Center for Security Policy

In April 1987, Frank Gaffney Jr. was nominated to serve as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Reagan Administration, having served in that role for seven months until being removed in November of that same 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, 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 2012, Gaffney released a 50-page document titled, "The Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama Administration". The CSP has since accused a number of US officials of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, including Huma Abedin In 2013, CSP received donations from Boeing ($25,000); General Dynamics ($15,000); Lockheed Martin ($15,000); Northrop 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". During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump cited a CSP poll in support of his restrictions on travel from several Muslim countries. and Deputy National Security Advisor Charles Kupperman in 2019. Kupperman served on the board of directors for CSP between 2001 and 2010. ==Controversy==

The Center and Gaffney have been criticized for propagating conspiracy theories by Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, Simon Maloy of Salon, CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen, Grover Norquist, Jonathan Kay, Georgetown University's Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim–Christian Understanding, Center for American Progress, Media Matters for America, the Southern Poverty Law Center, The Intercept, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Institute for Southern Studies, among others. Gaffney has been described as an influential member of the counter-jihad movement, and the CPS has been described as "arguably the most important" counter-jihad advocacy group. In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) labeled the CSP as a hate group and a "conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement", a characterization disputed by the CSP. SPLC representatives have characterized the CSP as "an extremist think tank" and suggested that it is led by an "anti-muslim conspiracy theorist." The SPLC further criticizes CSP's "investigative reports", saying that they are designed "to reinforce [Frank] Gaffney's delusions". Writing in Religion Dispatches, Sarah Posner described the organization as "a far-right think tank whose president, Frank Gaffney, was banned from the CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference] ... because its organizers believed him to be a 'crazy bigot'". The Center for Democratic Values at Queens College, City University of New York has said the center is among the "key players in the Sharīʿah cottage industry", which it describes as a "conspiracy theory" that claims the existence of "secretive power elite groups that conspire to replace sovereign nation-states in order to eventually rule the world". In March 1995, William M. Arkin, a reporter and commentator on military affairs, criticized the CSP's Gaffney as a "maestro of bumper-sticker policy" who "specializes in intensely personal attacks" and who has "never met a flag-waving, pro-defense, anti-Democratic idea he didn't like." Gaffney has also generated controversy for writing in 2010 that the logo of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency "appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo" and was part of a "worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam". ==See also==