As Rachel Maddow reported this Friday, on the 10th anniversary of the start of the war in Afghanistan, Mitt Romney decided to announce the members of his national security advisory team, and as she noted, of the twenty two people he named, fifteen of them are people who worked on foreign policy for the George W. Bush administration, and around a half dozen of them are former members of the neoconservative think tank and now defunct, PNAC, or The Project for the New American Century.
October 7, 2011

As Rachel Maddow reported this Friday, on the 10th anniversary of the start of the war in Afghanistan, Mitt Romney decided to announce the members of his national security advisory team, and as she noted, of the twenty two people he named, fifteen of them are people who worked on foreign policy for the George W. Bush administration, and around a half dozen of them are former members of the neoconservative think tank and now defunct, PNAC, or The Project for the New American Century.

Apparently Mitt Romney thinks it's a good idea to make all that's old new again with bringing in a bunch of neoconservative war mongers to advise him on matters of national security. If Mitt Romney thinks running as George W. Bush 2.0 on national security issues with the mood of the country being what it is right now after all the money and lives that have been wasted with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, I've got to wonder what bubble this man is living in.

From The Washington Post -- Mitt Romney taps foreign policy, national security advisers -- here's some of the list of those Romney has tapped to join his team:

Cofer Black, Vice President of Blackbird Technologies; Director of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center (1999-2002); United States Department of State Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism (2002-2004)

Christopher Burnham, Vice Chairman of Deutsche Bank Asset Management; United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Management (2005-2006); United States Under Secretary of State for Management (2001-2005)

Michael Chertoff, Chairman of the Chertoff Group; United States Secretary of Homeland Security (2005-2009); Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (2003-2005)

Eliot Cohen, Director of the Strategic Studies Program at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University; Counselor to the United States Department of State (2007-2009); Defense Policy Advisory Board Member (2001-2009)

Norm Coleman, Chairman of the Board, American Action Network; Adviser to the Republican Jewish Coalition; United States Senator (R-MN) (2003-2009)

John Danilovich, Member of the Trilantic European Advisory Council; CEO of Millennium Challenge Corporation (2005-2009); Ambassador to Brazil (2004-2005); Ambassador to Costa Rica (2001-2004)

Paula Dobriansky, Senior Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs (2001-2009)

Eric Edelman, Visiting Scholar at School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University; Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (2005-2009); Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs (2001-2003)

Michael Hayden, Principal of the Chertoff Group; Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2006-2009); Director of the National Security Agency (1999-2005)

Here's the full list from Romney's campaign site.

And for more on PNAC, here's Source Watch's site on them -- Project for the New American Century.

As Rachel noted, The Project for the New American Century has folded now, but their web site is still up for anyone who wants to revisit just how wrong they were about everything. Sadly as she reported, they're back under a new name -- The Foreign Policy Initiative -- which has less much visibility now for obvious reasons, but that somehow didn't stop Romney from making the decision to bring these people in to advise him on his political campaign and to bring them back into the spotlight.

MADDOW: With the greatest American failure in American policy hung around their necks. With the Project for a New American Century, neocon, fantasy a punchline now, Mitt Romney as a presidential candidate has decided to embrace them.

I'm at a loss for why he thinks this is a good idea, but that said, given Romney's flip-flops on so many issues, I'm not going to try to figure out who he thought he should be pandering to that would get him elected with this latest move.

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