Larry King ends his CNN talk show
Larry King claims to have completed 50,000

Nico Hines Times of London Washington
After 25 years of stellar interviews and more wives than Henry VIII, Larry King has announced his abdication from America’s cherished chat show circuit.
The lucrative race to succeed him on CNN intensified last night when the former radio host from New York bowed to ratings pressure and rumours of demotion by telling viewers “it’s time to hang up my nightly suspenders”.
Piers Morgan, the former editor of the Mirror, is one of the favourites to step into the primetime slot which will be vacated in the autumn.
Katie Couric, who is best known in Britain for asking Sarah Palin which newspapers she read, was the early front runner but she has reportedly turned the job down - leaving the way clear for the Britain’s Got Talent judge. Ryan Seacrest, the presenter of Simon Cowell’s US singing competition American Idol, is King’s own tip for the job.
King, 76, who claims to have completed 50,000 interviews, became a favourite amongst Washington and Hollywood establishment figures by maintaining a deferential tone as he welcomed a stream of high-profile guests to his show. President Obama, Bill Gates and Lady Gaga were among recent visitors to King’s iconic studio.
“I’m incredibly proud that we recently made the Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest running show with the same host in the same time slot,” he said. “With this chapter closing I’m looking forward to the future and what my next chapter will bring, but for now it’s time to hang up my nightly suspenders.”
Earlier this year, King, who has been married eight times, announced that he was separating from his wife Shawn Southwick, but the couple have since reunited.
“I talked to the guys here at CNN and told them I would like to end Larry King Live, the nightly show, this fall and CNN has graciously accepted, giving me more time for my wife and I to get to the kids’ Little League games,” King said in his statement.
While King’s celebrated career has included an interview with every president since Nixon, the New York Times recently reported his average audience has been cut in half since the presidential election in 2008 - down to around 725,000 per night.
King, whose contract was due to expire in June 2011, said he would continue to host one-off programmes for CNN. He said his first interview was with New York Governor Mario Cuomo, since then his guests have formed a who’s who of world leaders, actors and musicians. One of King’s greatest coups came in 1992, when Texas billionaire Ross Perot announced his presidential bid on the show.
Last night’s programme included comedian Bill Maher and US General David Petraeus, who was appointed head of Nato’s military operations in Afghanistan last week.
Jon Klein, president of CNNUS, said: “He will end his run with Larry King Live on his own terms, sometime this fall. Larry is a beloved member of the CNN family and will continue to contribute to our air with periodic specials

Walter H. Shorenstein dies at 95;

Democratic Party fundraiser and San Francisco real estate mogul
He headed one of the country's largest privately owned real estate firms, with holdings across the nation, and was the California Democratic Party's 1985 Man of the Year.
By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times
Walter H. Shorenstein, known as a titan of downtown San Francisco real estate development and a highly influential Democratic Party donor and fundraiser, has died. He was 95.
Shorenstein, former chairman and chief executive of the Shorenstein Co., died of natural causes Thursday at his home in San Francisco, said a family spokesperson.
"He was a man of extraordinary vision, leadership and wisdom," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said in a statement, describing Shorenstein as "a proud San Franciscan, a great American and a dear friend."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) called Shorenstein "a civic giant whose legacy is imprinted on the skylines of San Francisco, Oakland and many cities across the nation."
"He was a street-smart, self-made man whose business acumen was matched by a lifelong dedication to both politics and philanthropy," Feinstein said in a statement.
A World War II veteran who said he arrived in San Francisco after the war with "no job, a pregnant wife and less than $1,000 to my name," Shorenstein went on to head one of the country's largest privately owned real estate firms, with holdings across the nation.
By 1985, when he bought Bank of America's 52-story world headquarters in downtown San Francisco, Shorenstein was known as the city's biggest landlord. He estimated at the time that he owned or managed about 25% of the building space in San Francisco, some 10 million square feet of office and commercial real estate.
"It's the premier building in the world," Shorenstein told the San Francisco Chronicle the day the Bank of America deal was announced. "There is no comparison."
At the time, Shorenstein had recently been named the California Democratic Party's 1985 Man of the Year.
He had donated $190,000 to help bring the Democratic National Convention to San Francisco in 1984 and spearheaded efforts to raise an additional $1.8 million.
"When Walter Shorenstein asks for a contribution, people sit up and listen," Thomas E. Horn, attorney for the host committee for the convention, told The Times in 1985.
Charles T. Manatt, a former California and national Democratic Party chairman, described Shorenstein on Friday as "a very stand-up guy and longtime stalwart of the Democratic Party campaigns going back 50 or more years."
"For many years," Manatt said, "Walter Shorenstein and [movie mogul] Lew Wasserman were the two leading people as far as both personal support and also getting other people of good names to support the national party, and the presidential candidates and the Senate candidates as well.
"He was certainly very involved in the strategy-making of many of the different campaigns," Manatt said.The walls of Shorenstein's office, The Times reported in 1985, were filled with inscribed photos and mementos of former Presidents Johnson and Carter and former Vice President Walter Mondale.
A year earlier, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter had spent the night at Shorenstein's Seacliff mansion on their way to China.
In 1993, at the request of then-Mayor Frank Jordan, Shorenstein played a key role in the successful effort to keep the San Francisco Giants from moving to Florida by assembling and chairing a consortium of investors to purchase the baseball team.
Shorenstein was chairman of the 1975 Vietnam orphans airlift that matched the children with families in the U.S. He was also chairman of the national committee for the 50th anniversary celebration in 1995 of the signing of the United Nations charter in San Francisco.
Shorenstein made multimillion-dollar donations to a number of universities, including establishing the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University.
He and his wife, Phyllis, also endowed what is now the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in memory of his daughter Joan, a CBS news producer who died of cancer in 1985.
In 1992, Shorenstein made an unexpected appearance in the news when Nancy Novack, his 48-year-old former assistant, filed a lawsuit that claimed he had sexually harassed her for years before she was unfairly fired. The suit was settled, with terms that were kept confidential.
The son of a clothier, Shorenstein was born Feb. 23, 1915, in Glen Cove, N.Y. He attended Pennsylvania State University and the University of Pennsylvania before serving in the Army Air Forces during World War II. -After his discharge as a major, Shorenstein began his career in commercial real estate when he joined the brokerage firm Milton Meyer & Co. in property sales and management.
He became a partner in 1951, and two years later Time magazine named him a "Leader of Tomorrow." In 1960, he became president and sole owner of the company, which later took his name.
Shorenstein, who stepped down as chairman and chief executive about 10 years ago, was ranked No. 371 on Forbes magazine's list of the "400 Richest Americans" in 2009 with a net worth of $1 billion.
Phyllis, Shorenstein's wife of 49 years, died in 1994.
He is survived by his children, Douglas Shorenstein and Carole Shorenstein Hays, and six grandchildren.
dennis.mclellan@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

Democrats mulling stand-alone jobless aid
By ANDREW TAYLOR and STEPHEN OHLEMACHER (AP)
WASHINGTON — The demise of Democrats' jobs-agenda legislation means that unemployment benefits will phase out for more than 200,000 people a week. Governors who had counted on fresh federal aid will now have to consider more budget cuts, tax increases and layoffs of state workers.
Democratic officials said the House may try to revive the long-stalled jobless aid bill next week as a stand-alone bill shorn of controversial tax and spending provisions that prompted Senate Republicans to filibuster it on Thursday.
But the Senate may not have enough time to clear the measure for President Barack Obama's desk before leaving Washington for the Fourth of July recess. The impasse has meant that more than 1.2 million people have lost unemployment benefits averaging $300 a week.
The aides required anonymity to speak freely about internal party strategy.
Stymied by Republicans, Democrats are at a loss as they struggle to help pump up the economy in the run-up to congressional elections this fall.
Senate Democrats cut billions from the bill in an attempt to attract enough Republican votes to overcome a filibuster. But the 57-41 vote Thursday fell three votes short of the 60 required to crack a GOP filibuster.
"Democrats have given Republicans every chance to say 'yes' to this bill and support economic recovery for our middle class," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "But they made a choice to say 'no' yet again."
President Barack Obama will keep pressing Congress to pass the bill, his spokesman said. But Democrats haven't shown they can come up with the votes.
That's leading Democrats to consider breaking the jobless aid measure from the catchall bill and try to pass it as a stand-alone $33 billion measure next week before leaving Washington for a weeklong Independence Day recess. Key Senate Republicans, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, are pressing the idea.
But a Reid spokesman said the majority leader is committed to passing a Wall Street reform bill next week and predicted Republicans would block any move to do a stand-alone jobless aid bill after that measure passes.
The stand-alone approach proved to be the way forward for a measure to temporarily spare doctors from a 21 percent cut in Medicare payments, which Obama signed Friday.
The Medicare funding had been a part of the larger bill to provide extended unemployment benefits for laid-off workers and provide states with billions of dollars to avert layoffs. When it became clear Senate Republicans would block the larger bill, Democrats begrudgingly voted for the smaller Medicare fix.
"It is clear that Senate Republicans have no intention of passing any jobs legislation, whether it is tied to physician payments or not," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Congressional Democrats began the year with an aggressive agenda of passing a series of bills designed to create jobs. One has become law, offering tax breaks to companies that hire unemployed workers. Others stalled as lawmakers, after hearing from angry voters, became wary of adding to the national debt, which stands at $13 trillion.
"The debt is out of control," said Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass.
Republicans said the bill would have expanded government, not boosted the economy.
"The only thing Republicans have opposed in this debate are job-killing taxes and adding to the national debt," said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. "What we're not willing to do is use worthwhile programs as an excuse to burden our children and our grandchildren with an even bigger national debt than we've already got."
The rejected bill would have provided $16 billion in new aid to states, preserving the jobs of thousands of state and local government workers and providing what White House officials called an insurance policy against a double-dip recession. It also included dozens of tax breaks sought by business lobbyists and tax increases on domestically produced oil and on investment fund managers.
"This is a bill that would remedy serious challenges that American families face as a result of this Great Recession," said Max Baucus, D-Mont., the chief author of the bill. "This is a bill that works to build a stronger economy. This is a bill to put Americans back to work."
The legislation had been sharply pared back after weeks of negotiations with GOP moderates Snowe and Collins, but they were not persuaded to support the measure. The latest draft would have added $33 billion to the deficit.
The Medicare bill signed by Obama delays cuts in payments to doctors until the end of November — after congressional elections — when lawmakers hope the political climate is better for passing a more permanent, and expensive, solution.
There was some urgency to approve the funding because Medicare announced last week it would begin processing claims it had already received for June at the lower rate. Lawmakers said some doctors have already stopped seeing new Medicare patients because of the cuts.
The bill increases payments to providers by 2.2 percent. The legislation, which costs about $6.5 billion, is paid for with a series of health care and pension changes that both Democrats and Republicans agreed to.
The Medicare cuts were required under a 1990s budget-cutting law that Congress has routinely waived. The latest extension expired May 31 after concerns about adding to the budget deficit held up the larger bill that also included unemployment benefits.
Obama praised Congress for passing the measure, while urging lawmakers to work on a more permanent solution

Jobless aid measure dying in Senate
By ANDREW TAYLOR AP
WASHINGTON — Republicans in the Senate appear likely to kill legislation to provide continued unemployment checks to millions of people and provide states with billions of dollars to avert layoffs.
It would be a bitter defeat for President Barack Obama and Capitol Hill Democrats, who have been trying to advance the measure for months as an insurance policy against a double-dip recession.
Despite another round of cuts to the measure aimed at pacifying GOP deficit concerns, the measure seems doomed to die by a filibuster in a vote expected as early as Thursday.
Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he would pull the measure from the floor if Democrats lose the vote. Democrats hope that political pressure from voters and business groups might eventually revive the measure.
The latest version of the measure contains a variety of provisions sought by lawmakers in both parties, blending jobless aid averaging about $300 a week with the renewal of dozens of tax cuts sought by business groups and a host of other legislation. It is considerably smaller than a version that passed with GOP help just three months ago.
"It adds new taxes and over $30 billion to an already staggering $13 trillion dollar national debt," said Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
The catchall measure also includes $16 billion for state governments to avert layoffs, farm disaster aid, $1 billion for a youth summer jobs initiative and an extension of a bond program that subsidizes interest costs for state and local infrastructure projects. It would levy a new tax on investment fund managers but extend tax breaks such as lucrative credits that help businesses finance research and develop new products, and a sales tax deduction that mainly helps people in states without income taxes.
The death of the measure would mean that more than 200,000 people a week would lose their jobless benefits because they would be unable to reapply for additional tiers of benefits enacted since 2008. People seeking the popular homebuyer tax credit would be denied a paperwork extension approved by the Senate last week.
"This is a bill that would remedy serious challenges that American families face as a result of this Great Recession," said Max Baucus, D-Mont., the chief author of the bill. "This is a bill that works to build a stronger economy. This is a bill to put Americans back to work."
And doctors are livid about a 21 percent cut in their Medicare payments imposed last week; the bill would have afforded them a six-month reprieve from the cuts. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Thursday dropped her demand that the Medicare fee fix be part of the broader measure and told reporters that the House may clear a stand-alone bill for Obama's signature as early as Thursday night.
By the end of this week, about 1.2 million people will have lost their jobless benefits since a temporary extension expired at the beginning of the month, according to Labor Department estimates.
Thirty states had been counting on federal support to help balance their budgets for the fiscal year beginning next week since a $24 billion version had earlier passed both House and Senate. Without the money, governors warn they'll have to lay off tens of thousands of workers.
The pared-back $16 billion aid package would have meant almost $2 billion for cash-starved California and more than $2 billion for New York, according to estimates by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research and advocacy group.
Crestfallen Democrats tried in vain to win support from moderate Republicans like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, leaving them apparently two votes short of the 60 needed to defeat a filibuster. But talks collapsed Wednesday, aides said, leading Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to offer a pared-back measure that would add $33 billion to the deficit over the upcoming decade.
The bill has long been considered a must-pass measure, but the political sands have shifted since it first passed in March. That vote came in the wake of a political scalding for Republicans after Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., blocked a short-term extension of jobless aid.
In the interim, however, the debt crisis in Europe and growing anxiety on deficits and debt among voters has turned Republicans against the legislation, even though it's been cut considerably since passage of a March version that would have added about $100 billion to the debt.
Most of the measure — except for a six-month extension of jobless benefits for people who have been out of work for more than six months — is financed with offsetting tax increases or spending cuts, including more than $10 billion cut from last year's stimulus bill. Congress has always approved additional unemployment benefits as a deficit-financed emergency measure.
Democratic leaders said they bent over backwards to accommodate demands by Republicans for a smaller measure. Among the cuts revealed Wednesday was a more than $10 cut from last year's stimulus bill, mostly buy paring back food stamp benefits by about $11 a month per beneficiary.
"They asked to have it reduced, we did it. They asked to have it paid for, we did it," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.
A spokesman for Snowe confirmed she would vote to support the filibuster. She had unsuccessfully pressed for changes to a tax reform provision aimed at small businesses that shelter income as dividends exempt from payroll taxes. Collins told reporters she is undecided.
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

Cutting Off the Unemployed
Editorial NY Times

It was bad enough when the Senate left town for a long Memorial Day break without passing a bill to extend expiring unemployment benefits. It’s worse now.
Back in session for nearly three weeks, the Senate still has not acted. That means that 900,000 jobless workers have already lost their benefits, a number that will swell to an estimated 1.6 million people if an extension is not passed by the July Fourth holiday. Lost benefits — the average check is $309 a week — deprives struggling Americans of cash they need for buying food, paying the rent or mortgage and other essentials.
All indications are that when the Senate finally does pass a bill, it will be stingy and cynical — hacking away at jobless benefits and fiscal aid to cash-strapped states, while preserving tax breaks for the wealthy and other well-connected political donors.
The problem, as always, is getting 60 votes to overcome hurdles imposed by the Republican minority. But Republicans aren’t the only culprits here.
Passage was delayed last week as several Democratic senators — including John Kerry of Massachusetts, Mark Warner of Virginia and Maria Cantwell of Washington — worked to water down a provision in the bill that would have largely closed an unfair loophole that benefits rich fund managers in investment partnerships. Unfortunately, the senators seem to have won that fight.
This has led to even more maneuvering. Senator Olympia Snowe, a Republican of Maine, is now trying to eliminate another tax provision in the bill. The provision, which would raise roughly $9 billion over 10 years, would stop owners of some small corporations from overpaying themselves in profits and underpaying themselves in salary to lessen their payroll taxes.
At the same time, many lawmakers — mostly Republicans, but not all — are claiming that extending jobless benefits and aid to states is simply too costly. That may sound like good politics, but it is very bad economics. If the government fails to keep spending when the economy is weak, especially on core safety-net issues, it will only worsen unemployment and impede the chances of recovery.
Neither basic economics nor basic decency seems to matter. To win votes for passage, the Democratic leadership has agreed to drop the extra $25 a week that was added to unemployment benefits last year as part of the stimulus package. That would cut $6 billion from the roughly $40 billion it would cost to extend benefits through November. Senate leaders also are considering sizable cuts to the bill’s proposed $24 billion aid package for the states.
It’s unclear if even those cutbacks will be enough to win passage. What is clear is that unemployment is high, the safety net is frayed and the Senate has other priorities than helping struggling Americans.

Getting Shit Done
Andrew Sullivan
What are the odds that Obama's huge success yesterday in getting BP to pledge a cool $20 billion to recompense the "small people" in the Gulf will get the same attention as his allegedly dismal speech on Tuesday night? If you take Memeorandum as an indicator, it really is no contest. The speech is still being dissected by language experts, but the $20 billion that is the front page news in the NYT today? Barely anywhere on the blogs.
This is just a glimpse into the distortion inherent in our current political and media culture. It's way easier to comment on a speech - his hands were moving too much! - than to note the truly substantive victory, apparently personally nailed down by Obama, in the White House yesterday. If leftwing populism in America were anything like as potent as right-wing populism - Matt Bai has a superb analysis of this in the NYT today - there would be cheering in the streets. But there's nada, but more leftist utopianism and outrage on MSNBC. And since there's no end to this spill without relief wells, this is about as much as Obama can do, short of monitoring clean-up efforts, or rather ongoing management of the ecological nightmare of an unstopped and unstoppable wound in the ocean floor.
I sure understand why people feel powerless and angry about the vast forces that control our lives and over which we seem to have only fitful control - big government and big business. But it seems to me vital to keep our heads and remain focused on what substantively can be done to address real problems, and judge Obama on those terms. When you do, you realize that the left's "disgruntleist" faction needs to take a chill pill.
Take Iran. Everyone - part from still-delusional neocons - accepts that this is a hugely difficult issue. To read the neocon right, you'd think all our problems would be solved by the president declaring the regime "evil" and launching military strikes all over the country. Sound familiar? In the real world, most of us understand that the military option is madness, that the machinery of repression is strong enough for the coup regime to survive - but only just. Since Obama was elected, the legitimacy of the Tehran regime has been shredded - and I'd argue that removing America from the equation helped Iran's opposition, rather than stymying it. Most of us knew, moreover, that Russia and China would oppose any and all sanctions.
But in fact, after a painstaking process in which Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have been successfully cornered in world opinion as the transgressors, sanctions, with Russia's and China's support, have passed the UN Security Council. More focused sanctions are in force against the financial interests of the Revolutionary Guards, and will soon come from the US Congress and European capitals. The price of Ahmadi's paranoia will be high, which may explain his recent fulminations. Will this pragmatic step resolve the situation immediately? Of course not. Does it make a lot of pragmatic sense? Yes it does. Is it the best we can truly do? I suspect so. In other words: Obama and Clinton got difficult shit done. I think part of the message of "Goodbye To All That" as a core rationale for the Obama presidency is acknowledging when a president does difficult, messy but necessary things.
My own provisional judgment is the same on the economy, where Obama's actions helped prevent what could have been a Second Great Depression. Historians will fight over this, but it seems pretty clear to me right now that Obama picked most of the least worst options and is prepared, unlike the GOP, to speak honestly about the deficit in the next two years. In the bank bailouts (much more successful than we first thought), the stimulus (still working), the health insurance reform (a real start on a deep and vexing problem across the developed world), and even the swarm of issues around Gitmo (torture has ended, while necessary, lawful military detentions and renditions continue), you see the same pattern of emotionally unsatisfying but structurally deep changes in the orientation of the ship of state. This is very gradual change we can believe in.
In other words, while I haven't scanted on occasional criticism, I remain an enthusiast for this presidency's competence and long-term direction. Even on gay rights, where I have whined the loudest, we have achieved an end to the HIV travel ban, and the legislative end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, with a buy-in from the top brass. Broader progress is coming, as it should, not by presidential diktat but by the decisions and actions of those in the trenches, most notably the current work of Ted Olson and David Boies in grasping the core matter at hand: unconstitutional, arbitrary, animus-based, government-imposed discrimination against a minority. In less than two years, on another obvious policy of irrationality - the war on marijuana - the Obama years have also seen a deeper sea change than any of us expected.
I don't see all this as ideologically liberal or leftist - which is where I agree with some of Obama's sternest critics. But I never saw Obama as such and never supported him as such. He may, however, end up a liberal hero. To see why check out Michael Tomasky's sharp essay in Democracy Journal. Money quote:
Our political culture affects the way we think about the past as well. Too often, when progressives think of American history, we think only of the snapshots: those glorious moments when a historic bill is signed into law, or when the great progressive leader thunderingly confronts the forces of reaction. It’s good to remember those; they are our lodestars. But they are moments. Actual history is slower, more tedious, and certainly less uplifting. It’s not for Obama’s sake, but for liberalism’s over the long haul, that we need to consider this reality and proceed in full awareness of it. It’s only by seeing this fuller picture that we can know how history actually unfolds in real time and place our present experience within that context. We don’t do nearly enough of that. Cable news and op-ed pages and websites are a kind of modern-day camera obscura, giving us an image to be sure, accurate in a way, but upside-down.
The changes we want to see won’t happen in 18 months, or in two years, or four, or probably even eight. Indeed, the entire Obama era, if it lasts eight years, is best thought of not as a culmination, or a self-contained time frame that should be judged a failure if X, Y, and Z don’t happen. It’s the start of a process that may take 16 years, or 24; that may be along the way interrupted or undone; that will be fought tooth and nail, as we’ve plainly seen these recent months, by others whose idea of America is incomprehensible to us but who are citizens too, with the same rights we have. They (and by the way: no despair on their side! There is rage, to be sure, but judging from the Tea Party events I’ve been to and watched, it is a joyful rage) and the corporate interests and the elected representatives on their side have a lot of power. Liberal despair only reinforces their power and helps to ensure that whatever gains are made during the Obama term could quickly be rolled back. And if that happens, we are back, ten years from now, to fighting the usual rearguard battles.
And that's why Obama's incrementalism, his refusal to pose as a presidential magician, and his resistance to taking the bait of the fetid right (he's president - not a cable news host) seems to me to show not weakness, but a lethal and patient strength. And a resilient ambition.

Know hope.

Newburgh Terrorism Case May Establish a Line for Entrapment

By WILLIAM GLABERSON
WHITE PLAINS — When four Muslim converts from Newburgh, N.Y., were charged last year with planning to bomb Bronx synagogues and shoot down military planes at Stewart International Airport, officials described the plan as a chilling effort to commit local terrorism.
On Monday, the trial of the men was indefinitely postponed by a federal judge. But while this highly unusual turn of events threw much of the case into chaos, it helped clarify a central question: Did a shadowy informant encourage the men to plot mass murder, or did he go too far and manufacture a plan for mayhem?
The judge, Colleen McMahon, excused potential jurors on Monday and criticized the prosecutors for being late in giving the defense an investigator’s report suggesting that the men — a group of ex-convicts and drug offenders — were incapable of carrying out a complex attack without the informer, a fast-talker who was on the government payroll.
The dispute, as well as previous comments from Judge McMahon, suggests that the case will focus on the defense claim that the four were entrapped with promises of a $250,000 payment and a BMW, and that the men were so ill-equipped to plan an attack that none had a driver’s license or a car.
Infiltrators — civilian informers and government agents — have played a part in more than 30 terrorism investigations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, including the plan to bomb the Herald Square subway station, the plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the arrests last week of two New Jersey men on charges of seeking to join a militant group in Somalia.
But some terrorism experts say that the informant’s role in the Newburgh plot was more active than most, and that the case could define when a permissible sting operation becomes illegal entrapment.
“The degree to which the government seems to have led on the defendants is much more aggressive than we have seen in other cases,” said Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, which tracks terrorism prosecutions.
Defense lawyers in the Newburgh case refer to the informant — Shaheed Hussain, a Pakistani who was an informant in an earlier terrorism sting in Albany that was controversial — as an agent provocateur who earned his keep by scouring mosques for easy targets. Mr. Hussain “proposed, directed, supplied, funded and facilitated every aspect of the ‘terrorist’ plot,” defense lawyers said in a court filing. He attended to every detail, they said, including assembling weapons when the defendants could not follow his instructions.
The prosecutors declined to comment. But in legal filings they have said the investigation was “exemplary law enforcement work” and argued that secret recordings would show that the leader of the group, James Cromitie, was a “hate-filled, virulent anti-Semite who wanted to commit terrorist acts against Jews and the United States.”
They say Mr. Cromitie, a career criminal, was the real instigator of the plan. Mr. Cromitie, 43 at the time, referred to Osama bin Laden as “my brother,” according to prosecutors.
In the elaborate sting, Mr. Hussain arranged for the plotters to pick up fake bombs. The prosecutors noted that Mr. Cromitie and his three co-defendants “actually showed up and placed what they believed to be improvised explosive devices” in front of two synagogues, the Riverdale Temple and the Riverdale Jewish Center. They were arrested at the scene.
In May, Judge McMahon declined a defense request to dismiss the charges because of Mr. Hussain’s role in the plot.
But she noted that the case was centering on the sting. “Did the government become aware of potential criminal activity and take action to neutralize a real terrorist threat,” she wrote, “or did it locate some disaffected individuals, manufacture a phony terrorist plot that the individuals would (and could) never have dreamed up or carried out on their own, and then wrongfully induce them to participate in it?”
The men — Mr. Cromitie, David Williams IV, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen — could face life in prison if convicted of charges that include conspiracy and attempting to use weapons of mass destruction and antiaircraft missiles.
The entrapment defense seeks acquittal with the claim that a government agent fostered a crime that a defendant was not predisposed to commit. It has been notably unsuccessful in terrorism cases.
Ms. Greenberg of the Center on Law and Security said that of the more than 30 terrorism prosecutions involving informers since 2001, the center knew of no case in which the entrapment defense had been successful.
Still, civil liberties lawyers say they have been troubled as information has emerged in court cases about informants who have flattered and deceived Muslim men in one community after another. Christopher Dunn, the associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the case before Judge McMahon could define the limits of the terrorism sting.
“The Newburgh case,” Mr. Dunn said, “may be a pivotal test of just how far the government can go.”
Some lawyers argue that even an over-the-top performance by an informant who flashes money and pushes audacious terrorism schemes may serve the government well. Dru Stevenson, a professor at the South Texas College of Law who has written about entrapment in terrorism cases, said the government might want to foster the suspicion that comes from a clumsy infiltrator.
“If you have a person who is capable of committing terrorism,” Mr. Stevenson said, “you want them to worry that the person recruiting them at the mosque is an F.B.I. informer.”
But infiltration and lies have a cost, said Shamshad Ahmad, a physics lecturer at the State University of New York at Albany who is president of the local mosque. He knew the two Muslim men in the Albany plot, the mosque’s imam and a pizzeria owner, who were convicted after an intricate sting.
In Albany, Mr. Hussain, the same informant who later worked in Newburgh, spun out a fake money laundering plan that included a demonstration of a shoulder-fired missile, along with gifts and false friendship.
“I never imagined the United States would do this,” said Dr. Ahmad, who came to this country from India more than 30 years ago. “Soviet Union I could have expected it. Third world country, yes. Mafia, yes. But not the Justice Department.”

The President’s Moment
Editorial NY TIMES

If ever there was a test of President Obama’s vision of government — one that cannot solve all problems, but does what people cannot do for themselves — it is this nerve-racking early summer of 2010, with oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and far too many Americans out of work for far too long.
The country is frustrated and apprehensive and still waiting for Mr. Obama to put his vision into action.
The president cannot plug the leak or magically clean up the fouled Gulf of Mexico. But he and his administration need to do a lot more to show they are on top of this mess, and not perpetually behind the curve.
It is well within Mr. Obama’s power to keep his administration and Congressional Democrats focused on what the economy needs: jobs and stimulus. Voters are anxious about the deficit. But the president needs to tell them the truth — that without more spending the economy could remain weak for a very long time.
Unless Mr. Obama says it, no other politician will. Just the other day, the House passed an unemployment benefits extension from which Democrats, not Republicans, had stripped vital measures that would have helped lots of Americans, but did not close a tax loophole for billionaires.
Americans need to know that Mr. Obama, whose coolness can seem like detachment, is engaged. This is not a mere question of presentation or stagecraft, although the White House could do better at both. (We cringed when he told the “Today” show that he had spent important time figuring out “whose ass to kick” about the spill. Everyone knew that answer on Day 2.)
Any assessment of the 44th president has to start with the fact that he took office under an extraordinary burden of problems created by President George W. Bush’s ineptness and blind ideology. He has faced a stone wall of Republican opposition. And Mr. Obama has had real successes. He won a stimulus bill that helped avert a depression; he got a historic health care reform through Congress; the bitter memory of Mr. Bush’s presidency is fading around the world.
But a year and a half into this presidency, the contemplative nature that was so appealing in a candidate can seem indecisive in a president. His promise of bipartisanship seems naïve. His inclination to hold back, then ride to the rescue, has sometimes made problems worse.
It certainly should not have taken days for Mr. Obama to get publicly involved in the oil spill, or even longer for his administration to start putting the heat on BP for its inadequate response and failure to inform the public about the size of the spill. (Each day, it seems, brings new revelations about the scope of the disaster.) It took too long for Mr. Obama to say that the Coast Guard and not BP was in charge of operations in the gulf and it’s still not clear that is true.
He should not have hesitated to suspend the expanded oil drilling program and he should have moved a lot faster to begin political and criminal investigations of the spill. If BP was withholding information, failing to cooperate or not providing the ships needed to process the oil now flowing to the surface, he should have told the American people and the world.
These are matters of competence and leadership. This is a time for Mr. Obama to decisively show both.

Phoney Question (SLATE)
Should Obama have called BP executive Tony Hayward?
By John Dickerson
In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill have come a lot of new rules for presidential behavior. Based on what Obama has been criticized for—and the length he's gone to avoid criticism—he and future presidents battling a crisis will be expected to make weekly visits to the disaster area and cancel foreign trips, White House cultural events, and courtside interviews. Also, quit playing golf in advance of the crisis. Oh, and in a lasting (everlasting) crisis, the president must show anger, or at least urgency—in press conferences, on cable shows, and in leaked newspaper accounts—that includes, but is not limited to, jaw clenching and mild swearing.
Most of these rituals are ad-hoc—a pinch of tradition and a big dose of free-floating political pressure from opponents and pundits. The newest item on the crisis etiquette list concerns the president's use of the telephone. In the 50 days since the gulf oil spill, Obama has not called the CEO of British Petroleum, Tony Hayward. Is this another example of Obama's ironic detachment from his duties as president or a meaningless act of theater he has wisely blown off?
It might be both. We require a lot from our presidents, and our demands are contradictory. They must be able to stop oil leaking from the center of the earth and reverse the momentum of a $14 trillion economy. Then, under the weight of those kinds of stressful demands, we also ask that they sit through countless ceremonies, celebrations, and other time-consuming tedium. The presidential phone call encapsulates this confusing tension nicely. Presidents call Super Bowl coaches and congratulate negligible dignitaries on their elections. But they also are supposed to have the ultimate hot line, calling world leaders to bend them to America's will.
It is one of the symbols of the boundless power of the office that a president can pick up the phone and say, "Get me X," and X will be on the other end of the line shortly. (This one knows not to say, "Get me Osama Bin Laden.")
Every White House spurts out pictures of the president on the phone, issuing orders and pressing the case, to show action: Look how busy he is! The most famous case was in 1969, when Richard Nixon called Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong just after they set foot on the moon. Every chief executive should be seen as in command on the phone (if perhaps not as detail-oriented as Lyndon Johnson was when he called to dictate the particulars of his trousers to his tailor Joe Haggar).
Obama has boasted about being a phone-talker. Even when he was a senator, he told the New York Times that he loved that "everybody takes your phone calls." Obama also said in that interview, "If there is a topic I'm interested in, I can call the smartest people in the world on that topic and talk to them about it." His aides have promoted this image of a president who is not only curious but actively engaged in reaching out to communicate. The caption is the same for each one: "taking care of business." If it's an irritating ritual of the presidency, it's also one they've encouraged.
So we're not crazy for wondering whether Obama has put in a call to Hayward. When NBC's Matt Lauer asked the question, Obama said that "my experience is when you talk to a guy like a BP CEO, he's going to say all the right things to me. I'm not interested in words. I'm interested in actions." Fair enough. But. If words are going to be defined as the absence of action, Obama is in trouble. Indeed, that's what Obama is promising us with his response to the spill. He's talking a lot but also promising that he's going to act. You could imagine some number of voters saying about the president, "He's going to say all the right things to me. I'm not interested in words. I'm interested in actions."
At the same time, what would be the point of calling Hayward? The president brushed off Lauer's suggestion that on the phone he could give the BP CEO a piece of his mind. He said that simply getting angry might be what commentators want but won't produce a solution. It's true. They're not going to come up with a new strategy for plugging the well in a one-to-one chat. Nor would a call really satisfy the vast and conflicted pent up demand for a public display of emotion. To do that, the president would have to bop around like Bobby McFerrin.
Of course, in a sense it doesn't matter that a call would be substantive or puny PR. When it came out last fall that Obama hadn't talked with his Afghanistan commander, Stanley McChrystal, in the month after the general submitted his assessment of conditions there, that was shocking. The president had said Afghanistan was his top foreign-policy priority, and yet with his penchant for direct inquiry, he hadn't talked to the general he'd put there to turn things around? (Days later, the White House put together a quick meeting with Obama and the general.)
But calling the BP CEO is not really analogous to the McChrystal case, because Obama is not gathering facts from a subordinate who serves under him. Plus, he wouldn't trust Hayward to be straight, anyway. By the end of the day Tuesday, Sarah Palin published a long critique of Obama's lack of a phone call, saying it showed he was too trusting of BP. "The current administration may be unaware that it's the President's duty, meeting on a CEO-to-CEO level with Hayward, to verify what BP reports," she said. It's hard to see how a president would have the time or inclination to do the fact-checking himself, given other priorities related to the spill—or the special knowledge to it (though he had deputized his Ph.D. energy secretary to do it). Given Hayward's performance and the larger BP confusion or evasion about the oil flow, it's hard to imagine how a phone call would spring the truth, either.
A phone call can send a message. But the messages Obama wants to convey to BP are more powerful when made in public. The time has passed for the low-grade spin of a phone call. Obama scoffs at the demand that he vent, but it's not that he doesn't want to do it. He's already tried and it didn't work. Three weeks ago in the Rose Garden, he chastised company executives for finger-pointing. Showing anger at BP executives in front of the cameras puts public pressure on BP, shows the government isn't too close to the company, and shows the public that the president is doing something. His public warning to press BP not to "nickel and dime" Gulf area residents is a good sound-bite example.
In a crisis, the silly duties of the presidency go from merely annoying to threatening, because they distract from fixing the problem. Another such distraction will no doubt arise over the location of the president's summer vacation. If Obama vacations in Martha's Vineyard as he has before, critics will pounce. He's not on the job and not heeding his own travel advice, which has been that families should vacation in the Gulf. He has made the pitch that the waters are safe during his emergency visits. Why not send a stronger message by vacationing there himself? The president will have to decide whether this is a silly question that can be ignored or an ad-hoc ritual that must be performed. In the end, it's his call.

Sunday London Times
Another disaster awaits the land of oil addicts
BP has a shameful safety record, but America must also change its ways
Andrew Sullivan

There is something brutal about the rhetoric that has been coming from Barack Obama’s administration about the open wound in the ocean floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Talk of keeping “a boot on the throat” of BP is not your usual Obama cool.
But the president is not the only one furious with the oil company, on which he depends for some kind of end to the nightmare now reaching the coasts of Florida and Louisiana. BP signs have been vandalised; its green logo has been mercilessly lampooned on the web; its beleaguered chief executive has the permanent expression of a dog being washed; the company has been renamed “Beyond Patience” by a leading senator. And its stock plummeted last week.
Is this remotely fair? Don’t accidents happen? Is an iconic British company, whose stock is integral to so many British pensions and mutual funds, being used as a handy pinata for an angry nation?
At first blush, the onslaught against BP does seem a little much. But once you examine its recent record, the cornercutting and recklessness that precipitated this calamity, and the company’s enmeshment with the regulators who are supposed to be keeping watch ... well, you tend to get more angry, not less. Take a simple comparison with other multinational oil companies. Over the past three years, the US government department that monitors compliance with health and safety regulations has cited several companies for negligence or corner-cutting. Sunoco and ConocoPhillips have had eight “egregious, wilful” safety violations apiece. Citgo had two. Exxon had one. BP had ... 760.
These citations were not minor. As ABC News has reported, they were based on how BP showed “intentional disregard for the requirements of the [law], or showed plain indifference to employee safety and health”. Before the deaths of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon rig, an explosion at a BP refinery in Texas in 2005 killed 15 people and injured 180. An investigation found that BP had violated clear provisions of the Clean Air Act, and the company admitted its culpability by paying $50m in fines.
But the best is yet to come. In rebuilding the plant, BP failed again to follow the procedures demanded for safety, which meant it was fined another $87m last year — the biggest fine of its kind in history. It turned out that there was a “systemic safety problem” at all of BP’s refineries in the US. For good measure, a broken BP pipeline pumped 200,000 gallons of crude oil into the Alaska wilderness in 2006 — the company was found criminally negligent over corrosion in the pipe. No wonder a former special investigator of BP for the Environmental Protection Agency called the company “a convicted serial environmental criminal”.
Worse, it appears perfectly clear that a company making a profit of £8.75 billion last year can afford simply to pay the fines, bury the dead, hire the PR companies and carry on. And when you look at the preliminary facts about the Deepwater Horizon case, you see exactly the same recklessness. There’s no final word on how the disaster occurred (and we should wait for the full report) but internal BP memos show that there were several red flags before the explosion — from the type of cement used, to the readings on the blowout preventer, to a pressure test that showed a huge abnormality — that were ignored. Even BP’s own investigator concluded that the workers had made a “fundamental mistake”.
From this record and the preliminary accounts of the latest disaster, BP does indeed deserve the public whacking it is now receiving — and, in my view, those responsible should be prosecuted and jailed. Whether the latest attempts to cap the well manage to stem the flow or not, what is being done to the Gulf of Mexico is an appalling crime of negligence. Shareholders should not be complaining about the Obama administration’s rhetoric. They should have been demanding improved safety procedures to prevent such a disaster from occurring.
It’s also true that it is the US government’s responsibility to ensure that safety procedures are strictly followed. And for a long time the government has been Awol. Since Dick Cheney delivered the message at the beginning of George W Bush’s administration that domestic oil production was an urgent priority (yes, in a lovely irony, Halliburton, the company once run by Cheney, supplied the suspect cement for the well), the already unhealthy relationship between regulators and the regulated has become far worse.
Oil companies failed to report fully what they were planning, and permits were approved with almost absurd speed. In the Deepwater Horizon case, a permit was approved a mere 10 minutes after it was submitted. Obama did nothing to stop this syndrome when he came in, and his interior secretary, Ken Salazar, is well known for his cosiness with big oil. That will change now.
Alas, what won’t change is the oil addiction that has forced the US to drill deeper and deeper in more and more treacherous waters, where techniques carry more risks precisely because the terrain is brand new. If you want to assign real, structural blame, it belongs in the end to the American people, who simply refuse to wean themselves off carbon and want to continue having the cheapest petrol in the West. This habit bolsters America’s enemies, empowers oil-rich Islamic states and is slowly cooking the planet.
Meanwhile, the climate change bill passed in the House of Representatives remains stalled in the Senate. Because deep-sea oil exploration was a key way to get some Republicans on board for the package, the bill that might in the long run have prevented the same thing happening again has been killed by the BP gusher and a suspension of deep-sea drilling. The obvious solution — some kind of carbon tax — remains anathema. Remember that America is a country whose de facto leader of the opposition, Sarah Palin, ran on a slogan of “Drill, baby, drill!”
Which means that it’s not just a question of when this ghastly gusher is stopped; it’s a question of when exactly this will happen again. And there will be another company to blame then, like a crooked drug dealer whose addicted customer is getting sicker and sicker and more and more determined to get his fix. Maybe it will take an even greater disaster to force Americans to realise that they have finally hit bottom in their addiction. But I wouldn’t count on it, even then.

andrewsullivan.com

London Sunday Times
Operation calamity
The Israeli commandos who stormed a flotilla of aid ships were expecting a cakewalk – but then the bullets began to fly
Uzi Mahnaimi in Tel Aviv and Gareth Jenkins in Istanbul

Istanbul’s face has changed radically over the millennia — Greek, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Turk — but it remains one of the world’s great cities, home to a cosmopolitan and enlightened elite. There is also another Istanbul, however, one that last week lured Israel into scoring a spectacularly violent own goal and advanced the cause of militant Islam.
In the heart of the city, not far from the famous Blue Mosque and the shopping district of Nisantasi, which attracts visitors from western Europe, is Fatih, a fundamentalist stronghold where westerners are treated with suspicion and the clothing and customs speak of the Middle East.
For most of the members of Turkey’s secular middle class, who spend their lives in the air-conditioned offices and apartments, glitzy shopping centres, cafes and bars of the city’s upmarket neighbourhoods, Fatih’s narrow streets and chador-clad women could just as well be in a foreign country. Few have visited Fatih and most would laugh at the thought of it.
But it is from Fatih that Turkey’s most Islamist radical groups and organisations co-ordinate their activities and publish books and magazines extolling the virtues of a strict Islamic lifestyle — and, in many cases, openly calling on their young male readers to support the global jihad against the West.
Fatih is the headquarters of Insan Hak ve Hurriyetleri (the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, or IHH) — a name that has gone round the world since Israeli commandos killed at least nine of its activists early last Monday on a boat carrying relief supplies for Gaza.
IHH draws many of its members not just from Fatih but also from the shanty towns that encircle the sprawling city of 14m. Many are migrants from the countryside who have brought with them the conservative Islamic values of rural Anatolia.
Last week’s deadly confrontation in the eastern Mediterranean pitted a band of these tough young men — spoiling for a fight, in the opinion of one non-Turk who was on the boat — against a unit from Israel’s military elite that had no idea what it was taking on. Israeli special forces marines — who thought the task was beneath them because they had been told to cow the Turks with paintball guns — suddenly feared for their lives and started firing real bullets.
How could such a catastrophic miscalculation occur? And what really happened when Israel took on the Mavi Marmara as it cruised towards Gaza? Some of the accounts are partisan, lurid and wildly contradictory, but by the end of the week a plausible narrative was beginning to emerge.
FLOTILLA 13, Israel’s SBS-style navy frogmen, are respected as among the best of the world’s special forces. Last year the deputy commander of their frogman school, a captain, was sent on a daring operation in the eastern Mediterranean.
Sailing on a millionaire’s yacht to disguise their activity, he and his men crossed into Syrian waters just after dark, not far from the port of Tartus. Next morning they reached their operational location about a mile from a line of magnificent villas belonging to the Syrian elite.
Several commandos were sunbathing on deck, posing as tourists, when the spotters hidden on board detected a movement in the garden of one of the villas. A specialist sniper, armed with a long-range gun equipped with a silencer, was called to the upper deck.
The middle-aged Syrian general was sunbathing, fearless, in his back garden. His unsuspecting bodyguards controlled the front garden and the entrance. A single bullet was fired. No sound was heard. The general, in charge of arms sales to Hezbollah and liaison officer to North Korea, slumped back.
Before his family discovered that he was dead and not asleep, the yacht slipped into international waters. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria heard the bad news over the telephone while visiting Iran. Just before dawn, the yacht reached Flotilla 13’s base near a beautiful bay and impressive crusader castle in northern Israel. It was returned to its Israeli owner and the captain awaited his next mission.
Three weeks ago, when he was called to the briefing room, he expected another daring operation, perhaps a night-time underwater assignment to one of the Iranian ports. But when the bald-headed Flotilla 13 commander introduced the assignment, the captain was flummoxed. Some peace activists were planning to break Israel’s three-year-old blockade of Gaza with a flotilla of small ships carrying food aid, building materials and other supplies. Flotilla 13’s mission was to stop them. He was to command one of the forces boarding the largest ship, the Turkish Mavi Marmara.
What kind of mission is this, he asked, to board a passenger ship? Someone must have got it wrong, he suggested, they were not the coastguard but the most highly trained soldiers in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Send the police instead. His commander was adamant. These were the orders from the big guys.
Flotilla 13 is a small brigade with heavy-duty missions. But as from three weeks ago, all cross-border operations were called off and everyone was focused on stopping the “peace flotilla”.
“Intelligence was good,” the captain said last week during a debriefing. “We knew about all ships, their names and even specific information about some of the militants on board.”
They were told to prepare for minor resistance from passengers. Paint guns and Taser-type weapons, which they had never used, would suffice.
Because the operation was unprecedented for the commandos, they underwent several strange briefings. A psychologist told them how to deal with civilians. A lawyer explained to the stunned commandos the legal aspects of their operation. Then came a man from the foreign ministry in a three-piece suit and tie. The commandos, some of them still in swimming gear and wetsuits, gave him a friendly welcome. He was followed by the more familiar intelligence briefing and technical elements.
The captain and his men held a rehearsal. Fifty civilians were loaded onto ships and the commandos “took over”. One of them recalled: “It was a nice day out in the Mediterranean.”
The real thing began last Sunday evening. Those assigned to helicopters arrived at an air force base. Those who would be in the “Morenas” — the frogmen’s special high-speed boats — mustered at Ashdod navy base.
OUT at sea four small boats carrying international peace activists who had set out from Cyprus had a rendezvous with the Mavi Marmara, which had set sail from southern Turkey. It was under the control of the IHH, which Israel regards with deep suspicion as an associate of Hamas, the Palestinian militants in Gaza. But there were non-Turks among about 600 people on board, including Sarah Colborne, director of campaigns and operations at the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in London.
“We had assembled all the boats in international waters,” she said on her return to Britain last week. “At 11pm that night, Israeli naval boats were detected on the radar and sighted and a decision was made to move further back into international waters.
“We managed to get some broadcasts out that we were on a humanitarian mission, that the United Nations had called for ships to be sent with humanitarian aid to break the blockade on Gaza, that we were simply undertaking that goal. An emergency medical room was assembled and we were all told to put lifejackets on to prepare for any attack.”
Another Briton, Theresa McDermott, an Edinburgh postal worker and member of the Free Gaza Movement, was alongside the Mavi Marmara in the fleet’s smallest boat, Challenger 1.
“The skies were clear and there was a full moon. Their boats had the lights on, so on either side of us we could see two large vessels on the horizon. They were shadowing us all the way, and one of the photographers on board got a picture of a military frigate. They followed us through the night and most people went to sleep. I was up on the top deck keeping watch and trying to make sure they weren’t sneaking up on us.
“At 2am we realised one of their boats had come right up the back of the flotilla, but then it dropped off again. They were trying to make us feel nervous. It went very quiet, then at 4am we heard people starting their morning prayers on the Mavi Marmara. We were right next to them so we could hear the prayer call. It was still dark, then all of a sudden we saw smaller lights across to starboard and we knew the Israelis had dropped the smaller boats, carrier craft, into the water.
“They went for the Mavi Marmara first, with Zodiac commando boats that sliced through the flotilla. The Israelis started firing smoke bombs and sound grenades onto the Mavi Marmara. We heard the cracks of gunfire and I realised they were much more forceful than when they have taken us off boats before. They were coming really hard.”
ISRAEL’S prime minister, Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, spent last weekend in Canada, where he was supposed to be preparing for a meeting on Tuesday with Barack Obama. On Sunday all thoughts of it were set aside and a full operations room was established to let him control the events about to take place off Gaza.
The first call on his secure line — codename Mountain Rose — was put through late on Sunday to Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, sitting in the operations bunker at IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv.
The relationship between Bibi and Ehud goes back more than 40 years. Barak was a commander of Israel’s equivalent of the SAS and Bibi was one of his young officers. In 1972 they were among the commandos who stormed a hijacked Sabena jet at Tel Aviv airport. Bibi was injured by a bullet in his hand. Barak went untouched. Ever since, Netanyahu has regarded him as his mentor.
After they went into politics, Netanyahu became leader of Likud and Barak leader of the Labour party. But as prime minister in a coalition government, the rightwinger rarely opposes his old commander’s recommendations. “Both of them are talking in codes and language from their days with the special forces that no one can understand,” complained a cabinet minister recently.
Once again they had kept the government out of the loop about the peace flotilla. The seven members of the inner cabinet, known in Israel as the “Septet”, had been told individually of the general idea to storm the ships but were given no details.
Netanyahu now wanted to know if all military preparations were going well. Barak assured him everything was under control. It was only then that Netanyahu made telephone calls to world leaders to explain the delicate situation. David Cameron took his call at 10pm London time.
In Israel the frogmen got into their Black Hawk helicopters. “Normally, before an operation, we sit in the choppers silent like the grave. We are tense and worried,” said one of them later. “This time we were in high spirits, talking and cracking jokes.”
Another soldier gave his account: “You climb in according to your prepared order. I was the sixth from the left-hand side. One before last. We had a pleasant night flight of about 40 minutes. Once arrived, I took the rope and jumped — about 20 metres of descent.”
It was 4.10am Monday Israeli time. Vice-Admiral Eli Marom, the Israeli navy commander, was in one of the Morenas speedboats only 50 yards from the Mavi Marmara. He took out his handgun and shot three times in the air. Operation Sky Winds had begun.
Three Israeli commandos landed on the upper deck of the Mavi Marmara where young Turks “started resisting naturally ... like anyone who feels his life is threatened”, said Abdul Razzaq Maqri, a former Algerian parliamentarian who was watching on the ship.
The first Israeli officer was badly beaten and lost consciousness. The next two were beaten, tied up and hustled away to a lower deck. One of the Israelis said later: “Once I’d landed on the upper deck I noticed two terrorists beating one of our guys with a metal bar. I jumped on them, pushing them aside, but immediately they turned on me and began beating me.”
Their captain and the rest of his force, unaware of the situation, were still landing on the upper deck one after another and receiving the same treatment. The first Israeli to understand the situation was a young soldier monitoring live images from the scene. “They are smashing the fighters,” he was heard shouting. “They’re giving them hell.”
An officer in the command room asked: “Who is smashing whom?”
“The Arabs ... the terrorists ... these people ... they are giving hell to the fighters.” He paused. “They threw him [a soldier] from the upper deck!”
On his speedboat, Marom heard over the communications system the tense voice of one of his commando officers on board: “They are using real arms, I repeat, they are using real arms. Request permission to use handguns.”
In Tel Aviv, Barak was watching events live on a monitor and heard the request. Next to him was Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi, the commander of the IDF. Barak whispered: finish this at once. Netanyahu, calling from Canada, was ignored.
This was the moment when the commandos “switched the hard disk”, as one of them described it, stopped trying to be policemen and slipped the leash. Reports that one soldier, a staff sergeant, killed six Turks with his handgun have been denied by the IDF. But several militants from the IHH were soon dead on the deck.
Maqri remembers a shot ringing out and a fellow Algerian activist crumpling, bleeding from an eye. Colborne, who had been woken from a brief sleep by the sound of the attack and rushed to the top deck, saw the first fatality: “He was shot in the head. I saw him. He was obviously in a very bad way and he subsequently died. There were bullets flying all over the place when I was on the top deck and I took the decision to go downstairs.
“I couldn’t quite believe they were doing what they were doing. There was live ammunition flying around and I could hear the sounds of the bullets flying and the whir of the helicopter blades as people were dropped down onto the roof. What I saw was guns being used by the Israelis on unarmed civilians.”
The Israeli commandos stormed the control room of the ship. “The door was closed and I opened it with a strong kick,” said their captain. “The skipper was standing there talking to me, I think in Turkish. I ordered him in English to turn off the engine. He refused. I put the handgun to his throat. He got the hint. The engine was switched off. I informed the command that we controlled the ship.”
It was only then that Barak asked to be connected to Netanyahu. All under control, he said, in the slow charismatic voice that Netanyahu adores so much from their days of cross-border operations. Only a minute later Barak regretted making his report. Marom was on the line now. Three soldiers are missing, he told Barak. We’re searching for them.
Hamas has held an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, hostage for four years and his plight has turned Israel upside down. Did three of Barak’s best men face another agonising hostage situation? As usual, under stress, he was calm. “Freezing ice is in his veins, not blood,” said one of his former subordinates, trying to describe his behaviour during operations.
On board the Mavi Marmara, commandos rushed the lower decks to search for their friends. Andre Abu-Khalil, an Al-Jazeera TV cameraman, said the Turks “took the wounded Israeli soldiers to the lower decks. Twenty Turks made a human shield to prevent the Israeli soldiers from approaching. They knocked on the metal walls to warn them not to advance.
“Then, using a loudspeaker, they said to the Israelis that the soldiers would be freed only after the IDF provided medical help to the wounded people.”
The Israelis went on searching, said Abu-Khalil. “It took about 10 minutes till the Israeli soldiers opened fire. One of the people got a bullet in his head; the other was shot in his neck.”
The commandos stormed the machine room, killing militants guarding it, and found a wounded soldier chained to one of the pipes. The two others had managed to escape, jumping from a porthole into the sea. Marom called Barak: all soldiers found. There were nine civilians dead.
“At 5.15am we started broadcasting over the Tannoy for help to evacuate the critically injured,” said Colborne. The civilians dragged the casualties to an inner hall and closed the door behind them.
One of them, Hanin Zuabi, an Arab Israeli MP, spoke to one of the soldiers in Hebrew. “She asked me to take care of their injured people. I told her, ‘I’m not willing to get in there as I’m not sure they don’t have weapons, but we will take care of the wounded. Please, stay at the door and make sure only wounded will get out’.”
The Israelis say that during an initial search of the ship they found weapons, gas masks, ceramic flak jackets, written instructions and thousands of dollars in cash. “It was clear that they were very well prepared for resistance,” said one defence source.
Israeli intelligence is adamant that the IHH is a fundamentalist group affiliated with Hamas and Al-Qaeda. Hamas was an Islamic humanitarian organisation that developed a military wing. Israeli security suspects the IHH of following the same path.
One of the western activists on board said anonymously later that some young Turks had clearly been spoiling for a fight. But the ages of the dead — a 19-year-old, three men in their thirties, two in their forties, a 54-year-old and a 60-year-old — indicate that the clash was not confined to young militants. Most were killed in classic special forces style by several shots to the head and torso.
Other vessels in the peace flotilla had been overcome with much less violence — although some on board reported being beaten and Tasered.
On one of them, the Sofia, was Henning Mankell, the Swedish thriller writer. He felt that the masked and armed Israelis who took it over were ashamed of what they were doing. At least two of them were women.
He said: “I think in one way the soldiers were very disciplined, but if you looked at the eyes of the women they were not terrified but they looked as if they felt really like, shit — what the hell am I doing here?
“We asked why they did it and they said we had weapons aboard. We said we don’t have any weapons so they made a search of the ship. They came up with a razor and a little knife that you use to open boxes and they said they had found weapons. We laughed at this point. What else could you do.”
The boats in the flotilla were taken to Ashdod where agents of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, began to interrogate what they suspected was a hard core of IHH militants from the Mavi Marmara before releasing everyone under international pressure.
In Canada, Netanyahu cut short his trip and returned to Israel, where he faced unprecedented criticism. Western governments lined up to condemn the operation and security experts asked why the Israeli intelligence service had not infiltrated the Turks or sabotaged the Mavi Marmara.
It was suspected of sabotaging at least two of the smaller vessels, which suffered steering difficulties. One of them, the Irish-sponsored Rachel Corrie, with Mairead Maguire, the Nobel peace prize laureate, on board, stayed behind for repairs and did not approach Gaza until yesterday morning. It was stopped without violence by an Israeli boarding party.
Israel has rejected much of the criticism of Operation Sky Winds, but the Israeli defence establishment, long friendly with the Turkish military, is extremely worried. Turkey’s government, itself religiously based, has aligned itself with public anger. Reports to the Israeli defence ministry indicated that it might close down an Israeli intelligence station based on Turkish soil, not far from the Iranian border.
“If that happens,” said a well-informed Israeli source, “Israel will lose its ears and nose, which watch and sniff the Iranians’ back garden.”
It would mean that Israel’s botched Gaza blockade had weakened its defences against the much graver threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb.
Additional reporting: Jamie McGinnes and Jon Swain

Spillonomics: Underestimating Risk

By DAVID LEONHARDT NY TIMES
In retrospect, the pattern seems clear. Years before the Deepwater Horizon rig blew, BP was developing a reputation as an oil company that took safety risks to save money. An explosion at a Texas refinery killed 15 workers in 2005, and federal regulators and a panel led by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, said that cost cutting was partly to blame. The next year, a corroded pipeline in Alaska poured oil into Prudhoe Bay. None other than Joe Barton, a Republican congressman from Texas and a global-warming skeptic, upbraided BP managers for their “seeming indifference to safety and environmental issues.”
Much of this indifference stemmed from an obsession with profits, come what may. But there also appears to have been another factor, one more universally human, at work. The people running BP did a dreadful job of estimating the true chances of events that seemed unlikely — and may even have been unlikely — but that would bring enormous costs.
Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to consider what BP executives must be thinking today. Surely, given the expense of the clean-up and the hit to BP’s reputation, the executives wish they could go back and spend the extra money to make Deepwater Horizon safer. That they did not suggests that they figured the rig would be fine as it was.
For all the criticism BP executives may deserve, they are far from the only people to struggle with such low-probability, high-cost events. Nearly everyone does. “These are precisely the kinds of events that are hard for us as humans to get our hands around and react to rationally,” Robert N. Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard, says. We make two basic — and opposite — types of mistakes. When an event is difficult to imagine, we tend to underestimate its likelihood. This is the proverbial black swan. Most of the people running Deepwater Horizon probably never had a rig explode on them. So they assumed it would not happen, at least not to them.
Similarly, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan liked to argue, not so long ago, that the national real estate market was not in a bubble because it had never been in one before. Wall Street traders took the same view and built mathematical models that did not allow for the possibility that house prices would decline. And many home buyers signed up for unaffordable mortgages, believing they could refinance or sell the house once its price rose. That’s what house prices did, it seemed.
On the other hand, when an unlikely event is all too easy to imagine, we often go in the opposite direction and overestimate the odds. After the 9/11 attacks, Americans canceled plane trips and took to the road. There were no terrorist attacks in this country in 2002, yet the additional driving apparently led to an increase in traffic fatalities.
When the stakes are high enough, it falls to government to help its citizens avoid these entirely human errors. The market, left to its own devices, often cannot do so. Yet in the case of Deepwater Horizon, government policy actually went the other way. It encouraged BP to underestimate the odds of a catastrophe.
In a little-noticed provision in a 1990 law passed after the Exxon Valdez spill, Congress capped a spiller’s liability over and above cleanup costs at $75 million for a rig spill. Even if the economic damages — to tourism, fishing and the like — stretch into the billions, the responsible party is on the hook for only $75 million. (In this instance, BP has agreed to waive the cap for claims it deems legitimate.) Michael Greenstone, an M.I.T. economist who runs the Hamilton Project in Washington, says the law fundamentally distorts a company’s decision making. Without the cap, executives would have to weigh the possible revenue from a well against the cost of drilling there and the risk of damage. With the cap, they can largely ignore the potential damage beyond cleanup costs. So they end up drilling wells even in places where the damage can be horrific, like close to a shoreline. To put it another way, human frailty helped BP’s executives underestimate the chance of a low-probability, high-cost event. Federal law helped them underestimate the costs.
In the wake of Deepwater Horizon, Congress and the Obama administration will no doubt be tempted to pass laws meant to reduce the risks of another deep-water disaster. Certainly there are some sensible steps they can take, like lifting the liability cap and freeing regulators from the sway of industry. But it would be foolish to think that the only risks we are still underestimating are the ones that have suddenly become salient.
The big financial risk is no longer a housing bubble. Instead, it may be the huge deficits that the growth of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will cause in coming years — and the possibility that lenders will eventually become nervous about extending credit to Washington. True, some economists and policy makers insist the country should not get worked up about this possibility, because lenders have never soured on the United States government before and show no signs of doing so now. But isn’t that reminiscent of the old Bernanke-Greenspan tune about the housing market?
Then, of course, there are the greenhouse gases that oil wells (among other things) send into the atmosphere even when the wells function properly. Scientists say the buildup of these gases is already likely to warm the planet by at least three degrees over the next century and cause droughts, storms and more ice-cap melting. The researchers’ estimates have risen recently, too, and it is also possible the planet could get around 12 degrees hotter. That kind of warming could flood major cities and cause parts of Antarctica to collapse.
Nothing like that has ever happened before. Even imagining it is difficult. It is much easier to hope that the odds of such an outcome are vanishingly small. In fact, it’s only natural to have this hope. But that doesn’t make it wise.
David Leonhardt is an economics columnist for The Times and a staff writer for the magazine.

Gay? Whatever, Dude

By CHARLES M. BLOW NY TIMES
Last week, while many of us were distracted by the oil belching forth from the gulf floor and the president’s ham-handed attempts to demonstrate that he was sufficiently engaged and enraged, Gallup released a stunning, and little noticed, report on Americans’ evolving views of homosexuality. Allow me to enlighten:
1. For the first time, the percentage of Americans who perceive “gay and lesbian relations” as morally acceptable has crossed the 50 percent mark. (You have to love the fact that they still use the word “relations.” So quaint.)
2. Also for the first time, the percentage of men who hold that view is greater than the percentage of women who do.
3. This new alignment is being led by a dramatic change in attitudes among younger men, but older men’s perceptions also have eclipsed older women’s. While women’s views have stayed about the same over the past four years, the percentage of men ages 18 to 49 who perceived these “relations” as morally acceptable rose by 48 percent, and among men over 50, it rose by 26 percent.
I warned you: stunning.
There is no way to know for sure what’s driving such a radical change in men’s views on this issue because Gallup didn’t ask, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t speculate. To help me do so, I called Dr. Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the author or editor of more than 20 books on men and masculinity, and Professor Ritch Savin-Williams, the chairman of human development at Cornell University and the author of seven books, most of which deal with adolescent development and same-sex attraction.
Here are three theories:
1. The contact hypothesis. As more men openly acknowledge that they are gay, it becomes harder for men who are not gay to discriminate against them. And as that group of openly gay men becomes more varied — including athletes, celebrities and soldiers — many of the old, derisive stereotypes lose their purchase. To that point, a Gallup poll released last May found that people who said they personally knew someone who was gay or lesbian were more likely to be accepting of gay men and lesbians in general and more supportive of their issues.
2. Men may be becoming more egalitarian in general. As Dr. Kimmel put it: “Men have gotten increasingly comfortable with the presence of, and relative equality of, ‘the other,’ and we’re becoming more accustomed to it. And most men are finding that it has not been a disaster.” The expanding sense of acceptance likely began with the feminist and civil rights movements and is now being extended to the gay rights movement. Dr. Kimmel continued, “The dire predictions for diversity have not only not come true, but, in fact, they’ve been proved the other way.”
3. Virulent homophobes are increasingly being exposed for engaging in homosexuality. Think Ted Haggard, the once fervent antigay preacher and former leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, and his male prostitute. (This week, Haggard announced that he was starting a new “inclusive” church open to “gay, straight, bi, tall, short,” but no same-sex marriages. Not “God’s ideal.” Sorry.) Or George Rekers, the founding member of the Family Research Council, and his rent boy/luggage handler. Last week, the council claimed that repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” would lead to an explosion of “homosexual assaults” in which sleeping soldiers would be the victims of fondling and fellatio by gay predators. In fact, there is a growing body of research that supports the notion that homophobia in some men could be a reaction to their own homosexual impulses. Many heterosexual men see this, and they don’t want to be associated with it. It’s like being antigay is becoming the old gay. Not cool.
These sound plausible, but why aren’t women seeing the same enlightening effects as men? Professor Savin-Williams suggests that there may be a “ceiling effect,” that men are simply catching up to women, and there may be a level at which views top out. Interesting.
All of this is great news, but it doesn’t mean that all measures relating to acceptance of gay men and lesbians have changed to the same degree. People’s comfort with the “gay and lesbian” part of the equation is still greater than their comfort with the “relations” part — the idea versus the act — particularly when it comes to pairings of men.
As Professor Savin-Williams told me, there is still a higher aversive reaction to same-sex sexuality among men than among women.
For instance, in a February New York Times/CBS News poll, half of the respondents were asked if they favored letting “gay men and lesbians” serve in the military (which is still more than 85 percent male), and the other half were asked if they favored letting “homosexuals” serve. Those who got the “homosexual” question favored it at a rate that was 11 percentage points lower than those who got the “gay men and lesbians” question.
Part of the difference may be that “homosexual” is a bigger, more clinical word freighted with a lot of historical baggage. But just as likely is that the inclusion of the root word “sex” still raises an aversive response to the idea of, how shall I say, the architectural issues between two men. It is the point at which support for basic human rights cleaves from endorsement of behavior.
As for the aversion among men, it may be softening a bit. Professor Savin-Williams says that his current research reveals that the fastest-growing group along the sexuality continuum are men who self-identify as “mostly straight” as opposed to labels like “straight,” “gay” or “bisexual.” They acknowledge some level of attraction to other men even as they say that they probably wouldn’t act on it, but ... the right guy, the right day, a few beers and who knows. As the professor points out, you would never have heard that in years past.
All together now: stunning.

(I now return you to Day 46 of the oil spill where they finally may be making some progress.)


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Obama secretly deploys US special forces to 75 countries across world
Tim Reid and Michael Evans LONDON TIMES

President Obama has secretly sanctioned a huge increase in the number of US special forces carrying out search-and-destroy missions against al-Qaeda around the world, with American troops now operating in 75 countries.
The dramatic expansion in the use of special forces, which in their global span go far beyond the covert missions authorised by George W. Bush, reflects how aggressively the President is pursuing al-Qaeda behind his public rhetoric of global engagement and diplomacy.
When Mr Obama took office US special forces were operating in fewer than 60 countries. In the past 18 months he has ordered a big expansion in Yemen and the Horn of Africa — known areas of strong al-Qaeda activity — and elsewhere in the Middle East, central Asia and Africa.
According to The Washington Post, Mr Obama has also approved pre-emptive special forces strikes to disrupt terror plots, and has given the units powers and authority that was not granted by Mr Bush when he occupied the White House.
It also emerged yesterday that Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, has ordered the Pentagon to find savings of more than $100 billion (£68 billion) over the next five years to redistribute more funds for combat forces — including special operations units. Mr Gates has called on all departments to come up with proposals by July 31, and is initially demanding $7 billion in cuts and efficiencies for the 2012 fiscal year, and further cuts each year up to 2016.
The effort to provide more money for combat forces in Afghanistan and Iraq — including special operations units — is likely to lead to a clash with Congress, and also with the defence industry if favoured equipment programmes are scrapped.
The aggressive secret war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups has coincided with a surge in the number of US drone attacks in the lawless border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, an al-Qaeda and Taleban haven, since Mr Obama took office.
Just weeks after he entered the White House, the number of missile strikes from the CIA-operated unmanned drones significantly increased, and the pattern has remained. In Iraq, US forces have killed 34 out of the top 42 al-Qaeda operatives in the past 90 days alone.
General Ray Odierno, the US commander in Baghdad, disclosed yesterday that special forces had penetrated the al-Qaeda headquarters in Mosul in northern Iraq, which had helped them to target key figures involved in financing and recruiting .
Mr Obama has asked for a 5.7 per cent increase in the Special Operations budget for the 2011 fiscal year — a total of $6.3 billion — on top of an additional $3.5 billion he requested this year.
Of about 13,000 US special forces deployed overseas, about 9,000 are evenly divided between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their use, and the increase in drone attacks, is a strategy that has been strongly advocated by Joe Biden, the Vice-President, but criticised by the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Hundreds of civilians have died in special operations A report last week revealed that the top US commander in the Middle East had signed an order last September authorising a big expansion of clandestine military missions in the region, and also in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Somalia.
General David Petraeus signed the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Executive Order on September 30. In the three months that followed there was a surge of special operations troops into Yemen, where US operatives are now training local forces.
Since then, US military specialists working with Yemeni armed forces are said to have killed six out of 15 leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The raids followed reports linking the group to the murder of 13 Americans at Fort Hood, Texas, and the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines jet.
The order also allowed for US special forces to enter Iran to gather intelligence for a possible future military strike if tensions over its alleged nuclear weapons programme escalate dramatically.
The seven-page document states that the surge is designed to build networks that could “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” al-Qaeda and other militant groups, and to “prepare the environment” for future military strikes by US and local forces.
? President Obama is reported to have chosen a US intelligence veteran, retired General James Clapper, as his new Director of National Intelligence. General Clapper, whose nomination comes at a time of mounting domestic terror threats, would replace Dennis Blair, who stepped down last month amid heavy criticism over a string of security lapses.
Under the radar
Nov 2002 Hellfire missile fired from a drone at a car in northwest Yemen kills six al-Qaeda fighters, including Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, aide to Osama bin Laden and the planner of the bomb attack on USS Cole
Jan 2006 Missile attack on village of Damadola, Pakistan, kills 18 Pakistani villagers — but not the target, al-Qaeda’s No2, Ayman al-Zawahiri
June 2006 Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s top man in Iraq, killed along with 18 others when a house near Baghdad is bombed by US jets
Dec 2008 Six members of the Afghan police force killed in exchange of friendly fire with US special forces near the city of Qalat
Sep 2009 Four helicopter gunships open fire on a convoy in Barawe, Somalia, killing four Islamic insurgents, including Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, linked to al-Qaeda

Source: Times archives

Rue McClanahan, Actress and Golden Girl, Dies at 76

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Rue McClanahan, who helped make “The Golden Girls” a long-running television hit playing the saucy, man-devouring Southern belle Blanche Devereaux (in one scene she made a date at her husband’s funeral), died Thursday in Manhattan. Unlike Blanche, she had no trouble admitting her age, 76.
Her manager, Barbara Lawrence, said Ms. McClanahan died of a brain hemorrhage at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. She was treated for breast cancer in 1997 and had heart bypass surgery last year.
Ms. McClanahan was the youngest, by at least 10 years, of the four actresses who played the Golden Girls, well-dressed, clever-tongued, over-50 women who shared a house in Miami. The others were Bea Arthur (Dorothy), Betty White (Rose) and Estelle Getty (Dorothy’s mother, Sophia). Of the four, only Ms. White, 88, now survives.
The show seized the No. 1 rating its first night, in 1985, stayed in the top 10 for six seasons and captured bundles of Emmys, one of which went to Ms. McClanahan for outstanding lead actress in a comedy series in 1987.
The show, which was canceled in 1992 but carries on, profitably, in reruns, succeeded by putting smart, funny lines in the mouths of, well, seasoned women.
In one episode, Rose, a rather dense Pollyanna, wonders if it’s possible to love two men at the same time.
“Set the scene,” Blanche replies. “Have we been drinking?”
Some critics saw “The Golden Girls” as a progenitor of shows like “Sex and the City” (about four young women given smart, funny lines).
Ms. McClanahan had appeared in the sitcom “All in the Family,” which broke ground with topical humor, and its spinoff “Maude,” in which she played the best friend of the liberated, middle-aged title character (Ms. Arthur).
She also acted in movies as well as on and off Broadway. In 1970 she won an Obie for her role in the Off Broadway show “Who’s Happy Now?,” a family drama by Oliver Hailey in which she played the father’s mistress. She reprised the role on PBS in 1975.
In her autobiography, “My First Five Husbands ... and the Ones Who Got Away” (2007), Ms. McClanahan wrote that one of her proudest moments was getting a letter from Tennessee Williams about her performance as Caitlin Thomas, the poet’s wife, in “Dylan,” Sidney Michaels’s play about Dylan Thomas.
“Your work is that rare combination of earthiness and lapidary polish,” Williams wrote, “that quality being utterly common and utterly noble. Frippery combined with fierceness.”
But it was Ms. McClanahan’s part in “The Golden Girls” that stands out in popular memory.
To Ms. McClanahan, “The Golden Girls” was special for allowing its women to be funny and many-sided, not stock figures, recognizing “that when people mature, they add layers,” as she told The New York Times in 1985.
“They don’t turn into other creatures,” she added. “The truth is, we all still have our child, our adolescent and our young woman living in us.”
Eddi-Rue McClanahan was born in Healdton, Okla., on Feb. 21, 1934. Her first name was a contraction of her parents’ middle names. She dropped the Eddi when, mistaken for a man, she was drafted into military service after high school. She grew up in towns in Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana as her father, a building contractor, moved around.
She made her stage debut at age 4 in a local production of “The Three Little Kittens.” “A character actor even then,” she told People magazine.
She was offered dance scholarships to college but chose to major in drama at the University of Tulsa. She graduated with honors in 1956.
Moving to New York to study ballet and drama, Ms. McLanahan made her professional debut in 1957 at the Erie Playhouse in Erie, Pa. On a scholarship she took a four-week acting course at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, where one of her roles was Blanche DuBois in Williams’s “Streetcar Named Desire.” She later said that her Blanche on “Girls” was inspired by both Blanche DuBois and Scarlett O’Hara of “Gone With the Wind.”
For most of the next decade she appeared onstage in New York. She originated the role of Lady MacBird in “MacBird!,” Barbara Garson’s comic melding of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s ascent to power and “Macbeth.” Ms. McClanahan’s Broadway debut was as a prostitute in Murray Schisgal’s “Jimmy Shine,” which starred Dustin Hoffman as an unsuccessful abstract painter.
Reviewing “Who’s Happy Now?” in 1969, Edith Oliver wrote in The New Yorker that Ms. McClanahan’s portrayal of an innocent, sunny waitress was a “first-rate comedy performance that is always legitimate — no hokum, nothing but truth.”
Ms. McClanahan had been appearing sporadically on television and in low-budget movies when Norman Lear tapped her for a spot on “All in the Family” in 1972. She played half of a married couple who, after being invited to dinner, reveal that they are swingers.
Mr. Lear also cast her for a guest appearance on “Maude,” a part that grew into a regular role as Vivian Harmon, Maude’s fluttery, unliberated friend.
Brandon Tartikoff, the president of NBC Entertainment, got the idea for “Girls” after seeing statistics showing that about 37 percent of Americans were at least 45 years old. He passed the concept on to Susan Harris, a television writer who had created series like “Benson” and “Soap.” She was inspired by her grandmother, who had remained active until her death at 93.
“A gift from the gods,” Ms. McClanahan called her placement in the series. NBC decided to cast her against the unworldly type she had played on “Maude” and give her the sex-charged role. Betty White, who had played the man-hungry Sue Ann Nivens on the “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” was the ditsy Rose.
After “The Golden Girls” ended in 1992, Ms. McClanahan appeared in a spinoff, “The Golden Palace.” She also had roles in movies like “Out to Sea,” a comedy starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and on Broadway in “Wicked.” Away from acting, she delivered a lecture titled “Aging Gracefully” and campaigned for animal rights.
Ms. McClanahan is survived by her sixth husband, Morrow Wilson; her son, Mark T. Bish; and her sister, Dr. Melinda Lou McClanahan.
Ms. McClanahan, who never tired of talking about Blanche, was wise to her. Though Sophia, the dotty mother of the witty, dominant Dorothy, could be pointed, calling Blanche “Sheena, Queen of the Slut People,” Ms. McClanahan saw the character differently — as a woman who mainly just talked about sex.
As for Ms. McClanahan herself, she wasn’t a vamp, she told People magazine; she liked to grow tomatoes and make quilts.
Still, in her book, she offered “fun in bed quotients” for married and unmarried lovers. And she had a pat answer when asked if she was like Blanche: “Well, Blanche was an oversexed, self-involved, man-crazy, vain Southern belle from Atlanta — and I’m not from Atlanta.”