Top U.S. official chaired N. America-confab panel

At the recent high-level confab of the North American Forum in Banff, an assistant U.S. secretary of state chaired a panel that featured a presentation by Prof. Robert Pastor, author of a book promoting the development of a North American union as a regional government and the adoption of the amero as a common monetary currency to replace the dollar and the peso.

State Department spokesman Eric Watnik confirmed to WND that Thomas A. Shannon attended the Sept. 12-14 meeting of the North American Forum in his official capacity as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

As WND previously reported, the forum was closed to the press. WND has published the attendee list and the agenda of the conference which was leaked to WND by Canadian writer and publisher Mel Hurtig.

In numerous publications, professional presentations and testimony to Congress, Pastor has called for NAFTA to be evolved into a European Union-like regional government, ultimately complete with a legislative, judicial and executive institutional structure that would have supremacy over the United States.

Pastor is director of the Center for North American Studies at American University in Washington, D.C.

The State Department told WND Shannon was not endorsing Pastor's comments, yet the agency has no intention of making public Shannon's comments on the panel, nor Pastor's speech.

The North American Forum is a shell organization with no officer or business address, consisting of the three individuals who co-chaired the Banff meeting: George Schultz, former secretary of state under President Reagan; Canadian Peter Lougheed, the former Alberta premier and former leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta; and Mexico's Pedro Aspe, the former secretary of the Treasury of Mexico.

In the printed agenda for the Banff meeting, the panel chaired by Shannon is listed as follows:

SESSION II: A VISION FOR NORTH AMERICA: ISSUES & OPTIONS
Location: Alhambra Room
9:30 am PANEL:
Moderator: Dr. Thomas A. Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs

Panelists:

Robert Pastor, Director, Center for North American Studies, American University

Roger Gibbins, President & CEO, Canada West Foundation

Andrés Rozenthal, Mexican Council on Foreign Relations

The State Department website documents that Shannon addressed a group of Canadian diplomats, academics and Fulbright scholars in Ottawa Sept.14 in which he discussed the North American Forum conference in Banff.

In the speech, entitled "Why the Americas Matter," Shannon characterized the North American Forum as "a parallel structure to the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America." Shannon described SPP as designed to "enhance NAFTA" and again as "an add-on to NAFTA."

Andrés Rozenthal is listed as chairman of the North American Forum on Integration, or NAFINA, an organization of which Pastor also is listed as a member of the board of directors. WND >previously reported on NAFINA's "Triumverate," a model North American parliament annually held for student delegates from the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

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