The Asian Times puts out interesting material. In fact, there is some good background in the article mentioned below, when you disregard the latent anti-Semitism, vast-right-wing-conspiracy and mafia redux rubbish. That will be hard to do.
Asian Times
Jun 23, 2006
US: Danger, danger everywhere
By Tom Barry
On three occasions since the end of World War II - in 1950, 1976 and 2004 - elite citizen committees have organized to warn the United States of what they viewed as looming threats to national security.
These three Committees on the Present Danger (CPD) aimed to ratchet up the level of fear among the US public and policy community. In each case, the committees leveraged fear in attempts to increase military budgets, to mobilize the country for war, and to beat back isolationist, anti-interventionist and realist forces in US politics.
In the early 1950s and in the late 1970s, the Committees on the Present Danger succeeded in shifting the US to a war footing - first to launch the Cold War, and two decades later to end the move in the policy community toward detente and arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union.
The success of the first danger committees has inspired the country's hawks and neo-conservatives to imitate the CPD model. Both the Center for Security Policy, founded by Frank Gaffney in 1988, and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), founded in 1997 by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, cite the CPD model...
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