Frank Gaffney

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. (born April 5, 1953) is the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy, columnist at The Washington Times, Big Peace, and Townhall, and radio host on Secure Freedom Radio.

Early life
Gaffney was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1975, Gaffney graduated from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University. He received his graduate degree from Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

Career
Gaffney began his public service career in the 1970s, working as an aide in the office of Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson, under Richard Perle. From August 1983 until November 1987, Gaffney held the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy in the Reagan Administration, again serving under Perle. In April 1987, Gaffney was nominated to the position of US Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy. He served as the acting Assistant Secretary for seven months, though his confirmation was ultimately blocked by the United States Senate. In 1988, Gaffney established the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a neoconservative national security and defense policy organization.

Gaffney appeared on FahrenHYPE 9/11, the conservative documentary that was a rebuttal to Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11.

Gaffney was an executive producer for the documentary Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center. The documentary was created to air as part of the America at a Crossroads series on PBS, but it has not been shown. PBS claimed that the film failed "to meet their standards, " but Gaffney called the decision "censorship."

He is a founding member of the Set America Free Coalition to reduce dependence on foreign oil and is part of the current iteration of the Committee on the Present Danger.

In November 1992, Gaffney's Center for Security Policy organization released a report detailing voter fraud in Angola's presidential election. Election officials stopped registering voters 40 days before the election. Polling stations had identical voting results. The MPLA retained a monopoly on television election-coverage. CSP also found widespread vote buying by the MPLA, the discarding of as many as 25% of cast ballots, and electricity blackouts during voter counting. United Nations special envoy Margaret Anstee said she "had never witnessed a more unfair election, even in Latin America."

Along with a number of figures who later assumed leading positions in the George W. Bush administration, Gaffney was one of 25 signatories of the June 3, 1997 "Statement of Principles" from the controversial Project for the New American Century, an educational and political advocacy organization whose stated goal was "to promote American global leadership."

Dispute with Grover Norquist
In February 2003, Gaffney and neoconservative David Horowitz criticized Grover Norquist, an anti-tax activist and prominent Republican strategist, for alleged ties to Abdurahman Alamoudi, Khaled Saffuri, and Sami al-Arian, all of whom had attempted to influence the Bush Administration.

Gaffney said a press release by the American Muslim Council credited Ali Tulbah, a Bush-White House aide, for getting them access to the administration. Norquist banned Gaffney from the weekly "Wednesday Meeting" of the Leave Us Alone Coalition that Norquist hosted. Norquist later wrote an open letter, implying that Gaffney's account amounted to "racial prejudice, religious bigotry [and] ethnic hatred." In 2011, Gaffney accused Norquist of "helping the Muslim Brotherhood spread its influence" in the U.S. government. David Keene, President of the American Conservative Union, later commented on the Gaffney-Norquist dispute, saying, "I, for one, don't see it. If you read the transcript [of the panel], you can see if Frank was right or wrong, but there was nothing racist or bigoted about it."

In a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove dismissed Gaffney's assertions regarding Bush, stating "there's no there there." In an article appearing in the January 2007 edition of Vanity Fair about neoconservatives who pushed for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Gaffney said of Bush, "He doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course. 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."

Iraq War
In 2003, Gaffney called on the United States military to "take out" Al Jazeera news network for inciting violence against the Western world by showcasing Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein's "calls-to-arms."

On March 12, 2009, Gaffney appeared on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews and accused former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein of being involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing, "There is also circumstantial evidence, not proven by any means, but nonetheless some pretty compelling circumstantial evidence of Saddam Hussein's Iraq being involved with the people who perpetrated both the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and even the Oklahoma City bombing."

Criticism of Barack Obama
In October 2008, Gaffney questioned whether then Illinois Senator Barack Obama was a "natural born citizen of the United States" and his legal eligibility to be the President of the United States. In a series of Washington Times articles from February to June 2009, Gaffney accused the Obama administration of effectively adopting the Muslim Brotherhood's plan for the Middle East; Sharia law.

Gaffney continued this theme in a February 24, 2010 column on Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment, when Gaffney attacked the administration's plans to modernize and update the missile defense program as "US submission to Islam" from "an Alinsky acolyte", citing as evidence the redesigned logo of the Missile Defense Agency.
 * "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.
 * "What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency logo.... As Logan helpfully shows, the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo."

However, Al Kamen reported that the new Missile Defense Agency logo is over three years old and was actually developed during the George Bush administration.

Recent activities
In a series of articles in 2011, Gaffney charged that Suhail Khan's participation in the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) allowed for Muslim Brotherhood influence on the proceedings. Upon investigation, the ACU Board of Directors — including Morton Blackwell, Cleta Mitchell, David Keene and Wayne LaPierre — unanimously rejected and condemned these accusations as "reprehensible" and "unfounded". In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Gaffney testified to support a lawsuit against the then-planned Islamic Center of Murfreesboro.