Colson, Neuhaus, ECT
and Blackwater
in The White
House
ECT Document
Articulated
Vision Animating
Blackwater’s
Corporate Strategy
In 2002, Colson gave a
speech at Calvin College, where he
said: “ ‘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.’” –Blackwater,
17.
In this speech
‘the former Watergate
conspirator [Colson] 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.’ 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 neo conservatives. Author
Damon Linker, who once edited
Neuhaus’ journal, First
Things, termed this phenomenon
the rise of the ‘Theocons.’
ECT Document the
Manifesto of
Movement Prince
Serves and
Bankrolls – an
Agenda Almost
Identical to Bush
Administration
“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.’ 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.’ …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 advisor to
Bush, beginning with the 2000
campaign.
“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.’” –Blackwater,
20.
Prophecy Fulfilled
The servant of the
Lord wrote, “The Protestants
of the United States will be foremost
in stretching their hands across the
gulf to grasp the hand of
spiritualism; they will reach over
the abyss to clasp hands with the
Roman power; and under
the influence of this threefold
union, this country will follow
in the steps of Rome in trampling on
the rights of conscience.”
GC 588.
Here we have Richard
Neuhaus, once a Lutheran minister who
became a Roman Catholic priest, the
leading theocon, who is in the inner
circle of the White House, Chuck
Colson, a Watergate conspirator, in
the inner circle of the White House,
and Erik Prince, once Dutch Reformed,
who became an ardent Roman Catholic,
who represents the armed wing of the
combined Evangelical/Catholic
movement, all on the inside with the
White House.
ECT Document Concludes
With
Responsibility of
Evangelicals
and Catholics to
Prepare World
For Second Coming
The ECT document
concludes,” ‘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 of the
Third Millennium. It may be the
Springtime of world missions and
great Christian expansion…. 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.’” –ECT document
quoted in Blackwater, 21.
A Vision of
America’s Religious
and Political
Future
“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
Reverend Pat Roberson and Michael
Novak of the conservative American
Enterprise Institute. 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.’” –Damon
Linker, The Theocons, pp.
85-86, quoted in Blackwater, pp.
21, 22. (emphasis mine)
Blackwater Serving As
a Sort of
Armed Wing of the
Catholic-
Evangelical-Neocon
Holy War
Six years later, with
Bush, the Theocons, president in
power, Colson appeared with his
friend Erik Prince at Calvin College
once again. This time Colson quoted
‘a nineteenth century Calvinist
scholar who said, ‘Rome is not
an antagonist but stands on our
side…Therefore, let me ask, if
Roman Catholic theologians take up
the sword to do valiant and skillful
battle against the tendency that we
ourselves mean to fight to the death,
is it no part of wisdom to accept
their valuable help?’ Erik
Prince has been in the thick of this
right-wing effort to unite
conservatives Catholics,
evangelicals, and neoconservatives in
a common theoconservative holy war
– with Blackwater
serving as a sort of armed wing of
the movement. As Prince
himself once envisioned the role of
his mercenaries, ‘everybody
carries guns, just like Jeremiah
rebuilding the temple in Israel
– a sword in one hand and a
trowel in the other.’”
[Nathan Hodge, ‘Blackwater CEO
Touts Private Peacekeeping
Model,’ Defense Daily, February
23, 2005.] Quoted in Blackwater, 22.
A Great Network
An examination of
Erik’s connections reveals a
great network. He has been
contributing heavily to evangelical
Christian causes, “including
large donations to a slew of
Protestant schools and
colleges,” including $200,000 to
the Haggai Institute in Atlanta,
which has trained more than sixty
thousand [that’s 60,000]
evangelical leaders’ around the
globe. He has served on the board of
directors of and donated to Christian
Freedom International, whose board of
directors includes Blackwater
lobbyist Paul Behrends.
School Vouchers
__________________
Of course, it was not
Jeremiah, but Nehemiah, that Erik
meant. “They which builded on
the wall, and they that bare burdens,
with those that laded, every one
with one of his hands wrought in the
work, and with the other hand held
a weapon. For the builders,
every had his sword girded by his
side, and so builded.” Nehemiah
4:17,18. But Nehemiah’s builders
did not compromise. Nehemiah
and his men signed their covenant,
and here was part of its content:
‘They clave to
their brethren, their nobles, and
entered into a curse, and into an
oath, to walk in God’s law,
which was given by Moses the servant
of God, and to observe and do all
the commandments of the LORD our
Lord, and his judgments and his
statutes; And that we would not
give our daughters unto the people of
the land, nor take their daughters
for our sons: And if the
people of the land bring ware or any
victuals on the Sabbath day to sell, that
we would not buy it of them on the
Sabbath, or on the holy day:”
Nehemiah 10:29-31.
One of the favorite
causes is school vouchers [Blackwater,
23], a leading wedge to continue
breaking down the wall of separation
between church and state.
Blackwater’s
WPPS Contract:
The Elite Private
Guard of the
Global War
“In June 2004, at
the end of Bremer’s tenure,
Blackwater was handed one of the most
valuable and prestigious U.S.
government contracts on the market,
through the State Department
little-known Worldwide Personal
Protective Service (WPPS) program. State
Department documents describe the
WPPS program as a government
‘diplomatic security’
initiative to protect U.S. officials
and ‘certain foreign government
high level officials whenever the
need arises.’ In the government
documents, the work is described as
‘providing armed, qualified,
protective services details’
and, if ordered, ‘Counter
Assault Teams and Long Range Marksmen
teams.’ The companies might also
provide translators and perform
intelligence work. The State
Department warned the companies to
‘Ensure that contractor-assigned
protective detail personnel are
prepared to, and in fact shall
operate and live in austere, at times
unsettled conditions, anywhere in the
world.’ The contract also said
that if necessary, personnel, who are
American citizens, will be issued an
appropriate, official or diplomatic
passport.’ Private contractors
were also authorized to recruit and
train foreign nationals and to
‘conduct protective security
operations overseas with
them.’…
“For Blackwater,
the WPPS contract was a milestone
that solidified the company’s
role as preferred mercenary firm
or the U.S. government, the elite
private guard for the
administration’s global war.”
Blackwater, 165, 166.
The Permeable Membrane
Between “Overseas”
and “Back
Home”
The Osmotic Membrane
What is taking place
overseas in the military and
mercenary armies will all eventually
come home to roost. The membrane
between “overseas” and
“back home” is very thin
indeed, and completely permeable.
“The membrane
between foreign and domestic policy
is quite osmotic. The use of
torture, write the editors of the
Washington Post, carries enormous
dangers for us, because our
willingness to engage in it corrodes
democratic values. The administration
can talk ‘democracy’ all it
wants, but if you are practicing
torture, it becomes unclear in what
sense you are still a democracy. The
whole thing is a slippery slope. If
you entertain the moral argument that
if you have a captive who knows of an
imminent attack that will cost
thousands of lives, torture is
justified, the question then arises
as to where the cutoff point is. Why
stop with the captive, after all? Why
not his family, or his friends?”
Morris Berman, Dark Age America:
The Final Phase of Empire. New
York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006, p.
226.
“It was precisely
in this way that the practice of
torture rapidly spread through the
French security apparatus in Algeria.
In Israel, it went from rare
exception to nearly standard
practice, in a misguided effort
to prevent civilian acts of
terrorism. And once it becomes
common, it undermines a
society’s democratic norms,
whereby a nation is defending what it
stands for by subverting its own
values in order to defend them.
If Torture is
Justified, Why Be
Exercised Over
Curbing of Civil
Liberties?
“Furthermore, if
torture is justified in the defense
of our way of life, then why get
exercised over the curbing of civil
liberties. Which is obviously a much
milder issue in comparison…at
least for the time being…The
curbing of civil liberties associated
with the prevention of terrorism
actually got under way with Janet
Reno in 1996, when the government
passed the Effective Death Penalty
and Anti-terrorism Act, authorizing
the Justice Department to prosecute
individuals based on their
political beliefs and associations, loosen
the carefully crafted rules governing
federal wiretaps, criminalize
fund-raising for lawful activities
associated with unpopular causes,
jail permanent residents merely for
their affiliations or political
activity, even when lawful, with no
judicial review, and use secret
evidence (that only the judge can
see) in trials and detention hearing
(the burden of proof being placed on
the accused).
