So we have to look at their advisers for a clue.
The Nation:In March 2001, as Dick Cheney assembled his secret energy task force, Haley Barbour, one of the most powerful Republican lobbyists in Washington and a former chair of the Republican National Committee, fired off a memo to the Vice President. "A moment of truth is arriving," Barbour wrote, "in the form of a decision whether this Administration's policy will be to regulate and/or tax CO2 as a pollutant." Barbour pointedly asked, "Do environmental initiatives, which would greatly exacerbate the energy problems, trump good energy policy, which the country has lacked for eight years?"And more from The Nation:
The memo bore the imprimatur of Barbour's lobbying firm, but the real work was being done by Bracewell & Patterson, a midsize Texas law firm with a client list as long as the plume from a smokestack. Bracewell would go on to become one of the key lobbying outfits on energy policy in the Bush II era. Its clients have included massive coal-burning power plants like the Atlanta-based Southern Company; more than 450 oil companies represented by the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association; and Texas heavy hitters like Enron, ChevronTexaco and Valero Energy. All these interests had a major stake in persuading George W. Bush to abandon his campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide, the leading source of greenhouse-gas emissions. Two weeks after receiving Barbour's memo, Bush reversed his position and decided against naming CO2 as a pollutant, leading to more than six years of inaction in combating global warming.
It was the first of many victories for Bracewell & Patterson. In the coming years the firm would persuade the Administration to exempt coal-burning power plants from new pollution controls, forestall plans to reduce mercury emissions and shield the makers of MTBE, a toxic gasoline additive that contaminates drinking water, from costly lawsuits.
In March 2005 Bracewell got its biggest boost yet. At a press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, the firm unveiled a new partner: former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. It also unveiled a new name: Bracewell & Giuliani. It was a huge coup for the firm. "He's going to help expand Bracewell's reputation nationally and internationally," Bracewell lobbyist Scott Segal said at the time.
It was also a shrewd move for "America's mayor." Giuliani had already enjoyed a string of business successes following his term as mayor. He had launched the consulting firm Giuliani Partners shortly after 9/11, and he'd partnered with Ernst & Young to launch an investment bank, Giuliani Capital Advisors, which was sold in March to an Australian company for an undisclosed sum. Giuliani jet-setted around the globe in a Gulfstream, giving speeches at $100,000 a pop. His 2002 book Leadership sold more than a million copies.
A law firm would solidify Rudy's financial empire--but not just any firm would do. Partner Giuliani wanted to become President Giuliani. He needed money and, more important, political connections. Bracewell offered a gateway into the lavish world of Texas Republican fundraising and easy access to the same titans of industry who had helped make the Bush family rich and propelled W. into the White House. The former mayor of one of the bluest cities in the country had just inked a whole lot of red.
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By the time Giuliani joined Bracewell in 2005, the firm was regarded as "the most well-known face of aggressive energy-industry lobbying in DC," says John Walke, head of the clean air division at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The DC contingent has done little to tone down its advocacy since Rudy's arrival. In the wake of record oil industry profits, they lobbied against a tax on windfall revenue. At a recent EPA hearing in Philadelphia, physicians, state officials, environmentalists and even an asthmatic family testified about the need to reduce smog levels. But Holmstead, now Bracewell's star expert, brushed aside such concerns. "If you change the standard, it's not going to have any impact whatsoever," he said.
Rudy didn't come cheap. Bracewell paid Giuliani Partners $10 million for his services and Giuliani a base salary of $1 million a year, plus 7.5 percent of the firm's New York revenues. (Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch once said, "You can get rich, or you can get elected." Giuliani is trying to do both.) In return, Rudy performed a variety of tasks. He spearheaded the opening of the New York office, bringing over talent like Michael Hess, New York City's chief lawyer under Giuliani, and Marc Mukasey, the son of US Attorney General-designate Michael Mukasey, to head the firm's white-collar defense practice. In more than two years, the firm has grown to roughly forty lawyers, with annual revenues estimated at $27 million.
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Rudy was once widely considered one of the premier lawyers in the country. He was the youngest associate attorney general ever, under Ronald Reagan, and as district attorney in Manhattan he made a name for himself by prosecuting crooked congressmen, Wall Street schemers and mob leaders. Yet he's always had trouble balancing his law career with his politics. In 1989 Giuliani joined the New York firm of White & Case. The firm had a list of controversial clients, including the government of Panama, home to drug-dealing dictator Manuel Noriega; foreign banks that gave large loans to the apartheid regime in South Africa; and an Italian construction firm that helped build a chemical weapons plant in Libya.
When Giuliani launched a run for mayor that same year, he was blindsided by bad press. "White & Case represented all sorts of dictators and scumbags," says veteran political consultant Hank Sheinkopf. "Rudy could never understand why that would be a problem." Politicians of both parties called on Giuliani to release his client list. Billionaire businessman Ronald Lauder, who ran against Giuliani in the Republican primary, aired a television ad featuring side-by-side pictures of Giuliani and Noriega. Nelson Warfield, Lauder's spokesman at the time and a current adviser to presidential candidate Fred Thompson, sees parallels between then and now. "It was an issue for him in '89, and it's an issue for him in '07," Warfield says of Rudy's clients. (Thompson, it should be noted, has his own questions to answer about his lengthy career as a Washington lobbyist.)
The Giuliani campaign is anticipating such scrutiny. In a leaked campaign dossier obtained by the New York Daily News in January, the word "business" appeared at the top of a list of potential vulnerabilities, ahead of his ex-wife Donna Hanover. The concern was justified. After the 2004 election Giuliani saw the nomination for Homeland Security czar of a protégé, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, crash and burn when the press uncovered Kerik's affairs, unpaid back taxes and ties to the mob. "Rudy will be held to a higher standard," predicts GOP strategist Tony Fabrizio. "This is stuff he did after becoming America's mayor."
Bracewell & Giuliani presents a host of potential sore spots, on the left and the right. Operatives from rival GOP campaigns were quick to exploit the fact that the firm represented Citgo, the state oil company of Venezuela, one of the current bêtes noires of the right wing. Bracewell helped Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. block "indecency" laws on television, thwarting a pet issue of Christian conservatives. The firm provided counsel to the defense fund of disgraced former House majority leader Tom DeLay--at the same time that it was lobbying DeLay and Congress to grant immunity to the makers of the toxic gasoline additive MTBE, which faces hundreds of lawsuits for contaminating drinking water. Clients abroad have included repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan (Bracewell has two offices representing American oil companies in Kazakhstan; Rudy's Bracewell supporters recently held a campaign fundraiser there). A few years ago its biggest client was Enron.
Giuliani has accepted more money from the energy industry--$477,208 through the first half of 2007--than any other presidential candidate. These ties likely won't hurt him with GOP primary voters, who welcomed Bush and Cheney with open arms. But it could arouse the suspicions of moderate and independent voters in a general election, many of whom don't look forward to the idea of Halliburton clones dictating policy in the next White House.
Texas Loves Rudy
After joining Bracewell, Giuliani became a frequent visitor to Texas. He's raised nearly $4 million in the state, more than any other Republican, and as of August recruited thirty-seven of George W. Bush's Pioneers and Rangers (those who raised at least $100,000 and $200,000, respectively, for the Bush campaigns), second only to John McCain. Rudy became acquainted with Texas politics when he launched his aborted senatorial run against Hillary Clinton in 2000. Roy Bailey, a Dallas insurance mogul and former finance chair of the Texas Republican Party, helped him raise money for that race. They struck up a close friendship, and after 9/11 Giuliani told The American Lawyer magazine he "turned over" his postmayoral planning to Bailey, who became managing director of Giuliani Partners. At the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, where Rudy's invocation of 9/11 took center stage, Bailey met Pat Oxford, managing partner of Bracewell & Patterson. Over coffee the next day, Bailey floated the idea of Giuliani joining Bracewell. They clicked, and soon the deal was done.
Oxford himself is a player in Texas Republican politics. He met George W. Bush in the 1970s, worked on his campaigns and became a Pioneer in 2000 for Bush/Cheney. Through Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a law school classmate, Oxford met Karl Rove; they became "fast friends," Oxford told The American Lawyer. In 2000 Oxford formed the Mighty Texas Strike Force, dispatching volunteers from Texas to battleground states. During the 2000 recount in Florida, Oxford said he "ran Broward County" and managed the Bush/Cheney legal defense team, talking with Bush frequently in Texas. In 2004 his twenty-five-person "strike force" in Ohio became a source of contention when hotel workers in Columbus, according to a report compiled by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee, claimed that the strike team used "payphones to make intimidating calls to likely voters, targeting people recently in the prison system" and alleging that the FBI would send them back to jail if they voted.
Giuliani's business partners and Texas allies have come to play a prominent role in his presidential campaign. Oxford is the campaign's national chairman, marshaling operations and squiring Giuliani throughout the state. A fellow Houstonian, Jim Lee, a close ally of Governor Rick Perry and a Pioneer for Bush/Cheney in '04, is the campaign's new finance chief. The day-trading company Lee co-founded, Momentum Securities, was censured and fined $75,000 by the National Association of Security Dealers in 2001 for producing misleading advertising material, downplaying financial risks to investors and overstating its capital. After Lee raised $200,000 for Perry's re-election campaign, the governor appointed him last year to the board overseeing Texas's $96 billion public school employee pension fund.
Giuliani Partners's Roy Bailey introduced the candidate to GOP billionaires and major Bush supporters like T. Boone Pickens and Tom Hicks. Pickens got to know Rudy after dinner one night at Bailey's house. Hicks had committed to McCain's campaign, but after Bailey "went to see him and rib him about it," he changed his mind and became Giuliani's Texas chairman. The three hosted a fundraiser for Rudy last March in Dallas.
Pickens is a legendary corporate raider from West Texas who terrorized Wall Street by threatening to take over oil companies and grew filthy rich in the process. Since launching a hedge fund specializing in energy investments in 1996, Pickens has become even richer, making more than $1.5 billion in 2005. That same year he gave $165 million to Cowboy Golf, a small charity connected to his alma mater, Oklahoma State, and on whose board Pickens sits. Within an hour, the tax-deductible donation was invested back into the Pickens hedge fund, BP Capital. Critics who objected to the transaction, and Pickens's influence at OSU, began calling the school "Boone State."
More recently, Pickens has been prospecting in Texas's new oil: water. His company, Mesa Water, owns groundwater rights to 200,000 acres of land north of Amarillo (in Texas, unlike other Western states, groundwater is considered private by virtue of a "right to capture" law), which he's said he plans to sell to cities like El Paso, San Antonio and Dallas, potentially netting him $1 billion over the next thirty years. Pickens claims to be the "number-one steward of the land," but locals are wary of what Fortune magazine dubbed a Chinatown-esque scheme to divert water from the Panhandle, earning Pickens the status of "regional reprobate," as Salon put it. For a born-and-bred Texan, Pickens is more like Giuliani than you'd think, especially when it comes to his personal life: four wives, semi-estranged from his children, reviled in his hometown. His political profile is no less turbulent. When the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth needed seed money for an ad campaign smearing John Kerry's service record in Vietnam, Pickens ponied up an initial $500,000. He eventually gave $3 million to the group. Pickens has raised more than $500,000 for Giuliani, including $50,000 from employees of his hedge fund.
Tom Hicks isn't far behind Pickens financially, and his ties to the Bush family go even deeper. In 1994 under then-Governor Bush Hicks joined the University of Texas Board of Regents, one of the plushest appointments in the state, and was put in charge of investing the university's multibillion-dollar endowment. Hicks formed a private entity using UT money, called the University of Texas Investment Management Company, which invested millions with Bush family supporters and Hicks allies like The Carlyle Group, Bass Brothers of Fort Worth--who bailed out Bush's previous company, Harken Energy--and Dallas's Wyly family, all major patrons of the Bushes. News reports detailing the close family connections led to a major public controversy. Hicks stepped down at the end of his term, but the ties to Bush didn't end there. In 1998 Hicks bought the Texas Rangers for $250 million, three times what Bush and his partners paid for the team in 1989, and granted Bush six times his original share, making the failed businessman an overnight multimillionaire.
Hicks, who became vice chairman of the radio behemoth Clear Channel in 2000, helped Bush in whatever way he could. According to Salon, "Hicks announced on a conference call among Clear Channel's senior radio executives that the company was supporting Bush's presidential run, that everyone was encouraged to make donations, and that the legal department would be in contact with donors in order to maintain a proper roster." After 9/11 Clear Channel banned "potentially offensive" songs from its stations, and in the run-up to the war in Iraq, bankrolled supposedly grassroots pro-war "Rallies for America" across the country. The company gave nearly $470,000 to Republican candidates in 2006, roughly the same as in '04. Ironically, Hicks's investment fund sold its stake in Clear Channel last year to the private equity firm Bain Capital Partners--the longtime employer of Mitt Romney. Today, though, Hicks says, "I'm more closely aligned to Rudy than I am to Bush." As state chair for Giuliani, Hicks was given the task last January, according to the leaked strategy memo, of raising $30 million for the campaign in Texas, a figure that has thus far proven wildly optimistic.
When the New York Daily News obtained a leaked 140-page strategy memo from the Giuliani campaign in January "one name," according to the article, appeared "throughout the document: Paul Singer, a discreet hedge-fund tycoon who has been described as the Republican George Soros." The Upper East Side billionaire and longtime contributor to Republican and conservative causes was asked by the campaign to raise cash from Wall Street, recruiting other big-money donors and even contacting 9/11 survivors and victims' family members to support Giuliani's bid for the Republican nomination.And a little more is here.
Since then, Singer has become one of Giuliani's most important fundraisers, bundling more than $500,000 for the campaign. Singer and employees of his hedge fund, Elliott Associates, have chipped in an additional $168,000. The campaign frequently uses his private jet.
In late September Singer was once again in the news. Republicans in California with ties to the Giuliani campaign were pushing a ballot initiative that would award the state's electoral votes by Congressional district rather than winner-take-all, a move that could potentially throw a close election to a Republican. The group leading the drive was funded via a previously unknown organization in Missouri with exactly one donation of $175,000. When that outfit refused to divulge who made the contribution, the two GOP strategists in charge of the initiative quit in frustration. Eventually, as questions mounted, Singer admitted to being the sole contributor but claimed complete independence from the Giuliani campaign. Democratic lawyers in California believed otherwise, so they filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging a Giuliani-connected "money laundering operation."
That Singer was at the center of the controversy should come as no surprise. In the 1990s Singer's hedge fund pioneered a shadowy, lucrative and often ruthless form of investing whose practitioners earned the not-so-generous moniker "vulture funds." Vulture funds--or "sovereign debt investors," as they prefer to call themselves--buy old defaulted debts, usually from the poorest countries in the world, and then drag the debtors into court, seeking a settlement far above what the funds originally paid for the debt. These are debts that are usually forgiven when the countries are granted relief by wealthy nations like the United States and multilateral institutions like the World Bank. An official at the Bank likens vulture fund activities to giving up your seat on a bus for an old lady, only to see a young college jock swipe it.
Large hedge funds like Singer's Elliott Associates often operate in secret, through shell companies in tax shelters like the Cayman Islands. Since the end of 2005, more than a third of the countries receiving debt relief have been targeted by at least thirty-eight hedge funds, which have gotten judgments in excess of $1 billion. This reverse Robin Hood scheme has drawn criticism around the globe, including from Nelson Mandela and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
It all started in 1996, when Elliott paid $11 million for $20 million of debt, dating back to 1983, theoretically owed by the government of Peru. In 1989, then-US Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady had urged rich countries to forgive the debts of poor ones in order to spur economic growth and global development. Instead of settling with Peru, as its 180 other creditors did, Elliott took the government to court. "Pay us in full or be sued," Singer threatened.
A federal district court in New York initially ruled against Elliott, finding that the fund had purchased the debt "with the intent and purpose to sue" and "rejected each and every opportunity to participate in Peru's restructuring." Elliott appealed and won. Then the fund began working the political system in New York. With the help of a lobbying firm in Albany, Elliott, through a subsidiary, persuaded the New York legislature to change an obscure law governing compound interest, increasing Elliott's payout by $16 million, for a total, including interest, of $58 million. It was done so quietly that Peru's lawyers didn't find out until after the fact. A few years later the New York State Assembly eliminated another law that Peru had used to defend itself. Three months after the bill became law, Singer gave the lead sponsor, State Assembly Member Susan John, a $2,500 campaign donation.
Elliott's most recent target is the oil-rich but desperately poor West African nation of Congo, home to three civil wars since 1993, with 70 percent of the population below the poverty line. In the late 1990s Elliott, through a variety of shadowy subsidiaries, bought $100 million of defaulted Congolese debt for roughly 7 to 10 cents on the dollar, according to a legal brief filed by the Congolese government. A Cayman Islands-based entity called Kensington International went to court in London and received favorable judgments, ordering repayment of the debt plus interest. Then Kensington returned to court in London and sought to prevent Congo from repaying any other creditors until Kensington was paid. This time the judge balked, saying he didn't even know what Kensington International was and how much it had paid for the debts.
Only when Kensington sued Congo in New York under a RICO statute (which would triple a final judgment to $375 million), was it revealed that Kensington was a subsidiary of Singer's fund. Since then, Elliott/Kensington has pulled out all the stops. The fund retained as counsel Ted Olson, George W. Bush's initial choice to replace Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. Kensington has filed at least fifteen separate lawsuits against Congo and its business partners, in places ranging from the British Virgin Islands to Hong Kong to the United States.
After members of the Congolese government amassed large hotel bills at a UN summit in New York, Kensington lobbied the World Bank to block scheduled debt relief for the country, according to two sources close to the Congolese government. The fund placed op-eds in influential newspapers, produced letters of support from members of Congress and even filed a lawsuit in Brussels against the Belgian government to confiscate a 10 million euro foreign aid payment from Belgium to Congo. (In a separate case against Argentina, Elliott has enlisted former top Clinton Administration officials to persuade the country to pay debts that the firm acquired for as little as 15 cents on the dollar.) "They're completely amoral," says David Skeel, a professor of corporate law at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's almost a matter of pride to them."
Elliott says this type of investing accounts for only 1 percent of its $7 billion hedge fund. But Singer is unapologetic about the hardball tactics he pioneered. "Every country has poverty, including the USA," he told The Nation via e-mail. "Our disputes have always been with sovereigns who can pay but refuse." He dismisses his critics as "debtors who attempt to curry populist favor by paying just what they feel like paying" and "ideologically driven people and groups who do not realize that capital goes where it is welcome."
Singer has never been shy about expressing his conservative views. He regularly espouses them in Elliott's newsletter to investors, warning against universal healthcare and an equitable tax rate for hedge funds and advocating nuclear power to fight global warming.
This summer, as part of a fundraising shakeup, Giuliani made Singer a senior policy adviser focusing on the Middle East, a plum spot for the billionaire, given his ties to neoconservative outfits like the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Indeed, in a newsletter last March, Singer added his name to the list of Giuliani advisers who have advocated bombing Iran. "We think that it is necessary to do so," he wrote, "and soon."
And from TalkingPointsMemo:
Rudy Giuliani has just announced a new raft of foreign policy advisors. And I guess the premise of the campaign is now that the Bush administration wasn't sufficiently riddled by neoconservative whackjobs.
Topping the list: Michael Rubin as Senior Iran and Turkey Advisor and Middle East Advisory Board Member.
I really don't know how to describe Rubin for those who aren't familiar with him. He worked at Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans. But that hardly does the matter justice -- rather like saying Dick Cheney was a supporter of the Iraq War. On the TPM Scale of Pure Neoconism (TM) Rubin gets well over 99%. Like the most interesting and frightening neos, Michael is that perfect mix of extreme factual knowledge and extreme lack of judgment, prone to wild-eyed theories and fantasies of various sorts but all in the end leading inexorably toward catastrophic policy moves for the United States.
You really might as well put Ahmed Chalabi as your top Mideast or Iran advisor.
Rudy Giuliani collects foreign policy advisers like some people collect foreign coins.
His campaign just announced eight more of them. In September, he rolled out seven new ones, in addition to the core crew organized by Charles Hill, Giuliani's Foreign Affairs ghost writer, which includes a ideologically diverse range of experts ranging from neo-conservatives like Norman Podhoretz to democracy-promotion skeptics like Martin Kramer.
The release with all the new additions is below:
Rudy Giuliani Announces Additional Foreign Policy Advisors
Dr. Ruth Wedgwood, Adm. Robert Natter, Other Experts Join Team RudyNew York City - The Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee today announced additional members of Mayor Giuliani's foreign policy team, including Dr. Ruth Wedgwood, an internationally-renowned legal and United Nations expert, as a member of the International Law and Organizations Advisory Board, and Adm. Robert Natter, Ret., as Senior Military Advisor.
"Mayor Giuliani is enormously bright, tough and prudent," said Wedgwood. "He knows how to defend what we value, including the freedom of America in the face of a dangerous foe. He drives for results, not rhetoric. His human qualities are not masked, and his leadership will be characterized by articulate explanation of what America stands for in the world."
Wedgwood and Natter are joined by several advisors who served in Iraq: John Agresto, Owen West, and Michael Rubin. Other additions to the foreign policy team members include Kori Schake, David Frum, and Thomas Joscelyn.
"I support Rudy Giuliani because I believe our country really needs the managerial competence and fiscal conservatism he demonstrated so ably as Mayor of New York," said Schake. "He's focused on the most important problems, takes responsibility for his choices, is tough enough to implement decisions, and never loses sight of the greater good. We will be well served to have Rudy Giuliani as President."
Giuliani Policy Director Bill Simon said: "I'm delighted that these outstanding individuals have joined the foreign policy team that is continuing to grow under the strong leadership of Charles Hill."
Mayor Giuliani's foreign policy team advises the Mayor on a foreign policy vision that advances the United States as a world leader: expanding America's involvement in the global economy, strengthening our reputation around the world, and keeping our country on offense in the Terrorists' War on Us.
About Mayor Giuliani's Foreign Policy Advisors:
Ruth Wedgwood, International Law and Organizations Advisory Board Member
Wedgwood is the Burling Professor of International Law and Diplomacy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington, D.C., where she also directs the International Law and Organizations program.
Wedgwood has a broad experience in international institutions. In 2002, she was elected to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Previously, Dr. Wedgwood served as amicus curiae to the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, at the invitation of President Antonio Cassese, also serving as director of studies at The Hague Academy of International Law.
She is a member of the board of editors of the American Journal of International Law and was senior fellow and director of the Ford Foundation project on international law at the Council on Foreign Relations. Wedgwood has served on many advisory boards, including the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on International Law, the CIA's Historical Review Panel, the Congress's Hart-Rudman Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, and the U.S. delegations to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Wehrkunde Security Conference.
Wedgwood is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, where she was executive editor of the Yale Law Journal and won the Peres Prize for finest writing. She was a law clerk to Judge Henry J. Friendly and a law clerk on the U.S. Supreme Court.
She served as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, with Rudolph Giuliani, where she investigated and tried complex criminal cases. Wedgwood has taught at the U.S. Naval War College as the Stockton Professor of International Law and as a visiting professor at the University of Paris. She was a Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2006. She was also a professor on the Yale Law School faculty for over a decade and a fellow of Berkeley College. She is a member of the board of directors of Freedom House, which supports political freedom in the countries of the former Soviet bloc and the Middle East.
She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Law Institute, the International Institute of Strategic Studies, and the San Remo Institute on Humanitarian Law. She is a former vice president and life member of the American Society of International Law and chaired the ASIL Task Force on Terrorism.
Wedgwood has been a frequent commentator on legal issues on National Public Radio, the Lehrer News Hour, BBC, MSNBC, and ABC News, and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and LA Times.
Robert Natter, Senior Military Advisor
Admiral Natter retired from the US Navy as a four star Admiral after serving as Commander of the US Atlantic Fleet and the first Commander of US Fleet Forces Command, responsible for the training and equipping of all world wide deploying US Navy forces. Following one year of reserve enlisted service and four years at the Naval Academy, he was graduated and commissioned an Ensign in 1967.
His service at sea included department head tours in a Costal Minesweeper and Frigate, and Executive Officer tours in two Amphibious Tank Landing Ships and a Spruance Destroyer. He was Officer-in-Charge of a Naval Special Warfare detachment in Vietnam and commanded USS CHANDLER (DDG 996), USS ANTIETAM (CG 54), and the United States SEVENTH Fleet before his assignment at Fleet Forces Command.
Shore assignments included Company Officer and later Flag Secretary to the Superintendent at the U.S. Naval Academy; Executive Assistant to the Director of Naval Warfare in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations; staff member for the House Armed Services Committee of the 100th Congress of the United States; Executive Assistant to the Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, Executive Assistant to the Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, during Desert Storm Operations in the Middle East; Assistant Chief of Naval Personnel for officer and enlisted personnel assignments; Chief of the Navy 's Legislative Affairs organization; and Director for Space, Information Warfare, Command and Control. He was also the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations.
Admiral Natter was a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Naval War College and has Masters Degrees in Business Management and International Relations. In May 2000, he was honored as the fifth recipient of the Naval War College 's annual Distinguished Graduate Leadership Award.
His personal decorations include the Silver Star Medal, four awards of the Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, five awards of the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal with Combat V, Purple Heart, two awards of the Meritorious Service Medal, the Navy Commendation Medal with Combat V, Navy Achievement Medal with Combat V, and various unit and campaign awards.
John Agresto, Iraqi Advisory Board Member
Agresto is the former president of St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM. A long-time educator and scholar in American law and government, Dr. Agresto spent time in Iraq after the fall of Saddam working to rebuild the Iraqi higher education system. After earning his doctorate from Cornell University, he taught at the University of Toronto, Kenyon College, the New School University, and Duke. He was both deputy and acting chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, appointed by Ronald Reagan. He is also the author of an analysis of the current situation in Iraq, Mugged by Reality. He and his wife currently reside in New Mexico.
Owen West, Iraq Advisory Board Member
Owen is a graduate of Harvard College and Stanford Business School. He served as a Marine infantry officer for six years before joining Goldman Sachs, where he is currently a Managing Director of Energy Trading. Owen has taken two leaves-of-absence from Goldman to fight with the Marines in Iraq, most recently leading a team of advisors living with an Iraqi infantry battalion. As an author and reporter, his novels and articles on military affairs have won several awards including the Boyd Literary Award for best military novel and the Marine Corps Essay Contest. A former heavyweight rower, he has completed 100-mile marathons, attempted Mount Everest and finished as high as 2nd in the Eco Challenge. Owen is a director of the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation. He lives in New York City with his wife and two boys.
Michael Rubin, Senior Iran and Turkey Advisor and Middle East Advisory Board Member
Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Rubin is co-author of two books: Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (Palgrave, 2005) and author Into the Shadows: Radical Vigilantes in Khatami's Iran (Washington Institute, 2001). A native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Rubin earned a B.S. in Biology and a Ph.D. in History from Yale University. In 2002, the Council on Foreign Relations' International Affairs Fellowship placed Rubin on the Iran and Iraq desk at the Pentagon, from where he was seconded to Baghdad. Since 2005, Rubin has helped educate U.S. officers deploying to Iraq through the Naval Postgraduate School's Leadership Development & Education for Sustained Peace program.
Kori Schake, Senior Foreign Policy Advisor
Schake is a fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and holds the Distinguished Chair of International Security Studies at the U.S. Military Academy. She has just completed the book Managing American Hegemony: Essays on Power in a Time of Dominance. Other recent publications include: The Coming Crisis of High Expectations: Transatlantic Relations After the 2008 Elections (Centre for European Reform: October 2007), and "Dealing with a Nuclear Iran," (Policy Review, February/March 2007). She also runs the overarching issues team in the Project on National Security Reform, which aims to better structure, finance, staff, and train the U.S. government for contemporary security challenges.
Schake was the Director for Strategy and Requirements on the National Security Council, where her work focused on national security strategy, long-term defense planning, NATO adaptation, and management of coalitions with forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. She ran the interagency review of U.S. military bases around the world, which resulted in the most significant reposturing of U.S. forces since the Korean War.
Previous work includes six years in the Pentagon for both the Joint Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense and teaching in the faculties of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs, and the National Defense University.
David Frum, Senior Foreign Policy Advisor
Frum is the author of five books, including two New York Times bestsellers: The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush (2003) and co-author with Richard Perle of An End To Evil: How To Win the War on Terror (2004). His sixth book, Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, will be published later this year.
Frum is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and writes a daily column for National Review Online, plus weekly columns for Canada's National Post and Italy's Il Foglio. He has contributed frequently to the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and appears often on CNN, Fox News, and the BBC. Frum is a regular commentator on American Public Radio's "Marketplace" program.
Frum served as a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush.
Frum's first book, Dead Right, was described by William F. Buckley as "the most refreshing ideological experience in a generation," and by Frank Rich of the New York Times as "the smartest book written from the inside about the American conservative movement." In 1996, The Wall Street Journal acclaimed him as "one of the leading political commentators of his generation." In 2001, Judge Richard Posner's study of public intellectuals listed Frum as one of the 100 most influential minds in the United States.
Frum was born in Toronto, Canada in 1960. He received a simultaneous BA and MA in history from Yale in 1982. He was appointed a visiting lecturer in history at Yale in 1986; in 1987, he graduated cum laude from the Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Federalist Society.
Thomas Joscelyn, Senior Terrorism Advisor
Joscelyn is a terrorism analyst, economist, and writer living in New York. Most of Joscelyn's research and writing has focused on how al Qaeda and its affiliates operate around the world. He is a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard and its online publications, the Daily Standard and Worldwide Standard. His work has also been published by National Review Online, the New York Post, and other media outlets. Joscelyn is the author of Iran's Proxy War Against America, a booklet published by the Claremont Institute that details Iran's decades-long sponsorship of America's terrorist enemies. Mr. Joscelyn makes regular appearances on radio programs around the country and has appeared on MSNBC.
In 2006 he was named one of the Claremont Institute's Lincoln Fellows. In addition to his life as a terrorism analyst, Mr. Joscelyn also manages economic research projects focused on antitrust, regulatory and securities issues for a prominent economic consulting firm. He holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Chicago.
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