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Cato Daily Dispatch for November 27, 2001

Iraq Rejects Bush Demand On Arms Inspectors

Iraq rejected today a call by President Bush to let U.N. weapons inspectors back into the country to determine whether it is building weapons of mass destruction, according to Reuters.

"Anyone who thinks Iraq can accept an arrogant and unilateral will of this party or that, is mistaken," an Iraqi government spokesman said.

"Iraq is able to defend itself and rights and will not bow to threats but only to justice, and right," the spokesman said in a statement carried by the official Iraqi News Agency.

Bush yesterday demanded Iraq allow international arms inspections to resume, saying Washington's war on terrorism also targeted those who made weapons of mass destruction "to terrorize the world."

Earlier this year the Cato Institute hosted the policy forum "Ten Years after the Gulf War: The Lessons and Future of Washington's Iraq Policy," featuring former U.S. ambassador to Iraq Edward Peck and Middle East expert Laurie Mylroie.

Columbine-Like Plot Foiled

Classes resumed today at New Bedford High School after a holiday weekend in which three students were charged with plotting an attack on the school that the police said was intended to be bloodier than the 1999 killings at Columbine High School, according to The New York Times.

But even though the authorities said the plotters had all been caught, and the school was searched locker by locker for explosives on Sunday, things were not entirely back to normal.

About 40 percent of the school's 3,300 students stayed home, said Joseph Oliver, the headmaster. About 40 met with guidance counselors, and six students who were especially troubled or concerned about safety met with crisis counselors. Police cars and officers guarded the sprawling, mud-brown school complex and inside, between classes, teachers manned the hallways.

Over the years, Cato Institute scholars have produced a wide range of policy analyses, commentaries, and studies on some of the issues brought to center stage by school violence, including the failure of government-run schools, and proposals for strict federal gun control measures. The Cato Policy Analysis "Homeschooling: Back to the Future" addresses one alternative, while in a Cato Policy Report article, Executive Vice President David Boaz calls on the government to "Let the Children Go." The Cato Policy Analysis "Trust the People: The Case Against Gun Control" makes the case against poorly reasoned quick fixes. Selected Cato Readings on the Littleton School Shootings contain these essays and more.

White House Looks To Revive Internet Censorship

As the Supreme Court considers the fate of Congress' latest attempt to shield youngsters from Internet smut, one question looms large: Do "community standards" exist in the far-reaching, freewheeling realm of cyberspace?

The Court will ponder that First Amendment yardstick tomorrow, when they hear a Bush administration bid to revive the 1999 Child Online Protection Act, according to ZDNN. A federal appeals court in Philadelphia, siding with the American Civil Liberties Union and several Web sites last year, said the statute seemed to trample constitutionally protected speech and upheld a preliminary injunction blocking it.

At the heart of the debate is the law's "community standards" test, which the appeals court said imposes "an impermissible burden" on protected speech. Since Web publishers can't block access based on where a visitor lives, their sites could be "judged by the standards of the community most likely to be offended by the message," the court said.

In "New Wind in the Sails of the Censorship Crusade?" Director of Telecommunication Studies Adam Thierer writes that calls from Conservatives to censor the Internet "seem a bit ironic, however, given that conservatives are fond of talking about 'parental responsibility' but seem to want to pass the buck to Big Government when it comes to controlling their children's viewing or listening habits."

"Conservatives are also fond of making the argument that only political speech deserves strict First Amendment protection while other forms of speech and expression do not," he says.