Canadian cultural review magazine Adbusters, defines neo-conservatism as, "The belief that Democracy, however flawed, was best defended by an ignorant public pumped on nationalism and religion. Only a militantly nationalist state could deter human aggression …such nationalism requires an external threat and if one cannot be found it must be manufactured."10

Within the Ford administration there was a split between Cold War traditionalists seeking to minimize confrontations through diplomacy and detente and neo-conservatives advocating stronger confrontations with the Soviet’s "Evil Empire." The latter group became more entrenched when George H.W. Bush became CIA Director. Bush allowed the formation of "Team B" headed by Richard Pipes along with Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Paul Nitze and others, who formed the second Committee on the Present Danger to raise awareness of the Soviet threat and the continuing need for a strong aggressive defense policy. Their efforts led to strong anti-Soviet positioning during the Reagan administration. 12

The Committees on the Present Danger (CPD) extend from the 1950s Russian threat to the present. The current CPD proudly boasts on their website;

"In times of great challenge to the security of the United States, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents have traditionally joined to make an assertive defense of American interests.

Twice before in American history, The Committee on the Present Danger has risen to this challenge. It emerged in 1950 as a bipartisan education and advocacy organization dedicated to building a national consensus for a strong defense against Soviet expansionism. In 1976, the Committee on the Present Danger reemerged, with leadership from the labor movement, bipartisan representatives of the foreign policy community and academia, all of whom were concerned about strategic drift in US security policy. With victory in the Cold War, the mission of the Committee on the Present Danger was considered complete and consequently was deactivated.

Today, the current CPD promotes radical Islamists as the primary threat to the American people and millions of others who prize liberty. They claim that the threat is global. They also claim that they operate from cells in a number of countries. Rogue regimes seek power by making common cause with terrorist groups. The prospect that this deadly collusion may include weapons of mass murder was the justification for the invasion of Iraq."13

Stanley Milgram's famous experiment involving obedience to authority proved that individuals are fairly easily cowed into submitting to anyone who has a claim of authority, and that on average 61 percent of people will administer pain to another person if instructed to do so.15 Both test groups in these experiments rationalized their behavior by appealing to "the greater good." Because it was for the "advancement of science" they were able to be convinced they should ignore personal judgment and obey the instructions given to them by the experimenters.16

Martin Orne, who was one of those paid by the CIA to conduct experiments on obedience, showed in 1962 that people would go to tremendous lengths to please a person in authority. Orne conducted research that involved presenting subjects with a stack of 2,000 pages of random numbers and instructing them to add each two adjacent numbers until he returned. Over 90 percent of the test subjects continued in this meaningless task for up to five hours.17

Today the combination of political climate and technological capability presents a condition in which widespread manipulation of, not only the flow of information through the media, but also the manipulation of the emotional states and cognitive ability in large populations could be achieved. If policy elites are unaccountable to the public for their actions, and the public has been emotionally manipulated to support them, we can assume that they will certainly abuse their positions in the pursuit of their agendas.

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4 G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006 [5th ed.] and Peter Phillips, A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club, 1994, (http://library.sonoma.edu/regional/faculty/phillips/bohemianindex.html)

5 Early studies by Charles Beard in the Economic Interpretations of the Constitution of the United States (1929), established that economic elites formulated the US Constitution to serve their own special interests. Henry Klien (1933) in his book Dynastic America claimed that wealth in America has power never before known in the world and was centered in the top 2% of the population owning some 60% of the country. Ferdinard Lundberg (1937) wrote American's Sixty Families documenting inter-marring self-perpetuating families where wealth is the "indispensable handmaiden of government. C.Wright Mills determined in 1945 (American Business Elites, Journal of Economic History, Dec. 1945) that nine out of ten business elites from1750 to 1879 came from well to do families.

6 See R. Brady, Business as a System of Power, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943) and Val Burris, Elite Policy Planning Networks in the United State, American Sociological Association paper 1991.

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