Some journalists have been pointing this out. Now, Ben Smith at Politico asks Cheney’s camp about the distinction, and this is the answer he got:

“As the vice president has said repeatedly, the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided critical intelligence that saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks. The documents released yesterday demonstrate that conclusively. Anyone who doubts that hasn’t read the documents,” said the Cheney source.

Ben’s source is simply lying to him and daring the media not to point out the distinction. The documents do not say that the enhanced interrogation techniques provided critical intelligence. They say that detainees, some of whom were subjected to the techniques, at unspecified points, provided critical intelligence, and a great deal of that was of a historical nature. The CIA inspector general’s report specifically talks about the indeterminacy of the techniques’ effectiveness — at great and judicious length.

Don’t take my word for it. These are the documents Cheney asked the CIA to declassify to vindicate his position on torture. This is the CIA inspector general’s report. This is Cheney’s May speech at the American Enterprise Institute. (One conspicuous line from that speech: “People who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about values.”) Read them together. It’s not a he-said-she-said matter.

US Attorney General Michael Mukasey (WDCPix)

It’s been exactly one year since then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey proposed in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute that Congress pass legislation declaring a new, expanded war with al-Qaeda and the Taliban — thereby granting the president the authority to detain indefinitely members of those groups anywhere in the world where they’re found.

That proposal from a lame-duck Attorney General never got very far with the Democratic-controlled Congress. But a year later, the country is still debating that exact same detention authority. And news reports suggest that President Obama may seek precisely the same sort of authority that Mukasey was talking about.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Although the Detainee Policy Task Force yesterday announced it was taking a six-month extension on its deadline to formulate the policy, reports from National Public Radio, The Washington Post and Politico have all quoted anonymous Obama administration officials saying the president intends to create or continue some sort of indefinite detention system for suspected terrorists associated with al-Qaeda or the Taliban, whether through new legislation or mere “consultation” with Congress.

“There is no intent in the administration to rely on anything other than congressional authority,” one senior administration official reportedly told The Washington Post.

Whether that authority would take the form of an entirely new system of administrative detention outside the authority of the laws of war, as some have proposed, or whether it would rely either on the existing Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or seek a new authorization, is unclear.  The anonymous officials aren’t explaining (or don’t yet know) how the administration intends to go about solidifying its legal authority to indefinitely detain suspects without charge or trial arrested around the world.

The question arises because the Supreme Court, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, affirmed that the president does have authority to detain combatants arrested on the battlefield in a conventional war, which the United States was engaged in with Afghanistan at the time. Since then, lower federal courts have ruled that the United States can detain combatants who are members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. But it’s not clear if that authority would reach countries where there is no active combat — or if the authority described in the Hamdi decision  at some point runs out.

In attempting to answer that question a year ago today, Michael Mukasey, in a speech delivered to the American Enterprise Institute, said that Congress should:

acknowledge again and explicitly that this Nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans—soldiers and civilians alike. In order for us to prevail in that conflict, Congress should reaffirm that for the duration of the conflict the United States may detain as enemy combatants those who have engaged in hostilities or purposefully supported al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations.

Today, Obama — or at least members of his administration — appear to want something very similar.

“It’s hard to see how they would end up writing anything much different from what Mukasey proposed a year ago,” said Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. “And that was dead on arrival.” Although the issue was raised at congressional hearings, proposed legislation never received enough support even to get to the floor for a vote.

Last summer, Anders described the idea on the ACLU’s blog as “a multi-part plan to violate the Constitution” that would “give a president worldwide power to declare anyone a terrorist and hold the person forever – without ever charging anyone with a crime.”

Although it’s possible that Obama would have more sway with Congress than Bush did, the leaders of the judiciary committees in both the House and Senate have publicly opposed a preventive detention plan that would detain suspected terrorists that the president deems “dangerous” without charge or trial; the chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have likewise expressed reluctance.

So could Obama really get new authorization for preventive detention? Or will he try to rely on the old one, and issue an executive order or presidential memorandum clarifying (or extending) its scope? One reason he might want to seek new authorization is that, as David Kris, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division,  recently testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the authority the Supreme Court acknowledged in Hamdi could eventually “run out.” After all, the laws of war only authorize detention for the duration of active hostilities.

Anders said that in his conversations with lawmakers on the Hill, he hasn’t heard of any proposed legislation being circulated. “No one I’ve come across so far has seen or heard anything from the administration about an indefinite detention proposal,” he said.

In an e-mail, Ken Gude, associate director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program at the Center for American Progress, cautioned that new legislation could lead to far broader authority for indefinite detention than even Obama envisions.

“For me, the answer to this question decides the whole ball game — if they go to Congress, what will inevitably emerge is a broad preventive detention system regardless of what the Obama administration wants. If they rely on AUMF authority, then it can be much more narrow.”

From the AEI press release:

The Obama administration has made clear that defense spending is not a top budgetary priority either today or in the future.  And, indeed, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has already begun a process of cutting defense programs that, if left unchallenged, will immediately impact the armed forces’ ability to protect the country and deter potential adversaries.

What would be the strategic implications of an overall decrease in U.S. defense spending?

It’s a good question, especially if by “good” you mean “stupid” or “irrelevant” or “ignorant” or “dishonest.”

The Obama defense budget raises defense spending from the final Bush defense budget. Gates’ shift in spending is designed not for a non-existent “peace dividend” — where does Cornyn even come up with that? — but to support the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to put defense spending on a sustainable and actual-threat-centric footing. By all means, argue Gates’ priorities, but this is just box-turtle-level reasoning.

The speech rather quickly dovetailed into an attack on earmarks. “I’m aware that earmarks consume a very small proportion of the budget,” McCain said. The reason to focus on them is that they’re “deeply, deeply offensive” to Americans who are tightening their belts.

McCain also argued that the GOP wasn’t a “party of no,” (they had proposed smaller, tax-cut focused stimuli) and he ruled out any attempt to to use the budget reconciliation process to pass health care, education, or environmental reform. Doing that would debase “the normal 60 vote requirement that makes the Senate the unique environment that it is.”

iStockphoto

As the Obama administration moves forward with its green agenda, climate change concerns have been elevated to a top priority. Yet in the midst of the deepening economic crisis, public opinion appears to be moving in the opposite direction.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

A Gallup poll released last Wednesday found a six percent drop from last year in the number of people who are worried a “great deal” or a “fair amount” about global warming, after that number had been increasing for the previous five years. It also showed that after a similar five-year climb, the percentage of respondents who believe that the effects of global warming have already begun had decreased by eight points over the past year. A record-high 16 percent of Americans now believe that global warming will never occur; in more than ten years of polling, no more than 11 percent of respondents had ever expressed this opinion.

The day after the poll was released, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and a leading climate change skeptic, took to the Senate floor and celebrated the results as a triumph of information. “You should never underestimate the intelligence of the American people,” he proclaimed. “Sadly, that is exactly what the promoters of man-made climate fears have been consistently doing, and the American people have consistently rejected climate alarm.”

Inhofe attributed the shift in public opinion to new studies from prominent scientists that he said contradicted the prevailing climate change arguments embraced by former Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “A steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments have further refuted the claims of man-made global warming fear activists,” he said.

Gallup (click to enlarge)

On the other side of the climate debate, the Center for American Progress’ Joseph Romm, an acting assistant secretary of energy under Bill Clinton and an influential environmental activist, also chalked the changing attitudes up to a change in propaganda, albeit with a different slant.

“Objectively, in the last two years, the science makes painfully clear that climate risk has grown sharply,” he wrote on his blog, Climate Progress. “That means if the public has come to the reverse view, it must be due to the messaging and the media and the misinformers.” While “the vast majority of scientists are consistently bad at messaging,” he explained, global warming skeptics have “never stopped their single-minded disinformation campaign.”

Yet public opinion experts have a different explanation for the poll results.

Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew Research Center, argues that the economic downturn has trumped all other concerns. “In a time of economic crisis, people are less willing to focus on an issue like global warming because they see other, more pressing issues,” he said.

A similar phenomenon took place after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Dimock explained. “In January 2002, a few months after 9/11, the public’s sense of priority on a whole host of important issues just fell through the floor,” he said. “They expected the government, almost to the exclusion of other important things, to focus on this issue.”

Karlyn Bowman, who studies public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute, published a comprehensive report in April 2008 that tracked polls on the environment and global warming over the past several decades. Her data showed that in the three years following the 9/11 attacks, fewer people said they were worried about global warming than in any other year in the past decade.

Similarly, she argues, the economic crisis has now pushed environmental considerations aside. “The economy is just swamping all other issues right now,” she said. “Nothing else comes close.”

According to Paul Mohai, a professor of environmental policy and public opinion at the University of Michigan, this trend fits into historical patterns. “It’s not unusual at all that when there are economic problems in the country, concerns about the environment drop off,” he said.

Pew Research Center (click to enlarge)

The current economic crisis, of course, is the most severe in decades, and the Gallup poll is not the first to show its effects on public attitudes toward climate change. Every January, Pew conducts a poll to assess people’s “top priorities” for the government to address. This year, global warming came out on the very bottom of the list.

“Out of the 19 things that we ask people to rank as priorities, it’s number 19,” said Dimock. Only 30 percent of respondents considered global warming a “top priority,” down from 38 percent in 2007 and 35 percent in 2008. Other non-economic concerns likewise tumbled down people’s list of priorities, including crime, immigration and “protecting the environment” generally.

While the economy is likely the leading cause of reduced concern about global warming, these experts also posit a number of other possible explanations. Bowman and Mohai argue that Americans tend to feel less worried about a problem when they believe that the government is addressing it. In this case, confidence in President Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership to tackle global warming has led people to feel less personally worried about the issue. “During Republican administrations, people’s concerns about the environment go up, and during Democratic administrations they go down,” said Mohai.

Bowman’s 2008 study backs up this claim. In every poll she recorded since 1971, people have had greater confidence in the Democratic Party to protect the environment. In the latest poll included in her study, a February 2008 Pew poll, 65 percent of respondents expressed greater confidence in Democrats on this issue, compared to just 21 percent for Republicans.

Dimock, on the other hand, points to Al Gore’s Oscar-winning 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” as a possible complement to the economic causes of the change in public opinion. He hypothesizes that as a highly polarizing figure, Gore may have solidified Democratic support for his environmental agenda while turning off some Republicans and independents. “You can imagine how, with people feeling like Al Gore was lecturing them on global warming, so to speak, they might have some sort of backlash, because it was no longer coming from a neutral source. It was coming from a political source.”

Nonetheless, Dimock believes that the struggling economy is far and away the primary cause of the shift in public opinion. “The 800-pound gorilla is this economic crisis,” he said.

Inhofe’s claim that the change stems from the propagation of new scientific studies that cast doubt on man-made global warming theories garnered little support from these experts. “If that is indeed happening, I haven’t seen it on the news, and I follow it pretty closely,” said Mohai.

So what might cause Americans to renew their global warming concerns? In the lingo of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, it’s the economy, stupid.

“If and when people feel more comfortable about the economy turning around, their focus can turn to other issues,” said Dimock.

Just as President Obama has tied his economic agenda to an environmental one, it appears that Americans’ global warming concerns will rise and fall with their 401(k)s.

Clockwise from bottom-left: Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik and The American magazine

The buzz at this year’s American Enterprise Institute gala was, ironically enough, about how much easier it was to get inside. For eight years, entering the annual black tie dinner — put on by the influential conservative think tank that supplied the George W. Bush administration with dozens of high-level officials — meant sharing a vast hotel ballroom with the president or vice president, which meant extra scrutiny of your car and a security checkpoint to screen for weapons. This week, Dick Cheney was present, but armies of secret service agents were not.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

<.pullquote>”It’s much more fun without the metal detectors,” joked one libertarian think-tanker who’d been attending the galas for at least a decade.

There was also buzz about the size and style of the dinner, especially after Arthur C. Brooks, the new president of AEI, commented in his opening remarks about how the think tank was under some stress. Despite the international economic crisis, and despite the hand-wringing and rumor-mongering afoot at the city’s other think tanks, the event was at the same location, in the same scale, with the same open bar, that guests have grown accustomed to, with the same A-list guests: Ken Blackwell, Byron York, Doug Holtz-Eakin, Rep. John Shadegg, Tucker Carlson, John Fund, and Grover Norquist, to name a few.

These are trying times for most Washington, D.C. think tanks. Since the financial crisis began, the corporate and philanthropic foundations and donors who gird most think tanks have become stingier about their grants. In the case of AEI, the economic downturn has meant cutting back one prestige product and trimming some minor costs and low-level staff. AEI Outlooks are sent around digitally, instead of printed out en masse. Several long-time scholars have left for more complicated reasons. “I wouldn’t hear anything,” said one former staffer, “and then I’d notice that a name was off a door, or a scholar’s profile had been taken down from the web site.”

For liberals, a dip in AEI’s fortunes would be welcome news. This was the think tank that Slate’s Tim Noah called “the wellspring of President Bush’s worst ideas,” and its graduates include former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle, former Treasury Secretary John Snow, and Dick Cheney himself. There has been a mini-exile of neoconservatives from AEI, but there is little evidence that a sudden drying up of executive branch access is hurting the think tank. There are more mundane problems to worry about.

AEI’s bleaker financial picture is not a secret. It was clear at the end of Chris DeMuth’s 22-year tenure as president of AEI. At the November meeting of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a libertarian-leaning organization that produces research on and gives advice about charitable giving, DeMuth spoke on a panel about the future of conservative think tanks and acknowledged the “dramatic economic contraction” that was making their work difficult.

“We will work very hard on the revenue side,” said DeMuth, “soliciting support from people such as are attending this conference. But there is no way we are going to be able to get through the period ahead without looking at the cost side as well. We will have to become more lean, more focused.”

Unlike many think tanks that largely depend on endowments, AEI’s funding sources are inherently less stable. “AEI is heavily funded by corporate philanthropy,” explained Christopher Levenick, the editor of the Philanthropy Roundtable’s magazine and the former W.H. Brady Doctoral Fellow at AEI. “Naturally, they’ve taken a hit. Folks who have sponsored them for years have fallen by the wayside. They’ve always been a different kind of non-profit and they’re hurting because of it.”

The details of AEI’s financial picture are private, and spokespeople for the think tank do not discuss fundraising or financial specifics. Much of its donor information is privileged, although some foundations reveal the size and purpose of the grants they have given AEI. But it is clear that the foundation grants and large corporate donations that go to AEI have changed, in ways that have affected the bottom line, overall spending, and individual scholars. Companies that have given generously to AEI in the past, such as General Motors, are facing harder times.

“We’ve contacted AEI,” said Greg Martin, a spokesman for the General Motors Foundation, “and we’ve told them that this is a very tough time for General Motors and we’re either cutting or closely reviewing the contributions we’re giving to think tanks.”

Information about the think tank’s investments is similarly obscure. Tax filings from 2006, the most recent publicly available, reveal that some of AEI’s investments were in the hands of hedge funds that have been struggling. For example, AEI’s investments with Farallon Funds were worth $5.7 million in 2006, but Farallon Capital Management LLC took a 44 percent hit overall in 2008.

Norm Ornstein, the congressional scholar whose centrist work clashes with the neoconservative image of the think tank, was told last year by the Carnegie Foundation to look elsewhere for money to fund his Election Reform Project. He was pointed to the Open Society Institute, funded by George Soros, although he said Thursday he never made that call.

“In the last few years, I haven’t had to go out and beat the bushes because people were interested in what we’re doing,” Ornstein said. “That’s changed over the last few months. I’ve had to be a lot more active.”

Veronique Rodman, a spokeswoman for AEI, said the think tank is on “sound footing,” and pointed to the hiring of Toby Stock, a Harvard admissions dean who is now the think tank’s director of marketing and development. But she allowed that the economy was taking an obvious toll. “We may not get new desks and new furniture this year, but we’re OK.”

The most obvious cutback has been the fate of The American, the magazine launched in 2006 by James Glassman — the conservative editor who later served as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy — to replace The American Enterprise. In November, word came down that the print version of the magazine would stop, and the publication would continue online under current Editor-in-Chief Nick Schulz. The reason given, then and now, was that online magazines like Politico.com were proving that the medium could be profitable. The American was, according to someone familiar with this decision, “hemorrhaging” cash.*

Other AEI cutbacks that have drawn attention are explained as matters of organizational politics as much as by economics. Last year Joshua Muravchik, Michael Ledeen, and Reuel Marc Gerecht, all prominent neoconservatives, left the think tank in what journalist and historian Jacob Heilbrunn thought might be a “purge.” Ledeen said this week that his move from AEI to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies “had nothing to do with any cash issue.” But Ledeen’s Freedom Chair Endowment followed him from AEI to FDD, and some at AEI said that the organization had suffered a hit with the loss of Ledeen’s friends and funders. Muravchik said he was fired because of differences with AEI Vice President Danielle Pletka, but that he was offered a smaller severance package than he’d been offered when the possibility had been discussed before.

Those familiar with the funding of other conservative think tanks are not surprised that AEI is taking some hits. Carsten Walter, the director of membership for the Heritage Foundation, said the aggressive marketing and direct mail campaign of that think tank had made up for expected damage from skittish large donors and foundations. Since 2006, Heritage’s network of donors has expanded from 275,000 to roughly 415,000. Small-money donors who are angry at the new Democratic administration can show their might by supporting a conservative think tank. This sort of revenue stream isn’t available to AEI.

Back at AEI, Rodman is confident, but well aware that a longer economic slump will lead to greater problems. AEI has been through financial crunches before–when Chris DeMuth took charge in 1986, the organization was facing a bigger budget crunch than now. In the years since, the think tank has been parsimonious. The economic crisis is providing some hard lessons in the virtues of fiscal conservatism.

* This article originally contained this sentence: “Duncan Currie, who was managing editor of the magazine and is now a reporter and editor of National Review, was informed that AEI was 20 percent over budget and that cutting The American sliced the shortfall in half.” Mr. Currie tells us that this is inaccurate.

“It was not a purge of neoconservatives,” he said. “It was more mundane and grotesque than that. It was part of an ongoing power play by [AEI Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies] Danielle Plekta. She’s someone who makes Hillary [Rodham Clinton] look pleasant and soft by comparison. She’s pathologically self-serving. She, personally, drove Jeanne Kirkpatrick from AEI by being relentlessly abusive to her. And she has no conceivable qualifications for being in her position in the first place.”

Muravchik is starting to promote his new book “The Next Founders,” about democracy in the Middle East, which he said was completed despite Pletka’s attacks on his travel budget.