A snapshot of CFR dominance.

The major media widely reported the January 5 meeting President George W. Bush had with current and former secretaries of State and Defense at the White House to discuss the war in Iraq. In fact, President Bush and the other participants posed in the Oval Office for the photo below.

However, the media overlooked a very important aspect of the photo, and that is that 14 of the 17 policymakers in the picture currently belong to the Council on Foreign Relations. Two others (Rumsfeld and Laird) are formers members of the CFR. Of the 17, George W. Bush himself is the only one who has not belonged to the organization.

The CFR, a private organization based in New York City, has about 4,200 members, several hundred of whom are in the Bush administration. Hundreds of CFR members also served in past administrations, irrespective of whether the president in the White House was a Republican or a Democrat. The picture below provides just a snapshot of the dominance that the CFR has held over the executive branch of the U.S. government for decades.

Is the CFR dominance at the upper echelons of our government newsworthy? Imagine how the liberals in media would howl if the president assembled a group of 16 influential policy advisers, and it turned out that all but the president himself were past or present members of the National Rifle Association? Or if the president had selected hundreds of NRA members for top posts in his administration? Yet the NRA is an organization boasting millions of members, while the CFR consists of select government officials and the captains and kings of business, finance, and the media. The CFR is so influential that it has been called "the invisible government of the United States."

The CFR claims not to have an agenda, but it does. That agenda--the promotion of more and more internationalism leading to world government--has been pursued for decades by both Republican and Democrat administrations. Much of the evidence of the group's malfeasance is compiled in The Insiders by John F. McManus. In this book, Mr. McManus, the publisher of THE NEW AMERICAN and president of The John Birch Society, exposes the dominance of the CFR from the Carter administration through the first administration of George W. Bush and explains what we can do about it. The book (paperback, 205 pages) is available at $3.95 from American Opinion Book Services, P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54912; by calling: 920-749-3783; or from www.aobs-store .com. (See page one for shipping and handling charges.)