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February 11, 2007
The Death of Habeas Corpus. What it Means to Us.
HABEAS CORPUS. Why Should I Care?
THE DEATH OF HABEAS CORPUS.
Keith Olberman Commentary.
A look at other times in American history that should have taught us about the dangers of "chopping away" at Habeas Corpus. As George Santyana once said: "Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it."
To Build a War Workshop
TO BUILD A WAR WORKSHOPAn Editorial from the NY Times
February 10, 2007
It took far too long, but a report by the Pentagon inspector general has finally confirmed that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s do-it-yourself intelligence office cooked up a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda to help justify an unjustifiable war.
The report said the team headed by Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, developed “alternative” assessments of intelligence on Iraq that contradicted the intelligence community and drew conclusions “that were not supported by the available intelligence.” Mr. Feith certainly knew the Central Intelligence Agency would cry foul, so he hid his findings from the C.I.A. Then Vice President Dick Cheney used them as proof of cloak-and-dagger meetings that never happened, long-term conspiracies between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that didn’t exist, and — most unforgivable — “possible Iraqi coordination” on the 9/11 attacks, which no serious intelligence analyst believed.
The report said the team headed by Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, developed “alternative” assessments of intelligence on Iraq that contradicted the intelligence community and drew conclusions “that were not supported by the available intelligence.” Mr. Feith certainly knew the Central Intelligence Agency would cry foul, so he hid his findings from the C.I.A. Then Vice President Dick Cheney used them as proof of cloak-and-dagger meetings that never happened, long-term conspiracies between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that didn’t exist, and — most unforgivable — “possible Iraqi coordination” on the 9/11 attacks, which no serious intelligence analyst believed.
The inspector general did not recommend criminal charges against Mr. Feith because Mr. Rumsfeld or his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, approved their subordinate’s “inappropriate” operations. The renegade intelligence buff said he was relieved.
We’re sure he was. But there is no comfort in knowing that his dirty work was approved by his bosses. All that does is add to evidence that the Bush administration knowingly and repeatedly misled Americans about the intelligence on Iraq.
To understand this twisted tale, it is important to recall how Mr. Feith got into the creative writing business. Top administration officials, especially Mr. Cheney, had long been furious at the C.I.A. for refusing to confirm the delusion about a grand Iraqi terrorist conspiracy, something the Republican right had nursed for years. Their frustration only grew after 9/11 and the C.I.A. still refused to buy these theories.
Mr. Wolfowitz would feverishly sketch out charts showing how this Iraqi knew that Iraqi, who was connected through six more degrees of separation to terrorist attacks, all the way back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
But the C.I.A. kept saying there was no reliable intelligence about an Iraq-Qaeda link. So Mr. Feith was sent to review the reports and come back with the answers Mr. Cheney wanted. The inspector general’s report said Mr. Feith’ s team gave a September 2002 briefing at the White House on the alleged Iraq-Qaeda connection that had not been vetted by the intelligence community (the director of central intelligence was pointedly not told it was happening) and “was not fully supported by the available intelligence.”
The false information included a meeting in Prague in April 2001 between an Iraqi official and Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 pilots. It never happened. But Mr. Feith’s report said it did, and
Mr. Cheney will still not admit that the story is false.
In a statement released yesterday, Senator Carl Levin, the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has been dogged in pursuit of the truth about the Iraqi intelligence, noted that the cooked-up Feith briefing had been leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine so Mr. Cheney could quote it as the “best source” of information about the supposed Iraq-Qaeda link.
The Pentagon report is one step in a long-delayed effort to figure out how the intelligence on Iraq was so badly twisted — and by whom. That work should have been finished before the 2004 elections, and it would have been if Pat Roberts, the obedient Republican who ran the Senate Intelligence Committee, had not helped the White House drag it out and load it in ways that would obscure the truth.
It is now up to Mr. Levin and Senator Jay Rockefeller, the current head of the intelligence panel, to give Americans the answers. Mr. Levin’s desire to have the entire inspector general’s report on the Feith scheme declassified is a good place to start. But it will be up to Mr. Rockefeller to finally determine how old, inconclusive, unsubstantiated and false intelligence was transformed into fresh, reliable and definitive reports — and then used by Mr. Bush and other top officials to drag the country into a disastrous and unnecessary war.
February 10, 2007
IMMINENT IRAN AIR STRIKES THIS SPRING
Target Iran: US able to strike in the spring
Despite denials, Pentagon plans for possible attack on nuclear sites are well advanced
Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Saturday February 10, 2007
The Guardian
US preparations for an air strike against Iran are at an advanced stage, in spite of repeated public denials by the Bush administration, according to informed sources in Washington.
The present military build-up in the Gulf would allow the US to mount an attack by the spring. But the sources said that if there was an attack, it was more likely next year, just before Mr Bush leaves office.
Neo-conservatives, particularly at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, are urging Mr Bush to open a new front against Iran. So too is the vice-president, Dick Cheney. The state department and the Pentagon are opposed, as are Democratic congressmen and the overwhelming majority of Republicans. The sources said Mr Bush had not yet made a decision.
The Bush administration insists the military build-up is not offensive but aimed at containing Iran and forcing it to make diplomatic concessions. The aim is to persuade Tehran to curb its suspect nuclear weapons programme and abandon ambitions for regional expansion.
Robert Gates, the new US defence secretary, said yesterday: "I don't know how many times the president, secretary [of state Condoleezza] Rice and I have had to repeat that we have no intention of attacking Iran."
But Vincent Cannistraro, a Washington-based intelligence analyst, shared the sources' assessment that Pentagon planning was well under way. "Planning is going on, in spite of public disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry this out are being put in place."
He added: "We are planning for war. It is incredibly dangerous."
Deployment
Mr Cannistraro, who worked for the CIA and the National Security Council, stressed that no decision had been made.
Last month Mr Bush ordered a second battle group led by the aircraft carrier USS John Stennis to the Gulf in support of the USS Eisenhower. The USS Stennis is due to arrive within the next 10 days. Extra US Patriot missiles have been sent to the region, as well as more minesweepers, in anticipation of Iranian retaliatory action.
In another sign that preparations are under way, Mr Bush has ordered oil reserves to be stockpiled.
The danger is that the build-up could spark an accidental war. Iranian officials said on Thursday that they had tested missiles capable of hitting warships in the Gulf.
Colonel Sam Gardiner, a former air force officer who has carried out war games with Iran as the target, supported the view that planning for an air strike was under way: "Gates said there is no planning for war. We know this is not true. He possibly meant there is no plan for an immediate strike. It was sloppy wording.
"All the moves being made over the last few weeks are consistent with what you would do if you were going to do an air strike. We have to throw away the notion the US could not do it because it is too tied up in Iraq. It is an air operation."
One of the main driving forces behind war, apart from the vice-president's office, is the AEI, headquarters of the neo-conservatives. A member of the AEI coined the slogan "axis of evil" that originally lumped Iran in with Iraq and North Korea. Its influence on the White House appeared to be in decline last year amid endless bad news from Iraq, for which it had been a cheerleader. But in the face of opposition from Congress, the Pentagon and state department,
Mr Bush opted last month for an AEI plan to send more troops to Iraq. Will he support calls from within the AEI for a strike on Iran?
Josh Muravchik, a Middle East specialist at the AEI, is among its most vocal supporters of such a strike.
"I do not think anyone in the US is talking about invasion. We have been chastened by the experience of Iraq, even a hawk like myself." But an air strike was another matter. The danger of Iran having a nuclear weapon "is not just that it might use it out of the blue but as a shield to do all sorts of mischief. I do not believe there will be any way to stop this happening other than physical force."
Mr Bush is part of the American generation that refuses to forgive Iran for the 1979-81 hostage crisis. He leaves office in January 2009 and has said repeatedly that he does not want a legacy in which Iran has achieved superpower status in the region and come close to acquiring a nuclear weapon capability. The logic of this is that if diplomatic efforts fail to persuade Iran to stop uranium enrichment then the only alternative left is to turn to the military.
Mr Muravchik is intent on holding Mr Bush to his word: "The Bush administration have said they would not allow Iran nuclear weapons. That is either bullshit or they mean it as a clear code: we will do it if we have to. I would rather believe it is not hot air."
Other neo-cons elsewhere in Washington are opposed to an air strike but advocate a different form of military action, supporting Iranian armed groups, in particular the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), even though the state department has branded it a terrorist organisation.
Raymond Tanter, founder of the Iran Policy Committee, which includes former officials from the White House, state department and intelligence services, is a leading advocate of support for the MEK. If it comes to an air strike, he favours bunker-busting bombs. "I believe the only way to get at the deeply buried sites at Natanz and Arak is probably to use bunker-buster bombs, some of which are nuclear tipped. I do not believe the US would do that but it has sold them to Israel."
Opposition support
Another neo-conservative, Meyrav Wurmser, director of the centre for Middle East policy at the Hudson Institute, also favours supporting Iranian opposition groups. She is disappointed with the response of the Bush administration so far to Iran and said that if the aim of US policy after 9/11 was to make the Middle East safer for the US, it was not working because the administration had stopped at Iraq. "There is not enough political will for a strike. There seems to be various notions of what the policy should be."
In spite of the president's veto on negotiation with Tehran, the state department has been involved since 2003 in back-channel approaches and meetings involving Iranian officials and members of the Bush administration or individuals close to it. But when last year the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sent a letter as an overture, the state department dismissed it within hours of its arrival.
Support for negotiations comes from centrist and liberal thinktanks. Afshin Molavi, a fellow of the New America Foundation, said: "To argue diplomacy has not worked is false because it has not been tried. Post-90s and through to today, when Iran has been ready to dance, the US refused, and when the US has been ready to dance, Iran has refused. We are at a stage where Iran is ready to walk across the dance floor and the US is looking away."
He is worried about "a miscalculation that leads to an accidental war".
The catalyst could be Iraq. The Pentagon said yesterday that it had evidence - serial numbers of projectiles as well as explosives - of Iraqi militants' weapons that had come from Iran. In a further sign of the increased tension, Iran's main nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, cancelled a visit to Munich for what would have been the first formal meeting with his western counterparts since last year.
If it does come to war, Mr Muravchik said Iran would retaliate, but that on balance it would be worth it to stop a country that he said had "Death to America" as its official slogan.
"We have to gird our loins and prepare to absorb the counter-shock," he said.
War of words
"If Iran escalates its military action in Iraq to the detriment of our troops and/or innocent Iraqi people, we will respond firmly"George Bush, in an interview with National Public Radio
"The Iranians clearly believe that we are tied down in Iraq, that they have the initiative, that they are in position to press us in many ways. They are doing nothing to be constructive in Iraq at this point," Robert Gates said.
"I think it's been pretty well-known that Iran is fishing in troubled waters," Dick Cheney said.
"It is absolutely parallel. They're using the same dance steps - demonise the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq redux"Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter- terrorism specialist, in Vanity Fair, on echoes of the run-up to the war in Iraq.
"US policymakers and analysts know that the Iranian nation would not let an invasion go without a response. Enemies of the Islamic system fabricated various rumours about death and health to demoralise the Iranian nation, but they did not know that they are not dealing with only one person in Iran.
They are facing a nation: Iran's nuclear programme Special reportsIranIraqIsrael and the Middle EastSaudi ArabiaWorld news guideIran
Despite denials, Pentagon plans for possible attack on nuclear sites are well advanced
Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Saturday February 10, 2007
The Guardian
US preparations for an air strike against Iran are at an advanced stage, in spite of repeated public denials by the Bush administration, according to informed sources in Washington.The present military build-up in the Gulf would allow the US to mount an attack by the spring. But the sources said that if there was an attack, it was more likely next year, just before Mr Bush leaves office.
Neo-conservatives, particularly at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, are urging Mr Bush to open a new front against Iran. So too is the vice-president, Dick Cheney. The state department and the Pentagon are opposed, as are Democratic congressmen and the overwhelming majority of Republicans. The sources said Mr Bush had not yet made a decision.
The Bush administration insists the military build-up is not offensive but aimed at containing Iran and forcing it to make diplomatic concessions. The aim is to persuade Tehran to curb its suspect nuclear weapons programme and abandon ambitions for regional expansion.
Robert Gates, the new US defence secretary, said yesterday: "I don't know how many times the president, secretary [of state Condoleezza] Rice and I have had to repeat that we have no intention of attacking Iran."
But Vincent Cannistraro, a Washington-based intelligence analyst, shared the sources' assessment that Pentagon planning was well under way. "Planning is going on, in spite of public disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry this out are being put in place."
He added: "We are planning for war. It is incredibly dangerous."
Deployment
Mr Cannistraro, who worked for the CIA and the National Security Council, stressed that no decision had been made.
Last month Mr Bush ordered a second battle group led by the aircraft carrier USS John Stennis to the Gulf in support of the USS Eisenhower. The USS Stennis is due to arrive within the next 10 days. Extra US Patriot missiles have been sent to the region, as well as more minesweepers, in anticipation of Iranian retaliatory action.
In another sign that preparations are under way, Mr Bush has ordered oil reserves to be stockpiled.
The danger is that the build-up could spark an accidental war. Iranian officials said on Thursday that they had tested missiles capable of hitting warships in the Gulf.
Colonel Sam Gardiner, a former air force officer who has carried out war games with Iran as the target, supported the view that planning for an air strike was under way: "Gates said there is no planning for war. We know this is not true. He possibly meant there is no plan for an immediate strike. It was sloppy wording.
"All the moves being made over the last few weeks are consistent with what you would do if you were going to do an air strike. We have to throw away the notion the US could not do it because it is too tied up in Iraq. It is an air operation."
One of the main driving forces behind war, apart from the vice-president's office, is the AEI, headquarters of the neo-conservatives. A member of the AEI coined the slogan "axis of evil" that originally lumped Iran in with Iraq and North Korea. Its influence on the White House appeared to be in decline last year amid endless bad news from Iraq, for which it had been a cheerleader. But in the face of opposition from Congress, the Pentagon and state department,
Mr Bush opted last month for an AEI plan to send more troops to Iraq. Will he support calls from within the AEI for a strike on Iran?
Josh Muravchik, a Middle East specialist at the AEI, is among its most vocal supporters of such a strike.
"I do not think anyone in the US is talking about invasion. We have been chastened by the experience of Iraq, even a hawk like myself." But an air strike was another matter. The danger of Iran having a nuclear weapon "is not just that it might use it out of the blue but as a shield to do all sorts of mischief. I do not believe there will be any way to stop this happening other than physical force."
Mr Bush is part of the American generation that refuses to forgive Iran for the 1979-81 hostage crisis. He leaves office in January 2009 and has said repeatedly that he does not want a legacy in which Iran has achieved superpower status in the region and come close to acquiring a nuclear weapon capability. The logic of this is that if diplomatic efforts fail to persuade Iran to stop uranium enrichment then the only alternative left is to turn to the military.
Mr Muravchik is intent on holding Mr Bush to his word: "The Bush administration have said they would not allow Iran nuclear weapons. That is either bullshit or they mean it as a clear code: we will do it if we have to. I would rather believe it is not hot air."
Other neo-cons elsewhere in Washington are opposed to an air strike but advocate a different form of military action, supporting Iranian armed groups, in particular the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), even though the state department has branded it a terrorist organisation.
Raymond Tanter, founder of the Iran Policy Committee, which includes former officials from the White House, state department and intelligence services, is a leading advocate of support for the MEK. If it comes to an air strike, he favours bunker-busting bombs. "I believe the only way to get at the deeply buried sites at Natanz and Arak is probably to use bunker-buster bombs, some of which are nuclear tipped. I do not believe the US would do that but it has sold them to Israel."
Opposition support
Another neo-conservative, Meyrav Wurmser, director of the centre for Middle East policy at the Hudson Institute, also favours supporting Iranian opposition groups. She is disappointed with the response of the Bush administration so far to Iran and said that if the aim of US policy after 9/11 was to make the Middle East safer for the US, it was not working because the administration had stopped at Iraq. "There is not enough political will for a strike. There seems to be various notions of what the policy should be."
In spite of the president's veto on negotiation with Tehran, the state department has been involved since 2003 in back-channel approaches and meetings involving Iranian officials and members of the Bush administration or individuals close to it. But when last year the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sent a letter as an overture, the state department dismissed it within hours of its arrival.
Support for negotiations comes from centrist and liberal thinktanks. Afshin Molavi, a fellow of the New America Foundation, said: "To argue diplomacy has not worked is false because it has not been tried. Post-90s and through to today, when Iran has been ready to dance, the US refused, and when the US has been ready to dance, Iran has refused. We are at a stage where Iran is ready to walk across the dance floor and the US is looking away."
He is worried about "a miscalculation that leads to an accidental war".
The catalyst could be Iraq. The Pentagon said yesterday that it had evidence - serial numbers of projectiles as well as explosives - of Iraqi militants' weapons that had come from Iran. In a further sign of the increased tension, Iran's main nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, cancelled a visit to Munich for what would have been the first formal meeting with his western counterparts since last year.
If it does come to war, Mr Muravchik said Iran would retaliate, but that on balance it would be worth it to stop a country that he said had "Death to America" as its official slogan.
"We have to gird our loins and prepare to absorb the counter-shock," he said.
War of words
"If Iran escalates its military action in Iraq to the detriment of our troops and/or innocent Iraqi people, we will respond firmly"George Bush, in an interview with National Public Radio
"The Iranians clearly believe that we are tied down in Iraq, that they have the initiative, that they are in position to press us in many ways. They are doing nothing to be constructive in Iraq at this point," Robert Gates said.
"I think it's been pretty well-known that Iran is fishing in troubled waters," Dick Cheney said.
"It is absolutely parallel. They're using the same dance steps - demonise the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq redux"Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter- terrorism specialist, in Vanity Fair, on echoes of the run-up to the war in Iraq.
"US policymakers and analysts know that the Iranian nation would not let an invasion go without a response. Enemies of the Islamic system fabricated various rumours about death and health to demoralise the Iranian nation, but they did not know that they are not dealing with only one person in Iran.
They are facing a nation: Iran's nuclear programme Special reportsIranIraqIsrael and the Middle EastSaudi ArabiaWorld news guideIran
February 9, 2007
Constitutional Experts Say Congress Has Power to Stop an Attack on Iran
Leading Experts Say Congress Must Stop An Attack on Iran: Is That Constitutionally Possible?
Absolutely - According to Experts on Both Sides of the Aisle
By JOHN W. DEAN Friday, Feb. 09, 2007
In a February 5 OpEd in the Los Angeles Times, Leon Weiss and Larry Diamond explained that they were uncertain whether President Bush's recent tough talk toward Iran was bully pulpit bluster, meant solely to control Iran's dangerous actions, or if the President was again on the road to war. (Weiss is a senior science fellow at the Center for International Security at Cooperation at Stanford University; Diamond is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.)
Accordingly, Weiss and Diamond called on Congress to find out which is the case, and, if the President's intention is indeed warlike, to take preventive action so that the President does not launch a war in Iran - given his performance in Iraq. They suggest sending the President what is, in effect, a veto-proof measure -- by placing the measure in an appropriations bill - advising the President that "Congress will not support a U.S. military strike on that country" unless authorized by Congress. If Bush were to violate such a law, they urged, Congress should file a lawsuit against him, and begin impeachment proceedings.
James Fallows expressed a similar concern about the Administration's actions in Iran in his recent Atlantic Monthly column. "If we could trust the Administration's ability to judge America's rational self-interest, there would be no need to constrain its threatening gestures toward Iran," Fallows suggested. Such trust, however, has not proven to be merited.
Nevertheless, Fallows concluded, even if the Bush Administration has warlike intentions with respect to Iran, Congress can do nothing other than "draw the line. It can say that war with Iran is anathema to the interests of the United States and contrary to the will of its elected representative."
These commentators have raised the question of whether Congress can, in fact, prevent a president from taking the nation to war. This was the subject of a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing chaired by Senator Russ Feingold, where he sought to explore "not what Congress should do, but what can Congress do."
While the hearing was focused on Iraq, and Congressional power in general, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) specifically asked the panel of constitutional experts, during the questioning, about what legal restrictions might be placed on the president's going to war in Iran.
Because the constitutional experts submitted formal statements to the Committee, which are available online, and several of them are terrific briefs on the law and relevant history, I have linked those statements to their names. Rather than rely solely upon their own summaries of their positions, given during the hearing, I have instead cited from, and commented on, their prepared statements seeking to set forth the essence of their positions.
What is especially significant, in my eyes, is that the conclusion that Congress does indeed have power to significantly restrict the Administration in its plans for war, transcends politics: Even experts who have worked for Republican administrations have come to this conclusion.
Statements of Constitutional Experts
Professor David Barron from the Harvard Law School opened the testimony. Barron is a graduate of Harvard Law School and clerked for Judge Reinhardt on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, as well as for Associate Justice Stevens on the United States Supreme Court. He served as an attorney advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School in 1999. Column continues below ↓
"Congress possesses substantial constitutional authority to regulate ongoing military operations, and even to bring them to an end," Barron stated, explaining that while the power of the purse is the strongest authority to control executive military actions, it is not the only power. Barron's statement reviews relevant rulings of the Supreme Court, and finds in them, and in the Constitution, no real limits on Congress's powers to manage a war. In fact, his review of the sources related to this question shows that to find otherwise would be contrary to the clear intention of the nation's Founders to control the chief executive.
Professor Robert Turner graduated from the law school at the University of Virginia and is now a professor there. He co-founded the school's Center for National Security Law. He served as the National Security Advisor to Senator Robert Griffin (R-MI) in the mid 1970's and worked at the Pentagon, the White House, and the State Department during the Reagan Administration, and from 2001 to 2003 worked in the Bush White House Counsel's office.
Professor Turner's statement was based as much on "a practical appreciation of the imperatives of presidential military decision making in a time of crisis as from a deep study of the case law." While the committee was not seeking policy advice, Turner was offering it. He concluded that "Congress does indeed possess the power to limit the broad outlines of hostilities through legislation," but he explained, in effect, why in his view, Congress should not use that power, as a policy matter.
Dr. Louis Fisher is a Constitutional Law Specialist at the Library of Congress. Before joining the Library of Congress, he spent thirty-six years at the Congressional Research Service. Dr. Fisher
has published a number of authoritative books relating to legislative versus executive branch conflicts. (And I have most of them on my book shelf.) Dr. Fisher's statement explained that not only does Congress have the power to influence the direction of the nation's military when at war, but its members have the responsibility to do so. Drawing on history, he sets forth what the Framers of the Constitution did, and why they did it. His statement is rich in historical quotations that are not the now-hackneyed comments commonly found in discussion of these issues.
For example, in 1793, Fisher reported, Madison called war "the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. . . . In war, the honours and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honourable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace."
And in 1861, Fisher advised the committee, Attorney General Edward Bates explained that the President is Commander in Chief not because he is "skilled in the art of war and qualified to marshal a host in the field of battle." Rather he is Commander in Chief so whoever leads U.S. armies to battle "is subject to the orders of the civil magistrate, and he and his army are always 'subordinate to the civil power.'"
Bradford Berenson, now a partner at Sidley & Austin, graduated from the Harvard Law School and clerked for Judge Silberman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Associate Justice Kennedy on the United States Supreme Court. He also served as Associate Counsel to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003, a position in which he focused on the relationship between the Congress and the Executive.
Berenson took an approach similar to Professor Turner's. Accepting that the Constitution and rulings make it very clear that Congress has ample power and authority relating to this nation's military activities, he instead made a policy case as to why Congress should not exercise their power. He acknowledged the nature of his statement when summarizing it for the committee, and quickly conceded, "I think the constitutional scheme does give Congress broad authority to terminate a war."
Finally, Professor Walter Dellinger of the Duke University School of Law testified. Dellinger, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department under President Clinton, and also acting Solicitor General from 1996 to 1997 (during which time he argued nine cases before the High Court) is a graduate of Yale Law School and a former law clerk for Associate Justice Hugo Black
"In the absence of any congressional legislation on point," Dellinger said in his prepared statement, "I would be ready to conclude that a president can act on his own authority and pursuant to his own judgment in matters of national security. Once Congress has acted, however, the issue is fundamentally different. The question then becomes whether the Act of Congress is itself unconstitutional."
In short, all the experts on this politically diverse but balanced panel agreed - in the abstract - that the Congress has the power to control a warrior president. But, as Walter Dellinger noted, the action itself must be constitutional.
Senator Kennedy thus, during the questioning, properly moved the discussion from the abstract to the specific.
Can Congress Prevent the President from Going to War In Iran?
In condensed form, with a few annotations, here is the text of the exchanges that occurred.
They require no commentary:
SEN. KENNEDY: "Question just quickly through the panel. Is the President required to seek authorization from Congress before using the military force against Iran?"
DR. FISHER: "I think if there's some action that's a threat to U.S. soldiers I think a president has the power to repel sudden attacks, protect U.S. troops. Otherwise, if it goe
s beyond isolated incidents like that I think you're running into the preface of the Iraq Resolution, which …Congress amended … to make sure it applied only to Iraq. So I think by statute, by legislative policy, you can confine the President to Iraq." (Emphasis added.)
SEN. KENNEDY: "I'm interested in … what actions can Congress take now to ensure the President doesn't take us into war in Iran without congressional authorization."
PROF. BARRON: "The question of whether the President could right now initiate any actions against the Iran -- I think the proper way to think about it is what authority does he have under the current Iraq Authorization Statute, which would require some close consideration. . . . William Rehnquist [as an assistant attorney general] … thought that a statutory limitation on the exercise of such authority would be constitutionally valid. So I think the legal question then comes to . . . no doubt Congress could restrict him from going and widening the war, not just in terms of the amount of troops used, but in the geographic area covered, and the only issue is whether Congress has in effect already done so by virtue of the limitations and bounds of the Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq that's already enacted." (Emphasis added.)
SEN. KENNEDY: "Yes, Professor Turner."
PROF. TURNER: "Senator, let me just make nuanced point on this. John Hart Ely in his War and Responsibility made the point that after Congress declared war against Germany, FDR did not need a new declaration of war to go into North Africa after the German forces. Going into Cambodia I think was perfectly legal because the North Vietnamese had taken over the whole side of Cambodia. . . . I could see a situation in which Iran became involved in the Iraq War where the President would be able to use force. . . . I think in terms of launching a major war against Iran he should get and would need an official [Congressional approval] for Iran. But there's some area in there where I think he could act." (Emphasis added.)
SEN. KENNEDY: "If Congress passed legislation requiring the President to seek authorization from Congress before using military force against Iran would the President be obliged to seek such authorization before launching military action?"
MR. BERENSON: "Senator Kennedy, I think the questions that you're posing falls into the sphere . . . of shared powers, and it's important to recognize that for very important institutional reasons the President is the first mover and the prime mover in this area of shared powers. That has to do with the fact that unlike Congress which needs to go through an often time consuming and difficult legislative process, a process that can sometimes be stymied, the President has the ability to receive information in real time to act to protect the national security. So the President through the [clause vesting him with executive power], through his executive authority in the absence of legislation to the contrary by the Congress, I think unquestionably would have authority to engage Iran in hostilities, whether in defense of our forces inside the borders of Iraq or if he decided that we needed to do something to address Iran's nuclear facilities. I do not think he would be acting outside the scope of his constitutional authority. That said, for major military actions most presidents have recognized the importance of coming to Congress as a political and practical matter. It is certainly unwise, if not unconstitutional, to try to engage in large scale hostilities or engage a new enemy in warfare without public support. And the best way to ensure that at the outset is, of course, to come to Congress." (Emphasis added.)
SEN. KENNEDY: "My time, Mr. Chairman, is up. Mr. Dellinger -"
PROF. DELLINGER: "Briefly, I agree with Mr. Berenson's statement. I believe that the President does have the authority to introduce U.S. troops into situations of hostilities, including in Iran, in the absence of congressional limitation as long as the anticipated scope and duration does not amount to a war. I don't believe he has the authority to send 500,000 troops into Iran, but he does have the authority to deploy U.S. forces in hostilities…. That said, it is also clear that Congress can impose limits either before or after the fact on the size, scope, and duration of that. But I do believe there's a consensus in the Executive Branch position that the President has the authority to deploy U.S. forces into hostilities when Congress has not spoken to the question." (Emphasis added.)
* * *
In sum, as I read both the general statements of these experts, and their specific answers to Senator Kennedy's question about Iran, everyone agrees that Congress has the power to prevent a president from going to war.
The only question that is doubtful, then, is whether the members of Congress actually have the will to do so. This, I suspect, is what James Fallows concluded, when he said that, at best, they might draw a line.
Of course, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney know this too, so they will do whatever they wish to do - and Congress may or may not catch up. But there is no real question as to whether Congress could legally stop Bush and Cheney from going to war in Iran without coming to Congress to fully explain what they are doing and why.
Congress has that power; the only question is whether it will dare to use it.
Absolutely - According to Experts on Both Sides of the Aisle
By JOHN W. DEAN Friday, Feb. 09, 2007
In a February 5 OpEd in the Los Angeles Times, Leon Weiss and Larry Diamond explained that they were uncertain whether President Bush's recent tough talk toward Iran was bully pulpit bluster, meant solely to control Iran's dangerous actions, or if the President was again on the road to war. (Weiss is a senior science fellow at the Center for International Security at Cooperation at Stanford University; Diamond is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.)Accordingly, Weiss and Diamond called on Congress to find out which is the case, and, if the President's intention is indeed warlike, to take preventive action so that the President does not launch a war in Iran - given his performance in Iraq. They suggest sending the President what is, in effect, a veto-proof measure -- by placing the measure in an appropriations bill - advising the President that "Congress will not support a U.S. military strike on that country" unless authorized by Congress. If Bush were to violate such a law, they urged, Congress should file a lawsuit against him, and begin impeachment proceedings.
James Fallows expressed a similar concern about the Administration's actions in Iran in his recent Atlantic Monthly column. "If we could trust the Administration's ability to judge America's rational self-interest, there would be no need to constrain its threatening gestures toward Iran," Fallows suggested. Such trust, however, has not proven to be merited.
Nevertheless, Fallows concluded, even if the Bush Administration has warlike intentions with respect to Iran, Congress can do nothing other than "draw the line. It can say that war with Iran is anathema to the interests of the United States and contrary to the will of its elected representative."These commentators have raised the question of whether Congress can, in fact, prevent a president from taking the nation to war. This was the subject of a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing chaired by Senator Russ Feingold, where he sought to explore "not what Congress should do, but what can Congress do."
While the hearing was focused on Iraq, and Congressional power in general, Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) specifically asked the panel of constitutional experts, during the questioning, about what legal restrictions might be placed on the president's going to war in Iran.
Because the constitutional experts submitted formal statements to the Committee, which are available online, and several of them are terrific briefs on the law and relevant history, I have linked those statements to their names. Rather than rely solely upon their own summaries of their positions, given during the hearing, I have instead cited from, and commented on, their prepared statements seeking to set forth the essence of their positions.
What is especially significant, in my eyes, is that the conclusion that Congress does indeed have power to significantly restrict the Administration in its plans for war, transcends politics: Even experts who have worked for Republican administrations have come to this conclusion.
Statements of Constitutional Experts
Professor David Barron from the Harvard Law School opened the testimony. Barron is a graduate of Harvard Law School and clerked for Judge Reinhardt on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, as well as for Associate Justice Stevens on the United States Supreme Court. He served as an attorney advisor in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School in 1999. Column continues below ↓
"Congress possesses substantial constitutional authority to regulate ongoing military operations, and even to bring them to an end," Barron stated, explaining that while the power of the purse is the strongest authority to control executive military actions, it is not the only power. Barron's statement reviews relevant rulings of the Supreme Court, and finds in them, and in the Constitution, no real limits on Congress's powers to manage a war. In fact, his review of the sources related to this question shows that to find otherwise would be contrary to the clear intention of the nation's Founders to control the chief executive.
Professor Robert Turner graduated from the law school at the University of Virginia and is now a professor there. He co-founded the school's Center for National Security Law. He served as the National Security Advisor to Senator Robert Griffin (R-MI) in the mid 1970's and worked at the Pentagon, the White House, and the State Department during the Reagan Administration, and from 2001 to 2003 worked in the Bush White House Counsel's office.
Professor Turner's statement was based as much on "a practical appreciation of the imperatives of presidential military decision making in a time of crisis as from a deep study of the case law." While the committee was not seeking policy advice, Turner was offering it. He concluded that "Congress does indeed possess the power to limit the broad outlines of hostilities through legislation," but he explained, in effect, why in his view, Congress should not use that power, as a policy matter.
Dr. Louis Fisher is a Constitutional Law Specialist at the Library of Congress. Before joining the Library of Congress, he spent thirty-six years at the Congressional Research Service. Dr. Fisher
has published a number of authoritative books relating to legislative versus executive branch conflicts. (And I have most of them on my book shelf.) Dr. Fisher's statement explained that not only does Congress have the power to influence the direction of the nation's military when at war, but its members have the responsibility to do so. Drawing on history, he sets forth what the Framers of the Constitution did, and why they did it. His statement is rich in historical quotations that are not the now-hackneyed comments commonly found in discussion of these issues.For example, in 1793, Fisher reported, Madison called war "the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. . . . In war, the honours and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honourable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace."
And in 1861, Fisher advised the committee, Attorney General Edward Bates explained that the President is Commander in Chief not because he is "skilled in the art of war and qualified to marshal a host in the field of battle." Rather he is Commander in Chief so whoever leads U.S. armies to battle "is subject to the orders of the civil magistrate, and he and his army are always 'subordinate to the civil power.'"
Bradford Berenson, now a partner at Sidley & Austin, graduated from the Harvard Law School and clerked for Judge Silberman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Associate Justice Kennedy on the United States Supreme Court. He also served as Associate Counsel to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003, a position in which he focused on the relationship between the Congress and the Executive.
Berenson took an approach similar to Professor Turner's. Accepting that the Constitution and rulings make it very clear that Congress has ample power and authority relating to this nation's military activities, he instead made a policy case as to why Congress should not exercise their power. He acknowledged the nature of his statement when summarizing it for the committee, and quickly conceded, "I think the constitutional scheme does give Congress broad authority to terminate a war."
Finally, Professor Walter Dellinger of the Duke University School of Law testified. Dellinger, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department under President Clinton, and also acting Solicitor General from 1996 to 1997 (during which time he argued nine cases before the High Court) is a graduate of Yale Law School and a former law clerk for Associate Justice Hugo Black
"In the absence of any congressional legislation on point," Dellinger said in his prepared statement, "I would be ready to conclude that a president can act on his own authority and pursuant to his own judgment in matters of national security. Once Congress has acted, however, the issue is fundamentally different. The question then becomes whether the Act of Congress is itself unconstitutional."
In short, all the experts on this politically diverse but balanced panel agreed - in the abstract - that the Congress has the power to control a warrior president. But, as Walter Dellinger noted, the action itself must be constitutional.
Senator Kennedy thus, during the questioning, properly moved the discussion from the abstract to the specific.
Can Congress Prevent the President from Going to War In Iran?
In condensed form, with a few annotations, here is the text of the exchanges that occurred.
They require no commentary:
SEN. KENNEDY: "Question just quickly through the panel. Is the President required to seek authorization from Congress before using the military force against Iran?"
DR. FISHER: "I think if there's some action that's a threat to U.S. soldiers I think a president has the power to repel sudden attacks, protect U.S. troops. Otherwise, if it goe
s beyond isolated incidents like that I think you're running into the preface of the Iraq Resolution, which …Congress amended … to make sure it applied only to Iraq. So I think by statute, by legislative policy, you can confine the President to Iraq." (Emphasis added.)SEN. KENNEDY: "I'm interested in … what actions can Congress take now to ensure the President doesn't take us into war in Iran without congressional authorization."
PROF. BARRON: "The question of whether the President could right now initiate any actions against the Iran -- I think the proper way to think about it is what authority does he have under the current Iraq Authorization Statute, which would require some close consideration. . . . William Rehnquist [as an assistant attorney general] … thought that a statutory limitation on the exercise of such authority would be constitutionally valid. So I think the legal question then comes to . . . no doubt Congress could restrict him from going and widening the war, not just in terms of the amount of troops used, but in the geographic area covered, and the only issue is whether Congress has in effect already done so by virtue of the limitations and bounds of the Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq that's already enacted." (Emphasis added.)
SEN. KENNEDY: "Yes, Professor Turner."
PROF. TURNER: "Senator, let me just make nuanced point on this. John Hart Ely in his War and Responsibility made the point that after Congress declared war against Germany, FDR did not need a new declaration of war to go into North Africa after the German forces. Going into Cambodia I think was perfectly legal because the North Vietnamese had taken over the whole side of Cambodia. . . . I could see a situation in which Iran became involved in the Iraq War where the President would be able to use force. . . . I think in terms of launching a major war against Iran he should get and would need an official [Congressional approval] for Iran. But there's some area in there where I think he could act." (Emphasis added.)
SEN. KENNEDY: "If Congress passed legislation requiring the President to seek authorization from Congress before using military force against Iran would the President be obliged to seek such authorization before launching military action?"
MR. BERENSON: "Senator Kennedy, I think the questions that you're posing falls into the sphere . . . of shared powers, and it's important to recognize that for very important institutional reasons the President is the first mover and the prime mover in this area of shared powers. That has to do with the fact that unlike Congress which needs to go through an often time consuming and difficult legislative process, a process that can sometimes be stymied, the President has the ability to receive information in real time to act to protect the national security. So the President through the [clause vesting him with executive power], through his executive authority in the absence of legislation to the contrary by the Congress, I think unquestionably would have authority to engage Iran in hostilities, whether in defense of our forces inside the borders of Iraq or if he decided that we needed to do something to address Iran's nuclear facilities. I do not think he would be acting outside the scope of his constitutional authority. That said, for major military actions most presidents have recognized the importance of coming to Congress as a political and practical matter. It is certainly unwise, if not unconstitutional, to try to engage in large scale hostilities or engage a new enemy in warfare without public support. And the best way to ensure that at the outset is, of course, to come to Congress." (Emphasis added.)
SEN. KENNEDY: "My time, Mr. Chairman, is up. Mr. Dellinger -"
PROF. DELLINGER: "Briefly, I agree with Mr. Berenson's statement. I believe that the President does have the authority to introduce U.S. troops into situations of hostilities, including in Iran, in the absence of congressional limitation as long as the anticipated scope and duration does not amount to a war. I don't believe he has the authority to send 500,000 troops into Iran, but he does have the authority to deploy U.S. forces in hostilities…. That said, it is also clear that Congress can impose limits either before or after the fact on the size, scope, and duration of that. But I do believe there's a consensus in the Executive Branch position that the President has the authority to deploy U.S. forces into hostilities when Congress has not spoken to the question." (Emphasis added.)
* * *
In sum, as I read both the general statements of these experts, and their specific answers to Senator Kennedy's question about Iran, everyone agrees that Congress has the power to prevent a president from going to war.
The only question that is doubtful, then, is whether the members of Congress actually have the will to do so. This, I suspect, is what James Fallows concluded, when he said that, at best, they might draw a line.
Of course, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney know this too, so they will do whatever they wish to do - and Congress may or may not catch up. But there is no real question as to whether Congress could legally stop Bush and Cheney from going to war in Iran without coming to Congress to fully explain what they are doing and why.
Congress has that power; the only question is whether it will dare to use it.
February 4, 2007
Caucus Poll of the Week: February 4-11
BEGINNING OF EACH POLLING QUESTION: As you read you some possible ways to resolve the situation in Iraq and bring U.S. troops home, please tell me which of these, if any, you would find acceptable.
(1) What if reducing the violence and restoring order can be achieved by...
(2) What if reducing the violence and restoring order can be achieved by...
(3) What if reducing the violence and restoring order can be achieved by...
To provide more detailed answers or responses to these questions, please click on the "comments" link at the bottom of this box (with the little pencil next to it). If you do not have a Google account, just choose other and type in the name that you would like others to see. It's fast and easy and you do not need a Google account to respond. We all want to know what you have to say about this important issue.
(1) What if reducing the violence and restoring order can be achieved by...
(2) What if reducing the violence and restoring order can be achieved by...
(3) What if reducing the violence and restoring order can be achieved by...
To provide more detailed answers or responses to these questions, please click on the "comments" link at the bottom of this box (with the little pencil next to it). If you do not have a Google account, just choose other and type in the name that you would like others to see. It's fast and easy and you do not need a Google account to respond. We all want to know what you have to say about this important issue.
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You will find other American's answers under question #23.
Multi-Media Essays on the War in Iraq
Both of these multi-media essays make strong commentaries on our military involvement in the Iraq War.
PLEASE BE AWARE THAT BOTH OF THESE ESSAYS CONTAIN IMAGES FROM THE WAR IN IRAG THAT ARE GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING . VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
We debated whether or not to post these essays; but, as we know from the business of our caucus, war is disturbing, destructive and severe. In the end, we believe that we must view the effects of war to be stronger advocates to end it.
A MULTI-MEDIA ESSAY SET TO MUSIC
NO BRAVERY by James Blunt
(If image does not appear immediately, click once on the blank spot below and wait patiently. When image appears, click on the play button.)
PLEASE BE AWARE THAT BOTH OF THESE ESSAYS CONTAIN IMAGES FROM THE WAR IN IRAG THAT ARE GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING . VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
We debated whether or not to post these essays; but, as we know from the business of our caucus, war is disturbing, destructive and severe. In the end, we believe that we must view the effects of war to be stronger advocates to end it.
A MULTI-MEDIA ESSAY SET TO MUSIC
NO BRAVERY by James Blunt
(If image does not appear immediately, click once on the blank spot below and wait patiently. When image appears, click on the play button.)
Forty years after Bob Dylan penned Masters of War, we may gain some valuable insight into the continued importance of Dylan's message .
A Multi-Media Essay set to
MASTERS OF WAR by Bob Dylan
(A Response to NO BRAVERY by www.masters-of-war.org)
(If image does not appear immediately, click once on the blank spot below and wait patiently. When image appears, click on play button.)
Click Here to See What Americans Think About the War in Iraq
Click Here to See What Americans Think About the War in Iraq
From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq
The White House~by Craig UngerAn Advance Viewing of a VANITY FAIR Major Investigative Report--March 2007
The same neocon ideologues behind the Iraq war have been using the same tactics—alliances with shady exiles, dubious intelligence on W.M.D.—to push for the bombing of Iran. As President Bush ups the pressure on Tehran, is he planning to double his Middle East bet?
In the weeks leading up to George W. Bush's January 10 speech on the war in Iraq, there was a brief but heady moment when it seemed that the president might finally accept the failure of his Middle East policy and try something new. Rising anti-war sentiment had swept congressional Republicans out of power. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had been tossed overboard. And the Iraq Study Group (I.S.G.), chaired by former secretary of state James Baker and former congressman Lee Hamilton, had put together a bipartisan report that offered a face-saving strategy to exit Iraq. Who better than Baker, the Bush family's longtime friend and consigliere, to talk some sense into the president?
FROM THE WONDERFUL
FOLKS WHO BROUGHT YOU IRAQ
The White House--by Craig Unger
An Advance Viewing of a VANITY FAIR
Major Investigative Report--March 2007
Major Investigative Report--March 2007
By the time the president finished his speech from the White House library, however, all those hopes had vanished. It wasn't just that Bush was doubling down on an extravagantly costly bet by sending 21,500 more American troops to Iraq; there were also indications that he was upping the ante by an order of magnitude. The most conspicuous clue was a four-letter word that Bush uttered six times in the course of his speech: Iran.
In a clear reference to the Islamic Republic and its sometime ally Syria, Bush vowed to "seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies." At about the same time his speech was taking place, U.S. troops stormed an Iranian liaison office in Erbil, a Kurdish-controlled city in northern Iraq, and arrested and detained five Iranians working there.
Already, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on the war in Iraq. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people have been killed. Countless more are wounded or living as refugees. Launched with the intention of shoring up Israeli security and replacing rogue regimes in the Middle East with friendly, pro-Western allies, the war in Iraq has instead turned that country into a terrorist training ground. By eliminating Saddam Hussein, the U.S.-led coalition has sparked a Sunni-Shiite civil war, which threatens to spread thro
ughout the entire Middle East. And, far from creating a secular democracy, the war has empowered Shiite fundamentalists aligned with Iran. The most powerful of these, Muqtada al-Sadr, commands both an anti-American sectarian militia and the largest voting bloc in the Iraqi parliament."Everything the advocates of war said would happen hasn't happened," says the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, an influential conservative who backed the Iraq invasion. "And all the things the critics said would happen have happened. [The president's neoconservative advisers] are effectively saying, 'Invade Iran. Then everyone will see how smart we are.' But after you've lost x number of times at the roulette wheel, do you double-down?"
By now, the story of how neoconservatives hijacked American foreign policy is a familiar one. With Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld leading the way, neocons working out of the office of the vice president and the Department of Defense orchestrated a spectacular disinformation operation, asserting that Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction posed a
grave and immediate threat to the U.S. Veteran analysts who disagreed were circumvented. Dubious information from known fabricators was hyped. Forged documents showing phony yellowcake-uranium sales to Iraq were promoted.What's less understood is that the same tactics have been in play with Iran. Once again, neocon ideologues have been flogging questionable intelligence about W.M.D. Once again, dubious Middle East exile groups are making the rounds in Washington—this time urging regime change in Syria and Iran. Once again, heroic new exile leaders are promising freedom.
Meanwhile, a series of recent moves by the military have lent credence to widespread reports that the U.S. is secretly preparing for a massive air attack against Iran. (No one is suggesting a ground invasion.) First came the deployment order of U.S. Navy ships
to the Persian Gulf. Then came high-level personnel shifts signaling a new focus on naval and air operations rather than the ground combat that predominates in Iraq. In his January 10 speech, Bush announced that he was sending Patriot missiles to the Middle East to defend U.S. allies—presumably from Iran. And he pointedly asserted that Iran was "providing material support for attacks on American troops," a charge that could easily evolve into a casus belli."It is absolutely parallel," says Philip Giraldi, a former C.I.A. counterterrorism specialist. "They're using the same dance steps—demonize the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq redux."
The neoconservatives have had Iran in their sights for more than a decade. On July 8, 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's newly elected prime minister and the leader of its right-wing Likud Party, paid a visit to the neoconservative luminary Richard Perle in Washington, D.C. The subject of their meeting was a policy paper that Perle and other analysts had written for an
Israeli-American think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic Political Studies. Titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," the paper contained the kernel of a breathtakingly radical vision for a new Middle East. By waging wars against Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, the paper asserted, Israel and the U.S. could stabilize the region. Later, the neoconservatives argued that this policy could democratize the Middle East."It was the beginning of thought," says Meyrav Wurmser, an Israeli-American policy expert, who co-signed the paper with her husband, David Wurmser, now a top Middle East adviser to Dick Cheney. Other signers included Perle and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy during George W. Bush's first term. "It was the seeds of a new vision."
Netanyahu certainly seemed to think so. Two days after meeting with Perle, the prime minister addressed a joint session of Congress with a speech that borrowed from "A Clean Break." He called for the "democratization" of terrorist states in the Middle East and warned that peaceful means might not be sufficient. War might be unavoidable.
Netanyahu also made one significant addition to "A Clean Break." The paper's authors were concerned primarily with Syria and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but Netanyahu saw a greater threat elsewhere. "The most dangerous of these regimes is Iran," he said.
Ten years later, "A Clean Break" looks like nothing less than a playbook for U.S.-Israeli foreign policy during the Bush-Cheney era. Many of the initiatives outlined in the paper ha
ve been implemented—removing Saddam from power, setting aside the "land for peace" formula to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon—all with disastrous results.Nevertheless, neoconservatives still advocate continuing on the path Netanyahu staked out in his speech and taking the fight to Iran. As they see it, the Iraqi debacle is not the product of their failed policies. Rather, it is the result of America's failure to think big. "It's a mess, isn't it?" says Meyrav Wurmser, who now serves as director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute. "My argument has always been that this war is senseless if you don't give it a regional context."
She isn't alone. One neocon after another has made the same plea: Iraq was the beginning, not the end. Writing in The Weekly Standard last spring, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, made the neocon case for bombing Iran's nuclear sites. Brushing away criticism that a pre-emptive attack would cause anti-Americanism within Iran, Gerecht asserted that it "would actually accelerate internal debate" in a way that would be "painful for the ruling clergy." As for imperiling the U.S. mission in Iraq, Gerecht argued that Iran "can't really hurt us there." Ultimately, he concluded, "we may have to fight a war—perhaps sooner rather than later—to stop such evil men from obtaining the worst weapons we know."
More recently, Netanyahu himself, who may yet return to power in Israel, went as far as to frame the issue in terms of the Holocaust. "Iran is Germany, and it's 1938," he said during a CNN interview in November. "Except that this Nazi regime that is in Iran … wants to dominate
the world, annihilate the Jews, but also annihilate America."Like the campaign to overthrow Saddam, the crusade for regime change in Iran got under way in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. One of the first shots came in The Wall Street Journal in November 2001, when Eliot Cohen, a member of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), declared, "The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state [Iran] and its replacement by a moderate or secular government … would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden."
Then, as now, the U.S. had no official diplomatic communications with Iran, but a series of back-channel meetings from 2001 to 2003 put unofficial policy initiatives into action. The man who initiated these meetings was Michael Ledeen, an Iran specialist, neocon firebrand, and Freedom Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. During the Iran-contra investigations of the late 80s, Ledeen won notoriety for having introduced President Ronald Reagan's chief intriguer, Oliver North, to Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer and con man.
Ghorbanifar helped set up the first meetings, in Rome in December 2001. Among those attending were Harold Rhode, a protégé of Ledeen's, and Larry Franklin, of the Office of Special Plans, the Pentagon bureau that manipulated pre-war intelligence on Iraq. (Franklin has since pleaded guilty to passing secrets to Israel and has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.)
Ghorbanifar reportedly arranged an additional meeting in Rome in June 2002. This one was attended by a high-level U.S. official and dissidents from Egypt and Iraq. Then, in June 2003, just three months after the invasion of Iraq, Franklin and Rhode met secretly with Ghorbanifar in Paris at yet another gathering that was not approved by the Pentagon.
According to Ledeen, Ghorbanifar and his sources produced valuable information at the 2001 meetings about Iranian plans for attacking U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But it is also likely that there was some discussion of de-stabilizing Iran. As the Washington Monthly reported, the meetings raised the possibility "that a rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal U.S. foreign policy channels to advance a 'regime-change' agenda."
Also in attendance at the first meetings, according to administration sources who spoke to Warren P. Strobel, of Knight Ridder Newspapers, were representatives of the Mujahideen e-Khalq, or MEK, an urban-guerrilla group that practiced a brand of revolutionary Marxism heavily influenced by Mao Zedong and Che Guevara.
Having expertly exploited phony intelligence promoted by the Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.), a dubious exile group run by the convicted embezzler Ahmad Chalabi, the neocons were now pursuing an alliance with an even shadier collection of exiles. According to a 2003 report by the State Department, "During the 1970s, the MEK killed US military personnel and US civilians working on defense projects in Tehran.… The MEK detonated bombs in the head office of the Islamic Republic Party and the Premier's office, killing some 70 high-ranking Iranian officials.… In 1991, it assisted the Government of Iraq in suppressing the Shia and Kurdish uprisings in southern Iraq and the Kurdish uprisings in the north." In other words, the MEK was a terrorist group—one that took its orders from Saddam Hussein.
To hear some neocons tell it, though, the MEK militants weren't terrorists—they were America's best hope in Iran. In January 2004, Richard Perle was the guest speaker at a fundraiser sponsored by the MEK, although he later claimed to have been unaware of the connection. And in a speech before the National Press Club in late 2005, Raymond Tanter, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, recommended that the Bush administration use the MEK and its political arm, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (N.C.R.I.), as an insurgent militia against Iran. "The National Council of Resistance of Iran and the Mujahedeen-e Khalq are not only the best source for intelligence on Iran's potential violations of the nonprolife
ration regime. The NCRI and MEK are also a possible ally of the West in bringing about regime change in Tehran," he said.Tanter went as far as to suggest that the U.S. consider using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. "One military option is the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, which may have the capability to destroy hardened deeply buried targets. That is, bunker-busting bombs could destroy tunnels and other underground facilities." He granted that the Non-Proliferation Treaty bans the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, such as Iran, but added that "the United States has sold Israel bunker-busting bombs, which keeps the military option on the table." In other words, the U.S. can't nuke Iran, but Israel, which never signed the treaty and maintains an unacknowledged nuclear arsenal, can.
Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, when the U.S. mission there
seemed accomplished or at least accomplishable, Iran came to fear that it would be next in the crosshairs. To stave off that possibility, Iran's leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, began to assemble a negotiating package. Suddenly, everything was on the table—Iran's nuclear program, policy toward Israel, support of Hamas and Hezbollah, and control over al-Qaeda operatives captured since the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan..... February 2, 2007
Another Tribute to Molly Ivins
Missing Molly Ivins
by PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 2, 2007
Molly Ivins, the Texas columnist, died of breast cancer on Wednesday. I first met her more than three years ago, when our book tours crossed. She was, as she wrote, a card-carrying member of The Great Liberal Backlash of 2003, one of the half-dozen or so writers now schlepping around the country promoting books that do not speak kindly of Our Leader¹s record.
I can't claim to have known her well. But I spent enough time with her, and paid enough attention to her work, to know that obituaries that mostly stressed her satirical gifts missed the main point. Yes, she liked to poke fun at the powerful, and was very good at it. But her satire was only the means to an end: holding the powerful accountable.
She explained her philosophy in a stinging 1995 article in Mother Jones magazine about Rush Limbaugh. Satire ... has historically been the weapon of powerless people aimed at the powerful, she wrote. When you use satire against powerless people ... it is like kicking a cripple.
Molly never lost sight of two eternal truths: rulers lie, and the times when people are most afraid to challenge authority are also the times when it's most important to do just that.
And the fact that she remembered these truths explains something I haven't seen pointed out in any of the tributes: her extraordinary prescience on the central political issue of our time.
I've been going through Molly's columns from 2002 and 2003, the period when most of the wise men of the press cheered as Our Leader took us to war on false pretenses, then dismissed as Bush haters anyone who complained about the absence of W.M.D. or warned that the victory celebrations were premature.
Here are a few selections:
Nov. 19, 2002: The greatest risk for us in invading Iraq is probably not war itself, so much as: What happens after we win? ... There is a batty degree of triumphalism loose in this country right now.
Jan. 16, 2003: I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, Horrible three-way civil war?
July 14, 2003: I opposed the war in Iraq because I thought it would lead to the peace from hell, but I'd rather not see my prediction come true and I don't think we have much time left to avert it. That the occupation is not going well is apparent to everyone but Donald Rumsfeld. We don't need people with credentials as right-wing ideologues and corporate privatizers ‹ we need people who know how to fix water and power plants.
Oct. 7, 2003: Good thing we won the war, because the peace sure looks like a quagmire. ... ³I¹ve got an even-money bet out that says more Americans will be killed in the peace than in the war, and more Iraqis will be killed by Americans in the peace than in the war. Not the first time I've had a bet out that I hoped I'd lose.
So Molly Ivins who didn't mingle with the great and famous, didn't have sources high in the administration, and never claimed special expertise on national security or the Middle East got almost everything right.
Meanwhile, how did those who did have all those credentials do? With very few exceptions, they got everything wrong. They bought the obviously cooked case for war or found their own reasons to endorse the invasion.
They didn't see the folly of the venture, which was almost as obvious in prospect as it is with the benefit of hindsight. And they took years to realize that everything we were being told about progress in Iraq was a lie. Was Molly smarter than all the experts?
No, she was just braver. The administration's exploitation of 9/11 created an environment in which it took a lot of courage to see and say the obvious. Molly had that courage; not enough others can say the same. And it's not over.
Many of those who failed the big test in 2002 and 2003 are now making excuses for the surge. Meanwhile, the same techniques of allegation and innuendo that were used to promote war with Iraq are being used to ratchet up tensions with Iran.
Now, more than ever, we need people who will stand up against the follies and lies of the powerful. And Molly Ivins, who devoted her life to questioning authority, will be sorely missed.
by PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 2, 2007
Molly Ivins, the Texas columnist, died of breast cancer on Wednesday. I first met her more than three years ago, when our book tours crossed. She was, as she wrote, a card-carrying member of The Great Liberal Backlash of 2003, one of the half-dozen or so writers now schlepping around the country promoting books that do not speak kindly of Our Leader¹s record.
I can't claim to have known her well. But I spent enough time with her, and paid enough attention to her work, to know that obituaries that mostly stressed her satirical gifts missed the main point. Yes, she liked to poke fun at the powerful, and was very good at it. But her satire was only the means to an end: holding the powerful accountable.
She explained her philosophy in a stinging 1995 article in Mother Jones magazine about Rush Limbaugh. Satire ... has historically been the weapon of powerless people aimed at the powerful, she wrote. When you use satire against powerless people ... it is like kicking a cripple.
Molly never lost sight of two eternal truths: rulers lie, and the times when people are most afraid to challenge authority are also the times when it's most important to do just that.
And the fact that she remembered these truths explains something I haven't seen pointed out in any of the tributes: her extraordinary prescience on the central political issue of our time.
I've been going through Molly's columns from 2002 and 2003, the period when most of the wise men of the press cheered as Our Leader took us to war on false pretenses, then dismissed as Bush haters anyone who complained about the absence of W.M.D. or warned that the victory celebrations were premature.
Here are a few selections:
Nov. 19, 2002: The greatest risk for us in invading Iraq is probably not war itself, so much as: What happens after we win? ... There is a batty degree of triumphalism loose in this country right now.
Jan. 16, 2003: I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, Horrible three-way civil war?
July 14, 2003: I opposed the war in Iraq because I thought it would lead to the peace from hell, but I'd rather not see my prediction come true and I don't think we have much time left to avert it. That the occupation is not going well is apparent to everyone but Donald Rumsfeld. We don't need people with credentials as right-wing ideologues and corporate privatizers ‹ we need people who know how to fix water and power plants.
Oct. 7, 2003: Good thing we won the war, because the peace sure looks like a quagmire. ... ³I¹ve got an even-money bet out that says more Americans will be killed in the peace than in the war, and more Iraqis will be killed by Americans in the peace than in the war. Not the first time I've had a bet out that I hoped I'd lose.
So Molly Ivins who didn't mingle with the great and famous, didn't have sources high in the administration, and never claimed special expertise on national security or the Middle East got almost everything right.
Meanwhile, how did those who did have all those credentials do? With very few exceptions, they got everything wrong. They bought the obviously cooked case for war or found their own reasons to endorse the invasion.
They didn't see the folly of the venture, which was almost as obvious in prospect as it is with the benefit of hindsight. And they took years to realize that everything we were being told about progress in Iraq was a lie. Was Molly smarter than all the experts?
No, she was just braver. The administration's exploitation of 9/11 created an environment in which it took a lot of courage to see and say the obvious. Molly had that courage; not enough others can say the same. And it's not over.
Many of those who failed the big test in 2002 and 2003 are now making excuses for the surge. Meanwhile, the same techniques of allegation and innuendo that were used to promote war with Iraq are being used to ratchet up tensions with Iran.
Now, more than ever, we need people who will stand up against the follies and lies of the powerful. And Molly Ivins, who devoted her life to questioning authority, will be sorely missed.
February 1, 2007
So Long Molly...We'll Miss You...Lots
MOLLY IVINS, COLUMNIST, DIES AT 62
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: February 1, 2007
New York Times
Molly Ivins, the liberal newspaper columnist who delighted in skewering politicians and interpreting, and mocking, her Texas culture, died yesterday in Austin. She was 62.
Ms. Ivins waged a public battle against breast cancer after her diagnosis in 1999. Betsy Moon, her personal assistant, confirmed her death last night. Ms. Ivins died at her home surrounded by family and friends.
In her syndicated column, which appeared in about 350 newspapers, Ms. Ivins cultivated the voice of a folksy populist who derided those who she thought acted too big for their britches. She was rowdy and profane, but she could filet her opponents with droll precision.
After Patrick J. Buchanan, as a conservative candidate for president, declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention that the United States was engaged in a cultural war, she said his speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”
“There are two kinds of humor,” she told People magazine. One was the kind “that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity,” she said. “The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That’s what I do.”
Hers was a feisty voice that she developed in the early 1970s at The Texas Observer, the
muckraking paper that came out every two weeks and that would become her spiritual home for life.
Her subject was Texas. To her, the Great State, as she called it, was “reactionary, cantankerous and hilarious,” and its Legislature was “reporter heaven.” When the Legislature is set to convene, she warned her readers, “every village is about to lose its idiot.”
Her Texas upbringing made her something of an expert on the Bush family. She viewed the first President George Bush benignly. (“Real Texans do not use the word ‘summer’ as a verb,” she wrote.)
But she derided the current President Bush, whom she first knew in high school. She called him Shrub and Dubya. With the Texas journalist Lou Dubose, she wrote two best-selling books about Mr. Bush: “Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush” (2000) and “Bushwhacked” (2003).
In 2004 she campaigned against Mr. Bush’s re-election, and as the war in Iraq continued, she called for his impeachment. Last month, in her last column, she urged readers to “raise hell” against the war.
In a column in mid-January, Ivins urged readers to stand up against Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq.
"We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war," Ivins wrote in the Jan. 11 column. "We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'"
Molly Ivins, the liberal newspaper columnist who delighted in skewering politicians and interpreting, and mocking, her Texas culture, died yesterday in Austin. She was 62.
On Wednesday night, President Bush issued a statement that said he “respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase.”
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Published: February 1, 2007
New York Times
Molly Ivins, the liberal newspaper columnist who delighted in skewering politicians and interpreting, and mocking, her Texas culture, died yesterday in Austin. She was 62.Ms. Ivins waged a public battle against breast cancer after her diagnosis in 1999. Betsy Moon, her personal assistant, confirmed her death last night. Ms. Ivins died at her home surrounded by family and friends.
In her syndicated column, which appeared in about 350 newspapers, Ms. Ivins cultivated the voice of a folksy populist who derided those who she thought acted too big for their britches. She was rowdy and profane, but she could filet her opponents with droll precision.
After Patrick J. Buchanan, as a conservative candidate for president, declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention that the United States was engaged in a cultural war, she said his speech “probably sounded better in the original German.”
“There are two kinds of humor,” she told People magazine. One was the kind “that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity,” she said. “The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule. That’s what I do.”
Hers was a feisty voice that she developed in the early 1970s at The Texas Observer, the
muckraking paper that came out every two weeks and that would become her spiritual home for life.Her subject was Texas. To her, the Great State, as she called it, was “reactionary, cantankerous and hilarious,” and its Legislature was “reporter heaven.” When the Legislature is set to convene, she warned her readers, “every village is about to lose its idiot.”
Her Texas upbringing made her something of an expert on the Bush family. She viewed the first President George Bush benignly. (“Real Texans do not use the word ‘summer’ as a verb,” she wrote.)
But she derided the current President Bush, whom she first knew in high school. She called him Shrub and Dubya. With the Texas journalist Lou Dubose, she wrote two best-selling books about Mr. Bush: “Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush” (2000) and “Bushwhacked” (2003).
In 2004 she campaigned against Mr. Bush’s re-election, and as the war in Iraq continued, she called for his impeachment. Last month, in her last column, she urged readers to “raise hell” against the war.
In a column in mid-January, Ivins urged readers to stand up against Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq."We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war," Ivins wrote in the Jan. 11 column. "We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'"
Molly Ivins, the liberal newspaper columnist who delighted in skewering politicians and interpreting, and mocking, her Texas culture, died yesterday in Austin. She was 62.
On Wednesday night, President Bush issued a statement that said he “respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase.”
"I'm sorry to say that cancer can kill you but it doesn't make you a better person." --Molly Ivins
Mr. Bush added: “Her quick wit and commitment to her beliefs will be missed.”
Mary Tyler Ivins was born on Aug. 30, 1944, in California and grew up in the affluent Houston neighborhood of River Oaks. Her father, James, a conservative Republican, was general counsel and later president of the Tenneco Corporation, an oil and gas company.
As a student at private school, Ms. Ivins was tall and big-boned and often felt out of place. “I
spent my girlhood as a Clydesdale among thoroughbreds,” she said.
She developed her liberal views partly from reading The Texas Observer at a friend’s house. Those views led to fierce arguments with her father about civil rights and the Vietnam War.
“I’ve always had trouble with male authority figures because my father was such a martinet,” she told Texas Monthly.
After her father developed advanced cancer and shot himself to death in 1998, she wrote, “I believe that all the strength I have comes from learning how to stand up to him.”
Like her mother, Margot, and a grandmother, Ms. Ivins went to Smith College in Northampton, Mass. She also studied at the Institute of Political Science in Paris and earned a master’s degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Her first newspaper jobs were at The Houston Chronicle and The Minneapolis Tribune, now The Star Tribune. In 1970, she jumped at the chance to become co-editor of The Texas Observer.
Covering the Legislature, she found characters whose fatuousness helped focus her calling and define her persona, which her friends saw as populist and her detractors saw as manufactured cornpone. Even her friends marveled at how fast she could drop her Texas voice for what they called her Smith voice. Sometimes she combined them, as in, “The sine qua non, as we say in Amarillo.”
Ronnie Dugger, the former publisher of The Texas Observer, said the political circus in Texas inspired Ms. Ivins. “It was like somebody snapped the football to her and said, ‘All the rules are off, this is the football field named Texas, and it’s wide open,’ ” Mr. Dugger said.
In 1976, her writing, which she said was often fueled by “truly impressive amounts of beer,” landed her a job at The New York Times. She cut an unusual figure in The Times newsroom, wearing blue jeans, going barefoot and bringing in her dog, whose name was an expletive.
While she drew important writing assignments, like covering the Son of Sam killings and Elvis Presley’s death, she sensed she did not fit in and complained that Times editors drained the life from her prose. “Naturally, I was miserable, at five times my previous salary,” she later wrote. “The New York Times is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.”
After a stint in Albany, she was transferred to Denver to cover the Rocky Mountain States, where she continued to challenge her editors’ tolerance for prankish writing.
Covering an annual chicken slaughter in New Mexico in 1980, she used a sexually suggestive phrase, which her editors deleted from the final article. But her effort to use it angered the executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal, who ordered her back to New York and assigned her to City Hall, where she covered routine matters with little flair.
She quit The Times in 1982 after The Dallas Times Herald offered to make her a columnist. She took the job even though she loathed Dallas, once describing it as the kind of town “that would have rooted for Goliath to beat David.”
But the newspaper, she said, promised to let her write whatever she wanted. When she declared of a congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day,” many readers were appalled, and several advertisers boycotted the paper. In her defense, her editors rented billboards that read: “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” The slogan became the title of the first of her six books.
After The Times Herald folded in 1991, she wrote for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, until 1992, when her column was syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
Ms. Ivins, who never married, is survived by a brother, Andy, of London, Tex., and a sister, Sara Ivins Maley, of Albuquerque. One of her closest friends was Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, who died last year. The two shared an irreverence for power and a love of the Texas wilds.
“Molly is a great raconteur, with a long memory,” Ms. Richards said, “and she’s the best person in the world to take on a camping trip because she’s full of good-ol’-boy stories.”
Ms. Ivins worked at a breakneck pace, adding television appearances, book tours, lectures and fund-raising to a crammed writing schedule. She also wrote for Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation.
An article about her in 1996 in The Star-Telegram suggested that her work overload might have caused an increase in factual errors in her columns. (She eventually hired a fact-checker.) And in 1995, the writer Florence King accused Ms. Ivins of lifting passages Ms. King had written and using them in 1988 for an article in Mother Jones. Ms. Ivins had credited Ms. King six times in the article but not in two lengthy sentences, and she apologized to Ms. King.
Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.”
But she kept writing her columns and kept writing and raising money for The Texas Observer.
Indeed, rarely has a reporter so embodied the ethos of her publication. On the paper’s 50th anniversary in 2004, she wrote:
“This is where you can tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go after the bad guys with all the energy you have.”
RELATED LINKS: Selected Times Articles by Molly Ivins (February 1, 2007); Times Topic: Molly Ivins; Review of "Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush"; Columns From Molly Ivins (creators.com)
Mr. Bush added: “Her quick wit and commitment to her beliefs will be missed.”
Mary Tyler Ivins was born on Aug. 30, 1944, in California and grew up in the affluent Houston neighborhood of River Oaks. Her father, James, a conservative Republican, was general counsel and later president of the Tenneco Corporation, an oil and gas company.
As a student at private school, Ms. Ivins was tall and big-boned and often felt out of place. “I
spent my girlhood as a Clydesdale among thoroughbreds,” she said.She developed her liberal views partly from reading The Texas Observer at a friend’s house. Those views led to fierce arguments with her father about civil rights and the Vietnam War.
“I’ve always had trouble with male authority figures because my father was such a martinet,” she told Texas Monthly.
After her father developed advanced cancer and shot himself to death in 1998, she wrote, “I believe that all the strength I have comes from learning how to stand up to him.”
Like her mother, Margot, and a grandmother, Ms. Ivins went to Smith College in Northampton, Mass. She also studied at the Institute of Political Science in Paris and earned a master’s degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Her first newspaper jobs were at The Houston Chronicle and The Minneapolis Tribune, now The Star Tribune. In 1970, she jumped at the chance to become co-editor of The Texas Observer.
Covering the Legislature, she found characters whose fatuousness helped focus her calling and define her persona, which her friends saw as populist and her detractors saw as manufactured cornpone. Even her friends marveled at how fast she could drop her Texas voice for what they called her Smith voice. Sometimes she combined them, as in, “The sine qua non, as we say in Amarillo.”
Ronnie Dugger, the former publisher of The Texas Observer, said the political circus in Texas inspired Ms. Ivins. “It was like somebody snapped the football to her and said, ‘All the rules are off, this is the football field named Texas, and it’s wide open,’ ” Mr. Dugger said.
In 1976, her writing, which she said was often fueled by “truly impressive amounts of beer,” landed her a job at The New York Times. She cut an unusual figure in The Times newsroom, wearing blue jeans, going barefoot and bringing in her dog, whose name was an expletive.
While she drew important writing assignments, like covering the Son of Sam killings and Elvis Presley’s death, she sensed she did not fit in and complained that Times editors drained the life from her prose. “Naturally, I was miserable, at five times my previous salary,” she later wrote. “The New York Times is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.”
After a stint in Albany, she was transferred to Denver to cover the Rocky Mountain States, where she continued to challenge her editors’ tolerance for prankish writing.
Covering an annual chicken slaughter in New Mexico in 1980, she used a sexually suggestive phrase, which her editors deleted from the final article. But her effort to use it angered the executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal, who ordered her back to New York and assigned her to City Hall, where she covered routine matters with little flair.
She quit The Times in 1982 after The Dallas Times Herald offered to make her a columnist. She took the job even though she loathed Dallas, once describing it as the kind of town “that would have rooted for Goliath to beat David.”
But the newspaper, she said, promised to let her write whatever she wanted. When she declared of a congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day,” many readers were appalled, and several advertisers boycotted the paper. In her defense, her editors rented billboards that read: “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” The slogan became the title of the first of her six books.
After The Times Herald folded in 1991, she wrote for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, until 1992, when her column was syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
Ms. Ivins, who never married, is survived by a brother, Andy, of London, Tex., and a sister, Sara Ivins Maley, of Albuquerque. One of her closest friends was Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, who died last year. The two shared an irreverence for power and a love of the Texas wilds.
“Molly is a great raconteur, with a long memory,” Ms. Richards said, “and she’s the best person in the world to take on a camping trip because she’s full of good-ol’-boy stories.”
Ms. Ivins worked at a breakneck pace, adding television appearances, book tours, lectures and fund-raising to a crammed writing schedule. She also wrote for Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation.
An article about her in 1996 in The Star-Telegram suggested that her work overload might have caused an increase in factual errors in her columns. (She eventually hired a fact-checker.) And in 1995, the writer Florence King accused Ms. Ivins of lifting passages Ms. King had written and using them in 1988 for an article in Mother Jones. Ms. Ivins had credited Ms. King six times in the article but not in two lengthy sentences, and she apologized to Ms. King.
Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.”
But she kept writing her columns and kept writing and raising money for The Texas Observer.
Indeed, rarely has a reporter so embodied the ethos of her publication. On the paper’s 50th anniversary in 2004, she wrote:
“This is where you can tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go after the bad guys with all the energy you have.”
RELATED LINKS: Selected Times Articles by Molly Ivins (February 1, 2007); Times Topic: Molly Ivins; Review of "Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush"; Columns From Molly Ivins (creators.com)
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