[Nettime-bold] From: Ross Regnart USA

From: [email protected]
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2001 14:04:08 EST
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: CIA to Head Bush Religion Initiative by R Lederman

PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY!
CIA Think Tank to Head Bush Religion Initiative

The NY Times article below describes the two men Bush is
putting in charge of his religion plan, John J. DiIulio Jr. and
Stephen Goldsmith. Both men are senior fellows of the CIA's
Manhattan Institute and are colleagues of Charles Murray, author
of the classic text of scientific racism, The Bell Curve. Most of
Bush's advisors are also associated with the Bell Curve. As just
one of many examples, Murray was a consultant on Tommy
Thompsons' Wisconsin Welfare Reform program, which Bush
will make the national model

Following the Times article you will find quotes from the NY
Times and the Manhattan Institute's own website to substantiate
the CIA origin of the Manhattan Institute, its influence on GW
Bush and its very close decade-long association with Charles
Murray, who wrote The Bell Curve while a research fellow at
The Manhattan Institute.

Whether you are a fundamentalist Christian, an Orthodox Jew, a
devout Muslim or an atheist you might question what part the
CIA rightfully has in a multi-billion dollar "religion initiative" or
in any domestic US policy decisions. The best known modern
example of government sponsored religion-based initiatives is
Nazi Germany.

Robert Lederman
[email protected]
For numerous detailed articles expanding on the connection
between GW Bush, the CIA and former Nazis see:
http://Baltech.org/lederman/spray/

NY Times January 29, 2001
New Bush Office Seeks Closer Ties to Church Groups
By FRANK BRUNI and LAURIE GOODSTEIN

WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 < President Bush has selected a
University of Pennsylvania professor of political science to head
the first federal office intended to promote the integration of
religious groups into federally financed social services, several
Bush advisers said today.

The advisers said the opening of the office and the appointment
of John J. DiIulio Jr. to fill it would almost certainly be
announced at a White House event on Monday, and they
acknowledged that it would draw heated opposition from
organizations and religious groups that advocate a strict
separation of church and state.

But the encouragement and government financing of faith-based
programs was a signature campaign issue for Mr. Bush, who has
said he reads the Bible every day. And the decision to entrust the
new federal office in charge of that effort to Mr. DiIulio, a
widely published expert on juvenile crime with impressive
academic credentials, is an example of the political caution with
which the Bush administration will proceed.

The choice of Mr. DiIulio, in fact, is only one of several ways in
which Mr. Bush and his aides are trying to blunt any impression
that what the president is doing amounts to an evangelical
endeavor.

"John is a social scientist who believes in empirical evidence,"
said one Bush adviser, stressing Mr. DiIulio's focus on provable
results from faith-based social programs that address problems
like substance abuse, youth violence and teenage pregnancy. The
adviser also emphasized that Mr. DiIulio does not see faith-based
programs "as a panacea," but rather as one arrow in a quiver with
plenty of others.

In addition to Mr. DiIulio, the other central figure in the effort is
Stephen Goldsmith, the former mayor of Indianapolis who was
the chief domestic policy adviser for Mr. Bush's presidential
campaign.

Several Bush advisers said Mr. Goldsmith would be the chairman
of a new national advisory board whose work will complement
that of the new federal office. Mr. Goldsmith will also serve as
an official adviser to Mr. Bush on the issue.

Mr. Bush and his aides do not want the proposals related to
faith-based programs that they unveil to seem too driven by
religion. Indeed, the president's goal is to find new ways for the
federal government to encourage private charities < including
but not limited to religious groups < to provide more social
services.

To that end, the title of the new federal office will allude not just
to faith-based programs but also to community initiatives,
although several advisers said the order in which the words
"faith" and "community" would be placed was under debate.

Additionally, Mr. Bush has invited not only leaders of
faith-based groups but also the heads of other not-for-profit
organizations to meet on Monday morning at the White House to
kick off a week of events intended to describe and promote the
president's vision.

The guest list, according to one of the people on it, includes the
Rev. Stephen E. Burger, executive director of the Association of
Gospel Rescue Missions; Sara E. Mel�ndez, president and chief
executive officer of Independent Sector, a coalition of nonprofit
organizations and foundations; and Millard Fuller, founder and
president of Habitat for Humanity International, the ecumenical
house-building group.

"It is about faith-based institutions, but it's also about more than
that," said another Bush adviser, referring to Mr. Bush's plan to
encourage private groups to administer more of the kinds of local
programs often provided by government.

A more thorough integration of faith-based and other
not-for-profit groups into federally financed social services is a
cornerstone of compassionate conservatism, a political
philosophy with which Mr. Bush has strongly identified himself.

Compassionate conservatism holds that while the government
should limit the scope of the social services it provides, it should
take an active role as a catalyst and source of financing for work
done by neighborhood and religious groups.

Mr. Bush has said some of the groups with the best results for
rehabilitating prisoners or fighting drug abuse are ones that take
religious and spiritual approaches. He has also said the
government should not hesitate to give money to these groups, as
long as secular groups that provide similar services are also
available.

There are signs that these initiatives may elicit bipartisan
support. This morning, on the ABC News program "This Week,"
Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, the House
minority leader, signaled interest in Mr. Bush's approach.

The Bush administration will roll out these initiatives with the
utmost care, under the guidance of Mr. DiIulio, who is Catholic,
and Mr. Goldsmith, who is Jewish.

Although both are well liked by religious conservatives, neither
is an ideological lightning rod like Marvin Olasky, another
proponent of faith- based programs and compassionate
conservatism. Mr. Olasky was with Mr. Goldsmith and Mr.
DiIulio at a long meeting with Mr. Bush in Austin, Tex., nearly
two years ago.

"It's not just that we're paying attention to the politics of it," one
of the Bush advisers said. "We're paying attention to the
pragmatics of it. I think we're doing it right, and I think we're
going to be careful about it."

Mr. DiIulio's r�sum� makes him seem like a personification of
Mr. Bush's attempts to retain the support of religious
conservatives while also courting moderates and building a broad
base of support.

He is a fellow at both the Manhattan Institute, which is a
conservative think tank, and the Brookings Institute, which is
not. In a two-month period in the summer of 1999, he wrote
major articles for The Weekly Standard, a conservative
publication, and for The New Democrat, a moderate one. He
identifies himself as a new Democrat.

Mr. DiIulio has also done extensive work with black pastors in
urban areas, and one of the Bush administration's hopes is that
its advocacy of faith-based programs will be a bridge to black
ministers and win some support with the Congressional Black
Caucus.

Mr. Bush garnered the support of about 9 percent of black voters
in the presidential election and has been reaching out
aggressively to African- Americans ever since. This morning, he,
his wife, Laura, and his parents attended a Methodist church here
with a predominantly black congregation.

For years, Mr. DiIulio, who taught at Princeton before the
University of Pennsylvania, was known more for his work on
criminal justice issues than on his interest in faith-based
programs. He was among the voices loudly advocating increased
prison construction in the early 1990's and wrote a 1996 book
about the war against crime, "Body Count," with John P. Walters
and William J. Bennett, the former education secretary and drug
czar.

Mr. Goldsmith, a former prosecutor, was a two-term mayor in
Indianapolis who privatized everything from golf course
construction to sewage treatment and showed an interest in
revitalizing long-neglected inner-city neighborhoods. Late in his
second term, he started the Front Porch Alliance, a group that
acted as a liaison between religious congregations < mostly
urban African-American churches < and government.

For his work with churches, Mr. Goldsmith, a Republican, was
lauded by many evangelical Christian leaders. But some Jewish
leaders said they were nervous about an approach that redirects
tax dollars to churches.

"There's a lot of respect for Stephen Goldsmith," said Rabbi
David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of
Reform Judaism. "Many in the Jewish community know him and
respect him, but any time you have a formal government
endorsement of religion that this faith-based office conveys, that
takes us down a path that too often in our history has turned out
to be disastrous for religious freedom and religious tolerance."

NY Times Monday, May 12, 1997
Turning Intellect Into Influence Promoting Its Ideas, the
Manhattan Institute Has Nudged New York Rightward
"Currently housed in an unprepossessing warren on the second
floor of a building near Grand Central Terminal, the institute
was founded as a free-market education and research
organization by William Casey, who then went off to head the
Central Intelligence Agency in the Reagan Administration."

NY Times Monday, May 12, 1997 Manhattan Institute Has
Nudged New York Rightward
"...the institute was founded as a free-market education and
research organization by William Casey, who then went off to
head the Central Intelligence Agency in the Reagan
Administration."

NY Times June 12, 2000 Bush Culls Campaign Theme From
Conservative Thinkers �Gov. George W. Bush has said his
political views have been shaped by the work of Myron Magnet
of the Manhattan Institute.�

>From the MI website: Books That Influenced Gov. George W.
Bush Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare: "Referring
to this book, Gov. Bush has said, other than the Bible, that it was
the most important book he had read..."

"Education and Welfare: Meeting the Challenge
A Message from CCI Chairman, Mayor Stephen Goldsmith
[CCI is a division of Manhattan Institute]
America is in the midst of an urban renaissance...CCI�s April
conference �Next Steps in Welfare Reform� highlighted just how
far we�ve come. The conference brought together public officials
like Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and scholars like
Dr. Charles Murray to discuss how governments and private
groups have reduced dependency and increased
self-sufficiency...Fifteen years after the Manhattan Institute
published Charles Murray�s landmark study of American welfare
policy, Losing Ground, the presentations showed that ideas once
seen as radical now form the mainstream of the welfare debate."

[Among the panelists alongside Murray and Goldsmith was
Jason Turner, former head of Wisconsin's welfare program.
Turner later became infamous as head of NYC's abusive workfare
system after quoting the motto over the gates of Auschwitz -
"Arbeit Macht Frei - work shall make you free" [ see: NY Times
6/27/98].

"Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the
unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can
begin the fight for the 'remaking' of the Reich as they call
it." -Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 1

"Secular schools can never be tolerated because
such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral
instruction without a religious foundation is built on air;
consequently, all character training and religion must be
derived from faith . . . we need believing people." [Adolf
Hitler, April 26, 1933, from a speech made during negotiations
leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933]<

"We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with
social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The
most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a
religious appeal. We don't want the word to go out that we want
to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man
who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their
more rebellious members." -From Margaret Sanger's 12/19/39
letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, Milton, Massachusetts. Original
source: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, North
Hampton, Massachusetts. Also described in Linda Gordon's
Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth
Control in America, Grossman Publishers, 1976. Also see
Sanger's Birth Control Review
http://www.hli.org/issues/pp/bcreview/index.html

>From an announcement on the MI website
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/
Center for Civic Innovation Welfare Conference Held at the
Manhattan Institute Topic: �Next Steps in Welfare Reform.�
Participants: [a partial list]
Charles Murray (Author of Losing Ground; American
Enterprise Institute), Jason Turner (Commissioner, NYC
Human Resources Administration) April 14, 1999 New York,
New York<

>Village Voice 8/8/2000 Uncle Shrub's Cabin
"Absent in the sticky Philadelphia heat was the drumbeat of the
fire-breathing, nay-saying Christian Right. In its place, singing
the praises of the Jesus-influenced candidate and following a
script laid out by the Manhattan Institute...the social scientists
from the Manhattan Institute rolled out their charts and
reported that kids who go to church in poor neighborhoods do
fewer drugs and thus, churches, mosques, and synagogues
"should be supported as uniquely qualified agencies of social
control that matter a great deal in the lives of adolescents in
America's most disorganized and impoverished
communities."<