Elliot Abrams was one of the founding members of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Among the other participants in the CLI were: president and executive director, Randy Scheunemann (Scheunemann served until recently as a consultant on Iraq to Donald Rumsfeld), Treasurer Julie Finley, Gary Schmitt (director of the conservative foundation, Project for the New American Century) and Richard Perle, (chairman of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board), who is also closely associated PNAC.
In Dec. 2002 members of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq met with National Security Council officials to discuss the administration’s analysis of Iraq's declaration that it possessed no weapons of mass destruction.
This advocacy came at the same time that Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, were engaged in a series of briefings with foreign policy groups, Iraq specialists and other opinion makers that was termed as a "new phase," by a White House spokesman, who described the goal as building fresh public support for Bush administration policy vs. Iraq.
Members of the CLI met in November of 2002 with President Bush's national security adviser, Condi Rice, in an effort to mount "education and advocacy efforts to mobilize U.S. and international support freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny."
The CLI lobbied for the installation of the so-called Iraqi National Congress to replace the Hussein dictatorship. This group was the creation of the U.S. Congress which, following testimony from Ahmed Chalabi, and defense policy executive, Zalmay Khalilzad, passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, and sanctioned the new U.S. policy of regime change. Almost $100 million in taxpayer funds was provided to the group.
Elliot Abrams is a senior Bush official on the National Security Council. He was formally head of President Reagan's efforts in the Middle East. Abrams, was convicted for President Reagan's crimes in the Iran-Contra scandal and then pardoned by Bush I.
As assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs under President Reagan, Abrams was responsible for the controversial policies of that administration in Nicaragua and El Salvador during the 1980s, and played a key role in the U.S. relationship with Manuel Noriega.
In 2000, Abrams was made the improbable president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. In 2001 he was hired by Condolezza Rice for a position on the NSC overseeing Arab/ Israeli negotiations.
There is a good outline of this in the Tom Paine article: (The Return of Elliot Abrams)
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6895 Oh yeah, Condi's deputy sidekick, Stephen Hadley, was also founding a member of CLI along with Abrams. Hadley, the new National Security Advisor, has been advocating policies for many years which have, to no one's surprise, found their way into the ideological bulldozer which forms the doctrine of the Bush league's foreign policy.
Hadley worked closely with the Bush-Cheney campaign as a foreign policy advisor specializing in European and Russian affairs. He was a partner in Shea & Gardner, the Washington law firm representing Lockheed Martin. He was a member of the Vulcans, an eight-person foreign policy team formed during the Bush campaign that included Condoleezza Rice and Richard Perle.
Hadley, you recall, is the fluky bungler who took the blame for the insertion of the phony Iraq/Niger uranium charges in the president's State of the Union address, claiming that he ‘forgot' to relay CIA objections.
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