Odds & Ends on Blackwater

The Malta Independent Online reports:


A European Parliament working document drawn up by Giovanni Claudio Fava has claimed “Malta is the operational base of Blackwater, the organiser of private military militia which are increasingly taking on more and more roles which used to be undertaken by US forces in Iraq and elsewhere”.

American left-wing and anti-war media are in full cry about the underhand and subtle changes, which have made Blackwater the new symbol of American claimed supremacy, carried out by forces other than the regular military.

California Democratic Senator Henry Waxman has been holding a number of hearings on the spread of Blackwater but even they, the more anti-war media claims, have held back from seeing the whole wide picture.

Thus the four-hour interrogation of Blackwater director Eric Prince got lost in details, even discovering for instance a December 2006 “arrangement” negotiated by the State Department as compensation for an Iraqi policeman killed by a Blackwater employee.

But it was only Republican Darrell Issa from California who documented the intimate links between Prince and the Bush administration. On the eve of the hearings, Oliver North, the former colonel who had been condemned for exchanging arms with cocaine in the fight against communism in Nicaragua, accused Senator Waxman of a huge “witch-hunt”.

Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio, argued that since the military functions had been privatised, it was in Blackwater’s interest to prolong the war, rather than end it.

An article on Salon.com carried the charges by Jeremy Scahill that the Christian fundamentalists behind Blackwater were the hard core in favour of the war of George Bush and Dick Cheney and their “patron”, former Secretary of State George Schultz.

Eric Prince’s parents, Edgar Prince and his wife Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, through their foundation finance the Council for National Policy, an ultra-secret society which met in Salt Lake City on 28 September to hear Dick Cjheney argue the case for an attack on Iran.

Prince Senior is one of the pillars of Christian Coalition of Gary Bauer and of the Family Research Council of James Dobson.

Eric Prince, through his own foundation, the Freiheit Foundation, finances Christendom College, the Institute for World Politics, Crisis Magazine and the Prison Fellowship of Chuck Colson. Prince also finances the Legionnaires du Christ and Christian Freedom International.

When still 27 years old, Eric Prince founded Blackwater USA. He and those who soon joined him have profited from the more than $1,000 million they have taken as contracts from 2000 to 2006.

In 2004, Cofer Black passed from CIA to the State Department and thence became Blackwater’s vice-president. While still in the CIA, Black was in charge of the “special extraditions” organising the secret transfer of prisoners from Iraq or Afghanistan to countries less rigid against the practice of torture, such as Poland, Romania, Egypt, and so on.

These planes, which travelled between Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Afghanistan often made stopovers in many European countries such as the UK, Italy, France, Germany and Malta many times without the countries themselves being informed what was going on.

Now the Swiss procurator Dick Marty has sent documents regarding the “CIA’s flying prisons” to the European Parliament and names two Blackwater subsidiaries – Presidential Airways and Aviation Worldwide Services.

The Giovanni Claudio Fava document on behalf of the European Parliament says the two companies used CASA C-212 planes, usually used to transport paratroops and big cargoes and also able to land on improvised landing spots.

Cheney Heads to Utah for a Private Speech

The Salt Lake Tribune reports:

Vice President Dick Cheney will speak to a super-secret,conservative policy group in Utah on Friday during his second trip to the state this year.

Cheney will address the fall meeting of the Council for National Policy, a group whose self-described mission is to promote "a free-enterprise system, a strong national defense and support for traditional Western values."

The organization -- made up of few hundred powerful conservative activists -- holds confidential meetings and members are advised not to use the name of the group in communications, according to a New York Times profile of the group.

"The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before [or] after a meeting,'' a list of rules obtained by The Times showed. The group did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Czech Republic President Václav Klaus is also expected to address the Council for National Policy's meeting in downtown Salt Lake City. After his speech, Cheney will meet with Klaus, the vice president's office said Tuesday.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who ran the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, will also be in Utah on Friday but his campaign did not respond to a question about whether he would talk with the group.

Cheney's visit is expected to be short, only a few hours, according to people familiar with the trip's details. The trip coincides with fundraisers in California, Colorado, Nevada and Wyoming, Cheney's spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride said.

All of the events on the trip are closed to the public and the news media, McBride said.

Cheney last visited the state April 26 to give the commencement speech at Brigham Young University.

Behind Closed Doors

Who is The Council For National Policy and What Are They Up To? And Why Don't They Want You To Know?

At Americans United, Jeremy Leaming and Rob Boston write:

When a top U.S. senator receives a major award from a national advocacy organization, it’s standard procedure for both the politician and the group to eagerly tell as many people about it as possible.

Press releases spew from fax machines and e-mails clog reporters’ in-boxes. The news media are summoned in the hope that favorable stories will appear in the newspapers, on radio and on television.

It was odd, therefore, that when U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) accepted a “Thomas Jefferson Award” from a national group at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in August, the media weren’t notified. In fact, they weren’t welcome to attend.

“The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before or after a meeting,” reads one of the cardinal rules of the organization that honored Frist.

The membership list of this group is “strictly confidential.” Guests can attend only with the unanimous approval of the organization’s executive committee. The group’s leadership is so secretive that members are told not to refer to it by name in e-mail messages. Anyone who breaks the rules can be tossed out.

What is this group, and why is it so determined to avoid the public spotlight?

That answer is the Council for National Policy (CNP). And if the name isn’t familiar to you, don’t be surprised. That’s just what the Council wants.

The CNP was founded in 1981 as an umbrella organization of right-wing leaders who would gather regularly to plot strategy, share ideas and fund causes and candidates to advance the far-right agenda. Twenty-three years later, it is still secretly pursuing those goals with amazing success.

Since its founding, the tax-exempt organization has been meeting three times a year. Members have come and gone, but all share something in common: They are powerful figures, drawn from both the Religious Right and the anti-government, anti-tax wing of the ultra-conservative movement.

It may sound like a far-left conspiracy theory, but the CNP is all too real and, its critics would argue, all too influential.

What amazes most CNP opponents is the group’s ability to avoid widespread public scrutiny. Despite nearly a quarter century of existence and involvement by wealthy and influential political figures, the CNP remains unknown to most Americans. Operating out of a non-descript office building in the Washing ton, D.C., suburb of Fairfax, Va., the organization has managed to keep an extremely low profile an amazing feat when one considers the people the CNP courts.

New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick was finally able to pierce the CNP veil in August when he attended a gathering of the group in New York City just before the Republican convention, where the organization presented Frist with the “Jefferson Award.”

The Times described the CNP as consisting of “a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country” who meet “behind closed doors at undisclosed locations…to strategize about how to turn the country to the right.”

Accepting the award, Frist acknowledged the group’s power, telling attendees, “The destiny of the nation is on the shoulders of the conservative movement.”

The CNP meeting was perhaps more important than what took place on the carefully choreographed GOP convention stage a few days later, said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“The real crux of this is that these are the genuine leaders of the Republican Party, but they certainly aren’t going to be visible on television next week,” Lynn told The Times days before the start of the GOP convention. “The CNP members are not going to be visible next week, but they are very much on the minds of George W. Bush and Karl Rove every week of the year, because these are the real powers in the party.”

The Times’ Kirkpatrick was able to obtain the CNP’s current membership list and reported that its roster includes Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association and Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. A CNP financial disclosure form for 2002 lists Norquist and Howard Phillips, founder of the ultra-conservative Constitution Party, as directors. The current president of the group is Donald P. Hodel, former executive director of the Christian Coalition.

Other CNP directors include names that would not mean a lot to most people, but they are key players in the right-wing universe. Becky Norton Dunlop is vice president for external relations at the Heritage Foundation. James C. Miller III is former director of Citizens for a Sound Economy. Stuart W. Epperson owns a chain of Christian radio stations. E. Peb Jackson is former president of Young Life. T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., vice president of the CNP, was a domestic policy advisor to President Ronald W. Reagan and runs the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a group that funds right-wing newspapers on college campuses. Ken Raasch is a businessman who works in partnership with popular artist Thomas Kinkade.

Others who have been affiliated with the CNP include TV preachers Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, longtime anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly, Iran-Contra figure turned right-wing talk radio host Oliver North, former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), wealthy Cali fornia savings and loan heir Howard Ahmanson, former House Majority Leader Dick Army (R-Texas), Attorney General John Ashcroft and Tommy Thompson, secretary of the U.S. Depart ment of Health and Human Services.

Republican Party glitterati and top government officials frequently appear at CNP meetings. During the gathering before this year’s GOP convention, The New York Times reported that several Bush administration representatives were scheduled for speeches. Under secretary of State John Bolton spoke about plans for Iran, Assistant Attorney General Alexander Acosta talked about human trafficking and Dan Senor, who worked for Paul Bremer in Iraq, was scheduled to talk about the war there.

The Times said the CNP meeting was focused on the Bush-Cheney re-election efforts and quoted an anonymous participant who called the gathering a “pep rally” for the president’s campaign. Passing a federal marriage amendment and using that subject as a wedge issue was also a top priority.

The newspaper noted that another CNP meeting that took place shortly after the American invasion of Iraq included visits from Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A Canadian newspaper reported that Rumsfeld provided the gathering’s keynote address and that Cheney was scheduled to speak. (See “People & Events,” June 2003 Church & State.)

In April of 2002, according to an ABC News story that ran online, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was the keynote speaker at a CNP meeting in a northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Timothy Goeglein, a White House liaison to religious communities, also spoke.

Heavy-hitters such as these show that the CNP is a force to be reckoned with, and Republican politicians ignore the group at their peril. In 1999, GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush appeared before a CNP gathering in San Antonio, and, in a closed-door meeting, assured the members of his right-wing bona fides. Bush critics demanded that the president release the text of his remarks, but he refused. Nonetheless, rumors soon surfaced that Bush promised the CNP to implement its agenda and vowed to appoint only anti-abortion judges to the federal courts.

How did this influential organization get its start? To find the answer, it’s necessary to go all the way back to 1981 and the early years of the Reagan presidency.

Excited by Reagan’s election, Tim LaHaye, Richard Viguerie, Weyrich and a number of far-right conservatives began meeting to discuss ways to maximize the power of the ultra-conservative movement and create an alternative to the more centrist Council on Foreign Relations. In mid May, about 50 of them met at the McLean, Va., home of Viguerie, owner of a conservative fund-raising company.

Viguerie had a knack for networking. Shortly before helping launch the CNP, Viguerie and Weyrich initiated the Moral Majority and tapped Falwell to run it, making the obscure Lynchburg pastor a major political figure overnight. Viguerie’s goal was to lead rural White voters in the South out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party by emphasizing divisive social issues such as abortion, gay rights and school prayer.

Back when the CNP was founded, it was a little less media shy. In the summer of 1981, Woody Jenkins, a former Louisiana state lawmaker who served as the group’s first executive director, told Newsweek bluntly, “One day before the end of this century, the Council will be so influential that no president, regardless of party or philosophy, will be able to ignore us or our concerns or shut us out of the highest levels of government.”

From the beginning, the CNP sought to merge two strains of far-right thought: the theocratic Religious Right with the low-tax, anti-government wing of the GOP. The theory was that the Religious Right would provide the grassroots activism and the muscle. The other faction would put up the money.

The CNP has always reflected this two-barreled approach. The group’s first president was LaHaye, then president of Family Life Seminars in El Cajon Calif. LaHaye, a fundamentalist Baptist preacher who went on in the 1990s to launch the popular “Left Behind” series of apocalyptic potboilers, was an early anti-gay crusader and frequent basher of public education and he still is today.

Alongside figures like LaHaye and leaders of the anti-abortion movement, the nascent CNP also included Joseph Coors, the wealthy beer magnate; Herbert and Nelson Bunker Hunt, two billionaire investors and energy company executives known for their advocacy of right-wing causes, and William Cies, another wealthy businessman.

Interestingly, the Hunts, Cies and LaHaye all were affiliated with the John Birch Society, the conspiracy-obsessed anti-communist group founded in 1959. LaHaye had lectured and conducted training seminars frequently for the Society during the 1960s and ’70s a time when the group was known for its campaign against the civil rights movement.

Bringing together the two strains of the far right gave the CNP enormous leverage. The group, for example, could pick a candidate for public office and ply him or her with individual donations and PAC money from its well-endowed, business wing.

The goals of the CNP, then, are similarly two-pronged. Activists like Nor quist, who once said he wanted to shrink the federal government to a size where it could be drowned in a bathtub, are drawn to the group for its exaltation of unfettered capitalism, hostility toward social-service spending and low (or no) tax ideology.

Dramatically scaling back the size of the federal government and abolishing the last remnants of the New Deal may be one goal of the CNP, but many of the foot soldiers of the Religious Right sign on for a different crusade: a desire to remake America in a Christian fundamentalist image.

Since 1981, CNP members have worked assiduously to pack government bodies with ultra-conservative lawmakers who agree that the nation needs a major shift to the right economically and socially. They rail against popular culture and progressive lawmakers, calling them the culprits of the nation’s moral decay. Laws must be passed and enforced, the group argues, that will bring organized prayer back to the public schools, outlaw abortion, prevent gays from achieving full civil rights and fund private religious schools with tax funds.

The CNP does not directly fund these activities itself. In fact, a glance at the group’s publicly available financial statements reveals a modest budget. In 2002, the CNP operated with income of just over $1.2 million. The national office has just a handful of staff members.

(In no way a grassroots organization, the CNP gets much of its money from far-right foundations. The Coors family and Richard DeVos, founder of Amway, have been among the CNP’s largest financial backers. The group received $125,000 from a Coors family philanthropic arm, the Castle Rock Foun dation, and the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation. Richard DeVos was also one of the CNP’s early presidents and Jeffrey and Holly Coors have been members for many years.)

The CNP’s budgetary figures don’t tell the whole story, however. Financial data shows that the bulk of its money $815,227 in 2002 is spent on “educational conferences and seminars for national leaders in the fields of business, government, religion and academia to explore national policy alternatives.” An additional $69,108 was spent on “weekly newsletters…distributed to all members to keep them apprised of member activities and public policy issues.”

In other words, the CNP is merely a facilitator. While the group has an affiliated arm CNP Action that does some lobbying, in the main it does not work directly to implement the schemes its members devise during the three yearly meetings. The well-heeled leaders and their affiliated organizations are expected to come up with their own funds to pay for the plots hatched during the meetings.

Despite the group’s obsessive desire for secrecy, some information has leaked out over the years, mainly due to the persistent efforts of a few writers and researchers.

In 1988, writer Russ Bellant noted in his book The Coors Connection, which details the beer dynasty’s funding of right-wing causes and groups, that many CNP members have been associated with the outer reaches of the conservative movement. Bellant found that among the far right, there is a certain cachet to being a CNP member. Members pay thousands of dollars yearly to keep their CNP membership. Bellant noted that at the time, individuals paid $2,000 per year for membership and those seeking a spot on the CNP’s board of directors shelled out $5,000 each.

Research undertaken by a now-defunct watchdog group, the Institute for First Amend ment Studies (IFAS), shed some more light on the group’s activities. For many years running, IFAS founder Skip Porteous was able to obtain CNP membership lists, which he posted online.

Bellant noted that Tom Ellis, a top political operative of the ultra-conservative Jesse Helms, followed LaHaye as the CNP president in 1982. Ellis had a checkered past, having served as a director of a foundation called the Pioneer Fund, which has a long history of subsidizing efforts to prove blacks are genetically inferior to whites.

Bellant’s book, as well as work by the IFAS, reveals other CNP members who have flirted with extremist and hateful propaganda.

In addition to obsessing over communist threats and buttressing white supremacist ideology, the CNP has included many members bent on replacing American democracy with theocracy.

LaHaye, like the whole of the nation’s Religious Right leaders, nurtures a strong contempt for the First Amendment principle of church-state separation, because it seriously complicates their goal of installing fundamentalist Christianity as the nation’s officially recognized religion. LaHaye has worked within the CNP and other groups to replace American law with “biblical law.” (See “Left Behind,” February 2002 Church & State.)

Former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed has also been involved with the CNP and addressed the group during the August GOP meeting in New York. Asked about his relationship with the CNP by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Aug. 29, Reed fell back on the common ploy of asserting that the group is just a ramped-up social club.

“I think it’s like-minded individuals who believe in conservative public policy views. And they get together a few times a year,” said Reed (whose CNP topic was “The 2004 Elections: Who Will Win in November?”).

Reed, now a top official of the Bush-Cheney campaign, said he is no longer a CNP member, asserting that he quit because “I was just busy doing other things.”

The CNP goes way beyond LaHaye and Reed in its effort to embrace the Religious Right. For many years, the late leader of the Christian Recon struc tionist movement, Rousas J. Rushdoony, was a member. Reconstructionists espouse a radical theology that calls for trashing the U.S. Constitution and replacing it with the harsh legal code of the Old Testament. They advocate the death penalty for adulterers, blasphemers, incorrigible teen agers, gay people, “witches” and those who worship “false gods.”

Another CNP-Reconstruc tionist tie comes through Howard Phillips, the Con stitution Party leader. Phillips, a longtime CNP member, is a disciple of Rushdoony and uses rhetoric that strikes a distinctly Reconstructionist tone. In a 2003 Constitution Party gathering in Clackamas, Oregon, Phillips told party members and guests, “We’ve got to be ready when God chooses to let us restore our once-great Republic.” A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center said that Phillips proclaimed that his party was “raising up an army” to “take back this nation!”

The CNP has provided more prominent Religious Right figures, such as Dob son, with a forum to promote church-state merger and shove the Republican Party toward the right. In 1998, Dobson ap peared before a CNP gathering where he admitted he voted for Constitution Party nominee Phillips in the 1996 presidential election instead of Republican candidate Bob Dole. Dobson threatened to bolt the Republican Party and take “as many people with me as possible” if the GOP did not stop taking Christian conservatives for granted. (Dobson’s speech, like all addresses before CNP functions, was not intended for media coverage. A transcript was published by the IFAS, which was able to gain access to the meeting. The transcript remains avail able on the Internet at www.buildingequality.us/ifas /cnp/dobson.html.)

Dobson railed against the Repub lican-controlled Congress for apparently giving short shrift to the “pro-moral community” and easily acquiescing to a “post-modern notion, that there is no moral law to the universe.” That notion, Dobson said, has spread throughout the nation like a cancer.

For Dobson, the moral law of the universe is clear and should be evident to all lawmakers. The universe “has a boss,” he said. “And He has very clear ideas of what is right and wrong.”

Dobson blasted the Republican-led Congress for increasing funding to Planned Parenthood and the National Endowment of the Arts and for espousing a “safe sex ideology” that he said includes advocacy of the use of condoms to help prevent sexually transmitted diseases.

All of this, Dobson said, directly contravenes God’s law.

“It’s a lack of conviction that there is a boss to the universe and that there are moral standards that we are held to and we need officials that will stand up and respect them,” Dobson said.

Dobson concluded his lecture by begging CNP members “shamelessly, to use your influence on the party at this critical stage of our history. You have a lot of influence on the party. A lot of you are politicians. I beg you to talk to them about what’s at stake here because they’ve laid the foundation for a revolt and I don’t think they even know it because they’re so out of touch with the people that I’m talking about.”

Dobson seemed fully aware that he was speaking to an ultra-partisan group. Indeed, the ABCNews.com report noted that some CNP members have bragged about helping “Christian conservatives” take over Republican state party operations in several Southern and Mid western states.

The CNP’s current executive director, a former California lawmaker named Steve Baldwin, has tried to downplay the organization’s influence on powerful state and national lawmakers. He has remained cagey about the CNP’s goals, insisting it is merely a group that counters liberal policy arguments.

In many ways, Baldwin himself exemplifies the CNP’s operate-in-secret strategy. As a political strategist in Cali fornia in the early 1990s, Baldwin was one of the key architects of the “stealth strategy” that led to Religious Right activists being elected to school boards and other local offices.

“Stealth candidates” were trained to emphasize pocketbook issues such as taxes and spending. But once elected, they would pursue a Religious Right agenda, such as demanding creationism in public schools. A spate of the candidates won election in Southern Cali fornia in the early 1990s, but most were later removed by the voters when the true agenda became apparent.

Baldwin tried to use the stealth strategy during his own campaign for the California Assembly in 1992. He lost that race but fared better in 1994, winning election to a seat in the 77th Assembly District. While in office, he helped lead efforts by Religious Right conservatives to take over the state GOP and, briefly, the entire Assembly.

Baldwin had to leave the Assembly in 2000 after serving six years due to California’s term-limits law. According to one California media outlet, his hard-right views had by then alienated most other members of the Assembly.

But Baldwin refused to let up. In the spring of 2002, while working at the CNP, he penned a controversial article for the law review at TV preacher Pat Robertson’s Regent University. The piece, “Child Molestation and the Homosexual Movement,” linked pedo philia to homosexuality.

The article went on to become a staple in the Religious Right’s anti-gay canon, despite the fact that its claims were challenged by legitimate researchers.

“It is difficult to convey the dark side of the homosexual culture without appearing harsh,” wrote Baldwin. “However, it is time to acknowledge that homosexual behavior threatens the foundation of Western civilization the nuclear family.”

What might the future hold for Baldwin and the CNP? Already Jenkins’ vision of a day when powerful politicians would pay heed to the group has come to pass. With social issues such as same-sex marriage increasingly dominating the Religious Right’s agenda, the organization is not likely to want for things to do.

Americans United, which has monitored the activities of the CNP for years, says the groups holds radical views and is especially dangerous because of its success in connecting Religious Right activism with the secular right’s deep financial pockets.

AU’s Lynn said he hopes the media begins to pay more attention to the CNP and expose its goals.

“If the CNP gets its way,” Lynn said, “the First Amendment, along with the rest of the U.S. Constitution, will be replaced with fundamentalist dogma. In order to ensure religious liberty for future generations of Americans, the CNP’s agenda must be derailed.”

Club of the Most Powerful Gathers in Strictest Privacy

The New York Times reports:

Three times a year for 23 years, a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country have met behind closed doors at undisclosed locations for a confidential conference, the Council for National Policy, to strategize about how to turn the country to the right.

Details are closely guarded.

''The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before of after a meeting,'' a list of rules obtained by The New York Times advises the attendees.

The membership list is ''strictly confidential.'' Guests may attend ''only with the unanimous approval of the executive committee.'' In e-mail messages to one another, members are instructed not to refer to the organization by name, to protect against leaks.

This week, before the Republican convention, the members quietly convened in New York, holding their latest meeting almost in plain sight, at the Plaza Hotel, for what a participant called ''a pep rally'' to re-elect President Bush.

Mr. Bush addressed the group in fall 1999 to solicit support for his campaign, stirring a dispute when news of his speech leaked and Democrats demanded he release a tape recording. He did not.

Not long after the Iraq invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld attended a council meeting.

This week, as the Bush campaign seeks to rally Christian conservative leaders to send Republican voters to the polls, several Bush administration and campaign officials were on hand, according to an agenda obtained by The New York Times.

''The destiny of our nation is on the shoulders of the conservative movement,'' the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, told the gathering as he accepted its Thomas Jefferson award on Thursday, according to an attendee's notes.

The secrecy that surrounds the meeting and attendees like the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly and the head of the National Rifle Association, among others, makes it a subject of suspicion, at least in the minds of the few liberals aware of it.

''The real crux of this is that these are the genuine leaders of the Republican Party, but they certainly aren't going to be visible on television next week,'' Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said.

Mr. Lynn was referring to the list of moderate speakers like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York who are scheduled to speak at the convention.

''The C.N.P. members are not going to be visible next week,'' he said. ''But they are very much on the minds of George W. Bush and Karl Rove every week of the year, because these are the real powers in the party.''

A spokesman for the White House, Trent Duffy, said: ''The American people are quite clear and know what the president's agenda is. He talks about it every day in public forums, not to any secret group of conservatives or liberals. And he will be talking about his agenda on national television in less than a week.''

The administration and re-election effort were major focuses of the group's meeting on Thursday and yesterday. Under Secretary of State John Bolton spoke about plans for Iran, a spokesman for the State Department said.

Likewise, a spokesman for Assistant Attorney General R. Alexander Acosta confirmed that Mr. Acosta had addressed efforts to stop ''human trafficking,'' a major issue among Christian conservatives.

Dr. Frist spoke about supporting Mr. Bush and limiting embryonic stem cell research, two attendees said. Dan Senor, who recently returned from Iraq after working as a spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian administrator, was scheduled to provide an update on the situation there.

Among presentations on the elections, an adviser to Mr. Bush's campaign, Ralph Reed, spoke on ''The 2004 Elections: Who Will Win in November?,'' attendees said.

The council was founded in 1981, just as the modern conservative movement began its ascendance. The Rev. Tim LaHaye, an early Christian conservative organizer and the best-selling author of the ''Left Behind'' novels about an apocalyptic Second Coming, was a founder. His partners included Paul Weyrich, another Christian conservative political organizer who also helped found the Heritage Foundation.

They said at the time that they were seeking to create a Christian conservative alternative to what they believed was the liberalism of the Council on Foreign Relations.

A statement of its mission distributed this week said the council's purposes included ''to acquaint our membership with those in positions of leadership in our nation in order that mutual respect be fostered'' and ''to encourage the exchange of information concerning the methodology of working within the system to promote the values and ends sought by individual members.''

Membership costs several thousand dollars a year, a participant said. Its executive director, Steve Baldwin, did not return a phone call.

Over the years, the council has become a staging ground for conservative efforts to make the Republican Party more socially conservative. Ms. Schlafly, who helped build a grass-roots network to fight for socially conservative positions in the party, is a longstanding member.

At times, the council has also seen the party as part of the problem. In 1998, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family spoke at the council to argue that Republicans were taking conservatives for granted. He said he voted for a third-party candidate in 1996.

Opposition to same-sex marriage was a major conference theme. Although conservatives and Bush campaign officials have denied seeking to use state ballot initiatives that oppose same-sex marriage as a tool to bring out conservative voters, the agenda includes a speech on ''Using Conservative Issues in Swing States,'' said Phil Burress, leader of an initiative drive in Ohio, a battleground state.

The membership list this year was a who's who of evangelical Protestant conservatives and their allies, including Dr. Dobson, Mr. Weyrich, Holland H. Coors of the beer dynasty; Wayne LaPierre of the National Riffle Association, Richard A. Viguerie of American Target Advertising, Mark Mix of the National Right to Work Committee and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform.

Not everyone present was a Bush supporter, however. This year, the council included speeches by Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party and Michael A. Peroutka of the ultraconservative Constitution Party. About a quarter of the members attended their speeches, an attendee said.

Nor was the gathering all business. On Wednesday, members had a dinner in the Rainbow Room, where William F. Buckley Jr. of the National Review was a special guest. At 10 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, members had ''prayer sessions'' in the Rose Room at the hotel.