OVERVIEW:
The Center for Security Policy (CSP) is a far-right,Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The organization’s founder and current president is Frank Gaffney Jr.. The organization’s mission statement is “To identify challenges and opportunities likely to affect American security”,where main activities are focused on exposing and researching what it believes to be jihadist threats to the United States; a number of these beliefs have been widely discredited, such as its false claims about American ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The CSP has been criticized by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, among a wide variety of other media and research organizations, for propagating conspiracy theories and Islamophobia, and described as a hate group.
HISTORY:
In April 1987, Frank Gaffney, Jr. was nominated to serve as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Reagan Administration. He served in that role for seven months until was forced from his post in November of that year. In a meeting with former Department of Defense officials after Gaffney’s ouster, Richard Perle, for whom Gaffney had previously served as a top deputy, said, “What we need is the Domino’s Pizza of the policy business. … If you don’t get your policy analysis in 30 minutes, you get your money back.” Gaffney founded the CSP a year later in 1988. One of the Center’s annual reports later echoed Perle’s words calling the CSP “the Domino’s Pizza of the policy business.”
In 2010, James Woolsey and Joseph E. Schmitz co-authored a CSP report that claimed sharia law was a major threat to the national security of the United States. In 2012, Gaffney released a 50-page document titled, “The Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama Administration”. The document questioned the Obama administration’s approach to the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East. The CSP has since accused a number of US officials of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, including Huma Abedin and Grover Norquist.
In 2013, CSP received donations from Boeing ($25,000); General Dynamics ($15,000); Lockheed Martin ($15,000); Northrup Grumman ($5,000); Raytheon ($20,000); and General Electric ($5,000).The group has also received $1.4 million from the Bradley Foundation. The CSP helped to organize a rally on Capitol Hill on September 9, 2015 against the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Donald Trump spoke at the rally. In a separate report about Iran, the CSP declared that Susan Rice, Richard Haass, and Dennis Ross were being secretly controlled by a covert “Iran lobby”. On March 16, 2016, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz announced he would appoint Gaffney to be his National Security Advisor. Cruz also said his foreign policy team would also include three other employees of Gaffney’s think tank: Fred Fleitz, Clare Lopez, and Jim Hanson. During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump cited a widely debunked CSP poll in support of his call to ban Muslims from the United States. Since 2017 several people with ties to the CSP have joined the Trump administration, including Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway in 2017, chief of staff for the National Security Council Fred Fleitz in 2018, and Deputy National Security Advisor Charles Kupperman in 2019. Kupperman served on the board of directors for CSP between 2001 and 2010.
Board of Directors: E. Miles Prentice III, Bruce J. Brotman, Nina Cunningham, Kenneth J. Dragotta, Fred Fleitz, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., Marlin L. Hefti, Jack London, Andrew W. Miller, Jr., Ebrahim Moussazadeh, Augusta H. Petrone, Donald L. Woodsmall
Staff: Fred Fleitz, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., Shaun Seifert, Clare Lopez, Christopher Holton, Adam Savit, Tommy Waller, David Yerushalmi, Nancy Menges
Fellows: Stephen C. Coughlin, Nonie Darwish, Michael J. Del Rosso, Paula A. DeSutter, Kevin D. Freeman, Caroline Glick, Daniel Pipes, Joseph E. Schmitz, Deborah Weiss
Funders: ‘Board of Regents’, American Express Company, Bank of America, Boeing, Chevron Corporation, Lockheed Martin, MetLife, Morgan Stanley, Northrop Grumman, UBS
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Address: 2020 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Suite 189 – Washington, District of Columbia 20006
Website: https://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/
Facebook:www.facebook.com/securefreedom/
Twitter:www.twitter.com/securefreedom
YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCPPw4A4ZmhK_e95S2Ka0Xaw
Contact:info@centerforsecuritypolicy.org