Frank Gaffney

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Frank J. Gaffney Jr. (born 1953) is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the The Washington Times, Jewish World Review and Townhall.com, and a notable neo-conservative. He is a 1975 graduate of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University and holds a graduate degree from the Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

Gaffney began his public service career working as an aide in the office of Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson under Richard Perle in the 1970s. In April of 1987, Gaffney was nominated to and temporarily acted in the position of Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration. His appointment was blocked by the U.S. Senate.

In 1988, Gaffney established the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a self-described conservative national security and defense policy organization. The CSP is subsidized by donors supportive of conservative causes, and includes the Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation, the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation, and the William H. Donner Foundaction. [1]

He is a signatory, along with several major figures in the George W. Bush administration, of the June 3, 1997 "Statement of Principles"[2] from the Project for the New American Century, "a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership."[3]

In 2002, he was banned from the weekly "Wednesday Meeting" of the Leave Us Alone Coalition hosted by conservative activist Grover Norquist for attacking what Gaffney claimed were Bush administration ties to radical Islamic groups. Gaffney's statement angered Norquist, who referred to him as "a sick, little bigot".^{[citation needed]} In a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove dismissed Gaffney's assertions regarding President Bush stating "there's no there there" ("In Difficult Times, Muslims count on unlikely hero", by Tom Hamburger and Glenn R. Simpson, Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2003).

Gaffney is the lead author of War Footing (Naval Institute Press, 2005), a collection of essays that "...offer ten specific steps that Americans, as individuals and as communities, can take to ensure their way of life and safety and the future well-being of their children and grandchildren."[4]

On February 13, 2007, Gaffney wrote a commentary for the Washington Times in which he misattributed the following quote to Abraham Lincoln:

"Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged."

The quote was used as the basis for an opinion article suggesting such treatment is appropriate for current members of Congress who are critical of what Gaffney describes as the "War for the Free World." Lincoln never uttered these words. Glenn Greenwald has documented how the purported Lincoln quote has appeared in several writings, after first appearing as a result of a copy editor's error in a 2003 article in Insight magazine. [5]

In an article appearing in the January 2007 edition of Vanity Fair about neo-conservatives who pushed for the invasion of Iraq, Gaffney says of President Bush:

"'He doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course,' Gaffney says. 'He talks about it, but the policy doesn't track with the rhetoric, and that's what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the world and at home. It also creates the sense that you can take him on with impunity.'"

As recently as February 22, 2007, on Tucker Carlson's MSNBC program, Gaffney claimed that the Iraq Study Group found that Saddam Hussein had active WMD programs at the time of the US invasion in March, 2003 -- when in fact the Iraq Study Group concluded the exact opposite.^{[citation needed]} President George W. Bush himself has admitted that Saddam did not have WMD: "The main reason we went into Iraq at the time was we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. It turns out he didn't."^{[citation needed]} Gaffney further claims that Saddam was planning to ship these biological and chemical weapons to the US in "aerosol cans and perfume sprayers," an assertion that he repeats frequently without offering substantiation, although the only citations to this claim come from Gaffney himself.

He says that:

"the international situation bequeathed by Bill Clinton to George Bush was considerably more threatening than was widely perceived at the time," [6].

He appeared on FahrenHYPE 9/11, the conservative documentary that was intended as a rebuttal to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. He is a founding member of the Set America Free Coalition, dedicated to reducing dependence on foreign oil.