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Institutional
Affiliations
The Washington
Times: Columnist (1), (3)
Defense
News: Monthly Contributor (1)
Investor's
Business Daily: Monthly Contributor (1), (3)
Benador
Associates: Expert Speaker (3)
The Foundation
for the Defense of Democracies: Member of the Board
Ariel
Center for Policy Research: Contributing Expert (10)
Americans
for Victory over Terrorism: Senior Adviser (14)
Project
for the New American Century: Signed several PNAC statements,
including is founding statement of principles (15)
National
Review online: Contributing Editor (1), (3)
Middle
East Forum: Participated on a Daniel Pipes and Ziad Abdelnour-led
study that urged using force to drive Syria from Lebanon, May 2000
(16)
American Committee for Peace in Chechnya:
Member
Government
Service
Department
of Defense: Assistant Secretary of Defense for International
Security Policy, nominated in 1987 (1), (3)
North
American Treaty Organization: High Level Group Chairman for
the organization’s senior politico-military committee, 1987
(1), (3)
Department
of Defense: Representative in U.S.-Soviet negotiations and ministerial
meetings (1), (3)
Department
of Defense: Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear
Forces and Arms Control Policy under Assistant Secretary Richard
Perle, August 1983-November 1987 (1), (3)
Senate
Armed Services Committee: Professional Staff Member on the Committee,
February 1981-August 1983 (1), (3)
Office
of Sen. Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson: Aide in the areas
of Defense and Foreign Policy, 1970s (1), (3)
Corporate
Connections/Business Interests
NB:
Although Gaffney doesn’t seem to have many direct corporate
interests himself, the advisory council of his Center for Security
Policy is dominated by figures with strong ties to defense industries.
To name just a few: Stanley Ebner is a chief Boeing lobbyist; Charles
Kupperman is Lockheed Martin’s vice president for space and
strategic missiles; Douglas Graham is Lockheed’s director
of defense systems; Amoretta Hoeber is a former TRW executive; Robert
Livingston is a Raytheon lobbyist; and George Keyworth is on the
board of Hewlett Packard. (5)
Education
Georgetown
University School of Foreign Service: B.Sc.
Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies:
M.A. in International Studies (1), (3)
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Highlights
& Quotes
Gaffney,
a former Reagan administration official who cut his teeth working
under Richard Perle
when the “prince of darkness” was an adviser to Sen.
“Scoop” Jackson in the 1970s, is one of the key heavy-lifters
of the neoconservative-hawk policy institute world. From his perch
at the Center for Security Policy (CSP), Gaffney routinely excoriates
any and all arms control agreements, stridently defends U.S. intervention
in places such as Iraq, and defends the hardline policies of Israel’s
Likud Party.
Writes
journalist Jason Vest: “While CSP boasts an impressive advisory
list of hawkish luminaries, its star is Frank Gaffney, its founder,
president and CEO. A protégé of Perle going back to
their days as staffers for the late Senator Henry "Scoop"
Jackson (a k a the Senator from Boeing, and the Senate's most zealous
champion of Israel in his day), Gaffney later joined Perle at the
Pentagon, only to be shown the door by Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci
in 1987, not long after Perle left. Gaffney then reconstituted the
latest incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger. Beyond
compiling an A-list of influential conservative hawks, Gaffney has
been prolific over the past fifteen 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.)” (5)
In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in
February 2003, Gaffney justified U.S. engagement with Former Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, arguing, “I think [an
argument] can be made and that certainly was made at the time when
we were siding with Saddam Hussein, we were helping him, we were
ignoring his murderous attack against one of our ships, we were
facilitating even I'm afraid deadly technologies transfer to his
arsenal, he was the lesser of two evils, we did not want to see
the Iranians under the Ayatollah Khomeini prevail in this struggle
and we were trying as best we could to prevent that from happening”
(7)
However,
he said, “I think if the United States fails to eliminate
Saddam's regime now, it would be a catastrophe, not just for us
or the Iraqi people, but for international security more generally.
Not only will you have left Saddam in place and certainly with access
to weapons of mass destruction, probably with a considerable arsenal
of them already at hand, you would have emboldened him, and I think
a great many others who are watching with keen interest how this
plays out including the North Koreans who I think are trying to
help him stay in power and stave off American action through their
own diversionary activities, that would be a much more dangerous
world I believe than one in which we have in fact dispatched Saddam
Hussein and I can tell you most especially in the Middle East, which
is a region of the world that respects power above all else, the
contempt for the United States and more generally the West for failing
to exercise power, for allowing themselves to be checked by something
as patently fraudulent as this world body, would invite a level
of terror and danger I think to our civilian population and our
interests and again not just those of the United States but those
of the free world unlike anything we've seen to date.” (7)
His
prognostications regarding the war in Iraq: “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.” (7)
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. More recently,
Gaffney said in a 2003 interview, “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.” (7)
Gaffney
is a contributing editor to National Review online and a columnist
for American Spectator online, WorldNetDaily.com and JewishWorldReview.com.
His op-ed pieces have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today,
The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian
Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, and Newsday. (1), (3)
Gaffney
is the brother of Devon Gaffney Cross, a member of the Pentagon’s
Defense Policy Board, as well as the boards of the Center for Strategic
and Budgetary Assessments and the Center for Security Policy. (17),
(1)
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