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Cato Daily Dispatch for November 29, 2004

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Cato Scholar Argues Medical Marijuana Case
Election Dispute Widens Gap between Iraq Sects
Intelligence Reform Up to Bush

Cato Scholar Argues Medical Marijuana Case

"Several U.S. Supreme Court justices expressed doubts that states can let seriously ill patients ease their symptoms by using marijuana, a drug the federal government has designated as illegal," according to Bloomberg News.

"The Bush administration is appealing a lower court decision allowing two California women to use marijuana on their doctors' recommendation. The administration says the federal Controlled Substances Act, which lists marijuana among the most strictly controlled drugs such as cocaine and LSD, overrides laws in nine states that permit medical use of marijuana."

Cato senior fellow Randy Barnett, author of Restoring the Lost Constitution, argued the case before the Court today. Barnett says that "the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce does not extend to plants grown in one's own back yard for personal medical use as authorized by state law."

Cato filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case that calls on the Supreme Court to affirm the decision of the lower court.

Election Dispute Widens Gap between Iraq Sects

"A growing dispute over the timing of Iraq's first elections in decades is exacerbating divisions between the country's largest sectarian groups," the Wall Street Journal reports.

"The controversy, which pits Iraq's majority Shiite community against its Kurdish and Sunni minorities, comes just 10 weeks before Iraqis are supposed to go to the polls to elect a 275-person national assembly charged with picking the country's next government and crafting a permanent constitution."

In "A Democratic Iraq May Not Be Friendly to U.S.," Christopher Preble, Cato Institute director of foreign policy studies, writes: "What if Shi'a Muslims, who comprise over 60 percent of the total population of Iraq, elect a leader with ties to Iran -- a democracy, but one in which religious mullahs dominate political life, suppress dissent, are building nuclear weapons, and fund terrorism? What if ethnic Kurds, emboldened by their relative autonomy from the last 12 years, choose leaders committed to full-fledged statehood, independent of Iraq? What if a host of candidates split the votes of Shiites and Kurds, while minority Sunni Muslims unite behind a former Baath Party official?

"In short, if a democratic election, reflecting the honest and freely expressed wishes of the Iraqi people, produces a leader deemed insufficiently committed to Washington's goals, the Bush administration will be forced to affirm or reject its alleged attachment to the principle of democracy."

Intelligence Reform Up to Bush

"The fate of an overhaul of U.S. intelligence agencies rests with President Bush, who must exert more pressure on holdout Republicans if he wants compromise legislation to pass this year, a lead Senate negotiator said yesterday," according to the Washington Post.

In "Building Leverage in the Long War: Ensuring Intelligence Community Creativity in the Fight against Terrorism," James W. Harris, a former CIA executive, writes: "In the war ahead, the adaptable nature of the adversary will demand an equally agile U.S. intelligence effort. More resources and better human intelligence will help. But an agile intelligence community will require something else: that the intelligence community at last dispense with the internal barriers that stifle communications and collaboration. Building an agile intelligence capability will require that internal communications improve, that robust and perhaps formal alliances with external centers of expertise be constructed, and that a genuine multidisciplinary analytic effort blossom and achieve a creative flair that is not typical of bureaucratic enterprises.

"Metrics will be needed for measuring progress in the effort. They should include measures of improved communication within the intelligence community, structures that connect the intelligence community to the best and the brightest outside the world of intelligence, and indicators of true analytic innovation. Intelligent risk taking and the ability of individual initiative to overcome bureaucratic caution would be central themes in a successful effort."

Wyatt Dubois, editor, wdubois@cato.org