This article was originally published in The Nation.

It began as a fairly straight-forward story about a shareholder lawsuit: The Koch brothers, Charles and David, who together own 50 percent of the libertarian Cato Institute, filed suit to recover a 25 percent stake held by longtime chairman William Niskanen, who died last autumn and whose widow has yet to relinquish those shares.

Cato’s shareholder’s agreement is “pretty clear” according to legal writer Alison Frankel: shareholders cannot sell or transfer their shares without first offering them back to the Institute and then to the remaining Cato shareholders. But there’s one legal ambiguity: Cato’s shareholder agreement “doesn’t specifically address what happens when a shareholder dies.”

What started as a rather arcane legal dispute between the Koch brothers and their longtime lieutenant, Cato president Ed Crane, quickly transformed into a PR-manufactured Washington melodrama: The famed and revered (in some quarters) Cato Institute has turned against its Dr. Frankenstein, Charles Koch, attacking its maker with the full range of PR-weaponry that has served Cato effectively over these past four decades. The same pundits who only yesterday fell over themselves defending the billionaire Koch brothers as principled libertarians now denounce their benefactors as venal Republican Party warmongers out to crush the Cato Institute’s “nonpartisan” “independent” “scholarship” for the crime of being, yes, principled libertarians.

It would all be good for a laugh, if the spin hadn’t succeeded in conning the media and confusing the public, even roping in some well-meaning progressives like Common Cause, who defended Cato’s “independence.”

But in order for progressives and others to make an honest and practical assessment about the Cato Institute and its battle with the Kochs, we need to first set the record straight about some of the claims being spun.

Cato Claim #1: The Cato Institute was one of the earliest and most principled critics of the Bush Administration’s wars abroad and attacks on civil liberties at home (here and here).

Fact: The Cato Institute’s actual record during the Bush Administration years was anything but principled and far from heroic.

John Yoo, author of the notorious “torture memo,” served on the Cato Editorial Board for Cato Supreme Court Review during the Bush presidency. At the same time, Yoo was writing the Bush administration’s legal justifications for waterboarding, Guantanamo, warrantless wiretapping and more. Yoo also contributed articles to Cato Supreme Court Review and a chapter to a Cato book titled The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton criticizing President Clinton’s “imperial presidency.”

The “Cato Policy Report” attacked progressive critics of Bush’s War on Terror as “Terrorism’s Fellow Travelers“ in its November/December 2001 issue. Former Vice President of Research Brink Lindsey wrote, “Most of the America haters flushed out by September 11 are huddled on the left wing of the conventional political spectrum.”

Another Cato executive, Ted Galen Carpenter, former VP for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies, enthusiastically supported Bush’s war on terror and called on Bush to invade Pakistan.

The Cato Institute advised the 2002-04 Republican-dominated Congress to commence military strikes in Pakistan in its Cato Handbook for Congress arguing, “Ultimately, Afghanistan becomes less important as a place to conduct military operations in the war on terrorism and more important as a place from which to launch military operations. And those operations should be directed across the border into neighboring Pakistan.”

Another Cato Institute executive, Roger Pilon, vigorously supported Bush’s attacks on civil liberties. Pilon, Cato’s VP for Legal Affairs and founding director of the Cato Institute’s “Center for Constitutional Studies,” supported expanded FBI wiretapping in 2002 and called on Congress to reauthorize the Patriot Act as late as 2008.

While it’s true that compared to other pro-Republican think-tanks, Cato did have periods when it was critical of Bush’s wars and attacks on civil liberties, those attacks weren’t consistent and showed every sign of being subordinated to the Cato Institute’s political demands. The most obvious example of this came in 2005, when Cato suddenly called a halt to its growing criticisms of Bush’s War on Terror and fired one of its most ardent anti-interventionists (another resigned), sparking a backlash from some prominent non-Cato libertarians like antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo, who wrote: “Now that the majority of Americans have turned against this war, the Cato bigwigs are lining up with the neoconservatives who want to ‘stay the course.’” In 2006, with Bush’s presidency in tatters, Cato re-started its criticism in earnest.



John Yoo, Cato Editorial Board member 2001-2007

Cato Claim #2: The Cato Institute is independent of the Republican Party establishment and often as much in opposition to the GOP as to the Democrats.

Fact: In reality, the Cato Institute has been one of the leading Republican Party policy and propaganda factories since at least the early 1990s.

In 1995, the LATimes described the Cato Institute as the Republican revolution’s favorite hangout, “the hottest think tank in town. On any given day, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas might be visiting for lunch. Or Cato staffers might be plotting strategy with House Majority Leader Dick Armey, another Texan, and his staff. Cato’s constitutional law briefs cross the desks of conservative Supreme Court justices and their clerks.”

In 2005, a Washington Post article observed, “Nowadays, Cato alumni are everywhere in the Bush administration.” Among Cato figures in the Bush Administration named in the article: Andrew Biggs, Derrick Max, Charles Blahous, Leanne Abdnor and Carolyn Weaver, who helped launch Cato’s war on Social Security back in 1979.

President Bush’s high-priority Social Security privatization plan was all thanks to lobbying by Cato president Ed Crane and Cato executive José Piñera, a former Pinochet official who heads Cato’s Social Security privatization project.



Cato Institute McCarthyism: Cato calls leftist critics of Bush’s War on Terror “Terrorism’s Fellow Travelers”

Cato Claim #3: The Kochs are staging an unprecedented GOP takeover of the Cato Institute by staffing it with Republican Party operatives and backers (here and here).

Fact: The Cato Institute’s board of directors and staff have always been stacked with Republican Party supporters, donors and operatives.

…To read the rest of this article about Cato Institute myths and facts, go to The Nation, or click here.

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About author Mark Ames was founder and editor of The eXile, the notorious Moscow-based, English-language newspaper shuttered last year after a raid by Russian authorities. He is the author of two books: The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia (together with Matt Taibbi), and Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond.