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Cato Daily Dispatch for September 26, 2003

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Iran High on Agenda at Camp David Talks
White House Seeks Greater Private-sector Involvement in Medicare
Privacy Concerns Prompt Congress to Shut Pentagon Office

Iran High on Agenda at Camp David Talks

According to the Associated Press, "As President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin try to bridge differences on Iraq's future, an old feud has taken on new urgency -- Russia's aid to Iran's nuclear program. 'You bet I'll talk to President Putin about it this weekend,' Bush said a day before the two leaders meet at the Camp David presidential retreat Friday and Saturday."

In "Iran: Déjà Vu All Over Again", Cato Director of Defense Policy Studies Charles Pena, writes that "clearly, the administration is concerned about a fundamentalist Islamic country acquiring nuclear weapons. But what better way to create more incentive to obtain such weapons than threatening to topple the regime in Tehran? And if the administration tries to undermine the ruling Islamic clerics, they are likely to suppress the fledgling democratic reform movement.

"The rest of the world was skeptical about the administration's rationale for invading Iraq. It is likely to be more skeptical about Iran. But the real question is whether -- having yet to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or any real linkages to al Qaeda -- the American public is willing to suspend disbelief a second time."

In "'Ancient History': U.S. Conduct in the Middle East Since World War II and the Folly of Intervention", Cato's former senior editor, Sheldon Richman, discusses the history of U.S. intervention in Iran. He writes: "The American people have not been well served by U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. They have been forced to pay billions of dollars to foreign governments, and that has cost them untold opportunities for better lives afforded by an undistorted consumer economy."

White House Seeks Greater Private-sector Involvement in Medicare

"Three months after the House and the Senate passed separate bills to redesign Medicare, the White House is prodding congressional negotiators to go further than either measure to offer financial inducements for private health plans to take a bigger role in the program," Washington Post reports.

In a Policy Analysis released last week, "War between the Generations: Federal Spending on the Elderly Set to Explode", Cato Institute Director of Fiscal Policy Studies Chris Edwards, and research assistant Tad DeHaven write that "a wide range of reforms is needed to deal with rising entitlement costs. Social Security and Medicare should be turned into savings-based systems with payroll contributions funding personal health care and retirement accounts. Taxes on saving should be sharply reduced so that Americans can put more money aside for their own future. Medicare reforms should reduce health care costs by increasing competition and relying more on out-of-pocket payments. Centralized redistribution systems for the elderly need to be replaced by personal savings and greater individual responsibility for retirement in the new century."

Privacy Concerns Prompt Congress to Shut Pentagon Office

"A Pentagon office that became steeped in controversy over privacy issues and a market in terrorism futures was shut down by Congress today as the Senate passed and sent to President Bush a $368 billion military measure that eliminates money for it," reports The New York Times.

"The Pentagon spending plan for 2004 adopted by the Senate says that the office, the Information Awareness Office, which had been headed by Adm. John M. Poindexter, should be 'terminated immediately' while a few projects under its control could be shifted elsewhere within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The House passed the measure on Wednesday."

Civil libertarians may have cause to celebrate the impending demise of the Pentagon office, but any number of other threats to Americans' privacy and liberty still exists. As Cato Senior Fellow Robert Levy writes in "Assaults on Liberty", "If Poindexter's office "were the first and only budding threat to civil liberties, opponents might be less apprehensive. But against a backdrop of multiple laws, executive orders and proposals - all potentially troublesome to hard-core Bill of Rights devotees - our constitutional watchdogs are justifiably uneasy." He describes several other serious encroachments on civil liberties on the part of the federal government since September 11, 2003, including the USA PATRIOT Act, expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court's authority, domestic detention of noncitizens, secret INS trials, detention of U.S. citizens, monitoring of attorney-client communications, and military tribunals, among others.

Levy concludes that, "if administration critics have a single overriding concern about policies adopted in the wake of 9/11, it is this: The president and the attorney general have concentrated too much unchecked authority in the hands of the executive branch - compromising the doctrine of separation of powers, which has been a cornerstone of our Constitution for more than two centuries."

Cato's "Handbook for the 108th Congress" contains recommendations for improving the PATRIOT Act, including:

"Tighten [its] requirements for advance judicial approval and judicial review; impose a shorter-term sunset clause on all provisions of the PATRIOT Act; exclude ordinary criminal activities from coverage of the PATRIOT Act; establish rules that govern detention of citizens and noncitizens suspected of terrorist links; and ensure that domestic detainees have access to counsel and judicial review."

Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org