The cruise will host guest speakers like former United States representative to the United Nations John Bolton, Star Tribune columnist James Lileks and former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed.

The cruise website heralds Pawlenty’s accomplishments as Minnesota governor: “[Pawlenty] supported requiring visa expiration dates on driver’s licenses, a 24-hour waiting period on abortions, implementing the state’s conceal-carry gun law and changing the state’s education requirements.”

The ship will depart from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and swing past Grand Turk, San Juan and St. Thomas during the Nov. 12-19 cruise. Cabins range from $2,399 to $6,999. Tourists will enjoy “plenty of chances to meet, schmooze and enjoy personal interaction with our special guest speakers,” according to the cruise website.

The National Review cruise gained some negative attention in 2007 when the Independent newspaper of the U.K., sent reporter Johann Hari to cover the event. Hari described a “ship of fools,” where jokes about violence against Muslims, immigrants and liberals were common and old ladies went from “sweet to suicide-bomb in six seconds.” (Hari was later embroiled in a ethics scandal about correct attribution of quotes in high-profile interviews).

Still, this trip promises to be more placid than the recently contentious Republican nomination struggle Pawlenty dropped out of last month: “The cruise will include cocktail receptions, evening cigar and cognac smokers, dinners together, group excursions, and seminar sessions.”

Feith, along with Paul Wolfowitz, headed the Office of Special Plans under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, tasked with digging up raw intelligence on Saddam Hussein before the war began — specifically ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

Today, Politico’s Ben Smith reports that Perry reached out to Rumsfeld himself for tips on foreign policy contacts:

Perry’s aides have been tight-lipped about the gathering, which National Review reported included former Rumsfeld aides Doug Feith, Daniel Fata, and William Luti, as well as the magazine’s Andrew McCarthy and others. But I’m told Rumsfeld helped steer Perry’s staff to the low-key advisory group, and his detainee adviser Cully Stimson was also invited, but couldn’t attend.

Stimson ran the Department of Defense’s detainee affairs office, overseeing prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan. Fata, at the Department of Defense under Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, focused on Europe and NATO.

Feith, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, slammed many of his former colleagues on the Iraq war in his 2008 memoir.

Despite few other indicators as to how Perry would handle foreign policy, Adam Serwer at the American Prospect suggests, based on that lineup of visitors, “Perry would be the candidate most likely to inherit the former president’s foreign policy views.”

Till now, Perry’s foreign policy experience has centered on the Texas-Mexico border, where he’s criticized the Obama administration for its “grossly inadequate” defense, and dispatched Texas Department of Public Safety officers and helicopters for additional defense.

As the Texas Tribune reported in late June, Perry also staked out his turf in the Israel-Palestine debate, with a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, criticizing attempts to protest Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza.

The National Review editorial board called the deal “fake” and urged Congress to reject it:

We’d vote “no,” even if we understand the impulse to move on to more important matters and to avoid a leap into the dark that might include a politically damaging shutdown. At the very least, freshmen and other conservatives should be frank about the deal’s shortcomings, refusing to exaggerate its merits as their leadership often has. The episode is strike one against the speakership of John Boehner.

RedState’s Erick Erickson is also warning House Republicans against supporting the deal:

If House Republicans vote for the bipartisan compromise, they should be driven into the street by the tea party movement and horsewhipped — metaphorically speaking. In reality, they should be primaried.

What started out as $38.5 billion in cuts, turned into around $14 billion in cuts and a bunch of accounting gimmicks. Each new day brings new disgusting revelations. According to the Congressional Budget Office, “total federal outlays will still rise by approximately $177 billion.” Yes, that says “rise” not “decrease.

A House vote is expected late Thursday.

For those concerned that Paul would seek to undercut the Federal Reserve by any means with his new position, the interview offers both hope and reason for concern. It doesn’t appear that a Paul chairmanship will be dominated by measures to completely strip the Fed of its power, but Paul will try to use his new position of power to highlight his concerns with the institution.

nro: Are you going to try to use your influence there to, as per your book title, “End the Fed”?

PAUL: Not directly. Indirectly, though, yes. The Fed will end because the system we have is not viable. All printing-money systems always end. So my goal in the book as well as in the committee is to expose the Fed for what they do, how important it is economically, why they don’t achieve what they pretend to achieve, and why they need to have more transparency. I would just like to legalize competition, legalize the Constitution, and allow people to use gold and silver as legal tender. And then if people don’t like the paper money, they can start using gold and silver in savings accounts or spending or whatever. Today if you do that, you go to prison.

Paul also briefly discussed his take on a number of other issues such as illegal immigration (perhaps not quite as libertarian as you might expect), making another presidential run in 2012 (he’s still deciding), and the new majority in the House. Besides his son Rand Paul — who has moved in with his father in Washington D.C., after he was elected to the U.S. Senate from Kentucky — Paul sees potential allies in the new class of Republicans.

A lot are not politicians, a lot have run their first races, like Rand did — that was his first race, he didn’t work his way up the system. I think it will be a lot of people like that who will be very independent-minded, and that’s what we need.

Read the full interview at NR’s website.

Panelists mentioned — and quickly dismissed — several Republican pushes for improving immigration policy. While Latino immigrants typically identify as Democrats, the GOP could have a better chance winning over other sets of highly-skilled immigrants, said James Gimpel, a government professor from the University of Maryland.

But the political will to pass visa reform to allow more highly-skilled workers is lacking, other panelists argued. “The reason that we’re never going to get to some kind of high skilled immigrant policy, the civil rights prism that we view immigration policy would make that impossible,” said moderator Mark Krikorian, director of the pro-enforcement Center for Immigration Studies.

The debate over birthright citizenship, most recently spearheaded by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), likely damaged the GOP’s reputation on immigration, said David Frum, editor of FrumForum and a former Bush speechwriter. “Republicans need to send the message that this is not about race,” he said, adding that many white voters could find the rhetoric off-putting as well. “I don’t think you need oversensitive ears to hear a lot of racial coding in the Republican message of the past two years.”

Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor at National Review magazine, said the “pro-legal immigration, anti-illegal immigration” strategy favored by Republicans such as Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio won’t win Republicans any favors among Latino voters. “It amounts to enthusiastically supporting arrival of new Democratic voters while still harassing their friends and neighbors,” he said.

So what should the party do, other than keeping quiet on immigration? Ponnuru said the party could benefit — albeit marginally — from more outreach to black and Latino media outlets, and additional government spending on programs such as English as a second language courses.

It’s a message some members of the Republican Party seem to have received, with candidates such as Meg Whitman in California attempting to woo Latino voters through heavy outreach and opposition to Arizona’s harsh SB 1070 immigration law. The Republican National Committee and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, too, have been careful to veer the debate over birthright citizenship to the less-contentious waters of “birth tourism.”

Still, some panelists argued efforts to win over Latino voters to the GOP could be a losing battle in a nation with growing economic inequality. “In the ideology of conservatism, opportunity is supposed to be the equalizer,” Frum said. “If that opportunity is dwindling, is conservatism even relevant?”

Andrew McCarthy (YouTube: Hoover Institution)

As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) works on a deal with the White House to stop the civilian trial for 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, he has one overriding fear in mind: The disclosure of classified information that might occur in an open trial. Graham’s communications director, Kevin Bishop, told The Washington Independent last month that “military justice and the military framework — a military commission — would allow us to better protect classified information.” In a recent address, Graham intoned that “valuable intelligence was compromised” in a 15-year-old case, the New York trial of the “Blind Sheikh,” in which a list of unindicted co-conspirators leaked out from the court, and suggested the leak was a dangerous prologue for future terrorism trials.

[Security1]That disclosure has been a cause celebre on the right, frequently invoked to argue that the courts are incapable of handling terrorism cases. But perhaps the leading exponent of that overall review, the former prosecutor on the Blind Sheikh case, thinks the disclosure of the list is overblown. What’s more, he concedes that he didn’t make full use of the tools available to him as a prosecutor to prevent such disclosures, even as he continues to contend that civilian courts are inherently too perilous a venue for handling terrorism-related information.

“We did not ask for CIPA protection on any of the discovery, including the co-conspirator list,” recalled Andrew McCarthy, a former New York federal prosecutor who now writes for National Review, referring to the Classified Information Procedures Act, the statute governing how courts handle classified information. “I suppose we could’ve done that.” Still, McCarthy, whom a February New York Times profile identified as one of the most influential conservative voices in the current debate over the propriety of trying terrorists in civilian courts, added, “I think too much is made of the example of the co-conspirator list.”

The case that gave rise to the disclosure was a sprawling, years-long prosecution into a conspiracy emerging from the 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. Led by the Egyptian-born Omar Abdul Rahman, known as the “Blind Sheikh,” a group of terrorists plotted to blow up a variety of high-value targets in the New York area, including the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and the George Washington Bridge. McCarthy and his team — a legal all-star cast including Patrick Fitzgerald, later made famous as the special prosecutor on the Valerie Plame identity-leak case; and judge Michael Mukasey, the future attorney general — successfully convicted Rahman in 1995, thereby obtaining the first big American conviction against members of an Islamist terrorist conspiracy.

During the course of the trial, however, a list of unindicted co-conspirators distributed to defense counsel made its way out of the trial, reportedly making its way to Osama bin Laden. McCarthy has occasionally used the disclosure to contend that the courts are ill-suited to handling terrorism cases. “As underscored by al-Qaeda’s receipt of the co-conspirator list from our trial, the congenial rules of access to attorneys, paralegals, investigators and visitors make it a very simple matter for accused terrorists to transmit what they learn in discovery to their confederates — and we know they do so,” McCarthy writes in his 2008 memoir of his experience prosecuting the Blind Sheikh, “Willful Blindness.”

Graham magnified that contention in a February radio address sponsored by the Republican Party, even going so far as to imply that the disclosure paved the way for the 9/11 attacks: “Our intelligence services later learned this list made its way back to bin Laden tipping him off about our surveillance. A conviction was obtained in that trial, but valuable intelligence was compromised. The rest is history.”

Yet a review of the court records commissioned by TWI found no evidence that McCarthy and his fellow prosecutors made use of all the tools at their disposal to protect the list. Not only did the government not invoke CIPA, which would have restricted access to classified information in a case to officers of the court who hold security clearances and cannot remove information from secure facilities, prosecutors did not seek to place any protective orders on non-classified information like the co-conspirators list — which would have placed additionally restrictive rules on handling it. McCarthy said he believed Mukasey, the judge who heard the case, issued a “general protective order” for information shared with defense council for the trial’s discovery phase, but conceded, “We didn’t go piece by piece of discovery to the court for a protective order.” An individual close to the case who would not speak for attribution said there was never any protective order over the co-conspirator list, a finding borne out by TWI’s examination of the court record. Mukasey, through a spokesman, declined to comment.

A 2008 study conducted for the civil liberties organization Human Rights First examined how the courts have handled hundreds of terrorism prosecutions before and after 9/11 and found negligible, if any, disclosures of classified or sensitive information. The study, written by two former federal prosecutors who, like McCarthy, worked for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, wrote of the co-conspirator list, “Had the government sought a court order restricting dissemination of the list, perhaps it would not have been disseminated to Bin Laden.”

Jim Benjamin, one of the authors of the study — whom McCarthy praised for “going out of their way to be fair and get[ting] the facts accurate” — clarified that he does not consider McCarthy or anyone else prosecuting the Blind Sheikh to be negligent. “Andy did a spectacular job on the Blind Sheikh prosecution and throughout his career as a prosecutor in the Southern District,” Benjamin, now with the law firm Akin Gump, said in an interivew. “I don’t criticize him for anything he did on the Blind Sheikh case, including not seeking a protective order, although doing so has become routine practice in terrorism cases today. The bottom line is that no system is ever going to be perfect, no matter how well intentioned or diligent the lawyers were, and Andy was certainly both.”

Asked why he never invoked CIPA in the case, McCarthy replied, “To be candid with you, I never thought it was worth either the five seconds it would have taken the judge to orally order it, or the piece of paper it was written on if it was written on a piece of paper, because one of the things I really came away thinking as a prosecutor who’s done mafia cases and drug cases and all these other cases and then was finally doing national security cases, people who are looking to blow up buildings don’t really care about nondisclosure orders.”

But the lack of a protective order or a CIPA invocation does beg the question of whether it’s fair to indict the entire criminal justice system as incapable of handling terrorism cases if prosecutors in a pre-9/11 case didn’t use all the tools available to them to prevent unwarranted disclosure. For his part, McCarthy believes that the focus on the disclosure of the co-conspirator list misses the forest for the trees in terms of the access to information that civilian courts openly provide — particularly information that doesn’t even rise to the level of sensitive, let alone classified — a prospect that unnerves him when considering terrorism cases.

“The co-conspirator list is just a single instance of a much broader problem in terrorism cases,” McCarthy said. “Everything that goes on in the way of not only disclosure under the rules, but more importantly, testimony in a courtroom is a problem in terms of the degree to which it edifies the enemy. These are rules that are made for normal trials that don’t involve national security situations when you’re dealing with a faction that you’re at war with. At the time that our trial took place, the United States certainly wasn”t in a state of war, even if the other side was. But I don’t think there can be any question that the day-to-day dishing out of discovery — we’re talking now about thousands of pages of information that get turned over. And I will tell you, these are problems you deal with on a day-to-day basis at trial.”

Benjamin, whose 2008 study of terrorism trials examined hundreds of cases, responded that he was unaware of “examples where that scenario has unfolded and there has been a security breach as a result.” If anything, he continued, the fact that opponents of civilian trials for terrorists point to the disclosure of the co-conspirator list indicates that the courts are robustly capable of convicting terrorists without running the risk of dangerous disclosures.

“Although any leak of sensitive information is a serious matter, I think this one incident from 15 years ago tends to be given too much weight in the broader debate about the ability of federal courts to safeguard classified evidence,” Benjamin said. “When you stack up this single incident against the scores of cases where CIPA has been invoked and there haven’t been leaks, I think the better conclusion to draw is the opposite one — that the civilian courts have generally been able to handle terrorism cases effectively and without jeopardizing national security.”

That’s a conclusion fervently embraced by Attorney General Eric Holder, who has been asked about the co-conspirator list by members of Congress. “The co-conspirator list was not a classified document. Had there been a reason to try to protect it, prosecutors could have sought a protective order, but that was not a classified document,” Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee in November. “It is my firm belief that through the use of CIPA, we can protect information in Article III [federal] courts in the same way that they can be protected in military commissions.”

James O'Keefe and the cover of a recent issue of his old college magazine (YouTube, The Centurion)

When James O’Keefe applied for a grant to fund a conservative newspaper at Rutgers University, he appealed to people like Sarah Longwell. As the senior program officer at the Collegiate Network, she toured campuses across America to help conservative and libertarian students start newspapers or keep their publications running. She “read basically every conservative college paper,” and got to know the sort of people attracted to the unpaid work of right-leaning campus muckraking.

“You always knew when you met a James O’Keefe,” Longwell told TWI. “When I watch the television, and watch him say things like ‘the truth will set you free,’ I think: there’s a certain type of person who’s so obsessed with being in-your-face contrarian, and being famous for it, that he does it without thinking of the consequences. I certainly met people like him in other places.”

[GOP1]Few conservative activists went on to achieve the fame O’Keefe did for the 2009 sting he pulled with fellow activist Hannah Giles, posing as a pimp and prostitute inside ACORN offices, and secretly taping the advice they received. In the week since O’Keefe and three colleagues were arrested for apparently tampering with phones in the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), national reporters have trained their eyes on organizations like the Collegiate Network and the Leadership Institute. The CN also gave a grant to the Patriot (George Washington University) and The Counterweight (University of Minnesota-Morris), where O’Keefe’s accomplices Stan Dai and Joseph Basel, respectively, had worked in college. The Leadership Institute employed O’Keefe for a year to train conservative activists; while there, he formed a friendship with Ben Wetmore, another veteran campus conservative who put up the four activists at his home before the Landrieu escapade. But any attempt to make them the faces of conservative college journalism, argued Longwell, would be off-base.

“From what he’s said and what he’s doing, O’Keefe strikes me as an ideologue,” said Longwell. “To use him to define conservative campus journalism is silly.”

Longwell has gained some perspective on this. In 2005, she left the Intercollegiate Studies Institute–the umbrella organization that runs CN–for Berman and Company, a free-market public relations firm in Washington that aggravates liberals with dogged, smart-alecky campaigns against their causes. Also joining Berman was Justin Wilson, once the editor of CN’s paper at the University of Michigan, then another program director at CN. Both later worked with Bret Jacobson, formerly the editor of the CN’s paper at the University of Oregon. (Before she came to CN, Longwell worked at a CN paper at Kenyon College.) In the years since, all three of them helped out with a punchy campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act–legislation that would make it easier for workers to form unions–at Berman’s Center on Union Facts. That campaign included ads that portrayed union organizers as thugs and undercover videos–conducted with more subtlety than O’Keefe, who would pose in costume–that captured union strategists shifting their strategy. One measure of how successful Berman and Company was at frustrating Democrats came when the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) angrily ripped up one of the firm’s anti-EFCA newspaper ads in front of a cheering crowd of union workers.

According to activists who spoke with TWI, the experience of campus conservatives who went on to Berman is more representative of the movement’s investment in college journalism than the trials of James O’Keefe, Stan Dai, Joseph Basel and Ben Wetmore. It’s the sort of work that the three latter activists were doing until last week, using their training and connections to become players in the intelligence industry or in conservative activism. For the Leadership Institute, the Collegiate Network, and the National Journalism Center run by Young Americans for Freedom–just three of the conservative training organizations that have operated for more than a generation–the Landrieu debacle was a distraction from a project that had been going quite well. Conservative activists and journalists who’ve come out of those training programs have had a larger, but quieter, impact than O’Keefe. (Disclosure: I edited a CN paper, The Northwestern Chronicle, from 2002 to 2004, and I held a CN fellowship at USA Today from 2004 through 2005.) They’re well-funded–ISI, CN’s parent organization received, $8.3 million in contributions in 2009–and while they don’t release the names of donors, their trustees include American Spectator publisher Al Regnery (ISI), Heritage Foundation president Ed Fuelner (ISI), and GOP strategist Frank Donatelli (LI).

“Every two years or so, somebody writes a story about how conservatives on college campuses have suddenly discovered journalism,” said John J. Miller, an editor at National Review who came there from the same conservative UM paper as Berman’s Justin Wilson, and who hires summer interns from the CN roster. “Still, if you took people under the age of 40 or 45, right-of-center journalists–however you want to categorize them–a lot of them came from these conservative campus newspapers.”

While O’Keefe’s experience with the Leadership Institute has received more attention than his CN grant–and more than the internship Hannah Giles had at the National Journalism Center–the path from campus conservative journalism to D.C. influence is reliable. Before Marc Thiessen wrote speeches for George W. Bush, he was editor-in-chief of the Vassar Spectator. Before the Chamber of Commerce’s James Gelfand was tripped up for an email asking if it was possible to fund a study that would discredit health care reform, he was an editor at the Northwestern Chronicle. They place yearlong fellows at Roll Call, The Hill, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, and USA Today. Last year, the CN’s program expanded to the Raleigh News & Observer in North Carolina. John McCormack scored a Collegiate Network internship with Miller on the strength of his work with the GW Patriot–the same paper that produced Stan Dai. From there he got the CN fellowship at The Weekly Standard, and was hired full-time after his fellowship ended. In October 2009 and January 2010, he shifted the momentum of elections in New York’s 23rd congressional district and in Massachusetts by hounding candidates who were blowing off his questions, prompting them to overreact–and suffer from the ugly headlines that resulted.

This doesn’t take much money. The Leadership Institute’s contribution to college papers consists of Balance in Media Grants–once $500, recently raised to $750–to offset the cost of the first issue of a new publication. The Collegiate Network gives out annual grants up to several thousand dollars based on a number of factors, including frequency and quality of publications, and pays stipends for its media fellowships. Media organizations who hire CN fellows are pleased by the results, and not bothered by the O’Keefe story.

“We’ve been quite happy with our CN fellows over the years,” said John Siniff, executive forum editor at USA Today. “Does the O’Keefe story change the way I think about interns from the CN? No.”

In the months after O’Keefe’s ACORN story, he was embraced by the conservative journalism network. He gave a short, well-received speech to the annual Collegiate Network conference, held last year in San Antonio. The Leadership Institute trumpeted O’Keefe’s experience with the group. Since the Landrieu debacle, the praise has mellowed but not disappeared.

“There was a fairly universal celebration that he gave ACORN a black eye,” said Steven Sutton, who manages the college journalism program for LI. “I don’t think it marks a milestone or launch date — we’re not going to be having James O’Keefe Day dinners to mark the day that he busted ACORN.”

“This kind of ‘stunt’ journalism requires skill, like an acrobat,” said Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative author whose work at the Dartmouth Review in the early 1980s set the tone for decades of conservative campus journalism. “It’s pretty easy to fall off the ropes if you’re stupid about it. The ACORN story ‘worked,’ because the masquerade proved a point about ACORN, but trying to tap a senator’s phones–well, there’s a point where you are breaking the law, and no one is above the law.”
Among conservatives, there’s a consensus that the work of campus journalists, and the connections that the network can give them, won’t be touched by O’Keefe’s scandal. Berman’s David Martosko–who attended Dartmouth with D’Souza, but did not work for the Review–told TWI that campus conservative papers continue to produce smart “contrarians” with exactly the reporting skills and sense of humor that Berman needs.

“For every James O’Keefe,” said Sarah Longwell, “there are 50 serious journalists coming out of these programs.”

In fact, it turned out that the memo was a draft from the Justice Department prepared for the president, as Andrew McCarthy at National Review acknowledged in an update of his earlier breathless post.  That post relied on a post from Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government site, which obtained a copy of the leaked memo and posted it.

To McCarthy, who is not one to shrink from a little fearmongering, the notion of transferring to Illinois all those Gitmo detainees who’ve been imprisoned for up to eight years without charge on an island prison created precisely to deny them the right to a fair trial is “an outrage. It will inevitably result in trained terrorists being released in the United States — bank on it.”

In his update, McCarthy sheepishly acknowledges that an administration official told ABC News, which bothered to contact the administration about the document, that the memo “is a draft, predecisional document that lawyers at various agencies were drafting in preparation for a potential future announcement about where to house GTMO detainees.”

The post in which Hanson makes the criticism is 675 words; before reading the speech he published a post of 372 words. Of all the arguments a prolific conservative writer can make against Obama, this is one of the strangest.

The rally, shown in the video below the jump, was held across the street from the courthouse where Holder wants to try self-described 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others, and less than a mile from the former World Trade Center, where the attacks occurred. It ended with both speakers and the crowd calling for Holder’s resignation.