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Cato Dispatch for June 14, 2007

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(Links to outside sources were active as of the date of this dispatch; however, not all news sources maintain links to current stories indefinitely. Some links also may require registration.)

FBI Breaks the Law?

"An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism," reports The Washington Post. "The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling."

In the Cato@Liberty posting "More on Bush's Surveillance Flip-Flop," Mark Moller, Cato senior fellow in constitutional studies, writes on one legal route the FBI could have used — the courts created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: "Based on the DOJ briefing regarding the NSA surveillance about-face, it appears that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is not approving surveillance on a program-wide basis.  Instead, it is issuing individualized surveillance orders against particularized targets."

In the study "Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining," Jim Harper, Cato's director of information policy studies, and Jeff Jonas, IBM engineer, describe how vast amounts of data collected wouldn't have been useful anyway: "Though data mining has many valuable uses, it is not well suited to the terrorist discovery problem. It would be unfortunate if data mining for terrorism discovery had currency within national security, law enforcement, and technology circles because pursuing this use of data mining would waste taxpayer dollars, needlessly infringe on privacy and civil liberties, and misdirect the valuable time and energy of the men and women in the national security community. What the 9/11 story most clearly calls for is a sharper focus on the part of our national security agencies — their focus had undoubtedly sharpened by the end of the day on September 11, 2001 — along with the ability to efficiently locate, access, and aggregate information about specific suspects."

The Surge Isn't Working...

"Three months into the new U.S. military strategy that has sent tens of thousands of additional troops into Iraq, overall levels of violence in the country have not decreased, as attacks have shifted away from Baghdad and Anbar, where American forces are concentrated, only to rise in most other provinces, according to a Pentagon report released yesterday," reports The Washington Post. "The report — the first comprehensive statistical overview of the new U.S. military strategy in Iraq — coincided with renewed fears of sectarian violence after the bombing yesterday of the same Shiite shrine north of Baghdad that was attacked in February 2006, unleashing a spiral of retaliatory bloodshed. Iraq's government imposed an immediate curfew in Baghdad yesterday to prevent an outbreak of revenge killings."

In "More Troops Are Not the Answer," Christopher Preble, Cato's director of foreign policy studies, and Gordon Adams, fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, write: "If the new mission of the force is primarily counter-terrorism, no new troops are necessary, since the people combating terrorist organizations rarely wear military uniforms. As these and many other examples show, most successful counter-terrorism operations rely on intelligence, effective cooperation with foreign militaries, and the integration of law enforcement, diplomacy, foreign assistance, and financial intervention, not blunt military force. Not only is more force not the answer to the terrorist challenge, relying on large concentrations of conventional troops to accomplish what should be surgical missions may be completely counter-productive, increasing, rather than decreasing the terrorist threat."

Zimbabwe on Verge of Collapse

"Zimbabwe will collapse within six months, possibly leading to a state of emergency, says a leaked briefing report for aid workers in the country," BBC News reports. "Rampant inflation will mean shops and services can no longer function and people would resort to barter, it said."

In "Africa's Zimbabwe Problem," Marian L. Tupy, policy analyst with Cato's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and Brett D. Schaefer, Kingham fellow at the Heritage Foundation's Thatcher Center for Freedom, write: "Beginning in the late 1990s, Mugabe began facing serious challenges to his authority. In response to the growing opposition, he initiated a ruthless, seven-year campaign to maintain political power. During that time, Mugabe has targeted his opponents for abuse, legal harassment, and economic punishment, and used his authority to reward allies and elicit support from the police, the military, and other key groups. Notably, Mugabe started to expropriate large, mostly white-owned, commercial farms. With property rights and the rule of law severely weakened, credit and investment dried up, sending shockwaves through an economy that was heavily reliant on agricultural production. Those policies have resulted in a precipitous economic decline, political repression, and a humanitarian crisis rivaling that in Darfur."

Nicole Kurokawa, editor, nkurokawa@cato.org