Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (14 page)
But Erik Prince’s philanthropy has certainly not been limited to Catholic causes. The Prince family was deeply involved in the secretive Council for National Policy, described by the
New York Times
as “a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country [which has] met behind closed doors at undisclosed locations for a confidential conference” three times a year “to strategize about how to turn the country to the right.”
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The Council was started in 1981 by the Rev. Tim LaHaye, one of the founders of the modern right-wing Christian movement in the United States and author of the apocalyptic
Left Behind
novels.
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The idea was to build a Christian conservative alternative to the Council on Foreign Relations, which LaHaye considered too liberal. CNP membership is kept secret, and members are instructed that “The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before or after a meeting.”
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While membership lists are not public, CNP meetings have been attended by a host of conservative luminaries like Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Gary Bauer, and Ralph Reed. Holland H. Coors of the beer dynasty and Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association, Richard and Dick DeVos, and the likes of Oliver North, Grover Norquist, and Frank Gaffney are also affiliated with CNP.
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Guests are allowed to attend “only with the unanimous approval of the executive committee.”
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George W. Bush addressed the group in 1999, seeking support for his bid for the presidency.
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The group also has played host to powerful players in the Bush administration. Shortly after the Iraq invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attended CNP meetings; in 2004 John Bolton briefed the group on U.S. plans for Iran; John Ashcroft has attended meetings; as did Dan Senor, the top aide to Paul Bremer, the original head of the Iraq occupation.
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Former House majority leader Tom DeLay and several other prominent Republican politicians have also attended meetings.
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Then-Senate majority leader Bill Frist was given the CNP’s Thomas Jefferson Award. In his acceptance speech, he told the gathering, “The destiny of our nation is on the shoulders of the conservative movement.”
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Edgar Prince served a stint as vice president of the CNP from 1988 to 1989 and was CNP vice president at the time of his death.
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Elsa Prince was also a member of the organization. The DeVos family has donated at least $100,000 to the CNP, and the Princes gave at least $20,000 over a two-year period in the 1990s.
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While the lack of public records on the group makes it impossible to confirm that Erik Prince is a member, as his father was, the younger Prince has donated money to the CNP
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and has close relationships with many of its key players.
Erik Prince’s philanthropy and politics have also put him in bed with some of the most controversial political figures in recent U.S. history. Prince’s Freiheit Foundation, which is German for “liberty,” gave $500,000 to the Prison Fellowship in 2000.
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The Fellowship is a so-called prison reform organization that, among other things, advocates for “faith-based prisons.”
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It is the brainchild of Richard Nixon’s “hatchet man,” Watergate conspirator Charles Colson.
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In 1969, Colson was appointed Nixon’s Special Counsel; he was seen by many as the “evil genius” in the administration.
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In 1971, Colson wrote what later became known as Nixon’s Enemies List, a catalogue of the President’s political opponents, who would be targeted by the White House.
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Colson was the first person sentenced in the Watergate scandal, after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in the investigation of the break-in to the psychiatrist’s office of Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.
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Colson also allegedly tried to hire Teamsters thugs to beat up antiwar demonstrators and plotted to raid or firebomb the Brookings Institution.
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Colson became a born-again Christian before going to prison and after leaving wrote the bestseller
Born Again
about his conversion, the proceeds from which he used to found the Prison Fellowship.
As of late 2006, some 22,308 Fellowship volunteers operated in more than eighteen hundred U.S. prison facilities, while upwards of 120,000 prisoners participated in its monthly Bible study and seminar programs.
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It boasted of “ministries” in more than one hundred countries.
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Colson’s Fellowship has become so widespread that it actually runs the daily lives of some prisoners, including two hundred in a Texas prison, courtesy of one George W. Bush. “I’ll never forget this,” Bush said at the First White House National Conference on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. “When I was the Governor of Texas, one of the early initiatives in my governorship, one of the faith-based initiatives, was to turn over a part of the prison unit to a faith program, Chuck Colson’s program. He convinced me that this would be a great opportunity to change lives. And it would be—it would be better than stamping license plates.”
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Bush, whose administration held Colson’s work up numerous times as evidence of successful “faith-based initiatives,” went on to tell the story of a prisoner “whose life was changed and saved because of faith.”
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From the first week that Bush took office in 2001, Colson has been a regular adviser to the President. The Texas prison Colson ran was in Sugar Land
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—the district represented by then-majority leader Tom DeLay.
In 2002, Colson gave a speech at Calvin College about his Texas prison: “My friend Erik Prince, who is here tonight, traveled with me recently to a prison in Texas that has been under Prison Fellowship administration for the past eighteen months. This is an extraordinary program because it is not just that men are coming to Christ and being redeemed, as wonderful as that is. They are creating an entire culture!”
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A similar program at an Iowa prison was found unconstitutional in June 2006 because it used state funding, a judge said, for the indoctrination of “inmates into the Evangelical Christian belief system.” Colson has vowed to appeal the ruling all the way to the Supreme Court. He has suggested that his faith-based prison program is “the one really successful antidote” to what he termed “the largely unimpeded spread of radical Islam through our prisons.”
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Colson predicted, “If, God forbid, an attack by home-grown Islamist radicals occurs on American soil, many, if not most, of the perpetrators will have converted to Islam while in prison.”
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He suggested that opponents of his Prison Fellowship program are abetting terrorism and said the efforts to declare his program unconstitutional “leaves jihadists and other radical groups as the only game in town.”
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In October 2006, Colson was given the Faith & Freedom Award by the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty,
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an organization to which Prince has donated at least $200,000.
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The Grand Rapids-based organization has Prince’s stepfather, Ren Broekhuizen, on its board of directors, and its president and founder is the Rev. Robert Sirico, who presided over the funeral of Erik Prince’s first wife.
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“Islam has a monolithic worldview, which sees just one thing: the destruction of infidels and the recovery of territories they’ve lost,” Colson declared at the Acton dinner. “We’re in a hundred-year war and it’s time to sober up, and Christians understand it because we understand our history, and we understand what makes the religious mind tick, and secular America doesn’t get it.” Colson said when Mohammed wrote the Koran, “I think he’d had too many tamales the night before.”
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A few years earlier, in the 2002 speech in which Colson praised Erik Prince, the former Watergate conspirator talked extensively about the historical foundation and current necessity of a political and religious alliance of Catholics and evangelicals. Colson talked about his work, beginning in the mid-1980s, with famed conservative evangelical Protestant minister turned Catholic priest Richard Neuhaus and others to build a unified movement. That work ultimately led in 1994 to the controversial document “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.”
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The ECT document articulated the vision that would animate Blackwater’s corporate strategy and the politics practiced by Erik Prince—a marriage of the historical authority of the Catholic Church with the grassroots appeal of the modern conservative U.S. evangelical movement, bolstered by the cooperation of largely secular and Jewish neoconservatives. Author Damon Linker, who once edited Neuhaus’s journal,
First Things,
termed this phenomenon the rise of the “Theocons.”
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The ECT document became the manifesto of the movement that Erik Prince would soon serve and bankroll. It declared that “The century now drawing to a close has been the greatest century of missionary expansion in Christian history. We pray and we believe that this expansion has prepared the way for yet greater missionary endeavor in the first century of the Third Millennium. The two communities in world Christianity that are most evangelistically assertive and most rapidly growing are Evangelicals and Catholics.”
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The signatories called for a unification of these religions in a common missionary cause, that “all people will come to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.”
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The document recognized the separation of church and state but “just as strongly protest[ed] the distortion of that principle to mean the separation of religion from public life. . . . The argument, increasingly voiced in sectors of our political culture, that religion should be excluded from the public square must be recognized as an assault upon the most elementary principles of democratic governance.”
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But the ECT was not merely a philosophical document. Rather, it envisioned an agenda that would almost identically mirror that of the Bush administration a few years later, when Neuhaus would serve as a close adviser to Bush, beginning with the 2000 campaign.
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The signers of the ECT document asserted that religion is “privileged and foundational in our legal order” and spelled out the need to defend “the moral truths of our constitutional order.”
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The document was most passionate in its opposition to abortion, calling abortion on demand “a massive attack on the dignity, rights, and needs of women. Abortion is the leading edge of an encroaching culture of death.” It also called for “moral education” in schools, advocating for educational institutions “that transmit to coming generations our cultural heritage, which is inseparable from the formative influence of religion, especially Judaism and Christianity.”
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The document forcefully defended neoliberal economic policies. “We contend for a free society, including a vibrant market economy,” the signers asserted. “We affirm the importance of a free economy not only because it is more efficient but because it accords with a Christian understanding of human freedom. Economic freedom, while subject to grave abuse, makes possible the patterns of creativity, cooperation, and accountability that contribute to the common good.”
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It called for a “renewed appreciation of Western culture,” saying, “We are keenly aware of, and grateful for, the role of Christianity in shaping and sustaining the Western culture of which we are part.” “Multiculturalism,” the signers declared, has most commonly come to mean “affirming all cultures but our own.” Therefore, the ECT signers claimed Western culture as their “legacy” and set for themselves the task of transmitting it “as a gift to future generations.”
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“Nearly two thousand years after it began, and nearly five hundred years after the divisions of the Reformation era, the Christian mission to the world is vibrantly alive and assertive. We do not know, we cannot know, what the Lord of history has in store for the Third Millennium. It may be the springtime of world missions and great Christian expansion,” the lengthy document concluded. “We do know that this is a time of opportunity—and, if of opportunity, then of responsibility—for Evangelicals and Catholics to be Christians together in a way that helps prepare the world for the coming of him to whom belongs the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.”
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In addition to Neuhaus and Colson, the document was endorsed by one of the most powerful mainstream Catholic leaders in the United States, John Cardinal O’Connor of New York, as well as the Rev. Pat Robertson and Michael Novak of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
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The manifesto was years in the making and would greatly assist the unifying of the conservative movement that made George W. Bush’s rise to power possible. The ECT signers, according to Damon Linker—who worked for Neuhaus for years—“had not only forged a historic theological and political alliance. They had also provided a vision of America’s religious and political future. It would be a religious future in which upholding theological orthodoxy and moral traditionalism overrode doctrinal disagreements. And it would be a political future in which the most orthodox and traditionalist Christians set the public tone and policy agenda for the nation.”
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