A Call To Action
The New York Times
August 9, 2005
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 - More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.
In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.
The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas. Under American law, United States citizens and green-card holders may not be singled out in intelligence-collection operations by the military or intelligence agencies. That protection does not extend to visa holders, but Mr. Weldon and the former intelligence official said it might have reinforced a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.
A former spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, Al Felzenberg, confirmed that members of its staff, including Philip Zelikow, the executive director, were told about the program on an overseas trip in October 2003 that included stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Mr. Felzenberg said the briefers did not mention Mr. Atta's name.
The report produced by the commission last year does not mention the episode.
Mr. Weldon first spoke publicly about the episode in June, in a little-noticed speech on the House floor and in an interview with The Times-Herald in Norristown, Pa. The matter resurfaced on Monday in a report by GSN: Government Security News, which is published every two weeks and covers domestic-security issues. The GSN report was based on accounts provided by Mr. Weldon and the same former intelligence official, who was interviewed on Monday by The New York Times in Mr. Weldon's office.
In a telephone interview from his home in Pennsylvania, Mr. Weldon said he was basing his assertions on similar ones by at least three other former intelligence officers with direct knowledge of the project, and said that some had first called the episode to his attention shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The account is the first assertion that Mr. Atta, an Egyptian who became the lead hijacker in the plot, was identified by any American government agency as a potential threat before the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the 19 hijackers, only Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had been identified as potential threats by the Central Intelligence Agency before the summer of 2000, and information about them was not provided to the F.B.I. until the spring of 2001.
Mr. Weldon has long been a champion of the kind of data-mining analysis that was the basis for the work of the Able Danger team.
The former intelligence official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not want to jeopardize political support and the possible financing for future data-mining operations by speaking publicly. He said the team had been established by the Special Operations Command in 1999, under a classified directive issued by Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assemble information about Al Qaeda networks around the world.
"Ultimately, Able Danger was going to give decision makers options for taking out Al Qaeda targets," the former defense intelligence official said.
He said that he delivered the chart in summer 2000 to the Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and said that it had been based on information from unclassified sources and government records, including those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
"We knew these were bad guys, and we wanted to do something about them," the former intelligence official said.
The unit, which relied heavily on data-mining techniques, was modeled after those first established by Army intelligence at the Land Information Warfare Assessment Center, now known as the Information Dominance Center, at Fort Belvoir, Va., the official said.
Mr. Weldon is an outspoken figure who is a vice chairman of both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee. He said he had recognized the significance of the episode only recently, when he contacted members of the military intelligence team as part of research for his book, "Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America and How the C.I.A. Has Ignored It."
Mr. Weldon's book prompted one veteran C.I.A. case officer to strongly dispute the reliability of one Iranian source cited in the book, saying the Iranian "was a waste of my time and resources."
Mr. Weldon said that he had discussed the Able Danger episode with Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and that at least two Congressional committees were looking into the episode.
In the interview on Monday, Mr. Weldon said he had been aware of the episode since shortly after the Sept. 11 attack, when members of the team first brought it to his attention. He said he had told Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, about it in a conversation in September or October 2001, and had been surprised when the Sept. 11 commission report made no mention of the operation.
Col. Samuel Taylor, a spokesman for the military's Special Operations Command, said no one at the command now had any knowledge of the Able Danger program, its mission or its findings. If the program existed, Colonel Taylor said, it was probably a highly classified "special access program" on which only a few military personnel would have been briefed.
During the interview in Mr. Weldon's office, the former defense intelligence official showed a floor-sized chart depicting Al Qaeda networks around the world that he said was a larger, more detailed version similar to the one prepared by the Able Danger team in the summer of 2000.
He said the original chart, like the new one, had included the names and photographs of Mr. Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, as well as Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi, who were identified as members of what was described as an American-based "Brooklyn" cell, as one of five such Al Qaeda cells around the world.
The official said the link to Brooklyn was meant as a term of art rather than to be interpreted literally, saying that the unit had produced no firm evidence linking the men to the borough of New York City but that a computer analysis seeking to establish patterns in links between the four men had found that "the software put them all together in Brooklyn."
According to the commission report, Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi were first identified in late 1999 or 2000 by the C.I.A. as Qaeda members who might be involved in a terrorist operation. They were tracked from Yemen to Malaysia before their trail was lost in Thailand. Neither man was put on a State Department watch list before they flew to Los Angeles in early 2000. The F.B.I. was not warned about them until the spring of 2001, and no efforts to track them were made until August 2001.
Neither Mr. Shehhi nor Mr. Atta was identified by the American intelligence agencies as a potential threat, the commission report said. Mr. Shehhi arrived in Newark on a flight from Brussels on May 29, 2000, and Mr. Atta arrived in Newark from Prague on June 3 that year.
The former intelligence official said the first Able Danger report identified all four men as members of a "Brooklyn" cell, and was produced within two months after Mr. Atta arrived in the United States. The former intelligence official said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission staff about Able Danger when they visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003.
The official said he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta as a member of a Qaeda cell in the United States. He said the staff encouraged him to call the commission when he returned to Washington at the end of the year. When he did so, the ex-official said, the calls were not returned.
Mr. Felzenberg, the former Sept. 11 commission spokesman, said on Monday that he had talked with some of the former staff members who participated in the briefing.
"They all say that they were not told anything about a Brooklyn cell," Mr. Felzenberg said. "They were told about the Pentagon operation. They were not told about the Brooklyn cell. They said that if the briefers had mentioned anything that startling, it would have gotten their attention."
As a result of the briefing, he said, the commission staff filed document requests with the Pentagon for information about the program. The Pentagon complied, he said, adding that the staff had not hidden anything from the commissioners.
"The commissioners were certainly told of the document requests and what the findings were," Mr. Felzenberg said.
Philip Shenon and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for this article.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Bolton Sent to UN
A Call To Action
Click here to return to the browser-optimized version of this page.
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050815&s=iwilliams
by IAN WILLIAMS
[posted online on August 2, 2005]
Kofi Annan greeted the recess appointment of John Bolton as US ambassador to the United Nations in a measured way that was perhaps intended as a nuanced put-down: "We look forward to working with him, as I do with the other 190 ambassadors. And we will welcome him at a time when we are in the midst of major reform."
While Bolton supporters on the far right greeted his appointment as if he were Wyatt Earp coming to clean up Tombstone, which is in fact pretty much how Bush presented him, Annan subtly put him on a par with the Permanent Representative of Nauru, which has the size and population of an average Manhattan block, and hinted that the process of UN reform was already proceeding apace without his coming to the rescue.
Of course, subtlety and nuance are lost on both Bush and Bolton. The conservatives who applauded the President's courage and leadership in making a recess appointment are normally strict constructionists, and although Bush is by no means the first President to abuse the prerogative, it is clear that recess appointments were meant to be be used in cases of unexpected emergencies, not to bypass the confirmation process.
Bush did indeed stress the urgent need for the appointment because of the reform agenda before the sixtieth-anniversary summit of the UN. But the President has not really explained how he is assisting reform by sending to New York someone who has vocally dismissed the relevance of the organization, and whose record includes finding weapons of mass destruction where no one else could find them but losing his memory about recent interviews by the State Department's Inspector General.
The holdup in the Senate was precisely because the unreformed Bush Administration refuses to answer critical and substantive questions about Bolton's memories, not least about his role in inventing the fictitious weapons of mass destruction that the Administration invoked to justify the invasion of Iraq while trying to suppress more skeptical, and incidentally more accurate, reports.
As befits a quasi-feudal dynasty in the making, the Bush family is immensely loyal to its subordinates and supporters, as Karl Rove is now finding. But this is incredibly shortsighted. The White House is relying on Senate Democrats and dissident Republicans' forgiving and forgetting this calculated slight to their authority and, even more questionably, on John Bolton's discretion over the next few months.
Neither aspect of this plan is likely to pan out. Bolton's record over several decades of public life shows a vociferous and intemperate contempt for the UN, foreign countries and international law that befits a protege of the xenophobic Senator Jesse Helms. Bolton's record at the State Department shows that he regarded members of the Administration who disagreed with him, or were merely insufficiently enthusiastic about his own idiosyncratic take on government policy, as potential traitors. It will be interesting to see what he will do at the UN when he discovers that it is an organization full of foreigners, who often disagree with the United States, and even more so with his version of its policies.
Many Americans will hang their heads in shame at being represented by such a conservative caricature in the most prominent diplomatic forum in the world. They can in some measure comfort themselves that, on his past record, he will actually provoke opposition from other countries. The United States has had bullies for diplomats before, but at least they mostly did their elbow-twisting in private so that the victims could save face. Bolton will almost certainly dispense with such courtesies with both allies and enemies alike.
Perhaps the real damage is the signal Bush has sent to the other members of the UN: that the United States is not really serious about the organization it helped to found. Almost as worrying is the implicit message of encouragement to the know-nothings on the extreme right of the Republican Party, who get their news and geography from Rush Limbaugh and Fox, and see the UN as a cabal of gun-reforming, gay-liberating, abortion-peddling, US Constitution-undermining foreigners.
The UN may have its problems with mismanagement and corruption, but they are minute in comparison with those of the Bush Administration. In fact, the UN's most serious problem is the Bush Administration, whose scofflaw ways, epitomized by Bolton's behavior, have been hammering at the foundations of the UN Charter.
Of course, it could get worse. The Democrats have traditionally made the UN ambassador a Cabinet-level appointment. Bush may decide to follow suit for the man who strode into a Florida schoolhouse to stop the vote-counting in 2000.
Click here to return to the browser-optimized version of this page.
This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050815&s=iwilliams
by IAN WILLIAMS
[posted online on August 2, 2005]
Kofi Annan greeted the recess appointment of John Bolton as US ambassador to the United Nations in a measured way that was perhaps intended as a nuanced put-down: "We look forward to working with him, as I do with the other 190 ambassadors. And we will welcome him at a time when we are in the midst of major reform."
While Bolton supporters on the far right greeted his appointment as if he were Wyatt Earp coming to clean up Tombstone, which is in fact pretty much how Bush presented him, Annan subtly put him on a par with the Permanent Representative of Nauru, which has the size and population of an average Manhattan block, and hinted that the process of UN reform was already proceeding apace without his coming to the rescue.
Of course, subtlety and nuance are lost on both Bush and Bolton. The conservatives who applauded the President's courage and leadership in making a recess appointment are normally strict constructionists, and although Bush is by no means the first President to abuse the prerogative, it is clear that recess appointments were meant to be be used in cases of unexpected emergencies, not to bypass the confirmation process.
Bush did indeed stress the urgent need for the appointment because of the reform agenda before the sixtieth-anniversary summit of the UN. But the President has not really explained how he is assisting reform by sending to New York someone who has vocally dismissed the relevance of the organization, and whose record includes finding weapons of mass destruction where no one else could find them but losing his memory about recent interviews by the State Department's Inspector General.
The holdup in the Senate was precisely because the unreformed Bush Administration refuses to answer critical and substantive questions about Bolton's memories, not least about his role in inventing the fictitious weapons of mass destruction that the Administration invoked to justify the invasion of Iraq while trying to suppress more skeptical, and incidentally more accurate, reports.
As befits a quasi-feudal dynasty in the making, the Bush family is immensely loyal to its subordinates and supporters, as Karl Rove is now finding. But this is incredibly shortsighted. The White House is relying on Senate Democrats and dissident Republicans' forgiving and forgetting this calculated slight to their authority and, even more questionably, on John Bolton's discretion over the next few months.
Neither aspect of this plan is likely to pan out. Bolton's record over several decades of public life shows a vociferous and intemperate contempt for the UN, foreign countries and international law that befits a protege of the xenophobic Senator Jesse Helms. Bolton's record at the State Department shows that he regarded members of the Administration who disagreed with him, or were merely insufficiently enthusiastic about his own idiosyncratic take on government policy, as potential traitors. It will be interesting to see what he will do at the UN when he discovers that it is an organization full of foreigners, who often disagree with the United States, and even more so with his version of its policies.
Many Americans will hang their heads in shame at being represented by such a conservative caricature in the most prominent diplomatic forum in the world. They can in some measure comfort themselves that, on his past record, he will actually provoke opposition from other countries. The United States has had bullies for diplomats before, but at least they mostly did their elbow-twisting in private so that the victims could save face. Bolton will almost certainly dispense with such courtesies with both allies and enemies alike.
Perhaps the real damage is the signal Bush has sent to the other members of the UN: that the United States is not really serious about the organization it helped to found. Almost as worrying is the implicit message of encouragement to the know-nothings on the extreme right of the Republican Party, who get their news and geography from Rush Limbaugh and Fox, and see the UN as a cabal of gun-reforming, gay-liberating, abortion-peddling, US Constitution-undermining foreigners.
The UN may have its problems with mismanagement and corruption, but they are minute in comparison with those of the Bush Administration. In fact, the UN's most serious problem is the Bush Administration, whose scofflaw ways, epitomized by Bolton's behavior, have been hammering at the foundations of the UN Charter.
Of course, it could get worse. The Democrats have traditionally made the UN ambassador a Cabinet-level appointment. Bush may decide to follow suit for the man who strode into a Florida schoolhouse to stop the vote-counting in 2000.
Hot Topics
List of 2 items
US Treasury Secretary John Snow cemented his status as master of the obvious
when he conceded yesterday that the economic gains made under the Bush
administration
haven't been equally distributed. "One of the things we know is that less
educated people have seen their incomes and wages grow more slowly. That's
what
the numbers tell us," Snow said as Bush's economic team prepares to gather
in Crawford. Of course, with wealth and education levels tied so closely, it
's
no surprise the rich have benefited unequally: Years of massive targeted tax
cuts by the Bush folks have a tendency to do that.
[link]
Another day, another poll confirming just how out of touch President Bush is
with the American public. Check out these numbers from the latest CNN/USA
Today/Gallup
poll: 56 percent favor federal funding for stem cells (a move Bush opposes),
57 percent say the war in Iraq has made us less safe from terrorism, and 51
percent are dissatisfied with Bush's job as president. Let's just say that
if President Bush went to the political capital ATM right now, the machine
would
eat his card.
[link]
list end
Who Says That?
"The increased revenues and our spending restraint have led to good progress
in reducing the federal deficit." - President Bush, in his most recent radio
address
Morning Snark
List of 2 items
Spending restraint? President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress
have demonstrated about as much restraint as Donald Trump on payday.
And let's not fall into this "progress on the deficit" trap either.
Remember, if we're measuring Bush's "progress" from the record surpluses
that he inherited,
he'd still be so far behind he couldn't see the starting line with the
Hubble telescope.
list end
Monday, August 08, 2005
War Plans Drafted To Counter Terror Attacks in U.S.
A Call To Action
washingtonpost.com
Domestic Effort Is Big Shift for Military
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 8, 2005; A01
COLORADO SPRINGS -- The U.S. military has devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terrorist attacks in the United States, envisioning 15 potential crisis scenarios and anticipating several simultaneous strikes around the country, according to officers who drafted the plans.
The classified plans, developed here at Northern Command headquarters, outline a variety of possible roles for quick-reaction forces estimated at as many as 3,000 ground troops per attack, a number that could easily grow depending on the extent of the damage and the abilities of civilian response teams.
The possible scenarios range from "low end," relatively modest crowd-control missions to "high-end," full-scale disaster management after catastrophic attacks such as the release of a deadly biological agent or the explosion of a radiological device, several officers said.
Some of the worst-case scenarios involve three attacks at the same time, in keeping with a Pentagon directive earlier this year ordering Northcom, as the command is called, to plan for multiple simultaneous attacks.
The war plans represent a historic shift for the Pentagon, which has been reluctant to become involved in domestic operations and is legally constrained from engaging in law enforcement. Indeed, defense officials continue to stress that they intend for the troops to play largely a supporting role in homeland emergencies, bolstering police, firefighters and other civilian response groups.
But the new plans provide for what several senior officers acknowledged is the likelihood that the military will have to take charge in some situations, especially when dealing with mass-casualty attacks that could quickly overwhelm civilian resources.
"In my estimation, [in the event of] a biological, a chemical or nuclear attack in any of the 50 states, the Department of Defense is best positioned -- of the various eight federal agencies that would be involved -- to take the lead," said Adm. Timothy J. Keating, the head of Northcom, which coordinates military involvement in homeland security operations.
The plans present the Pentagon with a clearer idea of the kinds and numbers of troops and the training that may be required to build a more credible homeland defense force. They come at a time when senior Pentagon officials are engaged in an internal, year-long review of force levels and weapons systems, attempting to balance the heightened requirements of homeland defense against the heavy demands of overseas deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Keating expressed confidence that existing military assets are sufficient to meet homeland security needs. Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe, Northcom's chief operations officer, agreed, but he added that "stress points" in some military capabilities probably would result if troops were called on to deal with multiple homeland attacks.
Debate and Analysis
Several people on the staff here and at the Pentagon said in interviews that the debate and analysis within the U.S. government regarding the extent of the homeland threat and the resources necessary to guard against it remain far from resolved.
The command's plans consist of two main documents. One, designated CONPLAN 2002 and consisting of more than 1,000 pages, is said to be a sort of umbrella document that draws together previously issued orders for homeland missions and covers air, sea and land operations. It addresses not only post-attack responses but also prevention and deterrence actions aimed at intercepting threats before they reach the United States.
The other, identified as CONPLAN 0500, deals specifically with managing the consequences of attacks represented by the 15 scenarios.
CONPLAN 2002 has passed a review by the Pentagon's Joint Staff and is due to go soon to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and top aides for further study and approval, the officers said. CONPLAN 0500 is still undergoing final drafting here. (CONPLAN stands for "concept plan" and tends to be an abbreviated version of an OPLAN, or "operations plan," which specifies forces and timelines for movement into a combat zone.)
The plans, like much else about Northcom, mark a new venture by a U.S. military establishment still trying to find its comfort level with the idea of a greater homeland defense role after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Military officers and civilian Pentagon policymakers say they recognize, on one hand, that the armed forces have much to offer not only in numbers of troops but also in experience managing crises and responding to emergencies. On the other hand, they worry that too much involvement in homeland missions would diminish the military's ability to deal with threats abroad.
The Pentagon's new homeland defense strategy, issued in June, emphasized in boldface type that "domestic security is primarily a civilian law enforcement function." Still, it noted the possibility that ground troops might be sent into action on U.S. soil to counter security threats and deal with major emergencies.
"For the Pentagon to acknowledge that it would have to respond to catastrophic attack and needs a plan was a big step," said James Carafano, who follows homeland security issues for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank.
William M. Arkin, a defense specialist who has reported on Northcom's war planning, said the evolution of the Pentagon's thinking reflects the recognition of an obvious gap in civilian resources.
Since Northcom's inception in October 2002, its headquarters staff has grown to about 640 members, making it larger than the Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America, but smaller than the regional commands for Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. A brief tour late last month of Northcom's operations center at Peterson Air Force Base found officers monitoring not only aircraft and ship traffic around the United States but also the Discovery space shuttle mission, the National Scout Jamboree in Virginia, several border surveillance operations and a few forest firefighting efforts.
'Dual-Use' Approach
Pentagon authorities have rejected the idea of creating large standing units dedicated to homeland missions. Instead, they favor a "dual-use" approach, drawing on a common pool of troops trained both for homeland and overseas assignments.
Particular reliance is being placed on the National Guard, which is expanding a network of 22-member civil support teams to all states and forming about a dozen 120-member regional response units. Congress last year also gave the Guard expanded authority under Title 32 of the U.S. Code to perform such homeland missions as securing power plants and other critical facilities.
But the Northcom commander can quickly call on active-duty forces as well. On top of previous powers to send fighter jets into the air, Keating earlier this year gained the authority to dispatch Navy and Coast Guard ships to deal with suspected threats off U.S. coasts. He also has immediate access to four active-duty Army battalions based around the country, officers here said.
Nonetheless, when it comes to ground forces possibly taking a lead role in homeland operations, senior Northcom officers remain reluctant to discuss specifics. Keating said such situations, if they arise, probably would be temporary, with lead responsibility passing back to civilian authorities.
Military exercises code-named Vital Archer, which involve troops in lead roles, are shrouded in secrecy. By contrast, other homeland exercises featuring troops in supporting roles are widely publicized.
Legal Questions
Civil liberties groups have warned that the military's expanded involvement in homeland defense could bump up against the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts the use of troops in domestic law enforcement. But Pentagon authorities have told Congress they see no need to change the law.
According to military lawyers here, the dispatch of ground troops would most likely be justified on the basis of the president's authority under Article 2 of the Constitution to serve as commander in chief and protect the nation. The Posse Comitatus Act exempts actions authorized by the Constitution.
"That would be the place we would start from" in making the legal case, said Col. John Gereski, a senior Northcom lawyer.
But Gereski also said he knew of no court test of this legal argument, and Keating left the door open to seeking an amendment of the Posse Comitatus Act.
One potentially tricky area, the admiral said, involves National Guard officers who are put in command of task forces that include active-duty as well as Guard units -- an approach first used last year at the Group of Eight summit in Georgia. Guard troops, acting under state control, are exempt from Posse Comitatus prohibitions.
"It could be a challenge for the commander who's a Guardsman, if we end up in a fairly complex, dynamic scenario," Keating said. He cited a potential situation in which Guard units might begin rounding up people while regular forces could not.
The command's sensitivity to legal issues, Gereski said, is reflected in the unusually large number of lawyers on staff here -- 14 compared with 10 or fewer at other commands. One lawyer serves full time at the command's Combined Intelligence and Fusion Center, which joins military analysts with law enforcement and counterintelligence specialists from such civilian agencies as the FBI, the CIA and the Secret Service.
A senior supervisor at the facility said the staff there does no intelligence collection, only analysis.
He also said the military operates under long-standing rules intended to protect civilian liberties. The rules, for instance, block military access to intelligence information on political dissent or purely criminal activity.
Even so, the center's lawyer is called on periodically to rule on the appropriateness of some kinds of information-sharing. Asked how frequently such cases arise, the supervisor recalled two in the previous 10 days, but he declined to provide specifics.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
washingtonpost.com
Domestic Effort Is Big Shift for Military
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 8, 2005; A01
COLORADO SPRINGS -- The U.S. military has devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terrorist attacks in the United States, envisioning 15 potential crisis scenarios and anticipating several simultaneous strikes around the country, according to officers who drafted the plans.
The classified plans, developed here at Northern Command headquarters, outline a variety of possible roles for quick-reaction forces estimated at as many as 3,000 ground troops per attack, a number that could easily grow depending on the extent of the damage and the abilities of civilian response teams.
The possible scenarios range from "low end," relatively modest crowd-control missions to "high-end," full-scale disaster management after catastrophic attacks such as the release of a deadly biological agent or the explosion of a radiological device, several officers said.
Some of the worst-case scenarios involve three attacks at the same time, in keeping with a Pentagon directive earlier this year ordering Northcom, as the command is called, to plan for multiple simultaneous attacks.
The war plans represent a historic shift for the Pentagon, which has been reluctant to become involved in domestic operations and is legally constrained from engaging in law enforcement. Indeed, defense officials continue to stress that they intend for the troops to play largely a supporting role in homeland emergencies, bolstering police, firefighters and other civilian response groups.
But the new plans provide for what several senior officers acknowledged is the likelihood that the military will have to take charge in some situations, especially when dealing with mass-casualty attacks that could quickly overwhelm civilian resources.
"In my estimation, [in the event of] a biological, a chemical or nuclear attack in any of the 50 states, the Department of Defense is best positioned -- of the various eight federal agencies that would be involved -- to take the lead," said Adm. Timothy J. Keating, the head of Northcom, which coordinates military involvement in homeland security operations.
The plans present the Pentagon with a clearer idea of the kinds and numbers of troops and the training that may be required to build a more credible homeland defense force. They come at a time when senior Pentagon officials are engaged in an internal, year-long review of force levels and weapons systems, attempting to balance the heightened requirements of homeland defense against the heavy demands of overseas deployments in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Keating expressed confidence that existing military assets are sufficient to meet homeland security needs. Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe, Northcom's chief operations officer, agreed, but he added that "stress points" in some military capabilities probably would result if troops were called on to deal with multiple homeland attacks.
Debate and Analysis
Several people on the staff here and at the Pentagon said in interviews that the debate and analysis within the U.S. government regarding the extent of the homeland threat and the resources necessary to guard against it remain far from resolved.
The command's plans consist of two main documents. One, designated CONPLAN 2002 and consisting of more than 1,000 pages, is said to be a sort of umbrella document that draws together previously issued orders for homeland missions and covers air, sea and land operations. It addresses not only post-attack responses but also prevention and deterrence actions aimed at intercepting threats before they reach the United States.
The other, identified as CONPLAN 0500, deals specifically with managing the consequences of attacks represented by the 15 scenarios.
CONPLAN 2002 has passed a review by the Pentagon's Joint Staff and is due to go soon to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and top aides for further study and approval, the officers said. CONPLAN 0500 is still undergoing final drafting here. (CONPLAN stands for "concept plan" and tends to be an abbreviated version of an OPLAN, or "operations plan," which specifies forces and timelines for movement into a combat zone.)
The plans, like much else about Northcom, mark a new venture by a U.S. military establishment still trying to find its comfort level with the idea of a greater homeland defense role after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Military officers and civilian Pentagon policymakers say they recognize, on one hand, that the armed forces have much to offer not only in numbers of troops but also in experience managing crises and responding to emergencies. On the other hand, they worry that too much involvement in homeland missions would diminish the military's ability to deal with threats abroad.
The Pentagon's new homeland defense strategy, issued in June, emphasized in boldface type that "domestic security is primarily a civilian law enforcement function." Still, it noted the possibility that ground troops might be sent into action on U.S. soil to counter security threats and deal with major emergencies.
"For the Pentagon to acknowledge that it would have to respond to catastrophic attack and needs a plan was a big step," said James Carafano, who follows homeland security issues for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank.
William M. Arkin, a defense specialist who has reported on Northcom's war planning, said the evolution of the Pentagon's thinking reflects the recognition of an obvious gap in civilian resources.
Since Northcom's inception in October 2002, its headquarters staff has grown to about 640 members, making it larger than the Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America, but smaller than the regional commands for Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. A brief tour late last month of Northcom's operations center at Peterson Air Force Base found officers monitoring not only aircraft and ship traffic around the United States but also the Discovery space shuttle mission, the National Scout Jamboree in Virginia, several border surveillance operations and a few forest firefighting efforts.
'Dual-Use' Approach
Pentagon authorities have rejected the idea of creating large standing units dedicated to homeland missions. Instead, they favor a "dual-use" approach, drawing on a common pool of troops trained both for homeland and overseas assignments.
Particular reliance is being placed on the National Guard, which is expanding a network of 22-member civil support teams to all states and forming about a dozen 120-member regional response units. Congress last year also gave the Guard expanded authority under Title 32 of the U.S. Code to perform such homeland missions as securing power plants and other critical facilities.
But the Northcom commander can quickly call on active-duty forces as well. On top of previous powers to send fighter jets into the air, Keating earlier this year gained the authority to dispatch Navy and Coast Guard ships to deal with suspected threats off U.S. coasts. He also has immediate access to four active-duty Army battalions based around the country, officers here said.
Nonetheless, when it comes to ground forces possibly taking a lead role in homeland operations, senior Northcom officers remain reluctant to discuss specifics. Keating said such situations, if they arise, probably would be temporary, with lead responsibility passing back to civilian authorities.
Military exercises code-named Vital Archer, which involve troops in lead roles, are shrouded in secrecy. By contrast, other homeland exercises featuring troops in supporting roles are widely publicized.
Legal Questions
Civil liberties groups have warned that the military's expanded involvement in homeland defense could bump up against the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts the use of troops in domestic law enforcement. But Pentagon authorities have told Congress they see no need to change the law.
According to military lawyers here, the dispatch of ground troops would most likely be justified on the basis of the president's authority under Article 2 of the Constitution to serve as commander in chief and protect the nation. The Posse Comitatus Act exempts actions authorized by the Constitution.
"That would be the place we would start from" in making the legal case, said Col. John Gereski, a senior Northcom lawyer.
But Gereski also said he knew of no court test of this legal argument, and Keating left the door open to seeking an amendment of the Posse Comitatus Act.
One potentially tricky area, the admiral said, involves National Guard officers who are put in command of task forces that include active-duty as well as Guard units -- an approach first used last year at the Group of Eight summit in Georgia. Guard troops, acting under state control, are exempt from Posse Comitatus prohibitions.
"It could be a challenge for the commander who's a Guardsman, if we end up in a fairly complex, dynamic scenario," Keating said. He cited a potential situation in which Guard units might begin rounding up people while regular forces could not.
The command's sensitivity to legal issues, Gereski said, is reflected in the unusually large number of lawyers on staff here -- 14 compared with 10 or fewer at other commands. One lawyer serves full time at the command's Combined Intelligence and Fusion Center, which joins military analysts with law enforcement and counterintelligence specialists from such civilian agencies as the FBI, the CIA and the Secret Service.
A senior supervisor at the facility said the staff there does no intelligence collection, only analysis.
He also said the military operates under long-standing rules intended to protect civilian liberties. The rules, for instance, block military access to intelligence information on political dissent or purely criminal activity.
Even so, the center's lawyer is called on periodically to rule on the appropriateness of some kinds of information-sharing. Asked how frequently such cases arise, the supervisor recalled two in the previous 10 days, but he declined to provide specifics.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Exclusive: CIA Commander: We Let bin Laden Slip Away
A Call To Action
MSNBC.com
Newsweek
Aug. 15, 2005 issue - During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry battled about whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Bush, Kerry charged, "didn't choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill" the leader of Al Qaeda. The president called his opponent's allegation "the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking." Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border.
But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp." Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was."
In his book—titled "Jawbreaker"—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen's lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book's specifics, saying he's awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a "strategic disaster" because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora "was not necessarily just the number of troops."
Berntsen's book gives, by contrast, a heroic portrayal of CIA activities at Tora Bora and in the war on terror. Ironically, he has sued the agency over what he calls unacceptable delays in approving his book—a standard process for ex-agency employees describing classified matters. "They're just holding the book," which is scheduled for October release, he says. "CIA officers, Special Forces and U.S. air power drove the Taliban out in 70 days. The CIA has taken roughly 80 days to clear my book." Jennifer Millerwise, a CIA spokeswoman, says Berntsen's "timeline is not accurate," adding that he submitted his book as an ex-employee only in mid-June. "We take seriously our goal of responding quickly."
—Michael Hirsh
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
© 2005 MSNBC.com
MSNBC.com
Newsweek
Aug. 15, 2005 issue - During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry battled about whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Bush, Kerry charged, "didn't choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill" the leader of Al Qaeda. The president called his opponent's allegation "the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking." Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border.
But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp." Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was."
In his book—titled "Jawbreaker"—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen's lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book's specifics, saying he's awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a "strategic disaster" because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora "was not necessarily just the number of troops."
Berntsen's book gives, by contrast, a heroic portrayal of CIA activities at Tora Bora and in the war on terror. Ironically, he has sued the agency over what he calls unacceptable delays in approving his book—a standard process for ex-agency employees describing classified matters. "They're just holding the book," which is scheduled for October release, he says. "CIA officers, Special Forces and U.S. air power drove the Taliban out in 70 days. The CIA has taken roughly 80 days to clear my book." Jennifer Millerwise, a CIA spokeswoman, says Berntsen's "timeline is not accurate," adding that he submitted his book as an ex-employee only in mid-June. "We take seriously our goal of responding quickly."
—Michael Hirsh
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
© 2005 MSNBC.com
Bush Refuses To Meet With Sheehan
A Call To Action
Aides say 'Bush really cares'
by OfficialWire NewsDesk
CRAWFORD, TX -- (OfficialWire) -- 08/07/05 -- Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Sadr City, Iraq, on April 4, 2004, met with two Bush administration aides Saturday after president George W. Bush refused to come out to meet her.
Sheehan, 48 (shown here), traveled to the president's Crawford ranch after Bush said that fallen U.S. troops had died for a 'noble cause' and that the mission must be completed.
"I want to ask the president, 'Why did you kill my son? What did my son die for?" Sheehan told reporters. "Last week, you said my son died for a noble cause' and I want to ask him what that noble cause is?"
A group of approximately 50 supporters made their way toward Bush's ranch, chanting "W. killed her son!" as they walked. The protestors had marched approximately one half-mile down the country road leading to Bush's compound before police stopped them at a bend in the road, still nearly five miles from the ranch's gate.
Capt. Kenneth Vanek of the McLennan County Sheriff's Office said the group was stopped because some marchers ignored instructions to walk in the ditch beside the road, not on the road.
Eventually, national security adviser Steve Hadley and deputy White House chief of staff Joe Hagin were sent out by the president, who refused to meet Sheehan.
After the meeting, Sheehan said: "They (the advisers) said we are in Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that the world's a better place with Saddam gone and that we're making the world a safer place with what we're doing over there."
"And I said if he does care, why doesn't he come out and talk to me." Sheehan said she planned to continue her protest until she gets to talk to Bush.
"They were very respectful. They were nice men. I told them Iraq was not a threat to the United States and that now people are dead for nothing. I told them I wouldn't leave until I talked to George Bush," Sheehan added.
Aides say 'Bush really cares'
by OfficialWire NewsDesk
CRAWFORD, TX -- (OfficialWire) -- 08/07/05 -- Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Sadr City, Iraq, on April 4, 2004, met with two Bush administration aides Saturday after president George W. Bush refused to come out to meet her.
Sheehan, 48 (shown here), traveled to the president's Crawford ranch after Bush said that fallen U.S. troops had died for a 'noble cause' and that the mission must be completed.
"I want to ask the president, 'Why did you kill my son? What did my son die for?" Sheehan told reporters. "Last week, you said my son died for a noble cause' and I want to ask him what that noble cause is?"
A group of approximately 50 supporters made their way toward Bush's ranch, chanting "W. killed her son!" as they walked. The protestors had marched approximately one half-mile down the country road leading to Bush's compound before police stopped them at a bend in the road, still nearly five miles from the ranch's gate.
Capt. Kenneth Vanek of the McLennan County Sheriff's Office said the group was stopped because some marchers ignored instructions to walk in the ditch beside the road, not on the road.
Eventually, national security adviser Steve Hadley and deputy White House chief of staff Joe Hagin were sent out by the president, who refused to meet Sheehan.
After the meeting, Sheehan said: "They (the advisers) said we are in Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that the world's a better place with Saddam gone and that we're making the world a safer place with what we're doing over there."
"And I said if he does care, why doesn't he come out and talk to me." Sheehan said she planned to continue her protest until she gets to talk to Bush.
"They were very respectful. They were nice men. I told them Iraq was not a threat to the United States and that now people are dead for nothing. I told them I wouldn't leave until I talked to George Bush," Sheehan added.
Rich Liberals Vow to Fund Think Tanks
A Call To Action
Aim Is to Compete With Conservatives
By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 7, 2005; A01
At least 80 wealthy liberals have pledged to contribute $1 million or more apiece to fund a network of think tanks and advocacy groups to compete with the potent conservative infrastructure built up over the past three decades.
The money will be channeled through a new partnership called the Democracy Alliance, which was founded last spring -- the latest in a series of liberal initiatives as the Democratic Party and its allies continue to struggle with the loss of the House and the Senate in 1994 and the presidency in 2000. Many influential Democratic contributors were left angry and despairing over the party's poor showing in last year's elections, and are looking for what they hope will be more effective ways to invest their support.
Financial commitments totaling at least $80 million over the next five years generated by the Democracy Alliance in recent months -- at a time when some liberal groups, such as the George Soros-backed America Coming Together, are floundering -- suggest that the group is becoming a player in the long-term effort to reinvigorate the left. The group has a goal of raising $200 million -- a sum that would inevitably come in part at the expense of more traditional Democratic groups, although alliance officials say donors have committed to maintaining past contribution levels.
Alliance chairman Steven Gluckstern, a retired investment banker, said that President Bush's victory over Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) last year after millions of dollars had been poured into pro-Democratic "527" groups caused many contributors to think that a dramatically new approach is needed.
"It wasn't only the failure to win, it was the question 'What does it take to win?' " Gluckstern said. "Among the lessons learned was that to bring back the progressive majority in this country is not just a periodic election investment strategy."
The Democracy Alliance will act as a financial clearing house. Its staff members and board of directors will develop a lineup of established and proposed groups that they believe will develop and promote ideas on the left. To fulfill their million-dollar pledge, each partner must agree to give $200,000 or more a year for at least five years to alliance-endorsed groups.
The alliance is the brainchild of longtime Democratic strategist Rob Stein, who spent years studying conservative groups -- in particular their success in sustaining GOP politicians and achieving many of their policy goals. Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, is working with Stein and is a leading promoter of his effort.
Rosenberg said liberals and Democrats now face a conservative "information-age Tammany Hall, a 21st century political machine, that is simply better than what we have on our side.
"The infrastructure we have was built for a different time and mission. It was built around the congressional majority we had for 60 years in the 20th century, the labor movement and the urban-ethnic city machines," he added.
As alliance officials see it, many liberal groups are designed to protect an agenda that was enacted by past Democratic majorities -- as opposed to generating new ideas and communication strategies to win support from voters who do not belong to labor or other traditionally Democratic constituencies.
Among those on the board are Ann S. Bowers, founding trustee of the Noyce Foundation and former executive at Intel Corp.; Albert C. Yates, former president of Colorado State University; and California high-tech entrepreneur Davidi Gilo.
The goal of the alliance, according to organizers, is to foster the growth of liberal or left-leaning institutions equipped to take on prominent think tanks on the right, including the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, as well as such training centers as the Leadership Institute and the Young America's Foundation.
Almost all the alliance partners have been active donors of the Democratic Party and liberal interest groups. Many said they have concluded that their spending to date has lacked strategic coherence.
"There never has been an organized or coordinated look at connecting the dots of the progressive movement," said San Francisco businessman Mark Buell. He and his wife, Esprit de Corps founder Susie T. Buell, are major Democratic donors. Mark Buell, an alliance board member, said: "For 40 years, we had a voice somewhere, the White House, Congress, the Senate. For the first time, we find ourselves without a voice."
"To be effective in the 21st century in promoting your beliefs, it is necessary to have a financially secure institutional infrastructure that has the capacity to promote consistently and coherently a set of ideas, policies and messages," Stein said. "We understand that it's very hard to promote a belief system and to be operationally high performing if you don't have multi-year funding."
The shift of big money givers to the alliance poses a threat to the survival of such pro-Democratic independent groups as America Coming Together and the Media Fund. These two groups depended on many of the same donors to raise $196.7 million in 2003 and 2004. ACT recently announced that it is closing state offices and laying off most staff members. Democratic sources said its long-term survival is in doubt.
Soros, the billionaire financier, was the most prominent backer of the 2004 Democratic groups, but he has assumed only a modest role in the Democracy Alliance. He has stopped donating to ACT.
There has been a flourishing of new, pro-Democratic think tanks and advocacy groups in recent years. Clinton administration chief of staff John D. Podesta established the Center for American Progress; former Democratic congressional aide David Sirota recently set up the state-oriented Progressive Legislative Action Network; and author David Brock helped create Media Matters for America last year, among others. All these groups are potential recipients of money from alliance partners.
In addition, the number of liberal bloggers on the Web has been growing at a fast pace, and their blogs have become both central forums for debate over party strategies and hugely successful vehicles for campaign fundraising, including raising through online contributions more than two thirds of the $750,000 used in the surprisingly competitive House campaign of Democrat Paul Hackett in Ohio. Rosenberg has created the New Politics Institute, an organization that works with bloggers.
Alliance organizers said they are seeking to avoid involvement in the ideological disputes that have plagued Democrats in recent years. But it may prove difficult to avoid them when the list of organizations eligible for contributions is drafted.
Stein has spent considerable time in the midst of internal Democratic wars, having served as chief of staff to the Clinton-Gore transition in 1992 and strategic adviser to former Democratic National Committee chairman Ron Brown. In recent years, he has become a venture capitalist.
Jockeying for cash among possible recipient organizations has already begun. Robert L. Borosage, director of the liberal Campaign for America's Future, said the alliance will fund a "set of institutions in this city to be in the national debate, and we would like to be one of them."
Stein, who closely examined the finances of institutions on the right and left over the past two years, contends that there is a huge financial imbalance favoring conservatives that he puts at $295 million vs. $75 million.
In 2003, the 19 progressive organizations with budgets exceeding $1 million spent a total of $75 million, he said. In contrast, the 24 national think tanks on the right had $170 million in spending, along with state-based policy centers' $50 million and campus-based conservative policy organizations' $75 million to $100 million, according to Stein.
Liberal groups have been disproportionately dependent on one-year foundation grants for specific projects, Stein said, while the money flowing to conservative groups has often involved donors' long-term commitments with no strings attached. Stein noted that of 200 major conservative donors, about half sit on the boards of the think tanks they give to, increasing the strength of their commitment.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Aim Is to Compete With Conservatives
By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 7, 2005; A01
At least 80 wealthy liberals have pledged to contribute $1 million or more apiece to fund a network of think tanks and advocacy groups to compete with the potent conservative infrastructure built up over the past three decades.
The money will be channeled through a new partnership called the Democracy Alliance, which was founded last spring -- the latest in a series of liberal initiatives as the Democratic Party and its allies continue to struggle with the loss of the House and the Senate in 1994 and the presidency in 2000. Many influential Democratic contributors were left angry and despairing over the party's poor showing in last year's elections, and are looking for what they hope will be more effective ways to invest their support.
Financial commitments totaling at least $80 million over the next five years generated by the Democracy Alliance in recent months -- at a time when some liberal groups, such as the George Soros-backed America Coming Together, are floundering -- suggest that the group is becoming a player in the long-term effort to reinvigorate the left. The group has a goal of raising $200 million -- a sum that would inevitably come in part at the expense of more traditional Democratic groups, although alliance officials say donors have committed to maintaining past contribution levels.
Alliance chairman Steven Gluckstern, a retired investment banker, said that President Bush's victory over Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) last year after millions of dollars had been poured into pro-Democratic "527" groups caused many contributors to think that a dramatically new approach is needed.
"It wasn't only the failure to win, it was the question 'What does it take to win?' " Gluckstern said. "Among the lessons learned was that to bring back the progressive majority in this country is not just a periodic election investment strategy."
The Democracy Alliance will act as a financial clearing house. Its staff members and board of directors will develop a lineup of established and proposed groups that they believe will develop and promote ideas on the left. To fulfill their million-dollar pledge, each partner must agree to give $200,000 or more a year for at least five years to alliance-endorsed groups.
The alliance is the brainchild of longtime Democratic strategist Rob Stein, who spent years studying conservative groups -- in particular their success in sustaining GOP politicians and achieving many of their policy goals. Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, is working with Stein and is a leading promoter of his effort.
Rosenberg said liberals and Democrats now face a conservative "information-age Tammany Hall, a 21st century political machine, that is simply better than what we have on our side.
"The infrastructure we have was built for a different time and mission. It was built around the congressional majority we had for 60 years in the 20th century, the labor movement and the urban-ethnic city machines," he added.
As alliance officials see it, many liberal groups are designed to protect an agenda that was enacted by past Democratic majorities -- as opposed to generating new ideas and communication strategies to win support from voters who do not belong to labor or other traditionally Democratic constituencies.
Among those on the board are Ann S. Bowers, founding trustee of the Noyce Foundation and former executive at Intel Corp.; Albert C. Yates, former president of Colorado State University; and California high-tech entrepreneur Davidi Gilo.
The goal of the alliance, according to organizers, is to foster the growth of liberal or left-leaning institutions equipped to take on prominent think tanks on the right, including the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, as well as such training centers as the Leadership Institute and the Young America's Foundation.
Almost all the alliance partners have been active donors of the Democratic Party and liberal interest groups. Many said they have concluded that their spending to date has lacked strategic coherence.
"There never has been an organized or coordinated look at connecting the dots of the progressive movement," said San Francisco businessman Mark Buell. He and his wife, Esprit de Corps founder Susie T. Buell, are major Democratic donors. Mark Buell, an alliance board member, said: "For 40 years, we had a voice somewhere, the White House, Congress, the Senate. For the first time, we find ourselves without a voice."
"To be effective in the 21st century in promoting your beliefs, it is necessary to have a financially secure institutional infrastructure that has the capacity to promote consistently and coherently a set of ideas, policies and messages," Stein said. "We understand that it's very hard to promote a belief system and to be operationally high performing if you don't have multi-year funding."
The shift of big money givers to the alliance poses a threat to the survival of such pro-Democratic independent groups as America Coming Together and the Media Fund. These two groups depended on many of the same donors to raise $196.7 million in 2003 and 2004. ACT recently announced that it is closing state offices and laying off most staff members. Democratic sources said its long-term survival is in doubt.
Soros, the billionaire financier, was the most prominent backer of the 2004 Democratic groups, but he has assumed only a modest role in the Democracy Alliance. He has stopped donating to ACT.
There has been a flourishing of new, pro-Democratic think tanks and advocacy groups in recent years. Clinton administration chief of staff John D. Podesta established the Center for American Progress; former Democratic congressional aide David Sirota recently set up the state-oriented Progressive Legislative Action Network; and author David Brock helped create Media Matters for America last year, among others. All these groups are potential recipients of money from alliance partners.
In addition, the number of liberal bloggers on the Web has been growing at a fast pace, and their blogs have become both central forums for debate over party strategies and hugely successful vehicles for campaign fundraising, including raising through online contributions more than two thirds of the $750,000 used in the surprisingly competitive House campaign of Democrat Paul Hackett in Ohio. Rosenberg has created the New Politics Institute, an organization that works with bloggers.
Alliance organizers said they are seeking to avoid involvement in the ideological disputes that have plagued Democrats in recent years. But it may prove difficult to avoid them when the list of organizations eligible for contributions is drafted.
Stein has spent considerable time in the midst of internal Democratic wars, having served as chief of staff to the Clinton-Gore transition in 1992 and strategic adviser to former Democratic National Committee chairman Ron Brown. In recent years, he has become a venture capitalist.
Jockeying for cash among possible recipient organizations has already begun. Robert L. Borosage, director of the liberal Campaign for America's Future, said the alliance will fund a "set of institutions in this city to be in the national debate, and we would like to be one of them."
Stein, who closely examined the finances of institutions on the right and left over the past two years, contends that there is a huge financial imbalance favoring conservatives that he puts at $295 million vs. $75 million.
In 2003, the 19 progressive organizations with budgets exceeding $1 million spent a total of $75 million, he said. In contrast, the 24 national think tanks on the right had $170 million in spending, along with state-based policy centers' $50 million and campus-based conservative policy organizations' $75 million to $100 million, according to Stein.
Liberal groups have been disproportionately dependent on one-year foundation grants for specific projects, Stein said, while the money flowing to conservative groups has often involved donors' long-term commitments with no strings attached. Stein noted that of 200 major conservative donors, about half sit on the boards of the think tanks they give to, increasing the strength of their commitment.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
When Pigs Wi-Fi
A Call To Action
The New York Times
August 7, 2005
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
HERMISTON, Ore.
This is cowboy country, where the rodeo is coming to town, the high school's "kiss the pig" contest involves a genuine hog, and life seems about as high-tech as the local calf-dressing competition, when teams race to wrestle protesting calves into T-shirts.
But Hermiston is actually a global leader of our Internet future. Today, this chunk of arid farm country appears to be the largest Wi-Fi hot spot in the world, with wireless high-speed Internet access available free for some 600 square miles. Most of that is in eastern Oregon, with some just across the border in southern Washington.
Driving along the road here, I used my laptop to get e-mail and download video - and you can do that while cruising at 70 miles per hour, mile after mile after mile, at a transmission speed several times as fast as a T-1 line. (Note: it's preferable to do this with someone else driving.)
This kind of network is the wave of the future, and eastern Oregon shows that it's technically and financially feasible. New York and other leading cities should be embarrassed that Morrow and Umatilla Counties in eastern Oregon are far ahead of them in providing high-speed Internet coverage to residents, schools and law enforcement officers - even though all of Morrow County doesn't even have a single traffic light.
The big cities should take note, said Kim Puzey, the general manager of the Port of Umatilla on the Columbia River here. "We'd like people to say, 'If they can do it out in the boondocks with a small population, that model can be applied to highly complex areas,' " he said.
Mr. Puzey, who says wireless broadband is central to the port's operations, argues persuasively that broadband is just the next step in expanding the national infrastructure, comparable to the transcontinental railroad, the national highway system and rural electrification.
Indeed, we need to envision broadband Internet access as just another utility, like electricity or water. Often the best way to provide that will be to blanket a region with Wi-Fi coverage to create wireless computer networks, rather than running D.S.L., cable or fiber-optic lines to every home.
So if the first step was to get Americans wired, the next step is to make them wireless.
Two pioneers in that process are Portland, Ore., and Philadelphia, which are both moving toward citywide Wi-Fi Internet access. Consumers will still have to pay for broadband, but only about half as much as they do now.
Still, Portland and Philadelphia won't have their systems in place until next year. Meanwhile, the system in eastern Oregon covers a larger geographic area, is free for consumers and has been up and running for more than a year and a half.
One reason it sprang up here is that a nearby Army depot contains chemical weapons, so there is special concern about what would happen if a cloud of nerve gas escaped from the depot. That fear helped provide a pot of federal money to underwrite safety systems.
Usually, the police and fire agencies communicate just by radio, but Hermiston decided to go with a public-private partnership that established a Wi-Fi network. The police chief, Dan Coulombe, showed me the wireless computers that all police officers now carry. They can download data and receive images from video monitors - and, if nerve gas ever escaped, display the cloud's direction and speed.
Fingerprint readers are now being added to these portable devices so a police officer can almost instantly run a person's fingerprint through a multistate database. And if there's a report of a burglary, the police rushing to the scene can download floor plans of the building, live images from video monitors and information about the alarm system.
The wizard behind the system is Fred Ziari, an Iranian immigrant and Wi-Fi pioneer who runs a high-tech company in Hermiston and Portland, EZ Wireless. Mr. Ziari contracted with the local authorities to provide the Wi-Fi service, which lets consumers piggyback for nothing.
Hermiston is already starting to introduce WiMax, the next generation of technology after Wi-Fi, offering much higher speeds and greater range.
Other American towns need to follow Hermiston, not necessarily in holding "kiss the pig" contests, but in ensuring broadband Internet access as reliably as they do water or electricity. The fact is, unless you're a cowboy here in eastern Oregon, you're behind the times.
E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
August 7, 2005
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
HERMISTON, Ore.
This is cowboy country, where the rodeo is coming to town, the high school's "kiss the pig" contest involves a genuine hog, and life seems about as high-tech as the local calf-dressing competition, when teams race to wrestle protesting calves into T-shirts.
But Hermiston is actually a global leader of our Internet future. Today, this chunk of arid farm country appears to be the largest Wi-Fi hot spot in the world, with wireless high-speed Internet access available free for some 600 square miles. Most of that is in eastern Oregon, with some just across the border in southern Washington.
Driving along the road here, I used my laptop to get e-mail and download video - and you can do that while cruising at 70 miles per hour, mile after mile after mile, at a transmission speed several times as fast as a T-1 line. (Note: it's preferable to do this with someone else driving.)
This kind of network is the wave of the future, and eastern Oregon shows that it's technically and financially feasible. New York and other leading cities should be embarrassed that Morrow and Umatilla Counties in eastern Oregon are far ahead of them in providing high-speed Internet coverage to residents, schools and law enforcement officers - even though all of Morrow County doesn't even have a single traffic light.
The big cities should take note, said Kim Puzey, the general manager of the Port of Umatilla on the Columbia River here. "We'd like people to say, 'If they can do it out in the boondocks with a small population, that model can be applied to highly complex areas,' " he said.
Mr. Puzey, who says wireless broadband is central to the port's operations, argues persuasively that broadband is just the next step in expanding the national infrastructure, comparable to the transcontinental railroad, the national highway system and rural electrification.
Indeed, we need to envision broadband Internet access as just another utility, like electricity or water. Often the best way to provide that will be to blanket a region with Wi-Fi coverage to create wireless computer networks, rather than running D.S.L., cable or fiber-optic lines to every home.
So if the first step was to get Americans wired, the next step is to make them wireless.
Two pioneers in that process are Portland, Ore., and Philadelphia, which are both moving toward citywide Wi-Fi Internet access. Consumers will still have to pay for broadband, but only about half as much as they do now.
Still, Portland and Philadelphia won't have their systems in place until next year. Meanwhile, the system in eastern Oregon covers a larger geographic area, is free for consumers and has been up and running for more than a year and a half.
One reason it sprang up here is that a nearby Army depot contains chemical weapons, so there is special concern about what would happen if a cloud of nerve gas escaped from the depot. That fear helped provide a pot of federal money to underwrite safety systems.
Usually, the police and fire agencies communicate just by radio, but Hermiston decided to go with a public-private partnership that established a Wi-Fi network. The police chief, Dan Coulombe, showed me the wireless computers that all police officers now carry. They can download data and receive images from video monitors - and, if nerve gas ever escaped, display the cloud's direction and speed.
Fingerprint readers are now being added to these portable devices so a police officer can almost instantly run a person's fingerprint through a multistate database. And if there's a report of a burglary, the police rushing to the scene can download floor plans of the building, live images from video monitors and information about the alarm system.
The wizard behind the system is Fred Ziari, an Iranian immigrant and Wi-Fi pioneer who runs a high-tech company in Hermiston and Portland, EZ Wireless. Mr. Ziari contracted with the local authorities to provide the Wi-Fi service, which lets consumers piggyback for nothing.
Hermiston is already starting to introduce WiMax, the next generation of technology after Wi-Fi, offering much higher speeds and greater range.
Other American towns need to follow Hermiston, not necessarily in holding "kiss the pig" contests, but in ensuring broadband Internet access as reliably as they do water or electricity. The fact is, unless you're a cowboy here in eastern Oregon, you're behind the times.
E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Saturday, August 06, 2005
How Bush thinks: intuition over intellect
A Call To Action
latimes.com
advertisement
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-chait5aug05,0,6079158.column?track=hpmostemailedlink
JONATHAN CHAIT
Jonathan Chait
August 5, 2005
AS SOMEBODY WHO doesn't have the slightest feeling one way or another about baseball star Rafael Palmeiro, I have to say that it seems pretty clear Palmeiro has used steroids. Palmeiro recently tested positive for steroid use. And then there's former teammate Jose Canseco's allegation that he and Palmeiro both used steroids, which is impossible to verify but would seem to explain why Palmeiro's annual home run total nearly doubled after Canseco joined him on the Texas Rangers. None of this is ironclad proof, but it seems the simplest way to reconcile the available data.
President Bush, though, doesn't see it this way at all. When asked about Palmeiro's positive steroid test, Bush — who knew Palmeiro when the president owned the Rangers — replied, "Rafael Palmeiro is a friend. He testified in public and I believe him. He's the kind of person that's going to stand up in front of the Klieg lights and say he didn't use steroids, and I believe him."
This statement perfectly crystallizes Bush's thinking. Facts don't matter to him. What matters is how he feels about the person in question. In 2001, for instance, Bush met with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, and the two hit it off. As Bush later told Peggy Noonan, Putin recounted to him a story involving a cross given to him by his mother.
"I said to him, 'You know, I found that story very interesting. You see, President Putin, I think you judge a person on something other than just politics. I think it's important for me and for you to look for the depth of a person's soul and character. I was touched by the fact your mother gave you the cross.' " Bush publicly testified of Putin, "I was able to get a sense of his soul."
Personally, I put less weight on the fact that Putin got a cross from his mother, and more on the fact that Putin has smothered Russian democracy by outlawing opposition parties, shut down any remotely skeptical media outlet and subjected his critics to political show trials. Yet this sort of evidence has had barely any effect on Bush. Two years later, he was still praising Putin's desire for "a country in which democracy and freedom and rule of law thrive."
Bush is even apt to apply this particular brand of illogic to his own character. In one of the 2000 presidential debates, Al Gore pointed out that Bush as governor of Texas opposed a measure to expand children's healthcare and instead used the money for a tax cut. The debate moderator then asked Bush, "Are those numbers correct? Are his charges correct?" To which Bush replied, "If he's trying to allege that I'm a hardhearted person and I don't care about children, he's absolutely wrong."
The style of Bush's reply is telling. Gore was trying to make a point about Bush's moral priorities by establishing a series of facts about Bush's behavior. Rather than deny having chosen tax cuts over children's healthcare, or explain his rationale for having done so, Bush changed the subject to more comfortable ground: judging people's hearts. He asked the audience to intuit, based on the way he carries himself, that he is a warmhearted person, and thus to reject out of hand any facts that might clash with this impression.
The point isn't just that Bush refuses to engage with facts he finds inconvenient. (Many fail that test.) It's that Bush rejects reason itself. Reason is a process by which we draw our broader conclusions from an accumulation of specific evidence. When the evidence changes ("Hey, this Putin guy seems to be squelching dissent"), our conclusions can also ("Perhaps he doesn't love democracy as much as he said he did!"). Bush, on the other hand, arrives at his beliefs through intuition. His supporters marvel at the unshakeable certainty of his convictions. Well, no wonder.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
TMS Reprints
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Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service
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latimes.com
advertisement
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-chait5aug05,0,6079158.column?track=hpmostemailedlink
JONATHAN CHAIT
Jonathan Chait
August 5, 2005
AS SOMEBODY WHO doesn't have the slightest feeling one way or another about baseball star Rafael Palmeiro, I have to say that it seems pretty clear Palmeiro has used steroids. Palmeiro recently tested positive for steroid use. And then there's former teammate Jose Canseco's allegation that he and Palmeiro both used steroids, which is impossible to verify but would seem to explain why Palmeiro's annual home run total nearly doubled after Canseco joined him on the Texas Rangers. None of this is ironclad proof, but it seems the simplest way to reconcile the available data.
President Bush, though, doesn't see it this way at all. When asked about Palmeiro's positive steroid test, Bush — who knew Palmeiro when the president owned the Rangers — replied, "Rafael Palmeiro is a friend. He testified in public and I believe him. He's the kind of person that's going to stand up in front of the Klieg lights and say he didn't use steroids, and I believe him."
This statement perfectly crystallizes Bush's thinking. Facts don't matter to him. What matters is how he feels about the person in question. In 2001, for instance, Bush met with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, and the two hit it off. As Bush later told Peggy Noonan, Putin recounted to him a story involving a cross given to him by his mother.
"I said to him, 'You know, I found that story very interesting. You see, President Putin, I think you judge a person on something other than just politics. I think it's important for me and for you to look for the depth of a person's soul and character. I was touched by the fact your mother gave you the cross.' " Bush publicly testified of Putin, "I was able to get a sense of his soul."
Personally, I put less weight on the fact that Putin got a cross from his mother, and more on the fact that Putin has smothered Russian democracy by outlawing opposition parties, shut down any remotely skeptical media outlet and subjected his critics to political show trials. Yet this sort of evidence has had barely any effect on Bush. Two years later, he was still praising Putin's desire for "a country in which democracy and freedom and rule of law thrive."
Bush is even apt to apply this particular brand of illogic to his own character. In one of the 2000 presidential debates, Al Gore pointed out that Bush as governor of Texas opposed a measure to expand children's healthcare and instead used the money for a tax cut. The debate moderator then asked Bush, "Are those numbers correct? Are his charges correct?" To which Bush replied, "If he's trying to allege that I'm a hardhearted person and I don't care about children, he's absolutely wrong."
The style of Bush's reply is telling. Gore was trying to make a point about Bush's moral priorities by establishing a series of facts about Bush's behavior. Rather than deny having chosen tax cuts over children's healthcare, or explain his rationale for having done so, Bush changed the subject to more comfortable ground: judging people's hearts. He asked the audience to intuit, based on the way he carries himself, that he is a warmhearted person, and thus to reject out of hand any facts that might clash with this impression.
The point isn't just that Bush refuses to engage with facts he finds inconvenient. (Many fail that test.) It's that Bush rejects reason itself. Reason is a process by which we draw our broader conclusions from an accumulation of specific evidence. When the evidence changes ("Hey, this Putin guy seems to be squelching dissent"), our conclusions can also ("Perhaps he doesn't love democracy as much as he said he did!"). Bush, on the other hand, arrives at his beliefs through intuition. His supporters marvel at the unshakeable certainty of his convictions. Well, no wonder.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.
TMS Reprints
Article licensing and reprint options
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service
Home Delivery | Advertise | Archives | Contact | Site Map | Help
partners: KTLA Hoy
Bush shows he gives a damn...again
A Call To Action
AlterNet
By Monica Mehta
Posted on August 4, 2005, Printed on August 6, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/monica/23901/
Aah, it's August again, and once again, our President has decided to take another trip to his Texas ranch to ride his bicycle, pick up twigs, and chop cedar. And what better time to take a vacation? His right-hand man has been implicated in a CIA leak, our closest ally has undergone two terrorist attacks in the past month, 17 soldiers have just been killed in the last week in Iraq... nah, there's no reason whatsoever for him to stick around and do his job! So while millions of Americans continue to sweat and toil in the August heat, our dear President will be taking nearly five weeks away from the office -- his longest leave yet from the White House and the longest presidential retreat in at least 36 years. That means he'll have spent nearly 20 percent of his presidency at the ranch -- a record amount: No president will have spent as much time away from the White House as Bush has. Well, at least we can be assured that he's in touch with the working man's plight. Thanks, Prez, for showing us all in such concrete terms that you're so dedicated to your job.
Monica Mehta is an associate editor at AlterNet.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/monica/23901/
AlterNet
By Monica Mehta
Posted on August 4, 2005, Printed on August 6, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/monica/23901/
Aah, it's August again, and once again, our President has decided to take another trip to his Texas ranch to ride his bicycle, pick up twigs, and chop cedar. And what better time to take a vacation? His right-hand man has been implicated in a CIA leak, our closest ally has undergone two terrorist attacks in the past month, 17 soldiers have just been killed in the last week in Iraq... nah, there's no reason whatsoever for him to stick around and do his job! So while millions of Americans continue to sweat and toil in the August heat, our dear President will be taking nearly five weeks away from the office -- his longest leave yet from the White House and the longest presidential retreat in at least 36 years. That means he'll have spent nearly 20 percent of his presidency at the ranch -- a record amount: No president will have spent as much time away from the White House as Bush has. Well, at least we can be assured that he's in touch with the working man's plight. Thanks, Prez, for showing us all in such concrete terms that you're so dedicated to your job.
Monica Mehta is an associate editor at AlterNet.
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/monica/23901/
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Fw: John Bolton Appointed UN Ambassador Without Senate's Consent - FCNL
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kathy Guthrie" <kathyguthrie@fcnl.org>
To: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
Sent: Thursday, August 04, 2005 11:09 AM
Subject: John Bolton Appointed UN Ambassador Without Senate's Consent - FCNL
John Bolton Appointed UN Ambassador Without Senate's Consent
President Bush's recess appointment of John Bolton to the post of U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) could seem like a defeat for the
vast majority of people in the U.S. who support the UN and arms
control. In the past, John Bolton certainly has been no friend to the
UN. In fact, however, the nation-wide grassroots effort to prevent
Senate confirmation of John Bolton was a great success. Why?
Because senators - Republican and Democrat - listened to the concerns
of their constituents who asked them not to appoint an opponent of arms
control and the UN.
It was due to thousands of calls, emails, and letters from supporters
like you, that the Senate did not give its consent for this
appointment. Thank you for all your hard work in support of global
cooperation through diplomacy. Also because of you, Congress is now
engaged in a substantive debate on the nature of U.S.-UN relations and
UN reform.
Now we need the Senate to take action when it returns in September to
show strong support for the UN. The Senate should counter the
House's proposed cut in U.S. funding for the UN and support a more
effective approach to UN reform.
ACTION: Please contact your senators in their local offices while they
are on August recess. You can find local contact information by
visiting FCNL's web site at
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/DEBLEYFEBT/ISRWEYFGUV/ and entering your
zip code.
In your letter or phone call, express your support for the UN and for
effective global engagement. Urge your senators to oppose legislation
that would cut U.S. dues to the UN and to support proposals for more
effective, cooperative approaches to UN reform. The UN - whatever
its flaws - serves an essential problem-solving role in the current
age of politically motivated mass killings, global warming, the
HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The UN
needs cooperative U.S. leadership, as well as strong political and
financial support, for it to be more effective.
BACKGROUND: Confident that the Senate would not confirm his nominee,
President Bush this week used a constitutional procedure to appoint
John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador to the UN without Senate confirmation.
According to Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution, the president is
empowered to fill vacancies when the Senate is in recess. The
appointments are temporary, effective through the final adjournment of
the sitting Congress (in this case, January 2007). The constitutional
clause was originally created to fill vacancies that occurred during
long congressional recesses, but more recently presidents have used
this provision to circumvent Senate opposition. Although
disappointing, the recess appointment demonstrates that President
Bush's nominee could not garner sufficient bipartisan support for
Senate confirmation. To avoid this situation in the future, we hope
President Bush will consult with senators in advance on future
nominations to assure broad bipartisan support.
While FCNL opposed the nomination of John Bolton because of his extreme
views, we hope that as UN Ambassador he will demonstrate the diplomatic
traits required of this important position and engage with the
international community to address pressing global problems. His
appointment comes at a critical time for U.S.-UN relations. This
September, more than 75 world leaders will gather at the 2005 World
Summit to address issues of UN reform, international peace and
security, and global poverty and development. The U.S. should be
engaging cooperatively and helping lead the world community at this
important time. The U.S. Ambassador must aid this engagement by being
a consensus-builder who demonstrates restraint, moderation, and
diplomatic skill and by conveying a compelling vision for global
cooperation.
Unfortunately, the House has recently passed a misguided UN reform bill
(H.R. 2745) that would withhold 50% of U.S. dues if the UN fails to
implement a long list of specific reforms. Similar legislation has
been introduced in the Senate. This type of legislation is no way to
demonstrate cooperative U.S. leadership for a more effective UN.
Instead, the Senate should pass legislation that offers a positive
vision for U.S.-UN relations and promotes effective UN reform.
Col. Dan Smith (USA, Ret.) has written an analysis of the House's UN
reform bill if you would like to find out more:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/DEBLEYFEBT/KROSEYFGUW/
_______________________________________
Stop New Nuclear Weapons! Find out how,
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/DEBLEYFEBT/HQXVEYFGUX/
The Next Step for Iraq: Join FCNL's Iraq Campaign,
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/DEBLEYFEBT/DOGLEYFGUY/
Contact Congress and the Administration:
http://capwiz.com/fconl/utr/1/DEBLEYFEBT/LZBDEYFGUZ/
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bumper stickers and yard signs:
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Contribute to FCNL:
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from this list, please see the end of this message.
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________________________________________
Friends Committee on National Legislation
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fcnl@fcnl.org * www.fcnl.org
phone: (202)547-6000 * toll-free: (800)630-1330
We seek a world free of war and the threat of war
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In Congress, the GOP Embraces Its Spending Side
A Call To Action
washingtonpost.com
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 4, 2005; A01
GOP leaders this week sent House Republicans home for the summer with some political tips, helpfully laid out in 12 "Ideas for August Recess Events." Drop by a military reserve center to highlight increased benefits, the talking points suggest. Visit a bridge or highway that will receive additional funding, or talk up the new prescription drug benefit for seniors.
Having skirted budget restraints and approved nearly $300 billion in new spending and tax breaks before leaving town, Republican lawmakers are now determined to claim full credit for the congressional spending. Far from shying away from their accomplishments, lawmakers are embracing the pork, including graffiti eradication in the Bronx, $277 million in road projects for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), and a $200,000 deer-avoidance system in New York.
When the year started, President Bush made spending restraint a mantra, laying out an austere budget that would freeze non-security discretionary spending for five years and setting firm cost limits on transportation and energy bills. But now, as Congress fills in the details of the budget plan, there is little interest in making deep cuts and enormous pressure to spend.
Lawmakers have seen little to fear from a political backlash, some acknowledge, and Bush has yet to wield his veto pen. In fact, the White House has proved itself largely unable to overcome the institutional forces that have long driven lawmakers to ply their parochial interests with cash.
When lawmakers return in the fall, they are almost certain to vote for more tax cuts. They also will vote on a huge new defense spending bill. But proposals for cutting entitlement programs including Medicaid have yet to pick up much support.
"If you look at fiscal conservatism these days, it's in a sorry state," said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), one of only eight House members to vote against the $286.5 billion transportation bill that was passed the day before the recess. "Republicans don't even pretend anymore."
Last week, Congress approved transportation and energy bills that burst through the president's cost limits. Annual spending bills are inching above caps set by Congress itself in its budget plan for 2006. And a massive water projects bill passed by the House last month authorizes spending that would exceed current levels by 173 percent.
"You have to be courageous to not spend money," said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), "and we don't have many people who have that courage."
Indeed, Congress has exceeded the allocations or assumptions in its budget resolution four times -- and the year's legislative work is far from complete. According to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, those budget violations have raised spending through 2010 by roughly $2.2 billion above Congress's limits and tacked $115 billion onto the federal budget deficit through the end of decade, including $33 billion in 2006 alone.
That $33 billion may be tantamount to a rounding error in a $2.6 trillion budget, but it is 10 percent of the $333 billion budget deficit the White House has forecast for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.
"There's a rising level of frustration with the disconnect between where the vast majority of conservatives are in this country and how Congress is behaving," said former representative Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), whose Club for Growth political action committee finances the campaigns of conservative candidates. "There's going to be a wake-up call sooner or later."
For now, Congress and the White House are locked in a pattern of skirting their own constraints. In 2004, Bush demanded that no highway bill exceed $256 billion. Under pressure, he increased his limit to $284 billion this year. Congress responded with a five-year, $286.5 billion measure, but even that figure may be deceptive, Flake warned. The bill actually authorizes expenditures of $295 billion but assumes that, on the last day of the bill's life, Congress will rescind $8.5 billion in unused funds.
"Nobody believes that's going to happen," Flake said. "It's frankly a pretty transparent gimmick."
Bush set a firm cost limit of $6.7 billion for tax breaks in the energy bill. Congress then approved breaks worth $11.5 billion over 10 years in an energy bill that will cost $12.3 billion overall. In late June, the White House hastily requested an additional $975 million to finance unanticipated veterans' health care costs for 2005. The Senate responded with $1.5 billion.
So far, Congress has completed only two of 13 annual spending bills, but both -- one primarily financing the Interior Department, the other funding Congress -- busted lawmakers' prescribed spending caps, by $134 million. The House and Senate have passed spending plans for the departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Education that exceed Bush's request by billions.
And on July 14, the House overwhelmingly approved a major water bill that authorizes projects worth $10.3 billion over 10 years -- $4.4 billion in the first five. In 2000, Congress approved a similar act worth a fraction of that, $1.6 billion over five years.
To fiscal conservatives, it is not just the total cost of the bills but also their content. Covering 1,752 pages, the highway bill is the most expensive public works legislation in U.S. history, complete with 6,376 earmarked projects, according to the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. Kern County, Calif., home of powerful House Ways and Means Chairman Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R), snagged $722 million in projects, or nearly $1,000 per person. Los Angeles County, with clogged highways and 10 million people, will receive barely $60 per resident.
Even before the bill was signed, Kane County, Ill., leaders showed their faith in Speaker Hastert last week by unveiling blueprints for a $120 million bridge, to be financed largely by the federal government.
This week, House GOP leaders sent their legislators 52 pages of talking points, some addressing fiscal discipline, others touting the spending. The final page lays out 12 "Ideas for August Recess Events," none of which trumpets small government.
Sean M. Spicer, a spokesman for House Republican Conference Chairman Deborah Pryce (Ohio), said lawmakers have nothing to be ashamed of. House appropriators have recommended that 101 federal programs be terminated, at a savings of $4.6 billion. And House members have pushed their Senate colleagues to stay pretty close to the budget limits.
The highway bill means jobs, he said. The energy bill addresses a pressing national interest, and no one is going to complain about additional funding for veterans' health care, he added.
"With Congress unable to keep its pocketbook pocketed, it would be nice if President Bush could be counted upon to cast his first vetoes on bills so richly deserving of them," the editors of the conservative National Review wrote yesterday.
But administration officials counter that the bills could have been far worse. An energy bill worked out by House and Senate negotiators in 2003 would have cost more than twice as much as the current version.
"It should be signed," said Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell. "It's the best energy bill that can be passed."
The highway bill initially proposed in the House would have cost $88 billion more than the final version.
"The president's insistence on spending restraint resulted in both the highway and energy bills coming in far less than originally proposed by Congress," said Scott Milburn, spokesman for the White House budget office.
washingtonpost.com
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 4, 2005; A01
GOP leaders this week sent House Republicans home for the summer with some political tips, helpfully laid out in 12 "Ideas for August Recess Events." Drop by a military reserve center to highlight increased benefits, the talking points suggest. Visit a bridge or highway that will receive additional funding, or talk up the new prescription drug benefit for seniors.
Having skirted budget restraints and approved nearly $300 billion in new spending and tax breaks before leaving town, Republican lawmakers are now determined to claim full credit for the congressional spending. Far from shying away from their accomplishments, lawmakers are embracing the pork, including graffiti eradication in the Bronx, $277 million in road projects for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), and a $200,000 deer-avoidance system in New York.
When the year started, President Bush made spending restraint a mantra, laying out an austere budget that would freeze non-security discretionary spending for five years and setting firm cost limits on transportation and energy bills. But now, as Congress fills in the details of the budget plan, there is little interest in making deep cuts and enormous pressure to spend.
Lawmakers have seen little to fear from a political backlash, some acknowledge, and Bush has yet to wield his veto pen. In fact, the White House has proved itself largely unable to overcome the institutional forces that have long driven lawmakers to ply their parochial interests with cash.
When lawmakers return in the fall, they are almost certain to vote for more tax cuts. They also will vote on a huge new defense spending bill. But proposals for cutting entitlement programs including Medicaid have yet to pick up much support.
"If you look at fiscal conservatism these days, it's in a sorry state," said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), one of only eight House members to vote against the $286.5 billion transportation bill that was passed the day before the recess. "Republicans don't even pretend anymore."
Last week, Congress approved transportation and energy bills that burst through the president's cost limits. Annual spending bills are inching above caps set by Congress itself in its budget plan for 2006. And a massive water projects bill passed by the House last month authorizes spending that would exceed current levels by 173 percent.
"You have to be courageous to not spend money," said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), "and we don't have many people who have that courage."
Indeed, Congress has exceeded the allocations or assumptions in its budget resolution four times -- and the year's legislative work is far from complete. According to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, those budget violations have raised spending through 2010 by roughly $2.2 billion above Congress's limits and tacked $115 billion onto the federal budget deficit through the end of decade, including $33 billion in 2006 alone.
That $33 billion may be tantamount to a rounding error in a $2.6 trillion budget, but it is 10 percent of the $333 billion budget deficit the White House has forecast for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.
"There's a rising level of frustration with the disconnect between where the vast majority of conservatives are in this country and how Congress is behaving," said former representative Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), whose Club for Growth political action committee finances the campaigns of conservative candidates. "There's going to be a wake-up call sooner or later."
For now, Congress and the White House are locked in a pattern of skirting their own constraints. In 2004, Bush demanded that no highway bill exceed $256 billion. Under pressure, he increased his limit to $284 billion this year. Congress responded with a five-year, $286.5 billion measure, but even that figure may be deceptive, Flake warned. The bill actually authorizes expenditures of $295 billion but assumes that, on the last day of the bill's life, Congress will rescind $8.5 billion in unused funds.
"Nobody believes that's going to happen," Flake said. "It's frankly a pretty transparent gimmick."
Bush set a firm cost limit of $6.7 billion for tax breaks in the energy bill. Congress then approved breaks worth $11.5 billion over 10 years in an energy bill that will cost $12.3 billion overall. In late June, the White House hastily requested an additional $975 million to finance unanticipated veterans' health care costs for 2005. The Senate responded with $1.5 billion.
So far, Congress has completed only two of 13 annual spending bills, but both -- one primarily financing the Interior Department, the other funding Congress -- busted lawmakers' prescribed spending caps, by $134 million. The House and Senate have passed spending plans for the departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Education that exceed Bush's request by billions.
And on July 14, the House overwhelmingly approved a major water bill that authorizes projects worth $10.3 billion over 10 years -- $4.4 billion in the first five. In 2000, Congress approved a similar act worth a fraction of that, $1.6 billion over five years.
To fiscal conservatives, it is not just the total cost of the bills but also their content. Covering 1,752 pages, the highway bill is the most expensive public works legislation in U.S. history, complete with 6,376 earmarked projects, according to the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. Kern County, Calif., home of powerful House Ways and Means Chairman Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R), snagged $722 million in projects, or nearly $1,000 per person. Los Angeles County, with clogged highways and 10 million people, will receive barely $60 per resident.
Even before the bill was signed, Kane County, Ill., leaders showed their faith in Speaker Hastert last week by unveiling blueprints for a $120 million bridge, to be financed largely by the federal government.
This week, House GOP leaders sent their legislators 52 pages of talking points, some addressing fiscal discipline, others touting the spending. The final page lays out 12 "Ideas for August Recess Events," none of which trumpets small government.
Sean M. Spicer, a spokesman for House Republican Conference Chairman Deborah Pryce (Ohio), said lawmakers have nothing to be ashamed of. House appropriators have recommended that 101 federal programs be terminated, at a savings of $4.6 billion. And House members have pushed their Senate colleagues to stay pretty close to the budget limits.
The highway bill means jobs, he said. The energy bill addresses a pressing national interest, and no one is going to complain about additional funding for veterans' health care, he added.
"With Congress unable to keep its pocketbook pocketed, it would be nice if President Bush could be counted upon to cast his first vetoes on bills so richly deserving of them," the editors of the conservative National Review wrote yesterday.
But administration officials counter that the bills could have been far worse. An energy bill worked out by House and Senate negotiators in 2003 would have cost more than twice as much as the current version.
"It should be signed," said Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell. "It's the best energy bill that can be passed."
The highway bill initially proposed in the House would have cost $88 billion more than the final version.
"The president's insistence on spending restraint resulted in both the highway and energy bills coming in far less than originally proposed by Congress," said Scott Milburn, spokesman for the White House budget office.
Send in the clones...
A Call To Action
The New York Times
August 4, 2005
Beating Hurdles, Scientists Clone a Dog for a First
By GINA KOLATA
South Korean researchers are reporting today that they have cloned what scientists deem the most difficult animal, the dog.
The group worked for nearly three years, seven days a week, 365 days a year and used 1,095 eggs from 122 dogs before finally succeeding with the birth of a cloned male Afghan hound. The surrogate mother was a yellow Labrador retriever.
Dogs have such an unusual reproductive biology, far more so than humans, scientists say, that the methods that allowed cloning of sheep, mice, cows, goats, pigs, rabbits, cats, a mule, a horse and three rats, and creation of cloned human embryos for stem cells, simply do not work with them.
Woo Suk Hwang, the principal author of the dog cloning paper, being published in the journal Nature, wrote that the puppy, an identical twin of the adult Afghan but born years later, was delivered by Caesarean section on April 24. The pregnancy lasted a normal 60 days and the newborn pup weighed 1 pound 3.4 ounces and was named Snuppy.
Not Snoopy. The scientists named him for Seoul National University puppy.
Cloning researchers were awed at the achievement, but not everyone shared their admiration.
Nigel Cameron, a bioethicist at Chicago-Kent College of Law and director of its Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future, noted some people see dogs as members of the family. "There's sort of a dry run here for the human cloning debate," he said. "What we do with dogs we may well end up doing with our kids."
Dr. Cameron said he objected to cloning dogs, but not farm animals or laboratory rodents. He said he did, however, oppose all human cloning, including cloning human embryos for stem cells.
The reason that other researchers are so impressed, said Mark E. Westhusin, a cloning researcher at Texas A&M University, is that with dogs, "their reproductive biology makes them a nightmare." Cats, in what might seem a turnabout, are biologically much less finicky.
Dr. Westhusin cloned the first cat, in 2002, on his second try. But, he said, after trying for a few years to clone a dog, "I quit."
His work with cats and dogs was sponsored by a private company, Genetic Savings & Clone of Sausalito, Calif. Its chief executive, Lou Hawthorne, said the company had spent seven years and more than $19 million in its attempts to clone a dog. It just opened a lab in Madison, Wis., with 50 employees. But, so far, no dogs have been cloned.
Other researchers say dog cloning is so hard, they will not try it. George E. Seidel Jr. of Colorado State said Genetic Savings & Clone approached him and "I refused." As for the South Koreans, who succeeded in what is the Mount Everest of cloning, it was "simply a heroic effort, a brute force heroic effort," Dr. Seidel said.
Snuppy is the second coup this year for the Seoul researchers. In May, Dr. Hwang's lab announced that it had created cloned human embryos and extracted stem cells from them. The dog project is separate, and its goal, Dr. Hwang explained in an e-mail message, is to use dogs to study the causes and treatment of human diseases.
Dogs have long been used to study human diseases. Rabies, in fact, was first discovered in dogs, insulin was discovered in dogs, and the first open heart surgery was in dogs. Eventually, the team hopes to make dog embryonic stem cells and test them in the animals as treatments.
Dogs presented a number of challenges to the researchers. Ovulation is once or twice a year, but not predictable, and no one has found a way to induce ovulation by giving dogs hormones.
Eventually, the South Koreans discovered, through trial and error, a signature spike in the hormone progesterone that signaled ovulation.
With other animals, scientists collect mature eggs from ovaries, but the eggs dogs ovulate are immature. They mature in the oviduct and so far it has proved impossible to extract eggs from a dog's ovary and mature them in the laboratory.
So the researchers had to pinpoint when to pluck a mature egg from the oviduct, and needed surgery to retrieve it, instead of the kind of needle suctioning used in other animals.
The next step in cloning of any other animal is to replace the egg's genes with those of an adult and let the cloned embryo grow in the lab for several days.
But no one has been able to grow dog embryos in the lab. So the South Koreans quickly started the cloning. They removed the genetic material from the eggs and replaced it with skin cells from the ears of Afghan hounds. When the altered eggs were starting to develop into embryos, the researchers anesthetized a female dog, slipped the eggs into the animal's oviduct, and hoped the eggs would grow into early embryos, drift into the uterus, and survive. They found they had less than four hours after starting the process to get the eggs into the female dogs.
Ordinarily, researchers give hormones to female animals that are to serve as surrogate mothers, preparing them to become pregnant with a cloned embryo. Not so with dogs. No one knows how to prepare a dog for pregnancy, so the researchers used the same dogs for egg donors and for surrogate mothers, 123 dogs in all.
In the end, three pregnancies resulted. One ended in a miscarriage, one was carried to term but the puppy died a few weeks later of respiratory failure, and one resulted in Snuppy.
Until dog cloning becomes a lot more efficient, few people will be able to afford to clone their pets. Mr. Hawthorne estimated that it would cost more than $1 million to repeat what the South Koreans have done.
The market among dog owners might not be much, in any case. Apart from ethical issues, Dr. Cameron said, dogs are like family members. "My dog is now deceased," he said. "But I wouldn't want to clone Charlie. It would be disrespectful to Charlie and to Charlie II."
Tina Vogel, an Afghan breeder in Norwalk, Ohio, agreed that cloning a dog "would be like cloning a person." And she is opposed to that. "If it was meant to be, God would have done it," she said.
She said Afghans have a reputation as the dumbest dogs around, but that is just because they are "very aloof," more like a cat than a dog. "They are sweet and affectionate. If you have one you can never go back."
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
August 4, 2005
Beating Hurdles, Scientists Clone a Dog for a First
By GINA KOLATA
South Korean researchers are reporting today that they have cloned what scientists deem the most difficult animal, the dog.
The group worked for nearly three years, seven days a week, 365 days a year and used 1,095 eggs from 122 dogs before finally succeeding with the birth of a cloned male Afghan hound. The surrogate mother was a yellow Labrador retriever.
Dogs have such an unusual reproductive biology, far more so than humans, scientists say, that the methods that allowed cloning of sheep, mice, cows, goats, pigs, rabbits, cats, a mule, a horse and three rats, and creation of cloned human embryos for stem cells, simply do not work with them.
Woo Suk Hwang, the principal author of the dog cloning paper, being published in the journal Nature, wrote that the puppy, an identical twin of the adult Afghan but born years later, was delivered by Caesarean section on April 24. The pregnancy lasted a normal 60 days and the newborn pup weighed 1 pound 3.4 ounces and was named Snuppy.
Not Snoopy. The scientists named him for Seoul National University puppy.
Cloning researchers were awed at the achievement, but not everyone shared their admiration.
Nigel Cameron, a bioethicist at Chicago-Kent College of Law and director of its Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future, noted some people see dogs as members of the family. "There's sort of a dry run here for the human cloning debate," he said. "What we do with dogs we may well end up doing with our kids."
Dr. Cameron said he objected to cloning dogs, but not farm animals or laboratory rodents. He said he did, however, oppose all human cloning, including cloning human embryos for stem cells.
The reason that other researchers are so impressed, said Mark E. Westhusin, a cloning researcher at Texas A&M University, is that with dogs, "their reproductive biology makes them a nightmare." Cats, in what might seem a turnabout, are biologically much less finicky.
Dr. Westhusin cloned the first cat, in 2002, on his second try. But, he said, after trying for a few years to clone a dog, "I quit."
His work with cats and dogs was sponsored by a private company, Genetic Savings & Clone of Sausalito, Calif. Its chief executive, Lou Hawthorne, said the company had spent seven years and more than $19 million in its attempts to clone a dog. It just opened a lab in Madison, Wis., with 50 employees. But, so far, no dogs have been cloned.
Other researchers say dog cloning is so hard, they will not try it. George E. Seidel Jr. of Colorado State said Genetic Savings & Clone approached him and "I refused." As for the South Koreans, who succeeded in what is the Mount Everest of cloning, it was "simply a heroic effort, a brute force heroic effort," Dr. Seidel said.
Snuppy is the second coup this year for the Seoul researchers. In May, Dr. Hwang's lab announced that it had created cloned human embryos and extracted stem cells from them. The dog project is separate, and its goal, Dr. Hwang explained in an e-mail message, is to use dogs to study the causes and treatment of human diseases.
Dogs have long been used to study human diseases. Rabies, in fact, was first discovered in dogs, insulin was discovered in dogs, and the first open heart surgery was in dogs. Eventually, the team hopes to make dog embryonic stem cells and test them in the animals as treatments.
Dogs presented a number of challenges to the researchers. Ovulation is once or twice a year, but not predictable, and no one has found a way to induce ovulation by giving dogs hormones.
Eventually, the South Koreans discovered, through trial and error, a signature spike in the hormone progesterone that signaled ovulation.
With other animals, scientists collect mature eggs from ovaries, but the eggs dogs ovulate are immature. They mature in the oviduct and so far it has proved impossible to extract eggs from a dog's ovary and mature them in the laboratory.
So the researchers had to pinpoint when to pluck a mature egg from the oviduct, and needed surgery to retrieve it, instead of the kind of needle suctioning used in other animals.
The next step in cloning of any other animal is to replace the egg's genes with those of an adult and let the cloned embryo grow in the lab for several days.
But no one has been able to grow dog embryos in the lab. So the South Koreans quickly started the cloning. They removed the genetic material from the eggs and replaced it with skin cells from the ears of Afghan hounds. When the altered eggs were starting to develop into embryos, the researchers anesthetized a female dog, slipped the eggs into the animal's oviduct, and hoped the eggs would grow into early embryos, drift into the uterus, and survive. They found they had less than four hours after starting the process to get the eggs into the female dogs.
Ordinarily, researchers give hormones to female animals that are to serve as surrogate mothers, preparing them to become pregnant with a cloned embryo. Not so with dogs. No one knows how to prepare a dog for pregnancy, so the researchers used the same dogs for egg donors and for surrogate mothers, 123 dogs in all.
In the end, three pregnancies resulted. One ended in a miscarriage, one was carried to term but the puppy died a few weeks later of respiratory failure, and one resulted in Snuppy.
Until dog cloning becomes a lot more efficient, few people will be able to afford to clone their pets. Mr. Hawthorne estimated that it would cost more than $1 million to repeat what the South Koreans have done.
The market among dog owners might not be much, in any case. Apart from ethical issues, Dr. Cameron said, dogs are like family members. "My dog is now deceased," he said. "But I wouldn't want to clone Charlie. It would be disrespectful to Charlie and to Charlie II."
Tina Vogel, an Afghan breeder in Norwalk, Ohio, agreed that cloning a dog "would be like cloning a person." And she is opposed to that. "If it was meant to be, God would have done it," she said.
She said Afghans have a reputation as the dumbest dogs around, but that is just because they are "very aloof," more like a cat than a dog. "They are sweet and affectionate. If you have one you can never go back."
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Fw: Here We Go Again: Distorted TV Ads For Campaign 2006
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Subject: Here We Go Again: Distorted TV Ads For Campaign 2006
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Here We Go Again: Distorted TV Ads For Campaign 2006
The Republican party attacks Sen. Byrd and he responds. Both use misleading
material.
Aug. 3, 2005
(Note: To view this article with any associated
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Summary
With 15 months to go before election day 2006, the
National Republican Senatorial Committee unleashed
an attack ad in West Virginia in an attempt to
soften up Democratic Senator Robert Byrd for an
eventual GOP challenger. Byrd responded immediately
with a TV ad of his own.
Both ads contained shopworn distortions.
The NRSC
ad accused Byrd of voting "against body armor"
and "for higher taxes for the middle class" - as
misleading now as when Bush used the same attacks
against Kerry last year.
And Byrd responded by claiming he was being
attacked by "out-of-state special interests" with
an "agenda" that includes "tax breaks for companies
that ship our jobs overseas." In fact, the
ad was run by a political party and not by a
"special interest," and the tax breaks Byrd mentions
have been in place for decades, even when
Democrats
had a majority in the Senate and Byrd was their
leader. Few economists see those tax breaks as a
serious drain on US jobs.
Analysis
The NRSC ad is the first TV spot run by any national
party organization in the 2006 elections, which are
still 15 months away. Neither ad gets any points for
originality: both ads contain recycled distortions.
The NRSC announced its ad Aug 1 and said it would
run for at least two weeks in West Virginia at a
cost of "tens of thousands" of dollars. Byrd's ad
went up Aug. 2, and his website appealed for $55,000
to fund the response.
Body Armor, Again
The NRSC ad recycles a misleading claim that
Republicans used repeatedly against John Kerry in
2004, saying Byrd voted "against body armor in the
war on terror" in contrast to his votes "for
soldiers" earlier in his career.
What Byrd and Kerry actually voted against, of
course, was an enormous $87-billion supplemental
appropriation in 2003 that the Bush administration
sought to finance military operations and
reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. The
$87-billion spending bill contained a Pentagon
request for $300 million for "best-grade" ceramic
body armor for all troops in Iraq, many of whom had
been sent with older-style armor. As we pointed out
in an article last year, those funds for body armor
constituted only one-third of one percent of the
entire bill. There was no specific vote for or
against the $300 million for body armor.
Byrd says he voted against the $87 billion measure
because it contained $18.4 billion to rebuild Iraq
and not because of the $300 million for body armor.
He says he has voted for additional body
armor and
armoring of Humvees on several other occasions,
which the record shows is true. For example, only
last month he was on the winning side of a 100-0
vote favoring more spending on armored, wheeled
vehicles for the Army and Marines. (Vote 199, 25
July 2005) And he was also one of those who
supported an amendment last year to require the
Pentagon to reimburse troops or their families for
body armor or other equipment purchased for use in
Iraq or Afghanistan. (Vote 112, 14 June 2004)
Taxes? "Higher" Than What?
The NRSC ad also claims Byrd "votes higher taxes for
the middle class," which is craftily worded and
quite misleading. The NRSC cites votes by Byrd in
2001 and 2003, but those were not votes to
raise
taxes, they were votes against Bush's
proposed tax
cuts. That might make taxes "higher" than
Bush
wanted them but not higher than they were at the
time. Furthermore, those cuts delivered more relief
for upper-income taxpayers than for the "middle
class."
In fact, the ad ignores Byrd's vote for the "Working
Families" tax relief act which Bush signed last
October, extending several tax reductions for
middle-income families. (Vote 188, 23 Sep
2004).These included keeping the per-child tax
credit at $1,000, rather than allowing it to revert
to $500 per child as had been scheduled.
The NRSC cites only one vote by Byrd that was
actually in favor of raising taxes. That one wasn't
"today," it was a dozen years ago - the 1993 Clinton
deficit-reduction measure, which also contained
spending cuts. That 1993 measure did raise taxes on
the middle class but only very slightly. It raised
the gasoline tax by 4.3 cents per gallon. It also
increased the amount of Social Security benefits
that are subject to taxation, but only for those
making $44,000 a year for a married couple. The rest
of the increase was focused almost exclusively on
the highest-earning one percent of households.
Special Interests?
Byrd's counter-attack also makes claims that don't
stand up to factual scrutiny.
Byrd's ad says "out-of-state special interests" are
attacking him falsely, while showing a video snippet
of the NRSC ad. But the Republican party can't
accurately be called a "special interest" any more
than the Democratic party could be. The term is most
commonly used to describe lobbyists for narrow
economic concerns, and sometimes for one-issue
ideological groups as well. Broad-based political
parties just don't fit the definition.
For example, Princeton University's Worldnet defines
"special interest" as "an individual or group who
are concerned with some particular part of the
economy and who try to influence legislators or
bureaucrats to act in their favor." Byrd is way off
the mark here.
Tax Breaks for Outsourcing?
The Byrd ad also claims that the "agenda" of those
attacking him includes "tax breaks for companies
that ship our jobs overseas." We dealt with this
misleading claim at length last year when Kerry and
other Democrats were using it against Bush. In fact,
nobody is pushing to enact any such tax breaks.
It is true that US-based companies already have a
tax incentive to use foreign-earned income to build
factories overseas rather than bring profits back to
the US to be taxed at higher US rates. However, that
has been the case for decades - as long as the US
has taxed corporate income, in fact. It was true
when Bill Clinton was President, and it was true
when Byrd himself was the Senate Democratic leader
from 1977 to 1991. And, for most of that time,
Democrats had the majority.
Furthermore, as we said a year ago when Kerry was
using this line of attack, the tax break actually
has little effect on US jobs. Even those experts who
support a change in the tax code say multinational
businesses build plants in other countries mainly to
take advantage of lower wages and to be near their
global customers, too, not just for tax reasons.
And speaking of symbolic issues . . .
Flag Burning?
The NRSC ad claims Byrd votes "to allow flag
burning." This mischaracterizes his position and
record. It is true that Byrd voted in 2000 against
proposing an amendment to the US Constitution that
would give Congress the power to prohibit the
physical desecration of the U.S. flag. That measure
needed a 2/3 majority to pass, and Byrd was among
37
senators voting against it, ensuring its defeat. But
voting not to amend the Constitution isn't the same
as voting "to allow flag burning," which is already
allowed by Supreme Court decisions.
Among the
reasons Byrd gave at the time for his vote was that
"flag burning, though loathsome, is hardly
pervasive enough to warrant amending the
Constitution."
In his own ad, Byrd says he is "protecting our
flag." It is true that he co-sponsored a bill last
month that would make it a federal crime to
desecrate the flag, but only if it is done "with the
primary purpose and intent to incite or produce
imminent violence or a breach of the peace," which
would be a hard thing to prove and wouldn't cover
the simple burning of the flag as a protest. That
bill is pending.
If these two ads are representative of what's to
come in the next 15 months, we'll be busy here at
FactCheck.org.
Sources
Congressional Record, 29 March 2000: S1858
109TH CONGRESS
S.1370, "To provide for the protection of the flag
of the United States, and for other purposes,"
introduced 1 July 2005.
Senate Roll Call Votes 108th Congress - 1st Session
S. 1689 (Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for
Iraq and Afghanistan Security and Reconstruction
Act, 2004) Vote #400 17 Oct. 2003.
Related Articles
Did
Kerry Vote "No"
(http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=rqgaznbab.0.ltjcznbab.l89skabab.9260&p=http%3A%2F%2
Ffactcheck.org%2Farticle155.html) on Body Armor for Troops?
Bush
accuses Kerry
(http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=rqgaznbab.0.mtjcznbab.l89skabab.9260&p=http%3A%2F%2
Ffactcheck.org%2Farticle159.html) of 350 votes for "higher taxes"
Higher than what?
Bush Still Fudging
the Numbers
(http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=rqgaznbab.0.ntjcznbab.l89skabab.9260&p=http%3A%2F%2
Ffactcheck.org%2Farticle247.html)on Kerry's Tax
Votes
DNC Ad
Says Bush Lost Manufacturing
(http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=rqgaznbab.0.otjcznbab.l89skabab.9260&p=http%3A%2F%2
Ffactcheck.org%2Farticle234.html)Jobs
Kerry
Blames Corporate Tax Code
(http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=rqgaznbab.0.ptjcznbab.l89skabab.9260&p=http%3A%2F%2
Ffactcheck.org%2Farticle225.html) for Shipping Jobs
Overseas
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Monday, August 01, 2005
Who's Paying for Our Patriotism?
A Call To Action
washingtonpost.com
By Uwe E. Reinhardt
Monday, August 1, 2005; A17
President Bush assures us that the ongoing twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are worth the sacrifices they entail. Editorialists around the nation agree and say that a steadfast American public was willing to stay the course.
Should anyone be surprised by this national resolve, given that these wars visit no sacrifice of any sort -- neither blood nor angst nor taxes -- on well over 95 percent of the American people?
At most, 500,000 American troops are at risk of being deployed to these war theaters at some time. Assume that for each of them some 20 members of the wider family sweat with fear when they hear that a helicopter crashed in Afghanistan or that X number of soldiers or Marines were killed or seriously wounded in Iraq. It implies that no more than 10 million Americans have any real emotional connection to these wars.
The administration and Congress have gone to extraordinary lengths to insulate voters from the money cost of the wars -- to the point even of excluding outlays for them from the regular budget process. Furthermore, they have financed the wars not with taxes but by borrowing abroad.
The strategic shielding of most voters from any emotional or financial sacrifice for these wars cannot but trigger the analogue of what is called "moral hazard" in the context of health insurance, a field in which I've done a lot of scholarly work. There, moral hazard refers to the tendency of well-insured patients to use health care with complete indifference to the cost they visit on others. It has prompted President Bush to advocate health insurance with very high deductibles. But if all but a handful of Americans are completely insulated against the emotional -- and financial -- cost of war, is it not natural to suspect moral hazard will be at work in that context as well?
A policymaking elite whose families and purses are shielded from the sacrifices war entails may rush into it hastily and ill prepared, as surely was the case of the Iraq war. Moral hazard in this context can explain why a nation that once built a Liberty Ship every two weeks and thousands of newly designed airplanes in the span of a few years now takes years merely to properly arm and armor its troops with conventional equipment. Moral hazard can explain why, in wartime, the TV anchors on the morning and evening shows barely make time to report on the wars, lest the reports displace the silly banter with which they seek to humor their viewers. Do they ever wonder how military families with loved ones in the fray might feel after hearing ever so briefly of mayhem in Iraq or Afghanistan?
Moral hazard also can explain why the general public is so noticeably indifferent to the plight of our troops and their families. To be sure, we paste cheap magnetic ribbons on our cars to proclaim our support for the troops. But at the same time, we allow families of reservists and National Guard members to slide into deep financial distress as their loved ones stand tall for us on lethal battlefields and the family is deprived of these troops' typically higher civilian salaries. We offer a pittance in disability pay to seriously wounded soldiers who have not served the full 20 years that entitles them to a regular pension. And our legislative representatives make a disgraceful spectacle of themselves bickering over a mere $1 billion or so in added health care spending by the Department of Veterans Affairs -- in a nation with a $13 trillion economy!
Last year kind-hearted folks in New Jersey collected $12,000 at a pancake feed to help stock pantries for financially hard-pressed families of the National Guard. Food pantries for American military families? The state of Illinois now allows taxpayers to donate their tax refunds to such families. For the entire year 2004, slightly more than $400,000 was collected in this way, or 3 cents per capita. It is the equivalent of about 100,000 cups of Starbucks coffee. With a similar program Rhode Island collected about 1 cent per capita. Is this what we mean by "supporting our troops"?
When our son, then a recent Princeton graduate, decided to join the Marine Corps in 2001, I advised him thus: "Do what you must, but be advised that, flourishing rhetoric notwithstanding, this nation will never truly honor your service, and it will condemn you to the bottom of the economic scrap heap should you ever get seriously wounded." The intervening years have not changed my views; they have reaffirmed them.
Unlike the editors of the nation's newspapers, I am not at all impressed by people who resolve to have others stay the course in Iraq and in Afghanistan. At zero sacrifice, who would not have that resolve?
The writer is James Madison professor of political economy at Princeton University.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
washingtonpost.com
By Uwe E. Reinhardt
Monday, August 1, 2005; A17
President Bush assures us that the ongoing twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are worth the sacrifices they entail. Editorialists around the nation agree and say that a steadfast American public was willing to stay the course.
Should anyone be surprised by this national resolve, given that these wars visit no sacrifice of any sort -- neither blood nor angst nor taxes -- on well over 95 percent of the American people?
At most, 500,000 American troops are at risk of being deployed to these war theaters at some time. Assume that for each of them some 20 members of the wider family sweat with fear when they hear that a helicopter crashed in Afghanistan or that X number of soldiers or Marines were killed or seriously wounded in Iraq. It implies that no more than 10 million Americans have any real emotional connection to these wars.
The administration and Congress have gone to extraordinary lengths to insulate voters from the money cost of the wars -- to the point even of excluding outlays for them from the regular budget process. Furthermore, they have financed the wars not with taxes but by borrowing abroad.
The strategic shielding of most voters from any emotional or financial sacrifice for these wars cannot but trigger the analogue of what is called "moral hazard" in the context of health insurance, a field in which I've done a lot of scholarly work. There, moral hazard refers to the tendency of well-insured patients to use health care with complete indifference to the cost they visit on others. It has prompted President Bush to advocate health insurance with very high deductibles. But if all but a handful of Americans are completely insulated against the emotional -- and financial -- cost of war, is it not natural to suspect moral hazard will be at work in that context as well?
A policymaking elite whose families and purses are shielded from the sacrifices war entails may rush into it hastily and ill prepared, as surely was the case of the Iraq war. Moral hazard in this context can explain why a nation that once built a Liberty Ship every two weeks and thousands of newly designed airplanes in the span of a few years now takes years merely to properly arm and armor its troops with conventional equipment. Moral hazard can explain why, in wartime, the TV anchors on the morning and evening shows barely make time to report on the wars, lest the reports displace the silly banter with which they seek to humor their viewers. Do they ever wonder how military families with loved ones in the fray might feel after hearing ever so briefly of mayhem in Iraq or Afghanistan?
Moral hazard also can explain why the general public is so noticeably indifferent to the plight of our troops and their families. To be sure, we paste cheap magnetic ribbons on our cars to proclaim our support for the troops. But at the same time, we allow families of reservists and National Guard members to slide into deep financial distress as their loved ones stand tall for us on lethal battlefields and the family is deprived of these troops' typically higher civilian salaries. We offer a pittance in disability pay to seriously wounded soldiers who have not served the full 20 years that entitles them to a regular pension. And our legislative representatives make a disgraceful spectacle of themselves bickering over a mere $1 billion or so in added health care spending by the Department of Veterans Affairs -- in a nation with a $13 trillion economy!
Last year kind-hearted folks in New Jersey collected $12,000 at a pancake feed to help stock pantries for financially hard-pressed families of the National Guard. Food pantries for American military families? The state of Illinois now allows taxpayers to donate their tax refunds to such families. For the entire year 2004, slightly more than $400,000 was collected in this way, or 3 cents per capita. It is the equivalent of about 100,000 cups of Starbucks coffee. With a similar program Rhode Island collected about 1 cent per capita. Is this what we mean by "supporting our troops"?
When our son, then a recent Princeton graduate, decided to join the Marine Corps in 2001, I advised him thus: "Do what you must, but be advised that, flourishing rhetoric notwithstanding, this nation will never truly honor your service, and it will condemn you to the bottom of the economic scrap heap should you ever get seriously wounded." The intervening years have not changed my views; they have reaffirmed them.
Unlike the editors of the nation's newspapers, I am not at all impressed by people who resolve to have others stay the course in Iraq and in Afghanistan. At zero sacrifice, who would not have that resolve?
The writer is James Madison professor of political economy at Princeton University.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Nomination Stirs a Debate on Federalists' Sway
A Call To Action
August 1, 2005
By JASON DePARLE
WASHINGTON, July 31 - "I am a member of the Federalist Society, and I do not know, quite frankly, what it stands for."
The transcript does not say whether people in the Senate hearing room responded with disbelief. But that is how one person headed for a top job in the Justice Department, Viet D. Dinh, described his relationship with the society, a conservative legal group whose influence is the source of ever-swelling myth, mystery, insinuation, denial and debate.
In a new Washington ritual, President Bush has repeatedly drawn from the Federalist Society for cabinet members, senior aides and judges. And perhaps to deflect what many conservatives call unfair attacks by liberals, the nominees have repeatedly claimed to know little about the group's beliefs.
White House aides have worked hard to put distance between the society and John G. Roberts, the federal appeals judge Mr. Bush has nominated for the Supreme Court. They have even demanded corrections from newspapers that identified him as a member.
Then an old directory surfaced last week, listing Judge Roberts as part of one of the group's steering committees. The White House spokesmen clung to their line; since Judge Roberts had not, apparently, written a $25 membership check, he was not a formal member.
Who cares? Lots of people, it seems, because a fight over the influence of the Federalist Society is a proxy in the war over the federal judiciary and the Constitution itself.
Remarkable in its growth and reach, the society was founded in 1982 by law students unhappy with what they saw as liberal dominance in law school faculties and the courts. It now claims 35,000 participants (some paying dues and some not) and has chapters in virtually every law school and in 60 cities. Part of the society's influence stems from its sponsorship of public debates, which hone and promote conservative points of view.
But much of the influence, and most of the intrigue, flows from an informal social network, which members use to advance one another's causes and careers. Openly and behind the scenes, members have played prominent roles in the most pitched political battles in recent years, including the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the Florida recount fracas in 2000 that led to the election of Mr. Bush.
The society takes few official positions. But to some liberal critics, the activism of its members conjures all they fear about the legal right, from the defense of states' rights and business interests to attacks on affirmative action, gay rights and abortion. One liberal blog, democrats.com, called the group "the conservative cabal that is attacking America from within."
Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group, did not go that far in an interview last week. But he pointed to the society as a link between Judge Roberts and two Supreme Court justices many on the left abhor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justice Scalia was a faculty adviser to the society, and Justice Thomas has praised its work and spoken at its events.
"Just because someone belongs to the Federalist Society does not inherently disqualify them," Mr. Neas said. "But it certainly raises a lot of questions about whether that individual adheres to the judicial philosophy of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia," who are not "mainstream conservatives," he said.
Leaders of the group cry foul. Steven G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University who helped found the group as a law student at Yale and is now chairman of its board, evoked the question Senator Joseph McCarthy used a half-century ago in hunting Communists: "There's been an element of 'Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Federalist Society?' "
"It's worse than McCarthyism, because at least McCarthy was going after people who advocated a total dictatorship," he said. "We don't even hold a unified set of views."
Although the group endorses a few broad principles like the separation of powers and a faithful adherence to Constitutional text, Mr. Calabresi said there was much disagreement on particulars. "The Federalist Society is a debate club," he said.
The blurred lines between the group's official debate-club role and the private activities of many of its members were on display last week as the group's longtime president, Eugene B. Meyer, dismissed as "silly" accusations that the society was exercising secret influence. "That's just not how we operate," he said.
Mr. Meyer said outside observers often failed to recognized the idealism that attracted members. "I don't mean to sound too goody-two-shoes about this, but it's an interest in good government and how people can do the best for the society," he said. Recalling a trip through rural Mexico, Mr. Meyer spoke of the "Stone Age" living conditions there as an example of how people suffer "when they haven't had the rule of law."
Yet down the hall from Mr. Meyer's office, a vacated desk testified to the more activist role that members often play. It belonged to Leonard A. Leo, the executive vice president, who doubles as the head of Catholic outreach for the Republican Party and who has taken a leave of absence to help Judge Roberts win confirmation.
As he argued that the society's influence flowed from its intellectual work - "I sound a little like a broken record, but what I'm excited about are the ideas"- Mr. Meyer also said he had benefited from news media training by Creative Response Concepts. That is the public relations firm that represented Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group whose advertisements in last year's presidential campaign attacked the war record of Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee.
The Federalist Society hired the firm, Mr. Meyer said, to train members and place them on television shows during the confirmation process. He said the goal was to educate the public on the role of judges and courts. "Given the general philosophical outlook, the chances are very good that they'll support the nominee," Mr. Meyer said. "But that's not the purpose."
In the early days of the Bush presidency, administration officials said about a quarter of their judicial nominees were recommended by the Washington headquarters of the society. Mr. Meyer said the advice came from staff members speaking in their private capacities, not as official representatives.
With an annual budget of $5.5 million, the society has benefited from decades of support from prominent conservative organizations, including the John M. Olin, Sarah Scaife, and Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundations.
In the 1990's, three Federalist Society lawyers, Jerome M. Marcus, Richard W. Porter and George T. Conway, played important but covert roles in helping Paula Corbin Jones sue President Clinton for sexual harassment. They also worked behind the scenes to disclose Mr. Clinton's affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.
Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel whose report led to Mr. Clinton's impeachment, is a prominent member of the society, as is Theodore B. Olson, who successfully argued Bush v. Gore, the case that stopped the Florida recount in 2000 and ensured Mr. Bush's election.
According to the Senate Judiciary Committee, 15 of the 41 appeals court judges confirmed under Mr. Bush have identified themselves as members of the group. Complaining that the society serves as "the secret handshake" of Mr. Bush's judicial nominees, Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat on the committee, has repeatedly questioned them about the group's mission statement. Their answers, he said, have "ranged from the amusing to the preposterous."
Carolyn Kuhl, who later withdrew her stalled bid for an appeals court seat, wrote, "I did not participate in writing the mission statement."
"Therefore I am unable to opine," she said.
Jeffrey S. Sutton, who won a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, said, "I have no idea what their philosophy is."
Mr. Dinh, who left his Justice Department position in 2003 and now teaches law at Georgetown, said he answered candidly at his confirmation hearing. "I did not know, and still do not know, what the society stands for because it has no stated philosophy other than the exchange of ideas," he said. "There's no evasion in that. It's just as straightforward as it gets."
Mr. Durbin's questions did bring sharp words from one society member. "I am on the board of advisers of the Federalist Society, and I am darn proud of it," said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, a Utah Republican on the Judiciary Committee. Mr. Hatch called the society a group of lawyers "who are just sick and tired of the leftward leanings of our government."
Among those with a complex view of the group is Guido Calabresi, a federal appeals court judge and an uncle of Steven Calabresi. Judge Calabresi, a former dean of Yale Law School, was appointed by President Clinton, and his academic views are to the left of his nephew's.
"The Federalist Society was, when it got started, a wonderful idea," Judge Calabresi said, and it has made "a lot of conservative thought seem as respectable and attractive as it is." But he worries that its career-advancement role invites distrust and promotes conformity.
"It becomes something of a secret society," he said. "The conversation becomes a conversation among people who already know what they're going to say."
Anticipating the criticism, Steven Calabresi fired off a pre-emptive e-mail message to a reporter, arguing that the same could be said of elite law schools like Yale.
Unlike many arguments about the Federalist Society, though, this one promises to end amicably: the two Calabresis, close friends and mutual admirers, will soon be off for a shared vacation.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
August 1, 2005
By JASON DePARLE
WASHINGTON, July 31 - "I am a member of the Federalist Society, and I do not know, quite frankly, what it stands for."
The transcript does not say whether people in the Senate hearing room responded with disbelief. But that is how one person headed for a top job in the Justice Department, Viet D. Dinh, described his relationship with the society, a conservative legal group whose influence is the source of ever-swelling myth, mystery, insinuation, denial and debate.
In a new Washington ritual, President Bush has repeatedly drawn from the Federalist Society for cabinet members, senior aides and judges. And perhaps to deflect what many conservatives call unfair attacks by liberals, the nominees have repeatedly claimed to know little about the group's beliefs.
White House aides have worked hard to put distance between the society and John G. Roberts, the federal appeals judge Mr. Bush has nominated for the Supreme Court. They have even demanded corrections from newspapers that identified him as a member.
Then an old directory surfaced last week, listing Judge Roberts as part of one of the group's steering committees. The White House spokesmen clung to their line; since Judge Roberts had not, apparently, written a $25 membership check, he was not a formal member.
Who cares? Lots of people, it seems, because a fight over the influence of the Federalist Society is a proxy in the war over the federal judiciary and the Constitution itself.
Remarkable in its growth and reach, the society was founded in 1982 by law students unhappy with what they saw as liberal dominance in law school faculties and the courts. It now claims 35,000 participants (some paying dues and some not) and has chapters in virtually every law school and in 60 cities. Part of the society's influence stems from its sponsorship of public debates, which hone and promote conservative points of view.
But much of the influence, and most of the intrigue, flows from an informal social network, which members use to advance one another's causes and careers. Openly and behind the scenes, members have played prominent roles in the most pitched political battles in recent years, including the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the Florida recount fracas in 2000 that led to the election of Mr. Bush.
The society takes few official positions. But to some liberal critics, the activism of its members conjures all they fear about the legal right, from the defense of states' rights and business interests to attacks on affirmative action, gay rights and abortion. One liberal blog, democrats.com, called the group "the conservative cabal that is attacking America from within."
Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group, did not go that far in an interview last week. But he pointed to the society as a link between Judge Roberts and two Supreme Court justices many on the left abhor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justice Scalia was a faculty adviser to the society, and Justice Thomas has praised its work and spoken at its events.
"Just because someone belongs to the Federalist Society does not inherently disqualify them," Mr. Neas said. "But it certainly raises a lot of questions about whether that individual adheres to the judicial philosophy of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia," who are not "mainstream conservatives," he said.
Leaders of the group cry foul. Steven G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University who helped found the group as a law student at Yale and is now chairman of its board, evoked the question Senator Joseph McCarthy used a half-century ago in hunting Communists: "There's been an element of 'Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Federalist Society?' "
"It's worse than McCarthyism, because at least McCarthy was going after people who advocated a total dictatorship," he said. "We don't even hold a unified set of views."
Although the group endorses a few broad principles like the separation of powers and a faithful adherence to Constitutional text, Mr. Calabresi said there was much disagreement on particulars. "The Federalist Society is a debate club," he said.
The blurred lines between the group's official debate-club role and the private activities of many of its members were on display last week as the group's longtime president, Eugene B. Meyer, dismissed as "silly" accusations that the society was exercising secret influence. "That's just not how we operate," he said.
Mr. Meyer said outside observers often failed to recognized the idealism that attracted members. "I don't mean to sound too goody-two-shoes about this, but it's an interest in good government and how people can do the best for the society," he said. Recalling a trip through rural Mexico, Mr. Meyer spoke of the "Stone Age" living conditions there as an example of how people suffer "when they haven't had the rule of law."
Yet down the hall from Mr. Meyer's office, a vacated desk testified to the more activist role that members often play. It belonged to Leonard A. Leo, the executive vice president, who doubles as the head of Catholic outreach for the Republican Party and who has taken a leave of absence to help Judge Roberts win confirmation.
As he argued that the society's influence flowed from its intellectual work - "I sound a little like a broken record, but what I'm excited about are the ideas"- Mr. Meyer also said he had benefited from news media training by Creative Response Concepts. That is the public relations firm that represented Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group whose advertisements in last year's presidential campaign attacked the war record of Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee.
The Federalist Society hired the firm, Mr. Meyer said, to train members and place them on television shows during the confirmation process. He said the goal was to educate the public on the role of judges and courts. "Given the general philosophical outlook, the chances are very good that they'll support the nominee," Mr. Meyer said. "But that's not the purpose."
In the early days of the Bush presidency, administration officials said about a quarter of their judicial nominees were recommended by the Washington headquarters of the society. Mr. Meyer said the advice came from staff members speaking in their private capacities, not as official representatives.
With an annual budget of $5.5 million, the society has benefited from decades of support from prominent conservative organizations, including the John M. Olin, Sarah Scaife, and Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundations.
In the 1990's, three Federalist Society lawyers, Jerome M. Marcus, Richard W. Porter and George T. Conway, played important but covert roles in helping Paula Corbin Jones sue President Clinton for sexual harassment. They also worked behind the scenes to disclose Mr. Clinton's affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.
Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel whose report led to Mr. Clinton's impeachment, is a prominent member of the society, as is Theodore B. Olson, who successfully argued Bush v. Gore, the case that stopped the Florida recount in 2000 and ensured Mr. Bush's election.
According to the Senate Judiciary Committee, 15 of the 41 appeals court judges confirmed under Mr. Bush have identified themselves as members of the group. Complaining that the society serves as "the secret handshake" of Mr. Bush's judicial nominees, Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat on the committee, has repeatedly questioned them about the group's mission statement. Their answers, he said, have "ranged from the amusing to the preposterous."
Carolyn Kuhl, who later withdrew her stalled bid for an appeals court seat, wrote, "I did not participate in writing the mission statement."
"Therefore I am unable to opine," she said.
Jeffrey S. Sutton, who won a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, said, "I have no idea what their philosophy is."
Mr. Dinh, who left his Justice Department position in 2003 and now teaches law at Georgetown, said he answered candidly at his confirmation hearing. "I did not know, and still do not know, what the society stands for because it has no stated philosophy other than the exchange of ideas," he said. "There's no evasion in that. It's just as straightforward as it gets."
Mr. Durbin's questions did bring sharp words from one society member. "I am on the board of advisers of the Federalist Society, and I am darn proud of it," said Senator Orrin G. Hatch, a Utah Republican on the Judiciary Committee. Mr. Hatch called the society a group of lawyers "who are just sick and tired of the leftward leanings of our government."
Among those with a complex view of the group is Guido Calabresi, a federal appeals court judge and an uncle of Steven Calabresi. Judge Calabresi, a former dean of Yale Law School, was appointed by President Clinton, and his academic views are to the left of his nephew's.
"The Federalist Society was, when it got started, a wonderful idea," Judge Calabresi said, and it has made "a lot of conservative thought seem as respectable and attractive as it is." But he worries that its career-advancement role invites distrust and promotes conformity.
"It becomes something of a secret society," he said. "The conversation becomes a conversation among people who already know what they're going to say."
Anticipating the criticism, Steven Calabresi fired off a pre-emptive e-mail message to a reporter, arguing that the same could be said of elite law schools like Yale.
Unlike many arguments about the Federalist Society, though, this one promises to end amicably: the two Calabresis, close friends and mutual admirers, will soon be off for a shared vacation.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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