Alex Constantine - October 26, 2012
From: George Rupp | President & CEO, International Rescue Committee ...
"George Rupp has been president of the International Rescue Committee since July 2002.
As the IRC’s chief executive officer, Dr. Rupp oversees the agency’s relief and rehabilitation operations in 25 countries and its refugee resettlement and assistance programs throughout the United States. In addition, he leads the IRC’s advocacy efforts in Washington, Geneva, Brussels and other capitals on behalf of the world’s most vulnerable people. His responsibilities regularly take him to IRC program sites in Africa, Asia, and Europe."
The IRC is a "link in the CIA's covert network"
"The International Rescue Committee (IRC), the largest nonsectarian refugee relief agency in the world. Founded in the 1930s by socialist militants, the IRC attracted the support of renowned progressives such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Thomas, and Reinhold Niebuhr. But by the 1950s it had been absorbed into the American foreign policy establishment. Throughout the Cold War, the IRC was deeply involved in the volatile confrontations between the two superpowers and participated in an array of sensitive clandestine operations. The IRC thus evolved from a small organization of committed activists to a global operation functioning as one link in the CIA's covert network."
http://www.questia.com/library/84052038/covert-network-progressives-the-international-rescue
The 1988 issue of Louis Rukeyser's Business Almanac reports that the "largest fines for money laundering came in 1986" after the federal audit of Texas Commerce Bank of Houston, hit with "$1.9 million in civil fines for not reporting cash transactions."
Dr. George Rupp, a director of the bank, then president of Rice University, also sat on the board of the Panhandle Eastern Corporation in Houston, a holding company for the state's natural gas industry. Robert Mosbacher, George HW Bush's Commerce Secretary, served with Rupp on the board of Texas Commerce Bank -- an institution controlled throughout the1900s by the family of James Baker III, Bush's secretary of state and a partner in Baker & Botts, a law firm that largely serves Morgan-Rockefeller interests.
Linda Minor, a Houston-area attorney and student of the city's commercial history, informs us that the Bakers "formed one of the component banks that later merged into Texas Commerce -- for a client of his, Hugh Hamilton, who appeared to be a front from Scottish distilling interests. The Baker law firm always acted on behalf of clients and used other people's money to gain power for themselves. Their major clients were the Union Pacific, Southern Pacific and even the Missouri Pacific Railroads. They also were very into representation of power companies."
"Baker & Botts was actually the attorneys for the 'Octopus' from its first days."
The 1994 Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia offers this capsule bio of Dr. George Erik Rupp:
"1942, American educator and theologian, b. Summit, N.J. He studied in Germany before graduating from Princeton Univ. He earned a B.D. degree from Yale Univ. and a doctorate from Harvard. A Presbyterian minister, he has spent most of his career in the field of higher education. After serving as vice chancellor of the Univ. of Redlands, Redlands, Calif., he taught at the Harvard Divinity School, was Dean of Academic Affairs at the Univ. of Wisconsin at Green Bay, and became president of Rice Univ. in 1985 [Rice was founded by the grandfather of James Baker III, Captain James A. Baker -- originally intended as a world center for the study of the fascist-style eugenics, all the rage at the turn of the century]. He was named president of Columbia Univ. in 1993. He is the author of Commitment and Community (1989)."
The "Enemy Alien" Chair at Rice University
Everybody knows the war is over,
Everybody knows the good guys lost...
-- Leonard Cohen
Dr. Rupp could be counted on to "keep the secrets" at Rice U. There were others.
Dr. Franz Broten
There was, for instance, Franz Brotzen, a mysterious presence at Rice -- and an "enemy alien," per the draft board -- a German spy who got along famously with the "prickly" career college president, as reported in the Rice University Weekly (April 27, 1995), a story that chronicles the rise of a well-respected spy from Nazi Germany:
Spy Questions To Classroom Lessons Mark Brotzen's Life
By Meg Langner, Rice News Correspondent
In early 1945, Franz Brotzen, now a Rice University professor emeritus, was a U.S. military officer charged with helping to organize the once-powerful Nazi spy network in the Soviet Union into a resource for the United States.
The German high command knew the war would soon end. They expected no mercy from the Soviets but hoped to be punished less severely when they surrendered to the Americans, said Brotzen, the Stanley Moore Professor Emeritus of Materials Science. The United States knew very little about the Soviet Union at that time, he said, and when the Allies won the war, the Nazis decided to turn over to the United States their intelligence on the Soviets.
During the war, Germany controlled large spy networks within the U.S.S.R., but as the Nazis retreated before the Soviet forces, the system fell into disarray, Brotzen said.
Brotzen, along with three other American intelligence officers, was sent into Germany following the surrender of the Nazis, where he lived for six months interviewing former-Nazi officers who had served on the Eastern front. He fulfilled the American government's request for information on the Soviet Union by figuring out how facts could best be obtained.
"That was quite an exciting time, sort of a little bit out of spy novels," he said.
Brontzen left Germany for Brazil and eventually settled in at Rice University to conduct research in materials science.
Brotzen, born in Berlin, graduated from the gymnasium during the depression and landed a job with I.G. Farben, the chemical monopoly that manufactured poison gas for the "Solution," made extensive use of slave labor, etc. Farben maintained symbiotic bonds with a host of German and American corporations and the Nazi genocidists throughout the war. German spies under Farben corporate cover were dispatched throughout South America before the war, and the young drug salesman did fit the profile. Brotzen joined Farben's pharmaceutical division at the age of 18, and was quickly transferred to Brazil. In Teofilo Otoni, he worked temporarily in the sales department and contracted his share of diseases, he says, while wandering through the jungle, but survived to see WW II erupt.
He left Farben, by his own account, and took a job in Rio de Janeiro importing steel mill construction equipment. Franz began to read about metallurgy and his interest in materials science was kindled.
Brotzen headed for the U.S. to pursue a degree and arrived on December 1, 1941 -- a week before Pearl Harbor. His draft status: "enemy alien," but Brotzen quickly landed a job in Cleveland, Ohio anyways. He took evening classes at the Case School of Applied Science. A year after his entry into the States, he was drafted by the Army and packed off to a military intelligence training school in Maryland. The German expatriate spy rose to officer rank and taught at the military intelligence center until the final phase of the war, when he was sent back to Germany to liaison with the Nazi intelligence high command along the Eastern front.
A year later, he returned to the U.S., earned his doctorate at Case. and went on to become a full professor at Rice University in 1954:
His research has spanned almost every field within materials science, from work on materials' mechanical, electronic and magnetic behavior to studies of their physical chemistry, and Brotzen has long been internationally recognized as an outstanding researcher.
He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 and received the U.S. Senior Scientist Award from Germany's Humboldt Foundation in 1973. He is a fellow of ASM International and is the 1995 recipient of the Case Institute of Technology Distinguished Engineering Alumnus Award.
Brotzen has also been involved in student life at Rice. That he enjoys and excels in teaching is proven by the number of awards he has won: four George R. Brown Awards for Superior Teaching, the Gold Medal from the Alumni Association, the Minnie Stevens Piper Award and the Student Association's Mentor Award.
He is also a strong supporter of the college system. He and his wife, Frances, have been masters of both Jones and Brown, and they remain active Brown associates, welcoming and counseling advisee groups each year.
The couple also gives an annual scholarship in Brown and Jones and a substantial summer travel award open to all undergraduates from all colleges.
Brotzen has been active in university administration as well. In the early 1960s he was responsible for Rice's federal funding, which he helped increase from $1 million to $13.5 million.
And as the dean of engineering from 1962 until 1966, he expanded Rice's research and graduate programs in engineering.
He has also served on "practically every committee that ever existed on campus," according to Ronald Sass, Rice professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. Brotzen has spent a total of approximately 20 years on each of the Faculty Council and the University Council and its predecessors.
"He's someone who has ... a deep and abiding love for this institution," said Ronald Stebbings, professor of space physics and astronomy. "When I was a senior member of the administration, I often found that I'd learn important details about the running of the place from my weekly lunches with Franz.
"I can't think of anybody, frankly, who really has a clearer picture, on a day-to-day basis, of the wide range of things that are going on this campus."
Although he has made an enormous contribution to Rice over the years, Brotzen has kept up interests outside engineering and away from Rice. He loves to travel and has seen much of the world. He is an art buff
He follows sports and stays active in the Democratic Party.
He has taught as a visiting professor at schools including the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Germany, and the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, Switzerland....
Brotzen has been an integral part of the Rice community.
He retired in 1986, but President George Rupp immediately asked him to become the Stanley C. Moore Professor Emeritus of Materials Science and Brotzen has continued his research and taught every semester since, except one. There's no telling when he will actually retire.
"I'm having a ball, I'm having a very good time, so why change?" Brotzen said.
Some faculty members at Rice University suffer the occasional Aryan Obermensch. After all, this is the same institution of higher learning that once had a particularly loud and surly KKK chapter on campus, and withstood 17 years of federal pressure to admit Blacks before the courts forced the school to relinquish its discriminatory policies (Rice Thresher, March 29, 1996).
At the David Irving web site, the disgraced Holocaust revisionist credits a Rice scholar with furthering his writing career:
"April 22, 1996 Professor Francis Loewenheim, at Rice University in Houston, tells the author he has read and discussed [Irving's] Goebbels book with Professor Gordon Craig, the noted historian at Stanford; after seeing what Loewenheim has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Craig agrees the book should be published. John Walsh at The Independent phones Mr. Irving, and mentions that the review by Professor Donald Watt (London School of Economics), which they're publishing next week, is highly favorable...."
David Irving is a role model to the ultra-right fringe of Rice University's student body.
On December 12, 1997, the Austin American-Statesman reported:
"A Holocaust museum has rejected the donation of an advertising fee from Rice University's student newspaper after it printed an ad from a group that doubts the Holocaust occurred. 'This money is tainted and its purpose is to deny the murder of millions of human beings, Jews and non-Jews alike, and aims to deny Holocaust survivors the opportunity to bear witness for those who cannot speak for themselves,' said Abraham J. Peck, executive director of Holocaust Museum Houston."
Dr. Rupp's prominent pal James Baker III joined the Rice University Board of Governors in 1993. The Rice/Baker relationship is symbiotic. Grandfather Baker was instrumental in the founding of the university and served as its first chairman from 1891 through 1941. James Baker III inherited the ultraconservative obsessions of his grandfather, served in three right-wing administrations (Secretary of Commerce under President Ford, Reagan's chief-of-staff and treasury secretary in the Bush, Sr. regime. In August 1988, Baker was chairman of then VP GHW Bush's presidential campaign). When Clinton defeated Bush four years later, Baker moved on to Rice to direct the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, a think tank that serves the corporate sector.
In July1993, Dr. Rupp, the former Harvard Divinity School lecturer and world-class money launderer, was christened head of Columbia University. Four years later, the Chronicle of Higher Education (December 5, 1997) reported that the students and faculty at Columbia had "mixed feelings" about their president. "Though he was popular for his fund-raising success and several well-handled situations, his 'prickly' personality and plans for the undergraduate college have raised concerns."
Concerns that extended beyond Harlem. A paid advertisement concerning Rupp's cooperation with the German government appeared in the Washington Post in September1994, placed by the Church of Scientology. The CoS has struggled with the German government for years.
Scientology's cavil in the Post accused Columbia and the German government of collaborating to whitewash history:
"Nazis stormed through the streets of German cities, terrorizing and killing Jews and members of religious minorities. Although news of these events reached the outside world, nothing was done. Today, we would be wise not to ignore the early warning signs from a country which has twice this century brought the world to war, and whose government is today attempting to rewrite history with an exhibition at Columbia University puffing up so-called German resistance to the Nazis - a spectacle that, according to the Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, is intended solely to polish Germany's international prestige."
Dr. Rupp also rolls out the silk carpet for the intelligence establishment, though he is only the latest administrator to do so. In 1968, the North American Congress in Latin America (NACLA) published a report that dripped with opprobrium:
"Most of the evidence points to indirect relationships, but because the CIA is closed and secret and because the Columbia Administration refuses to discuss its CIA relations, it is quite possible that CIA-CU ties are far more direct and pervasive than the public data now indicates. In fact, our own information indicates that these ties are so direct as to involve a highly influential group of men in dual positions of leadership -- inside Columbia and in the CIA itself."
The Agency funded its fronts on campus via a maze of private trusts. One of the most generous was the Farfield Foundation, a major contributor to a number of CIA dummy fronts, represented at Columbia by Gardner Cowles, a Teachers' College trustee, and William A.M. Burden. Both sat on the board of the Farfield Foundation. Burden, a Farfield founder, was also a director of Lockheed Aircraft.
The foundation made a number of contributions in 1962 and 1964 to Columbia for "travel and study" fellowships. Another funding source was Sigurd Larmon, president of the advertising firm Young and Rubicam. Larmon was one of the academics selected in 1953 by President Eisenhower, according to the NACLA report, "to perfect the country's psychological warfare program." Eisenhower's psyop committee suggested "organization and techniques of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Psychological Strategy Board, the Voice of America, the Information Services of the State and other departments, and the psychological operations of the Army in Korea." In the late '60s, investigation of the CIA on campus was directed by Dr. Serge Lang of the Math Department -- he was denied access to the School's books. NACLA reported:
"When Lang asked if Columbia held any contract the existence of which was classified, Warren Goodell, Associate Director of Projects and Grants, said he was not at liberty to comment. Ralph S. Halford, then Dean of Graduate Faculties, stated the administration's official policy on CIA funding: 'University policy would not preclude the acceptance ... of project support from the CIA.' He went on to say that if a project was in line with regular academic duty, endorsed by the chairman or dean of the division in which it would be conducted, and approved by the Office of Projects and Grants as being appropriate to a University, 'the University would not hesitate to accept ... an offer by the CIA to furnish funds in support of the project.' ... As important as direct CIA involvement in SIA research projects, is Columbia's association with two organizations, the Asia Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations. The Asia Foundation has received much if not all of its financial support from the CIA. It has a budget of about $7 million a year to provide 'private American assistance to those Asian groups and individuals working for continued social and economic improvement.' ..."
In 1962, when Robert Blum, president of the Foundation, resigned, Kirk was appointed chairman of the Nominating Committee of the Trustees, whose purpose was to select a new president. In his search for suitable candidates for this position, Kirk sought the advice and suggestions of Dean Rusk and Averell Harriman, a move which indicates the importance of the Foundation. He also encouraged recommendations from George S. Moore, president of the First National City Bank of New York, and A.L. Nickerson, chairman of Socony Mobil Oil Company, Inc., concerning members of the bank and Socony Mobil, which had experience in Asian affairs. One man who was proposed as a possible choice was Robert Amory, but Kirk himself is reported to have feared that he might bring embarrassment to the Asia Foundation. From 1952-1962, Amory was Deputy Director of the CIA.
George Tenet, "acting" director of the CIA for four years, received his master's degree from Columbia's School of International Affairs (SIA), a limb of the CIA's Ivy League learning tree, in 1978. The Agency connection is long-standing. NACLA found an indirect tie between the CIA and SRI,
"demonstrated by the presence of Eugene C. Bewkes and Alger B. Chapman, advisory council members of SIA, and David S. Smith, Associate Dean of SIA, director of the International Fellows Program and a member of the Administrative Board of the Research Institute on Communist Affairs. All three men are directors of the Edward John Noble Foundation, which besides passing money for the CIA, has also given over $2 million [in federal proceeds] to SIA."
Smith's connection to Langley extended to a past position as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, and his involvement in the U-2 spy plane over flights.
Under Rupp's reign, spooks still haunt the campus. He keeps the secrets. He daren't mention, for instance, that the university trains CIA and Mossad agents, an arrangement subsidized by the black budget. Many students studying foreign languages at Columbia's Department of Middle East Languages and Culture are either training for the Israeli Mossad or the Central Intelligence Agency. Columbia students with poor grades who still want a CIA job receive scholarships to Cairo's American University, or Robert College in Turkey. Some Muslims in the foreign language schools at Columbia train for employment in D.C. One Jordanian-American student confessed that he is took Arabic in preparation for a State Department exam. Language study toward intelligence work is disguised as `cultural' programs, legitimizing them and assuring continued federal funding. (Muslimedia International, http://www.malaysia.net/mulimedia/, July 17, 1996)
The Best of "Wrong Intentions"
Detractors kvetch but George Rupp's much-touted fundraising abilities endeared him to the board of governors. Dr. Rupp is credited with raising an impressive $2.74 billion for the university over the past decade -- better than twice the administration's original goal.
But the books ain't Kosher. An Op-Ed column in a Columbia student newspaper examined "George Rupp's Dirty Little Secret":
"Before George Rupp was president of Columbia University (and after he graduated from Princeton, Yale Divinity School, and Harvard Graduate School with high honors from each, and was dean of the Harvard Divinity School), he was president of Rice University in Texas. During his time there, he was able to more than double their endowment from $500 million to $1.25 billion."
Nevertheless, Rice, like Columbia, had dropped in academic ranking. "It seems, perhaps, that that fair university in Houston shares some interesting secrets with us. The reason for this is simple.... Rice was able to make its money not only through alumni donations, but also by raising tuition and slowly decreasing the actual number of tenured faculty. Sound familiar? In fact, Rice used to be free, before Rupp served as president. As students here at Columbia, we've been witness to the continual growth of the undergraduate student body, while the number of tenured faculty in each department has either stayed the same or decreased. But we're all supposed to grin and bear it in overcrowded classrooms, meager course offerings each semester.... We cannot stand idly by as President Rupp runs this University with the wrong intentions." Rupp overlooks the fact that the school is
"... supposed to be a not-for-profit educational institution. It would seem that from living in New York, President Rupp has been lured by the flashy draw of life on Wall Street and thinks of himself as more of a CEO than anything else. Despite his distinguished academic career, it would appear that he values, above all else, the almighty dollar" (Columbia Daily Spectator, December 4, 2000).
Rupp's superhuman talent for scaring up funds is evident in his extraction of federal tax subsidies from Congress to support scientific research that benefits the same multinationals he has served all along -- academic-corporate welfare. Some might call it a scam. He is at the forefront of college presidents and scientists lobbying to sustain Cold War expenditures in state-supported research laboratories. "The federal government," he told a coterie of congressmen at a 1998 breakfast meeting, "has maintained a strong commitment to scientific discovery and innovation that has been crucial to maintaining and increasing America's economic strength, global competitiveness, national security and overall standard of living. It is critically important that we continue and expand upon the partnership forged between Congress and the university community."
Dr. Rupp based his appeal on a report by the Committee for Economic Development that determined returns on tax-subsidized "investments" in university-based science research had returned a 20-30 percent profit -- almost twice that of the average stock purchase (Columbia University Record, vol. 2, no. 5, October 2, 1998). The publicly-supported research culminates in patents that reap appreciable revenue for universities and corporations.
What else is a school for?
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