Cato Daily Dispatch for December 16, 2002
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Commission Warns Against Transforming FBI Into 'Secret Police'Republicans Plan to Move Aggressively on Nominations
North Korea Says Nonaggression Treaty Only Way to Prevent War
Commission Warns Against Transforming FBI Into 'Secret Police'
Former Virginia governor James S. Gilmore III warns today in a report by his federal terrorism commission that the government must guard against transforming the FBI into "a kind of secret police" focused only on preventing attacks, The Washington Post reports.
The fourth annual report by Gilmore's commission recommends that the government dedicate the FBI to law enforcement, and create an independent intelligence fusion agency that would coordinate information about potential attacks and report to President Bush.
The commission suggests that the new agency, the National Counter-Terrorism Center, should be staffed by intelligence analysts transferred from the FBI, CIA and other agencies.
In "Building Leverage in the Long War: Ensuring Intelligence Community Creativity in the Fight against Terrorism," former CIA official James W. Harris argues that intelligence agencies need more creative thinking and out-of-the-box approaches.
"In the war ahead, the adaptable nature of the adversary will demand an equally agile U.S. intelligence effort," he writes. "More resources and better human intelligence will help. But an agile intelligence community will require something else: that the intelligence community at last dispense with the internal barriers that stifle communications and collaboration."
Republicans Plan to Move Aggressively on Nominations
Senate Republicans are planning to move aggressively on judicial nominations at the start of the 108th Congress, hoping to hold three voting sessions in January to install new judges on the federal bench, according to Roll Call.
Leading Senate Republicans emerged from a meeting with White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales last week with a framework for how they will push for nominees previously held up by the outgoing Democratic majority.
While final dates have not been set, some GOP leaders are pushing to hold votes on judges in the Judiciary Committee as early as Jan. 10, 2003, just three days after the new Congress convenes.
In "How Constitutional Corruption Has Led to Ideological Litmus Tests for Judicial Nominees," Cato Vice President for Legal Affairs Roger Pilon writes, "After Democrats took control of the Senate in May of 2001, they began calling explicitly for ideological litmus tests for judicial nominees. . . . Democrats are quite explicit about the politics of the matter: their aim is to keep 'highly credentialed, conservative ideologues' from the bench. The rationales they offer contend that judges today are, and perhaps should be, 'setting national policy.' That is because judges today set national policy far more than they used to-and far more than the Constitution contemplates."
North Korea Says Nonaggression Treaty Only Way to Prevent War
North Korea said today that the signing of a nonaggression treaty with the United States is the only way to prevent a war on the Korean Peninsula, reports the Associated Press.
North Korea has repeatedly requested the nonaggression pact, but Washington has ruled out talks with North Korea unless it abandons its nuclear ambitions. Monday's remarks were similar to anti-U.S. rhetoric often issued by the communist country's state media.
Raising fears of a crisis along the world's last Cold War frontier, North Korea said last week it will reactivate plutonium-based nuclear facilities that U.S. officials believe could be used to make weapons.
In "Confronting the Korean Bomb," Senior Fellow Doug Bandow lays out a strategy for the U.S. to follow for North Korea, advising that "it should tell North Korea that when it begins to behave in a more positive fashion, agreeing to dismantle its nuclear operation and allow in outside inspectors, for instance, that official recognition, trade, membership in international organizations and the like will follow. Should the North continue to behave belligerently, however, there will be nothing to negotiate."
Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org
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