controlling interest. One of those companies just happened to be Lagardère SCA (aka Lagardère Group) where Saddam Hussein owned roughly $90 million worth of shares. This would give him about a 2% controlling interest at the time.
One of Lagardère's main businesses is in publishing. This includes everything from books, e-books, magazines, board games, and so on. Their portfolio includes huge companies and names that you are more familiar with, such as Virgin Media Group and the magazine publisher Hachette Filipacchi Médias.
As the globe’s media focuses on Iraq, an issue lost in the shuffle is the possible fate of Saddam Hussein’s own media stake: a 2 percent holding in Lagardère SCA, parent of publisher Hachette Filipacchi Magazines.
Once the Hussein government is toppled, officials at the United Nations and U.S. Treasury Department hint, the shareholding most likely will be inherited by whatever postwar government is put in place. If so, Lagardère will be happy to help take those shares off Iraq’s hands.
Hachette’s main titles are Elle, Premier, Paris Match and Car & Driver.
These weren't the only titles that came under Hachette Filipacchi Médias. They were just some of the biggest and well-recognized titles owned. In fact, one magazine went by almost unnoticed because no one understood the importance of it at that time. That magazine was George Magazine.
The first issue of George magazine was released in September 1995. The magazine received positive reviews, and at some point, it had the largest circulation of any political magazine in the United States. However, after some months, George left the format of traditional political publications, whose target audience comprises only the people in or around the political world. George’s main template soon became similar to magazines such as Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. They adopted a consistent underlying theme that connects media and celebrity with the subject of politics, in a way that the general audience would see political news and discourse regarding politics more interesting to read. A Times reporter even wrote that the magazine aims to reveal the people behind the scenes and be like the MTV of politics.
The critics of George called it a political magazine for people who do not understand politics. They even attacked it for stripping down the discussion of political issues from its coverage of politics.
However, the magazine soon began losing money, and in order to boost sales, the magazine, along with Kennedy, had to make controversies. In 1997, the magazine released one of their most notorious issues where Kennedy posed in the nude and attacked his cousins Joe Kennedy II and Michael Kennedy, who at that time had marital scandals that recently made the news. Later that year, John F. Kennedy Jr. said that the magazine should not be taken seriously.
Some of George magazine’s most notable contributors were Norman Mailer, Ann Coulter, Kellyann Conway, Rush Limbaugh, George Clooney, Stephen Glass, Chris Matthews, Steve Millner, Naomi Wolf, Jackie Stallon, and W. Thomas Smith Jr.
In 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr. tragically died in a plane crash; Hachette Filipacchi Magazines purchased his portion of the magazine from his estate. They held on to it for over a year and assigned Frank Lalli as the magazine’s editor-in-chief. They continued to publish their peculiar brand of celebrity and politics. However, the magazine experienced falling advertising sales, and in 2001, Hachette Filipacchi Magazines decided to cease the publication of George in 2001, just two years after John F. Kennedy Jr.’s death.
Today, George magazine is described as ahead of its time when viewing politics as popular culture.
2001 was a very interesting year. Who remembers their history? It included 9/11, anthrax attacks, the Patriot Act and so on.
Prisoner of War
They were always trying to control the narrative and the news.
This is what I read that lead me down this particular path. I was looking into the business dealings of the dictators during the Forever Wars that have taken place. Many I am finding have strong business ties with politicians, presidents, and heads of state.
As usual, the ‘liars and whores of the press’ promote the Big Lie about the secret team that snatched Saddam Hussein. Some claim the unit was not fully informed, other than that they had a high-priority target. And there are contentions that the unit, part of the CIA, came within a few seconds of misguidedly hurling a grenade down into the ‘spider hole’ in which Saddam was kept as a prisoner. Left unsaid by the oil-soaked, spy-riddled monopoly press was that Saddam was being held prisoner in that hole, breathing air through a tube to the surface, rather than the media fairy tale that he was simply hiding.
Why?
The reasons for having held Saddam prisoner revolve around his huge worldwide properties. Through some of his relatives and secret trust accounts and agreements, and through secret bank accounts and other financial intermediaries, Saddam Hussein has been a major stock- and bond-holder, using nominees, proxies and other ways to conceal ownership of the following, among his worldwide assets:
— Daimler-Chrysler, makers of, among other things, Mercedes-Benz cars. If Saddam was not held prisoner in a hole near Tikrit, he could have walked into shareholders’ meetings.
— Hachette, the foreign firm, owning, among other things, magazines in the U.S. and elsewhere. In the U.S., Saddam’s firm owned George magazine, now defunct, the editor of which was John F. Kennedy, Jr. In 1999, as the son of assassinated President Kennedy, Junior was fighting with magazine owner Hachette over their plan to cease publication of George magazine on or about December, 1999. Junior claimed this would violate his contract and agreement with Hachette.
JFK, Jr. was secretly intending to use the magazine to publicize at least two otherwise censored stories. The first story would reveal who all was complicit in the murder of his father, including the Bush crime family, particularly Daddy Bush, the Texas oil tycoons tied to Daddy Bush and then vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as some owners of the Federal Reserve key unit, the Federal Reserve District Bank of New York. (As we saw in Chapter 42, just prior to being assassinated, President Kennedy wrote an Executive Order, under a little-known provision, authorizing him to issue hundreds of millions of genuine $2 bills, in opposition to the Federal Reserve’s private fiat currency masquerading as the U.S. dollar.)
The second story JFK, Jr. was planning to publish concerned the treasonous business dealings of Daddy Bush with Saddam Hussein. Junior was threatening to stop Hachette suspending publication of George magazine by revealing that Daddy Bush’s private business partner, Saddam, was a major owner of Hachette. He also threatened to expose the long-time trickery and game-playing by Saddam by, for, and with the CIA and Daddy Bush and his various business cronies, including the Carlyle Group.
The monopoly press belatedly ran a story of Saddam’s 40-year role with the CIA. After the U.S.’ pre-emptive strike (not by a Declaration of War) and invasion of Iraq, United Press International (UPI) ran a story of Saddam’s secret role with the CIA. The UPI story (4/10/03) opened with a detailed article: “U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.”
UPI went on to point out that in 1959, Saddam, at a very young age, was made by the CIA as part of an assassination team to murder the Iraqi monarch running the country. Saddam, apparently incompetent to do so, failed.
So, Saddam Hussein was being kept as a prisoner in a ‘spider hole,’ from which he could not escape. He was being kept prisoner by surrogates, including his relatives as CIA contract employees, for the Carlyle Group.
Carlyle is run by a group of top level stooges for the American/British aristocracy, including a former British prime minister, a former top official of the CIA, Daddy Bush, and others jointly with Saudi royal family. Reportedly, Carlyle is a sinister, worldwide operation that works by taking over war production firms among others, and using corrupt means, squeezes war contracts out of the Pentagon. Among other things, Carlyle reportedly owns, in great part, a sinister manufacturer of anthrax vaccine. Are they the cause, in part, of strange illnesses and deaths among U.S. military?
Internet Archive: Sherman, H. Skolnick, Overthrow Of The American Republic — The Writings Of Sherman Skolnick, Dandelion Enterprises ( 2007) (Pages 242 -244)
So while I apologize for the transgression of "this topic leads into that," I did not know about this connection and found it fascinating myself. Surely if I found it fascinating, then others would as well. So I wrote about it. Or at least a piece of it. There is so much more to this story. But if I could feed pieces of it, maybe you will come to understand the bigger picture.
When I say it is all connected, it truly is all connected.
Speaking of, maybe someone should look in Halliburton, the purchase of VX nerve gas from US and British sources, and what companies have been charged by the Department of Justice for doing business with terrorists. Just a suggestion...
If you are looking for another article to read, might I suggest this one from PoliticFact titled Halliburton Defrauded American Taxpayers of "Hundreds of Millions of Dollars in Iraq."
Final Thoughts
War is not patient. It is not kind. War creates envy. It boasts and is proud. It dishonors those in its path. It is self-serving. Easily angered. And records all wrongs. War delights in evil and rejects the truth. It protects no one, destroys trust, diminishes hope, and preserves nothing.
— Written by Elizabeth P. Dove, aka Madam Punisher
Based off the Bible verse "Love is patient" from 1 Corinthians 13.
It’s me💙🙏⚔️
What a fascinating exposure of part of the intricate web that is controlled by the cabal at the top through a myriad of minions, be they individuals, think tanks, intelligence agencies, corporations, or other government entities….all funded through the world wide banking scions. On the superficial face of things your topics don’t appear to be connected in any fashion, however, you have delved deep enough to expose some of the connections. And, you are right: it IS ALL connected. Thank you for your insightful work on this topic! It has been a delightful read. God bless you.🙏🙏