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Cato Daily Dispatch for November 25, 2002

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Bush Signs Legislation to Arm Pilots
Saudi Official Refutes Claims of Gifts to Hijackers
Bush Signs Legislation Forming Homeland Security Department

Bush Signs Legislation to Arm Pilots

President Bush today will sign legislation that allows airline pilots to carry guns in cockpits, but it will be months before any take their weapons aboard, according to USA Today.

And when they do, it's likely that fewer than half of the roughly 75,000 pilots will choose or qualify to take the controversial step of arming themselves.

Before any pilot can pack a handgun, the government must set up a training program to make pilots proficient at shooting inside the confined quarters of a cockpit. The government also must write rules on what weapons should be allowed, how pilots carry the guns to and from the aircraft and whether they can carry them off duty.

Law-enforcement officers can't be everywhere, but an armed, trained citizenry can be. That's why pilots, flight attendants, and even trained passengers should be allowed to carry arms onboard aircraft if they want to, says Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies Robert Levy in "Invitation To Terror: This Plane Is A Gun-Free Zone".

Saudi Official Refutes Claims of Gifts to Hijackers

A senior Saudi official yesterday branded as "outrageous" and "crazy" reports that charitable gifts from the wife of the Saudi ambassador in Washington may have been intended for two Sept. 11 hijackers, but senior U.S. lawmakers of both parties faulted the Persian Gulf kingdom for continued lax financial controls, The Washington Post reports.

Adel al-Jubeir, a senior foreign policy adviser to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, the country's de facto ruler, said in interviews televised yesterday that the Saudi government was determined to uncover all the facts. In Washington, an embassy official said his government's investigation most likely would be widened to cover all beneficiaries of gifts handed out by the embassy.

But several senators, citing Saudi Arabia's poor record of cooperating with U.S. investigators since the attacks, expressed skepticism and called on the FBI to intensify its investigation of Saudi financial links to terrorism.

In "Befriending Saudi Princes: A High Price for a Dubious Alliance," released in March, Cato Senior Fellow Doug Bandow writes that Saudi Arabia is among Washington's most dubious allies, "a corrupt and totalitarian regime at sharp variance with America's most cherished values, including religious liberty." He argues that the United States should reassess its relationship with the Saudi regime and withdraw its troops from that country.

Bush Signs Legislation Forming Homeland Security Department

President Bush will sign legislation today giving him a Department of Homeland Security dedicated to preventing another Sept. 11 attack, and name White House adviser Tom Ridge to head it, Reuters reports.

The measure will bring about the biggest U.S. government reorganization in half a century by folding into the new anti-terror department all or parts of 22 federal agencies, including the Coast Guard, Secret Service and Border Patrol.

Neither the FBI nor the CIA will be part of the new Cabinet-level department, a decision that has drawn criticism from some law enforcement experts. The legislation does seek to bolster the analysis component of their intelligence information.

A chief aim is to avoid a repeat of the breakdowns in communication between the two agencies exposed by the hijacked airliner attacks last year on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon near Washington that killed about 3,000 people.

According to Ivan Eland, Cato's director of defense policy studies, "even before the September attacks, the U.S. government had sufficient bureaucratic machinery to deal with terrorist attacks on the homeland without adding a new department." He added, "the real problem revealed by the terrorist attacks is too much bureaucracy - causing too many communication and coordination problems - not too little." In his commentary, "Bush Plan is Just 'Do Something'," Eland outlines the flaws that could render a new homeland security department ineffective.

Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org