The first part of this two-part article provided a brief overview of the history of the Council on Foreign Relations (hereafter referred to as the Council), and demonstrated how with the backing of America’s leading liberal foundations (and working closely with many CIA-linked individuals) it has worked industriously to manufacture elite consent. This concluding part of the article will examine the Council’s present day democracy manipulating credentials, and provide a critical investigation of the people involved with their Orwellian Center for Preventive Action.

 

The Council as Premier Democracy Manipulator

Problematically, it is near on impossible to determine the extent of the Council’s current relations with secretive agencies like the CIA. However, it is possible to examine the Council’s links to global democracy manipulating organisations, like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which play an integral role in promoting US hegemony through soft power. Examining the ties of Council directors to such groups is particularly important as waging a cultural war for the world’s minds has always also been an integral component of the CIA’s own work: that said, this aspect of their work is downplayed and often misunderstood. In addition it is more than coincidental that the first head of the NED, Allen Weinstein, noted: “A lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” [1] 

Key democracy manipulators who currently sit on the Council’s board of directors include, Madeleine K. Albright, Richard Holbrooke:

• Peter Ackerman – who is the chair of both the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and Freedom House, and serves on the US advisory council of the US Institute of Peace
• Stephen W. Bosworth – who is the former president of the United States-Japan Foundation)
• Tom Brokaw – who is a director of the International Crisis Group, the International Rescue Committee, and the Committee to Protect Journalists, and whose wife is vice-chair of Conservation International
• Frank J. Caufield – who is a director of Refugees International
• Ann M. Fudge – who is a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, and is the chair of the US program advisory panel for the Gates Foundation
• Helene D. Gayle – who is a director of InterAction, and is the president of CARE USA
• Maurice R. Greenberg – who is a member of the board of overseers of the International Rescue Committee
• Carla Anderson Hills – who is a director of the International Crisis Group, and is a member of the  leadership council for the Initiative for Global Development
• Thomas R. Pickering – who is a trustee of both the Carnegie Corporation and the Eurasia Foundation, and a former director of the Center for Democracy – a Center whose president from 1985 to 2003 was Allen Weinstein, that is, the NED’s first acting president
• Colin L. Powell – who sits on the board of overseers of the International Rescue Committee
• David M. Rubenstein – who is a trustee of Freedom House
• Richard E. Salomon – who “serves as senior advisor to David Rockefeller”
• Anne-Marie Slaughter – who the chair of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion,  is a director of the New America Foundation, a trustee of the World Peace Foundation, serves on the strategy committee of the Project on Justice in Times of Transition, and is a member of both the Inter-American Dialogue and the Task Force on the United Nations [2]
• Vin Weber – who is a former chair of the NED, and is a member of the Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion, and
• Fareed Zakaria – who is a director of the New America Foundation.[3]

Given the strong links between the Council and the democracy manipulating establishment it is fitting that since 2002, the Council has awarded most of their annual Arthur Ross Book Awards to ‘democratically’-linked authors. The prize is given to those writers whose work makes an “outstanding contribution to the understanding of foreign policy or international relations”, and the Gold (first prize) winners to date – from 2007 to 2002 – include: [4]

• Kwame Anthony Appiah – Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers; Appiah is the chair of the American Council of Learned Societies, and he is a former director of the Sabre Foundation.
• Tony Judt – Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945; Judt is a member of the board of overseers of the Watson Institute for International Studies, and is a director of the French-American Foundation.
• Steve Coll – Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001; Coll “has been a foreign correspondent and editor at The Washington Post since 1985.”
• Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon – The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam’s War Against America;  Benjamin was a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and prior to joining this Center he was a senior fellow at the US Institute of Peace, while before this (from 1994 to 1999) he served on the staff of the National Security Council;  Simon is presently a senior fellow for the Council.
• Samantha Power – “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide; Power’s work has been critically analysed in some detail by Edward S. Herman (2007). In addition, her democracy manipulating affiliations are numerous and include being the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy (1998 to 2002), a member of the strategy committee of the Project on Justice in Times of Transition, a director of both the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, the International Rescue Committee, and the International Center for Transitional Justice, and she has also worked as a political analyst for the International Crisis Group.
• Robert Skidelsky – John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Freedom 1937-1946; Skidelsky is linked to two pro-free market think tanks, the Social Market Foundation (where is was a former chair of their board), and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (where he is presently a trustee).

As the Council prides itself on its ‘open’ nonpartisan nature it makes sense that Grose would mention in passing the existence of Shoup and Minter’s book Imperial Brain Trust. More critically Grose points out that “Richard Barnet, a scholar elected to Council membership in 1969 who remained a frequent critic, noted that membership in the Council on Foreign Relations could well be considered ‘a rite of passage for an aspiring national security manager.’” Although as Edward S. Herman and David Peterson (2008) note in their brilliant article, There Is No “War on Terror”, it would be more accurate to point out that membership in the Council is a rite of passage for an aspiring national insecurity manager.

Finally, it is worth remembering that for all their elite links to key democracy manipulators the Council also invites people whom many people would actually consider to be leading progressives. Such ostensibly ‘progressive’ individuals include people like Katrina vanden Heuvel, who is the editor and publisher of The Nation magazine. However, The Nation’s Council ties do not end there as two of their regular contributors are also linked to the Council, these being Mohamad Bazzi (who is &l

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