Don't Let The Door Hit You On The Way Out

Laura Rozen

July 22, 2004

From War and Piece

Going, going, gone. The director of the Committee on the Present Danger has stepped down. This from the NY Sun:

The managing director of the Committee on the Present Danger stepped down yesterday, just a day after the organization’s official launch.

Some members of the committee called for Peter Hannaford’s resignation after learning he once represented the political party of an Austrian nationalist, Joerg Haider, in Washington, The New York Sun has learned . . .

A freelance journalist, Laura Rozen, first disclosed Mr. Hannaford’s past affiliation with Austria’s Freedom Party on her Web log, War and Piece.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Hannaford said he had met Mr. Haider once at a Vienna dinner party in 1996 when he agreed to meet with members of his political party to discuss a possible contract with his public relations firm. “Haider said many silly things and he was trying to live them down,” he said.

But Mr. Hannaford also said the party’s agenda was quite reasonable. “Three or four of their Parliament members were quite level-headed,” he said. “The kinds of programs they supported in the Austrian context were quite sensible.”

The optics of Hannaford's historical lobbying client list when laid out [and which includes the People's Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria, as well as the Austrian Freedom Party] were pretty incompatable given that the whole purpose of this group is a sort of exercise in moral self-righteousness on foreign policy affairs. This whole resurrection of the COPD is really one big PR campaign after all, for purely domestic public consumption, as far as I can tell. [They weren't taking full page ads out in the Kansas City Star, either, if that gives us a sense of the swathe of domestic consumption they are looking to target.] After learning a bit more about the funders of this effort, from Justin Raimondo, it was clear to me why this resignation happened so quickly. More soon in a reported piece.