Cato Daily Dispatch for October 9, 2002
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CIA Says Iraq Deterred From Conducting Terrorist AttacksCato Scholar Shares Nobel Prize
Court Upholds Closed Hearings for Detainees
CIA Says Iraq Deterred From Conducting Terrorist Attacks
While the Bush administration pushed Congress yesterday for a broad vote to authorize the president to use force against Iraq, a new element was injected into the debate by a CIA assessment that Saddam Hussein, while now stopping short of an attack, could become "much less constrained" if faced with an American-led force, according to The New York Times.
The judgment was contained in an Oct. 7 letter signed by the deputy CIA director, John McLaughlin, on behalf of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence. It was alluded to in a hearing of a congressional panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks and then released last night, after the House opened its debate on Iraq.
The letter said "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks" with conventional or chemical or biological weapons against the United States.
"Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist action," it continued. It noted that Hussein could use either conventional terrorism or a weapon of mass destruction as "his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."
Ivan Eland, Cato's director of defense policy studies, issued the following statement in regards to the CIA letter: "The CIA noted that Iraq now appears to be deterred from initiating terrorist attacks against the United States with conventional, biological or chemical weapons. But if the United States did invade Iraq and attempted to depose Hussein, the CIA concluded that he probably would be more likely to conduct such attacks. "
Cato Scholar Shares Nobel Prize
Daniel Kahneman and Cato Adjunct Scholar Vernon Smith shared the 2002 Nobel economics prize today for work on how psychology affects people's buying decisions, and for developing laboratory experiments in economics, Reuters reports.
Smith, 75, born in Wichita, Kansas, is a professor of economics and law at George Mason University in Virginia.
"He has developed an array of experimental methods, setting standards for what constitutes a reliable laboratory experiment," the academy said.
Smith spearheaded "wind-tunnel tests" where trials of new market designs, such as a deregulated electricity market, are carried out in a lab before being implemented in practice.
Smith also serves as a member of the editorial board of the Cato Journal. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Human Action, Ludwig von Mises' treatise on economics, Smith wrote "Reflections on Human Action After 50 Years" for the Journal.
Court Upholds Closed Hearings for Detainees
A federal appeals court yesterday upheld the legality of closed immigration hearings for hundreds of "special interest" detainees in the Sept. 11 investigation, agreeing with the government that the secrecy is necessary to protect the nation against terrorism, according to The Washington Post.
In a 2-1 decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia acknowledged that the case raised profound First Amendment questions but adopted the government's position that open hearings could compromise the investigation and provide key information to terrorists planning future attacks.
The decision means that two federal appellate courts have now issued conflicting rulings on the secret hearings, an issue the government has said touches upon "the nation's very ability to defend itself." In August, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati ruled that the government had illegally closed immigration hearings for a Lebanese activist detained as a terrorism suspect.
Robert A. Levy, senior fellow in constitutional studies at Cato, has written, "Even persons convinced that President Bush cherishes civil liberties and understands that the Constitution is not mere scrap paper, must be unsettled by the prospect that an unknown and less honorable successor could exploit some of the dangerous precedents that the Bush administration has put in place."
Levy has also written on the Justice Department's TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) program in "United We Stand, but We'll Snoop Divided" and on how the federal government should handle "enemy combatants" in "Citizen Padilla: Dangerous Precedents".
Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org
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