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Frank Gaffney, director of the hardline neoconservative Center for Security Policy (CSP), is a leading anti-Islamic pundit in the United States who advocates for controversial weapons programs, a right-wing Israeli line on Mideast peace issues, and an expansive "war on terror" targeting "Islamofascists" (a popular Gaffney term). Gaffney has been a militarist gadfly since the 1970s, getting his start working on the staff of Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-WA) before joining the Ronald Reagan Pentagon working under Richard Perle.

In August 2011, the Center for American Progress (CAP) identified Gaffney and CSP as being part of “a small, tightly networked group of misinformation experts” who have been instrumental in the “rise of Islamophobia” in the United States.[1] Others included in the group are David Yerushalmi of the Society of Americans for National Existence, Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and Stop Islamization of America, and Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. The report, titled“Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America” and based on an exhaustive research of tax documents revealing the funding networks supporting Islamophobia campaigns, also identified a small number of rightwing foundations that appear to have been the key funders of this network, including the Bradley and Scaife foundations, as well as the Donor’s Forum.[2]

As an example of Gaffney’s “Sharia nonsense,” the report cites Gaffney’s claims regarding the Barack Obama administration’s logo for the Missile Defense Agency, which features a crescent-type shape, which Gaffney worried was a sign that the president might “submit” to Islam.[3] In a February 2010 article, Gaffney claimed, “Team Obama's anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter's authorities call Shariah.”[4]

In 2010, Gaffney’s CSP published a report titled “Shariah: The Threat to America,” which contends that U.S. Muslims are waging a “stealth jihad” aimed at imposing Islamic law on the United States and proposes prosecuting those who practice Sharia.[5] Citing the report, which was penned by David Yerushalmi, Gaffney wildly claimed that it“is now public knowledge that nearly every major Muslim organization in the United States is actually controlled by the MB [Muslim Brotherhood] or a derivative organization. Consequently, most of the Muslim-American groups of any prominence in America are now known to be, as a matter of fact, hostile to the United States and its Constitution.”Commenting on this view, Nathan Brown, director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University, said “Gaffney is a self-parody. I have better things to do with my time than investigating the veracity of his raving.”[6]

Nevertheless, despite—or perhaps because of—his bizarre views, Gaffney has “considerable influence on mainstream political discourse,” according to CAP. He isfrequently cited in the press as an "expert" on U.S. foreign policy, appearing on the BBC and other radio and TV broadcasts. He is also a prolific writer, having been published in most major media outlets and opinion journals, including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Republic, Washington Post, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, National Review, Newsday, and Commentary magazine.[7]

Trajectory

Gaffney has supported a long line of rightist and neoconservative advocacy groups and research institutes. He was a founding member of the Project for the New American Century, a neocon-led letterhead group formed in 1997 by William Kristol and Robert Kagan to champion a "Reaganite" foreign policy based on military strength and an interventionist overseas agenda. Gaffney is also a contributing expert for the Israel-based Ariel Center, which maintains a number of close links to rightist pro-Israel groups in the United States, and is a member of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), the hawkish anti-communist Cold War-era group that was revived after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to champion the war on terror. He is an advisor for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, created after 9/11 with the purported mission of "promoting pluralism, defending democratic values, and fighting the ideologies that drive terrorism," and was an advisor to the now largely defunct Americans for Victory over Terrorism, created in 2002 by a William Bennett-led group of hardliners and neoconservatives.

Gaffney's views on U.S. foreign policy were shaped during the formative years of the neoconservative political faction in the early 1970s, when some disaffected liberals rallied around Sen. "Scoop" Jackson, a hardline Democrat known for his combative support of Israel and sharp anti-communism. When Jackson failed to garner support for his presidential election campaign in the mid-1970s, many of his disaffected liberal followers (who were derisively tagged as "neoconservatives" by left-leaning political figures) joined the Republican Party.

After the presidential victory of Ronald Reagan, Gaffney joined the Pentagon, where he served as an aide to then-Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle. Because of his pugnacity, especially toward State Department officials, Gaffney earned the moniker "Perle's Bulldog." After Perle resigned in 1987, Gaffney was nudged out of the Pentagon by Perle's replacement Frank Carlucci. Gaffney subsequently created the Center for Security Policy, which counts among its advisors an impressive list of retired military brass and elite public policy figures.

Like other promoters of the "peace through strength" credo espoused by CSP, Gaffney criticized Reagan for slipping toward the liberal frameworks of détente and arms control during his second term. Frustrated former Pentagon officials, including Perle, gathered for a brainstorming session after Gaffney's ouster. "What we need is the Domino's Pizza of the policy business," said Perle. "If you don't get your policy analysis in 30 minutes, you get your money back." Soon thereafter, with a start-up grant from the Olin Foundation, Gaffney founded the CSP.[8]

According to Gaffney, the CSP "prides itself on being loosely modeled on the Committee on the Present Danger," which was also cited as the model for PNAC by its founders. Included on the CSP advisory council and board have been at least a dozen former CPD members. In a CSP annual report, Gaffney says CSP is "an organization for our time ... [whose] lean, agile organizational structure enables the Center to bring to today's debate what we call 'precision-guided ideas.'"

Before becoming undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith was the CSP's chairman and legal counsel as well as a financial contributor. Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney have also long been close associates of CSP, which has been described as the "Star Warriors Hall of Fame." Rumsfeld, in addition to being a CSP "Keeper of the Flame" award winner in 1998, has been a CSP financial backer, and Cheney was formerly a CSP board member.[9]

In 1990 Gaffney scoffed at those who had been persuaded by Mikhail Gorbachev. The CSP's mission was "to promote world peace through American strength," Gaffney asserted. Holding firm, he continued warning of the imperial designs of the then-collapsing Soviet Union. Gaffney discounted evidence that the country was rapidly disintegrating and dismissed the sincerity of Gorbachev's overtures of cooperation with the United States. "Now is the time for a new Team B," urged Gaffney, "and a clear-eyed assessment of the abiding Soviet (and other) challenges that dictate a continued, robust defense posture.”[10]

The Soviet Union imploded before Gaffney could mobilize right-wing congressional members to establish an independent threat assessments commission. However, during the 1990s the Center for Security Policy became one of the most influential policy institutes in the right's counter-establishment. Working with the congressional members of its advisory board, Gaffney's center was instrumental in establishing two independent commissions—chaired by Donald Rumsfeld—that challenged the Clinton administration's reluctance to authorize a space weapons program and a multi-tiered missile defense system.

In an article in the Nation, journalist Jason Vest wrote: "Beyond compiling an A-list of influential conservative hawks, Gaffney has been prolific over the past 15 years, churning out a constant stream of reports (as well as regular columns for the Washington Times) making the case that the gravest threats to U.S. national security are China, Iraq, still-undeveloped ballistic missiles launched by rogue states, and the passage of or adherence to virtually any form of arms control treaty. Gaffney and CSP's prescriptions for national security have been fairly simple: Gut all arms control treaties, push ahead with weapons systems virtually everyone agrees should be killed (such as the V-22 Osprey), give no quarter to the Palestinians and, most important, go full-steam ahead on just about every national missile defense program. (CSP was heavily represented on the late-1990s Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, which was instrumental in keeping the program alive during the Clinton years)."[11]

Terrorism, Islamofascism, and National Security

It was not until after 9/11, however, that Gaffney began zeroing in on what he saw as burgeoning international terrorist networks threatening the United States. As Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service wrote, "Precisely whom the war is being waged against depends on the week. But since the Center's founding in 1988, the enemy has included the Soviet Union and its real or suspected allies; China; the Oslo peace process; Arabs (especially Palestinians); the United Nations and the Law of the Sea, in particular; anyone opposed to ever-bigger defense budgets and expensive, if unworkable, missile-defense programs; and, most recently, 'Islamofascists' (from al-Qaida to Saudi Arabia and the UAE to Iran)."[12]

Gaffney says that post-9/11 the main threat to peace and security is "Islamofascism," which is a terms he says "makes clear that the war is about much more than Iraq and Afghanistan" and includes those countries—namely, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea, China, Cuba, Venezuela, and South Africa—which provide direct or indirect support for the Islamofascists "in their death struggle with us."[13]

A typical example of his discourse on this topic was a March 2006 article for the Jewish World Review titled “Islamofascist ‘Coup’ in Turkey,” in which Gaffney claimed that "Islamofascists" were poised to create a “Muslim caliphate,” in this case by trying to overturn Ataturk's secular legacy in Turkey. Wrote Gaffney: "Ending Ataturk's experiment and restoring the Muslim caliphate it supplanted has long been a goal of Islamofascists, adherents to a dangerous political movement whose global reach and terrorist methods have largely been enabled by decades of investment by the world's repressive Islamist regimes, led by Saudi Arabia. The rise of Islamofascism has prompted some in the West to hope that Turkey would continue to serve as a model for the Muslim world even after an avowed Islamist named Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2002 parlayed a minority of votes into a monopoly of power. This delusion contributed to the European Union allowing its negotiations for Turkish accession to the EU to be skillfully used by Erdogan to checkmate Turkey's military." He concluded: "It behooves the European Union to reinforce the political impact of such sentiment by making clear that Islamofascist behavior will be what precludes Turkey from being eligible for membership, not efforts by the Turkish military to counter the Islamists' takeover. And the United States and other freedom-loving nations must make clear that they view an Islamist Turkey as no model for the Muslim world and a threat to that nation's standing as a valued member of the free one."[14]

Two months prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Gaffney predicted during an interview for "Four Corners," an investigative TV news program of Australian Broadcasting Network, "I believe that when you find, as you will I hope shortly, that the Iraqi people welcome the end of this horrible regime, even if it comes at some further expense to themselves, knowing as they do that the alternative is more of the horror that they've lived under for the past two or three decades. Ah you'll see I think an outpouring of appreciation for their liberation that will make what we saw in Afghanistan recently pale by comparison. You'll see, moreover, evidence in the files and the bunkers that become available to our military, evidence not only of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs and his future ambitions for their use perhaps and for aggression against his neighbors, but also, I would be willing to bet, evidence of his past complicity with acts of terror against the West, perhaps more generally but certainly against the United States which in turn I think will further vindicate the course of action that this president is courageously embarked upon."[15]

Gaffney has frequently invoked the notorious Team B exercise of the mid-1970s—during which a team of outside analysts reinterpreted CIA intelligence regarding the Soviet threat to the United States—as a model for future threat assessment efforts. Ignoring the fact that most experts agree that Team B misrepresented the Soviet threat, Gaffney has repeatedly called for establishing a new Team B, most famously in 1990 after the Soviet threat had all but vanished.

He repeated this assertion again during his interview on Four Corners, saying: "Well I think one simply has to look at what the Soviets actually did and what they had, what they were building, what they were planning, to see that in fact the Team B assessment was vastly more accurate in its depiction of all of that, than was an assessment that they had a huge economy, they were not devoting much of it to military activities, the activities were not terribly threatening, they did not anticipate or desire to meet, let alone exceed, our military capabilities and the like, which was the sort of standard fare of the time in the intelligence community as I recall."[16]

Although largely devoted to U.S. security and defense policies, CSP also spends a lot of energy championing hardline Israeli security. In May 2006, for example, the institute launched an advertising campaign in the United States protesting a plan by the Israel government that CSP said was "giving territory to terrorists." When unveiling the 30-second spot, Gaffney said: "[Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert needs to know that Americans will not support, let alone finance, such an action that would threaten the future survival of both Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, endanger the effort to consolidate the liberation of Iraq, and create a new safe-haven from which Islamofascist terrorists will be able to plot and launch attacks against the United States."

Gaffney was the lead author of War Footing: Ten Steps America Must Take to Survive and Prevail in the War for the Free World. Among the other authors included in this 2005 book published by the Naval Institute Press are James Woolsey, General Tom McInerney, General Paul Vallely, Alex Alexiev, Andrew McCarthy, Claudia Rosett, Michael Rubin, Daniel Gouré, and two CSP scholars, Caroline Glick and Michael Waller.

At a 2006 CPD presentation, Gaffney warned that Tehran "is working toward a capability that could destroy America as we know it." According to Gaffney, Iran's missile program appears designed to detonate a nuclear weapon "in space high above the United States, unleashing an immensely powerful electro-magnetic pulse (EMP)" that would destroy the U.S. electrical grid. The result could reduce the United States "to a pre-industrial society in the blink of an eye.”[17]

Affiliations

Gaffney is also one of the principals of the Set America Free Coalition. The coalition—which includes military contractors, neocons, and greens—shares staff and principals with the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. It believes that national security is closely connected with energy security, especially from Middle East oil. Its slogan is "Cut Dependence on Foreign Oil. Secure America."[18]

The largely neocon group includes Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY); Clifford May, president of Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Robert McFarlane; Thomas Neumann of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Daniel Pipes of Middle East Forum, James Woolsey, and Meyrav Wurmser of the Hudson Institute. Other notables include Gary Bauer of American Values, former Sen. Lincoln Chaffee (R-RI), David Harris of the American Jewish Committee, and Milton Copulos of the National Defense Council Foundation.

CSP's board and advisory council include many figures with strong ties to defense industries. To name just a few: Stanley Ebner is a chief Boeing lobbyist; Charles Kupperman is vice president, Strategic Integration & Operations, Missile Defense Systems, Boeing Company; Douglas Graham is Lockheed's director of defense systems; and Amoretta Hoeber is a former TRW executive (Nation, September 2, 2002). Other CSP advisory council members include former Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA), Robert Joseph, Phyllis Kaminsky, and Fred Ikle.

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.