A reader pointed me to an editorial in this morning’s Washington Post, wherein Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty say that they did polling prior to the election in Iran that was predictive of the announced result. The first thing I did was to examine the authors of the this editorial.
Ken Ballen is president of Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, a nonprofit institute that researches attitudes toward extremism. Patrick Doherty is deputy director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation.
I know the New America Foundation. My brother works there and I was a finalist for a position there last year. I don’t have any inherent distrust of NAF, but I also know that their director Steve Coll, is about as connected with the foreign policy establishment in this country as it is possible to be. He’s the author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 and
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century
, the two most comprehensive books available in their fields.
Terror Free Tomorrow, however, is another story. I took a look, first, at their Board of Advisers. And here is what I found:
John McCain– of ‘Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Iran’ fame
Lee H. Hamilton– Bush/Cheney’s hand-picked 9/11 Commission co-chair, after Henry Kissinger turned down the job
Thomas H. Kean– Bush/Cheney’s hand-picked 9/11 Commission co-chair, after Henry Kissinger turned down the job
Slade Gorton– Bush/Cheney pick for 9/11 Commission
Thomas S. Foley– former Democratic Speaker of the House
Stephen W. Bosworth– Dean of The Fletcher School at Tufts University. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. Formerly U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea (1997-2001). Earlier, he served as the Ambassador to Tunisia and to the Philippines. He was President of the United States Japan Foundation, and was also the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs. He is also a member of the International Board of Advisers for the President of the Philippines.
Louis Caldera– member of the advisory board of the New Democrat Network, former president of the University of New Mexico, Secretary of the Army (1998-2001).
Husain Haqqani– Pakistani ambassador to the United States. He was formerly the director of the Center for International Relations and an associate professor at Boston University, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and co-chair of Hudson Institute’s Project on Islam and Democracy” and a scholar with Hudson’s Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World.
Mohammed Odeh Al-Rehaief– the Iraqi lawyer who claims to have told U.S. Marines the location of the captured Private Jessica Lynch in early April 2003. Weeks later, Al-Refaief and his family were granted U.S. asylum[1]. Along with the chance for U.S. citizenship, al-Rehaief received $300,000 from Rupert Murdoch’s Harper Collins for a book about the Lynch rescue.[2] He also was given a job at the Livingston Group[3], a high-powered D.C. lobby firm.[4] His book Because Each Life Is Precious: Why an Iraqi Man Came to Risk Everything for Pvt. Jessica Lynch is being promoted by his Livingston Group colleague Lauri Fitz-Pegado and Republican PR man Craig Shirley. Fitz-Pegado is infamous for her work at Hill & Knowlton PR in 1990 coaching the Kuwaiti girl called “Nayirah” in her shocking but phony testimony on Congressional hill that she’d seen Iraqi soldiers murdering Kuwaiti babies.
Muhammad Qodari– worked for the preeminent Indonesian think-tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Jakarta, Indonesia. Mr. Qodari has also served as Director of Research in charge of all surveys and polling for LSI, a leading polling firm in Indonesia.
Robin Wiener– a Board Member and Treasurer of Families of September 11, the leading organization representing family members of the victims of 9/11.
James Kreindler– the attorney [that] represent families of Lockerbie victims in a civil suit against Libya. He is a partner of the law firm of Kreindler & Kreindler. His specialty is aviation accident litigation and has been involved in well-known cases such as TWA Flight 800. Kriendler chairs the Plaintiffs’ Committee of the Aviation and Space Law Committee of the American Bar Association.
Mansoor Moaddel– a professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology at Eastern Michigan University.
This is one of those modestly right-wing organizations that propagate in Washington DC by coupling with the DLC, the New Democrat Network, and various foreign chambers of commerce. Of the four directors, one used to work for Richard Lugar, one for Sam Nunn, and another is Vice President at Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates (of Mark Penn and Doug Schoen fame). In other words, this is the true face of empire, mainly concerned with foreign investment opportunities, but in the guise of stamping out Islamic extremism and terrorism.
Maybe these folks did honest polling in Iran prior to the election, maybe they didn’t. The fact that one of their advisers is the Iraqi who started the Jessica Lynch hoax and who has connections to the Kuwaiti incubator hoax, is not giving me a whole lot of confidence. That this group is now committing itself to lending credibility to the Iranian elections is actually quite frightening.
