The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) describes itself as a non-profit, non-partisan policy institute "working to defend free nations against their enemies". It was founded shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks to address what it regards as the "threat facing America, Israel and the West". Its stated objectives are promoting human rights, defending "free and democratic nations", and opposing terrorism which it defines as "the deliberate use of violence against civilians to achieve political objectives".[1]
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It conducts "research and education on international terrorism—the most serious security threat to the United States and other free, democratic nations. It advocates United States military intervention in various muslim majority nations such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Pakistan, and Palestine.
FDD's chairman is James Woolsey. FDD's president is Clifford D. May and its executive director is Mark Dubowitz. Its Leadership Council is composed of prominent thinkers and leaders from the defense, intelligence, and policy communities including Paula Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Bill Kristol, Louis J. Freeh, Joseph Lieberman, Newt Gingrich, Max Kampelman, and Robert McFarlane.
Its Board of Advisors include Gary Bauer, Rep. Eric Cantor, Gene Gately, General P.X. Kelley, Charles Krauthammer, Kathleen Troia "KT" McFarland, Richard Perle, Steven Pomerantz, Oliver "Buck" Revell, Bret Stephens, and Francis J. "Bing" West.[2]
Foundation fellows and senior staff are Jonathan Schanzer, Vice President of Research, Khairi Abaza, Senior Fellow, Tony Badran, Research Fellow, Levant, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Director, Center for Study of Terrorist Radicalization, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Senior Fellow. Dr. Sebastian Gorka, Military Affairs Fellow, Thomas Joscelyn, Senior Fellow and Co-Chair, Center for Law and Counterterrorism, Jonathan Kay, Visiting Fellow, Dr. Michael Ledeen, Freedom Scholar, Andrew C. McCarthy, Co-Chair, Center for Law and Counterterrorism, Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi, Senior Fellow, Dr. J. Peter Pham, Non-Resident Senior Fellow, David B. Rivkin, Jr., Senior Fellow and Co-Chair, Center for Law and Counterterrorism[3]
The foundation has initiated the following centers, coalitions, committees and ongoing projects:
It engages in investigative reporting.
The foundation has promoted the utility of energy sanctions as part of a comprehensive economic warfare strategy against the Iranian regime. To this end, it provides leading research and analysis in support of strong, broad-based energy sanctions, including gasoline, natural gas, and oil sanctions, as part of a comprehensive strategy to end the Iranian regime's pursuit of nuclear weapons, support for terrorism, and abuse of human rights. The foundation also analyzes the prominent role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Iran's energy industry.
It will continue to monitor the Iranian energy sector for new entrants into the Iranian energy trade and any signs that companies which have reportedly left the market have resumed their trade.
The focus on energy sanctions has changed the debate in Washington. No longer a discussion over how to achieve a "grand bargain" with the Iranian regime, the debate now focuses on how to use sanctions to deter an aggressive regime dedicated to pursuing nuclear weapons, supporting terrorism, and repressing its own people.[4]
As the foundation's Mark Dubowitz noted, "the push for broad-based sanctions targeting Iran's energy sector, including steps taken to make it more difficult for Iran to import gasoline, acquire key energy technology, and attract investment for its energy sector, has already had a major impact. Not only are Iran's gasoline suppliers exiting the market, but energy investors, banks, technology providers, and insurers now face growing pressure to decide between doing business with the Iranian regime and continuing their business relationships in the lucrative U.S. market ... President Obama needs to enforce U.S. law and put these companies to a choice."[5]
The center comprises the core of the foundation's research and analysis on terrorist movements and ideologies. It is dedicated to identifying effective strategies and techniques to combat these threats. The center combines academic and policy research, training programs, strategic communications and investigative journalism to create cutting-edge analysis of what the U.S. military has dubbed the “long war.” Center director Daveed Gartenstein-Ross leads a group of experts with a range of knowledge and skills that afford unparalleled insights.
The foundation believes that the war against terrorism cannot be won on the battlefield alone, and says that Senior Fellow Andrew C. McCarthy is one of the nation’s leading experts on prosecuting the war against terrorists while protecting the civil liberties of Americans.
For 18 years, McCarthy was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York. From 1993 to 1995, he led the successful prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks. He also made major contributions to the prosecutions of the bombers of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as well as the Millennium plot attack at Los Angeles International Airport.
He joined the foundation as a senior fellow in 2004 to address the issue of protecting of civil liberties while fighting terrorism.
In 2006, the foundation stated that it tasked McCarthy with laying the groundwork for the Center for Law & Counterterrorism (CLC). This program examines the inevitable tension between civil liberties and national security. The CLC advisors McCarthy recruited include former Education Secretary William Bennett, retired Chief Federal District Judge Michael B. Mukasey, former Deputy Attorney General George J. Terwilliger III, National Review Editor Rich Lowry, Columbia Law School Professor Daniel C. Richman, and FDD Senior Fellow Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official.
The foundation claims to believe that what it considers to be terrorist controlled-and funded media—such as Hezbollah’s al-Manar Television and al-Nour Radio, and Hamas’ al-Aqsa TV—are used to promote hate, incite violence, recruit suicide bombers and other terrorists, and conduct operational surveillance. As a result, FDD founded the Coalition Against Terrorist Media (CATM)—with a membership that includes Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and secular organizations in America and Europe—to fight on this front. It wages a campaign to remove such networks from the airwaves.
Before CATM launched its campaign against al-Manar, the station reached a daily worldwide audience of 10 to 15 million viewers with its 24/7 broadcasts.
As a direct result of CATM’s campaign, the foundation says that the following goals were achieved:
The campaign to shut down al-Manar broadcasts have raised concerns about censorship from the American Civil Liberties Union.[6]
The Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) calls itself a non-partisan organization that seeks to stiffen U.S. resolve to confront and defeat the ideologies that drive terrorism. In its efforts, CPD focuses on the threats that militant Islamism allegedly presents to the national security of the United States and its allies. The Committee also is highlighting what it considers to be threats to basic human rights—in particular, women’s rights, gay rights, and freedom of religion.
To help drive these efforts, the Committee appointed as vice president for policy one of its members, Lawrence Haas, former communications director for Democratic Vice President Al Gore.
CPD has played a significant role in U.S. national security debates in the past. The Committee was formed in 1950 as a bipartisan advocacy organization for President Harry S Truman’s policy of containment against what it believed to be Soviet expansionism. The CPD then re-emerged in 1976 when its original leaders and others — including U.S. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson — believed that Americans’ will to win the Cold War was flagging, and that the United States should pursue policies to bring that conflict to a successful conclusion.
Today, CPD’s membership includes more than 100 former U.S. Cabinet members and White House officials from Republican and Democratic administrations, ambassadors, academicians, writers, and other foreign policy experts. Its co-chairmen are George Shultz, Secretary of State under President Reagan, and R. James Woolsey, Jr., Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under President Bill Clinton. U.S. Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) serve as honorary co-chairmen. CPD’s international co-chairmen are former Czech President Václav Havel and former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar.
The organization is controversial for its hard-line stance. Paleoconservative Patrick Buchanan has criticized it for lacking consistency while simultaneously claiming to be in favor of "strategic clarity" in terms of its objectives.[7] Tom Barry has criticized it as alarmist and militaristic in all its incarnations.[8]
Claudia Rosett, the foundation's journalist-in-residence, has reported on the United Nations, including the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal. She writes regularly for Commentary Magazine.
Insights gained from investigating the scandal led the foundation's reporter to other investigations in 2006, exposing more U.N. graft, misconduct, and abuse of public trust. Among the 35 articles published under Rosett’s byline in 2006 were claims that the United Nations indirectly helps advance North Korea's nuclear weapons program, and that its refugee agency sabotages the struggle of North Korean refugees seeking freedom.
Rosett also broke the story of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan accepting a $500,000 personal prize from the ruler of Dubai, through a prize jury stacked with U.N. personnel. Her 2006 investigation set off a storm of press criticism that ultimately forced the U.N. leader to return the prize money.
Following up on some of the high-ranking U.N. officials implicated in corruption scandals exposed earlier by Rosett, she again scooped the world press in 2006 by interviewing the former head of the U.N. Oil-for-Food program, Benon Sevan. Since fleeing the United States in 2005, Sevan had been living in the Cypriot capital of Nicosia. He had refused to speak to the media or to congressional investigators. Rosett conducted an exclusive two-and-a-half hour interview, which was published in The Wall Street Journal in April 2006.
The foundation's Iranian Threat Campaign called upon the Free World to defend itself against the escalating danger to democracy, freedom, and human rights posed by the "radical regime" ruling Iran.
The foundation says that this campaign raised global awareness of the threat from Iran and its terrorist proxies through more than 300 broadcast interviews of foundation staff in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East; nearly 100 newspaper and policy journal articles written by foundation staff; briefings to scores of policymakers in Washington and European capitals; 20 foundation publications; and polls the foundation released.
On college campuses, it sponsored speaking tours for Iranian dissident student leaders. In cooperation with the foundation's Arab and Muslim Speakers Bureau and FDD Undergraduate and Academic fellows at, among other schools, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago, these Iranian student leaders spoke to students and faculty about the alleged threat Iran’s mullahs pose to democracy and human rights.
The International Relations Center features a report on the foundation on its "Right Web" website, a program of the left-wing[9][10][11][12][13] think tank Institute for Policy Studies[14] which, according to its mission statement, seeks to "check the militaristic drift of the country." The report states that "although the FDD is an ardent critic of terrorism, it has not criticized actions taken by Israel against Palestinians that arguably fall into this category."[15] It terms the FDD a "prominent member of the web of neoconservative-aligned think tanks," including the American Enterprise Institute, Hudson Institute and Freedom House.[16] Left-wing writer Jim Lobe, writing in the Asia Times, referred to the FDD as a group "whose views largely mirror those of Israel's ruling Likud Party," and said that the FDD's board of advisors includes "prominent neo-cons and Iraq war boosters." [17] The American Conservative published an article accusing it of being funded mainly by a small number of pro-Israel hawks, as well as being engaged in "spin".[18] It is listed as a "pro-war" organization by globalsecurity.org with regard to its stance on Iran's nuclear program,[19] and has been described as one of the "top neocon think tanks" by the Christian Science Monitor.[20]