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Cato Daily Dispatch for July 9, 2003

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(Links to outside sources were active as of the date of this dispatch; however, not all news sources maintain links to current stories indefinitely. Some links also may require registration.)

Bush Defends Justification For Iraq War

"President Bush defended his justification for the Iraq war today even as the White House said it had been a mistake to accuse Saddam Hussein of trying to buy African uranium," Reuters reports.

"'I am absolutely confident in the decision I made,' Bush told a news conference with South African President Thabo Mbeki. 'There's no doubt in my mind that when it's all said and done the facts will show the world the truth.'

"The White House has acknowledged that Bush misspoke earlier this year when he said the Iraqi leader tried to buy uranium from Niger in West Africa as part of a program to develop weapons of mass destruction."

In an op-ed published in yesterday's Christian Science Monitor, Senior Fellow Doug Bandow argues that the Bush administration should come clean about its evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

"Perhaps the administration manipulated the evidence, choosing information that backed its view, turning assumptions into certainties, and hyping equivocal materials," writes Bandow. "That, too, would hardly be unusual. But no president should take the US into war under false pretenses. There is no more important decision: The American people deserve to hear official doubts as well as certitudes."

Pentagon Developing New Urban Surveillance System

"Police can envision limited domestic uses for an urban surveillance system the Pentagon is developing but doubt they could use the full system which is designed to track and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a city," reports the Associated Press. Dubbed 'Combat Zones That See' the project is intended to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas.

"Scientists and privacy experts say the unclassified technology also could easily be adapted to keep tabs on Americans. The project's centerpiece would be groundbreaking computer software capable of automatically identifying vehicles by size, color, shape and license tag, or drivers and passengers by face.

"The proposed software also would provide instant alerts after detecting a vehicle with a license plate on a watchlist, or search months of records to locate and compare vehicles spotted near terrorist attacks, according to interviews and contracting documents reviewed by The Associated Press."

Director of Defense Policy Studies Charles V. Peņa, writing about another Pentagon monitoring program, Total Information Awareness, argues that TIA is a violation of the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

"President Bush criticized congressional Democrats who opposed legislation to create a new Department of Homeland Security as 'not interested in the security of the American people,'" Peņa writes. "But how is invading everyone's privacy by monitoring e-mails, bank accounts, credit card transactions, telephone calling cards, medical records, and travel documents, and keeping a dossier on everyone going to make the country more secure against the threat of terrorism? It sounds more like the KGB making average people enemies of the state."

Student Challenges Enemy Combatant Status

"Lawyers for a Qatari student who was jailed by the military last month asked a federal court today to free him and challenged President Bush's authority to treat terrorism suspects as 'enemy combatants,'" The New York Times reports.

"Lawyers for the student, Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, argued in an appeal filed in federal court in Illinois that Bush's June 23 order declaring Marri to be an operative for Al Qaeda and an enemy combatant represented an act of 'unbridled authority' that was illegal and unconstitutional.

"Specialists in military law said that the legal challenge, coming just days after the Bush administration announced it was considering the use of military tribunals against six terrorism suspects, could present an important test of the executive branch's power to imprison suspects outside the reach of the civilian court system."

Robert A. Levy, Cato senior fellow in constitutional studies, wrote in "Citizen Padilla: Dangerous Precedent," a Cato Daily Commentary, that "the Constitution does not distinguish between the protections extended to ordinary citizens on one hand and unlawful-combatant citizens on the other . . . . The administration has decided that it will set the rules, prosecute infractions, determine guilt or innocence, then review the results of its own actions. That's too much unchecked power in the hands of the executive branch."

Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org