McCain Adviser Scheunemann Behind Neocon Iraq War Lobby

In the fall of 2002, the man who would become the John McCain campaign's top foreign policy adviser was tasked with a sensitive project at the behest of the White House. It began when President Bush's then deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley asked neoconservative activist and Lockheed Martin lobbyist Bruce Jackson to set up a committee that could mobilize public opinion for war with Iraq. ...

So Jackson turned to Randy Scheunemann, a longtime lobbying partner and fellow senior officer in a series of interconnected neoconservative advocacy groups: the Project for the New American Century, the US Committee on NATO, and the Project on Transitional Democracies. Scheunemann would set up and run the new group, called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq; unlike Jackson, he knew a lot about the hawks' case for war and ran in neoconservative circles where Chalabi (whom Scheunemann had met at a Hill event in the '90s) was a household name.

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