(Disclaimer: Yes, I work for Cato. The following post is my own opinion, and no one else’s. Nor should it be construed to be any sort of “official” position of Cato.)

Read this Will Wilkinson post about Disinfopedia, a community website that purports to gather the information submitted by users on the “real” motivations of think tanks and interest groups.

The Cato Institute entry is absurd. Despite this collection of Cato work on civil liberties, the Disinfo page says:

Sometimes, howeover, it has proven willing to set aside its libertarian principles – such as supporting a Bush administration moves to restrict civil liberties as part of the â??war on terror.â? In 2002, a Cato news release endorsed new Justice Department guidelines giving greater latitude to FBI agents to monitor Internet sites, libraries and religious institutions. “As reported in the press, the new FBI surveillance guidelines present no serious problems,” declared Cato legal affairs analyst Roger Pilon, a former Reagan administration official who writes frequent Cato commentaries defending property rights and opposing affirmative action that have appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. Pilon added that “law enforcement monitoring of public places is simply good, pro-active police work that violates the rights of no one.”

From that, you might think that Cato’s been cheerleading the White House every step of the way in the civil liberties-terror debate. Never mind that that Pilon release is pretty much the only time Cato has come down with the White House on a contentious issue involving civil liberties.

I added the following line to the entry at 7:30pm tonight:

Of course, for that one release by Pilon, Cato scholars such as Robert Levy and Timothy Lynch had railed against the Bush administration for its civil liberties record on, for example, the Padilla case, military tribunals, national ID cards, the creeping militarization of domestic law enforcement, border patrol, the drug war, grand jury abuse, the PATRIOT Act, federal surveilance of ordinary Americans, operation TIPS, and mandatory vaccinations against potential bioterror threats.

We’ll see how much time passes before it gets edited out.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2004 at 7:38 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.