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Freedom House, a largely U.S. government-funded group, was founded in 1941 by Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt in an effort to support President Franklin Roosevelt's advocacy of U.S. entrance in World War II at a time when, according to Freedom House's in-house history, "isolationist sentiments were running high in the United States." When the war ended, "Freedom House took up the struggle against the other 20th century totalitarian threat, Communism. ... The organization's leadership was convinced that the spread of democracy would be the best weapon against totalitarian ideologies. Freedom House thus embraced a mission to work to expand freedom around the world and to strengthen human rights and civil liberties in the United States. Freedom House thus strongly endorsed the post-war Atlantic Alliance, as well as such key policies and institutions as the Marshall Plan and NATO."

Since the 9/11 attacks and the onset of the "war on terror," Freedom House has devoted considerable energy to assessing the impact of "radical Islam" both in and outside the United States and advocating policies in many countries that have been the focus of the George W. Bush administration's anti-terror campaign. Among its initiatives have been a 2005 study purportedly showing the pervasive influence of radical Islam in U.S. mosques, the initiation in 2004 of a special study entitled Citizenship and Justice: A Survey of Women's Rights in the Middle East and North Africa , and U.S.-funded campaigns within Iran.

Freedom House's March 2003 "Statement on the Iraq War" underscored this shift in looking at Islamic countries. The statement repeated a core claim of the Bush administration—that the Iraq War will help create democratic reform throughout the Middle East: "The building of a democratic Iraq will require a serious long-term commitment of time and resources. Freedom House will do its part to press our government and other governments to make a serious commitment to this effort. For we believe that if the effort is made, it can have major positive implications for the future development of the Middle East, particularly the Gulf Region. Throughout most of its history, the oil rich Gulf region has been prey to colonial rule and domestic despotism. But the potential for democratic change in the Gulf is now increasingly evident. The Gulf monarchies of Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar are moving toward constitutional rule in which significant power resides with democratically elected representatives. There is widespread democratic ferment and overwhelming public support for democracy in Iran. Together with successful democratic reform in Iraq, the Gulf has the potential of making a clean break with a past rooted in repression and entering into the growing global community of democratic states."

During a March 2006 speech at Freedom House, Bush emphasized the group's work on Islamic countries, saying: "Freedom House has declared the year 2005 was one of the most successful years for freedom since the Freedom House began measuring world freedom more than 30 years ago. From Kabul to Baghdad to Beirut and beyond, freedom's tide is rising, and we should not rest, and we must not rest, until the promise of liberty reaches every people and every nation. In our history, most democratic progress has come with the end of a war. After the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II and the collapse of communism in the Cold War, scores of nations cleared away the rubble of tyranny and laid the foundations of freedom and democracy. Today, the situation is very different. Liberty is advancing not in a time of peace, but in the midst of a war, at a moment when a global movement of great brutality and ambition is fighting freedom's progress with all the hateful violence they can muster. In this new century, the advance of freedom is a vital element of our strategy to protect the American people, and to secure the peace for generations to come. We're fighting the terrorists across the world because we know that if America were not fighting this enemy in other lands, we'd be facing them here in our own land."

In a report about Bush's Freedom House speech, the Financial Times (March 30, 2006) reported that the organization had received U.S. government funding to undertake clandestine activities in Iran. Reported the newspaper: "Few in the Washington audience on Wednesday realized that Freedom House, an independent institution founded over 60 years ago by Eleanor Roosevelt, former first lady, is one of several organizations selected by the State Department to receive funding for clandestine activities inside Iran. Peter Ackerman, chairman of the board of trustees, who introduced Mr. Bush, is also the founder of a separate organization that promotes non-violent, civic disobedience as a form of resistance to repressive regimes. His International Center for Non-Violent Conflict has organized discreet 'workshops' in the Gulf emirate of Dubai to teach Iranians the lessons learned from east European movements. ... Mr. Ackerman, who is very wealthy from an earlier career as a financier, says he does not accept government money. Questioned by the FT, Freedom House confirmed it had received funding from the State Department for activities in Iran. It declined to give details but said it was not involved in Mr. Ackerman's work in Dubai."

(In a letter to the editor of Right Web News, Stephen Zunes, an ICNC board member, challenged a number of assertions made about ICNC and Ackerman in the Financial Times article cited above. In particular, he pointed out that Ackerman stepped down as chair of ICNC after taking on the post at Freedom House; that ICNC's independence from the U.S. government was beyond dispute, a fact made plain by its tax returns; and that it is wrong to imply that ICNC focuses merely on regimes opposed by the U.S. government. For more, see Right Web News, August 3, 2007.)

While touting itself as having a "bipartisan character," Freedom House is often associated with hawkish and neoconservative factions within both major U.S. parties, a fact made clear by many of its current and past supporters and board members, which have included former CIA Director James Woolsey, ex-Reagan administration official Kenneth Adelman, the late UN Amb. Jeane Kirkpatrick, and former member of the Committee on the Present Danger, Max Kampelman. Other board members have included the conservative Rolling Stone writer P.J. O'Rourke; Samuel Huntington, a Harvard professor who says the post-Cold War period will be dominated by a "clash of civilizations" between the Muslim and Christian worlds; Ruth Wedgwood, a right-leaning human rights lawyer; and Arthur Waldron, a longtime foreign policy hawk who has been a leading advocate for a hardline China policy. Many of these individuals have also supported the work of a number of other conservative organizations, including the Project for the New American Century, the Center for Security Policy, and the American Enterprise Institute. Other Freedom House supporters and scholars have included Mark Falcoff, the late Penn Kemble, Nina Shea , and Daniel Pipes.

Freedom House is perhaps best known for its yearly "Freedom in the World" report, which rates countries according to their level of political rights and civil liberties. The group has also served as an umbrella organization for a number of more specialized groups, like the Center for Religious Freedom led by Carol Adelman (now based at the neoconservative Hudson Institute) and the now-defunct American Committee for Peace in Chechnya. Aside from its two offices in the United States (in Washington DC and New York City), Freedom House also maintains overseas offices in Mexico, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Serbia, North Africa, Jordan, and Hungary.

Observers have raised serious concerns about the group's fairness and objectivity for decades. During the Reagan administration, Freedom House was criticized for serving as a U.S. propaganda instrument, supporting the death squad-linked ARENA party in El Salvador while attacking the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, championing Contra leaders like Arturo Cruz, and serving as a conduit for funds from the National Endowment for Democracy (see GroupWatch Profile: Freedom House).

Its work on radical Islam and association with the Bush administration's war on terror has been similarly criticized. One example is the Center for Religious Freedom, which was created in 1986 to report "on the religious persecution of individuals and groups abroad." Before the center moved to the Hudson Institute in 2006, its website revealed a highly selective agenda that said that the center "insists that U.S. foreign policy defend Christians and Jews, Muslim dissidents and minorities, and other religious minorities in countries such as Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Iran, and Sudan. It is fighting the imposition of harsh Islamic law in the new Iraq and Afghanistan and opposes blasphemy laws in Muslim countries that suppress more tolerant and pro-American thought."

In early 2005, the center published "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques," an 89-page study of some 200 documents allegedly "disseminated, published, or otherwise generated by the government of Saudi Arabia and collected from more than a dozen mosques in the United States." The study concluded that a "totalitarian ideology of hatred" is being "mainstreamed within our borders through the efforts of a foreign government, namely Saudi Arabia."

Commenting on the study's findings, Daniel Pipes, head of the hardline neoconservative Middle East Forum, wrote in a 2005 op-ed: "The insidious Saudi assault on America must be made central to the (misnamed) war on terror. The Bush administration needs to confront the domestic menace that the Wahabi kingdom presents to America. That means junking the fantasy of Saudi friendship and seeing the country, like China, as a formidable rival whose ambitions for a very different world order must be repulsed and contained."

However, the center's study on Saudi hate ideology seemed to suffer from a problem that critics charge is endemic in much of Freedom House's work: It drew stark conclusions from inadequate, selective research. In this case, Freedom House seemed to rifle through the libraries of only a handful of mosques across the United States and then implied in its conclusions that what it found in these mosques applied generally to mosques throughout the country. The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) opined in a review of the Freedom House report: "The study clearly shows that these 15 American mosques included some very hateful books in [their] libraries. However, to suggest that all American mosques are filled with such publications is a stretch."

ISPU criticized the center for its "uncritical" support of the view, promoted by Hisham Kabbani and Stephen Schwartz, that 80-85% of American mosques are controlled by Wahabbis. The institute pointed to its own 2004 study of Detroit-area mosques, which found that only 6% of the city's mosque-attending population had salafist/wahabbi views, and concluded that "the vast majority of American Muslims eschew extremist views." Although its study had received widespread attention and was released months before the Freedom House report, says ISPU, the Center for Religious Freedom failed to acknowledge or refer to its results.

ISPU concluded: "American-Muslim leaders must thoroughly scrutinize this study. Despite its limitations, the study highlights an ugly undercurrent in modern Islamic discourse that American-Muslims must openly confront. However, in the vigor to expose strains of extremism, we must not forget that open discussion is the best tool to debunk the extremist literature rather than a suppression of First Amendment rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution."

Freedom House's highly touted "Freedom in the World" reports, which are widely cited by the press but get less credence in the academic world, have also been criticized. Thus, while the Washington Post, for example, used Freedom House's report to give context to Bush administration rhetoric regarding democracy in the Middle East, academics tend to carefully qualify their usage of it, often going so far as to disqualify it because of perceived ingrained biases in research methods. (See, for example, "Rice Limits Rhetoric, And Maybe Impact," Washington Post, June 24, 2005.) In an example from academia, Marc Rosenbaum and Idean Salehyan, writing in article for the Journal of Peace Research, argue that they chose the so-called Polity dataset, an alternative to Freedom House's country dataset, because of "concern that the Freedom House indicators are biased in the direction of U.S. foreign policy preferences."

Justin Raimundo, a libertarian who is editorial director of the popular website Antiwar.com, has written of the group's freedom reports: "The U.S. government-funded organization known as 'Freedom House' has recently delivered a Christmas present to Russian President Vladimir Putin: his country has been downgraded, from 'partially free' to 'not free.' Israel, of course, is deemed completely 'free,' in spite of treating its Arab subjects worse than Sparta ever treated its helots. Putin is no Jeffersonian democrat, but neither has he rounded up and imprisoned an entire people and sought to ethnically cleanse them from their homeland. Freedom House standards are elastic, bending to the dictates of American foreign policy" (December 24, 2004).

Despite its strong association with U.S. foreign policy objectives, Freedom House has at times been critical of Washington. One notable example was the 2006 letter to Bush urging the government to bring its interrogation and detention practices in the war on terror into compliance with international humanitarian law: "We are writing because we believe that the continuation of current U.S. policies and practices related to interrogation and detention have directly undermined the success of those efforts. ... While Freedom House has documented the extraordinary expansion of freedom over the last three decades, we remain concerned about the millions of people around the world who do not enjoy fundamental freedoms. Countries around the world continue the practice of torture and physical abuse. The United States has been—and should be—the international leader in combating those practices. To continue to do so effectively, the United States must lead by example. Sadly, that example has been tarnished in the last several years."

According to its 2006 Annual Report, Freedom House received more than $20 million in federal grants in fiscal 2006. Its operating budget appears to be about $26 million. Private contributions, including from several conservative foundations, made up the rest. Private donors in fiscal 2006 included Ken Adelman, Kampelman, Wedgwood, and Ellen Bork. According to MediaTransparency.org, funding has come from Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife, and the Olin Foundation. In 2003, Smith Richardson gave $200,000 to support work by Nina Shea on U.S. policy toward the spread of Sharia law, work on the state of civil liberties around the globe, and peace-building efforts by Freedom House's now-defunct American Committee for Peace in Chechnya. Scaife and Bradley donated a combined total of $270,000 to the Center for Religious Freedom's "Sharia project" and related work in the same year.