A snapshot of CFR dominance.(Constitutional Rights Foundation)

The major media widely reported the January 5 meeting President George W. Bush had with current and former secretaries of State and Defense at the White House to discuss the war in Iraq. In fact, President Bush and the other participants posed in the Oval Office for the photo below.

However, the media overlooked a very important aspect of the photo, and that is that 14 of the 17 policymakers in the picture currently belong to the Council on Foreign Relations. Two others (Rumsfeld and Laird) are formers members of the CFR. Of the 17, George W. Bush himself is the only one who has not belonged to the organization.

The CFR, a private organization based in New York City, has about 4,200 members, several hundred of whom are in the Bush administration. Hundreds of CFR members also served in past administrations, irrespective of whether the president in the White House was a Republican or a Democrat. The picture below provides just a snapshot of the dominance that the CFR has held over the executive branch of the U.S. government for decades.

Is the CFR dominance at the upper echelons of our government newsworthy? Imagine how the liberals in media would howl if the president assembled a group of 16 influential policy advisers, and it turned out that all but the president himself were past or present members of the National Rifle ...