The director of the CIA recently testified to Congress that a terrorist attack was highly likely in the next 3-6 months. Coincidentally, it’s also budget time in Washington, as various departments scramble for increasing their share of federal dollars. Obama indicated he wanted to cut some spending down the road: all government bureaucracies want to avoid those cuts, so they’ll send out their respective heads to fight for their slice of the budget pie.

The CIA guy came in with the biggest splash. I’m not saying his announcement was false – and if it was, shame on him – but his announcement was timely. There was plenty of media coverage, as well. That means it’s likely the CIA prepared a media package to go with the Congressional testimony. Government agencies do that. They hand stories to the media and the media reads those stories to the cameras, often with little investigation on the part of the major media outlets, from Fox to CNN and all the major networks in between. They take the government word as gospel and pass it on to us. The pundits will howl one way or another to credit or discredit the sitting president or one of his close political cronies, but the bureaucracy itself is held sacrosanct. That suits the needs of the bureaucracy just fine.

When it comes to budget time, every bureaucracy wants a director or cabinet member that can get out and fight his president for every scrap of the budget he can grab. They don’t want someone that agrees with the president that, yes, the bureaucracy is overstaffed with middle managers and could do with a bit of a trim. There was one director of the USDA under Clinton that tried to rein in his department who soon found himself the target of an ethics query. When you fight the bureaucracy, one takes on a very powerful and resourceful opponent. It’s much easier to go native and become one of them than it is to support one’s president.

I’d expect other agencies to regard the CIA’s presentation to Congress with alarm. Not because the CIA pointed out a terrorist attack is likely to happen. Rather, because the CIA is likely to get a bigger budget at their expense. Look for more urgent meetings with Congress from other departments in the days to come as the budget fight thickens.

The film comes out Friday, February 12th, but I’m thinking of seeing it either on a Saturday or a Wednesday. Tickets are 2-for-1 on Wednesday and only $5.00 for matinee showtimes on Saturday. THIS WILL BE FOR CLASS PARTICIPATION POINTS, IF YOU WANT THEM!!! It’s not required, but this does look to be an awesome film. One aspect of the film deals with life in America post 9-11 for Muslims, but there’s much more to it than just that.

Let me know what days work for you and I’ll try to pick an AP Government night at Funasia. It’s got stadium seating, retractable armrests, and a great snack bar that features South Asian goodies. (Snack bar is cash only, so bring cash if you want to munch or get a coke…) If you can’t see it with the rest of the class, you can still see it on your own and talk about it with me.

“[The] right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” – Justice Harry Blackmun

Those words shook America back in 1973 and the Constitutional right to privacy was born. I don’t want to dwell on the pro- or anti-abortion position in this article, but I do want to look at how the Supreme Court came up with the right to privacy. It’s a fascinating study of how the Court can create legal standards even though the Constitution says all legislative power is vested in Congress.

The idea of judicial review is part of English Common Law, but it’s not used to set aside laws in that country unless they conflict with a treaty. When Justice Marshall asserted it for the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison, he created a new form of judicial review, in which courts could essentially exercise veto power over a law if they could craft a Constitutional argument to justify it. Never mind that some of the nation’s founding fathers spoke out against the idea of judicial review: Justice Marshall not only brought it into American law, he made it into something more powerful that it had been anywhere in the world, before or since.

Since Marshall’s assertion of power, the Court has been able to do some incredible things to American politics, not all of them constructive. The Supreme Court has produced some decisions that critics derided as bad law based upon bad reasoning. Bad as those decisions may be, they were those of the Supreme Court and they stand. In the case of Roe, the amazing creation of the right to privacy stunned many observers and led to further discussion of what, exactly the Supreme Court should be able to do. Discussion could not change the fact that the Supreme Court could pretty much do whatever it wanted to do, so long as it made up a reason to do it. H.L. Mencken once quipped that a judge is a law school student that gets to grade his own papers. In the case of the Supreme Court, there’s no appeal to how the student got his grade: it’s always an A+.

While it’s true that just as the Supreme Court can craft stupid rulings, Congress can pass stupid laws. Those laws of Congress, however, are at least closer to the people who they ultimately have to answer to. The Supreme Court answers to no one, as Thomas Jefferson pointed out: “Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control.”

(NOTE: This is *not* about abortion. This is about judicial review and how it can produce interesting results. Please keep your comments focused on judicial review.)

When a government wants to use a media outlet to participate in a disinformation campaign, how does it go about gaining complicity of the press?

It goes out and hands the story to the newspaper. In the case of the US Government, its media of choice are the New York Times and The Washington Post. The Israeli government prefers Rupert Murdoch’s outlets, like The Times of London, Fox News, and The New York Post.

Let me illustrate how this works with a real-world example. The Times of London recently ran a story on how Iran’s nuclear program was gaining progress. That story was planted by the Israelis. We know this because the source was listed as “an Asian intelligence source,” which is how the Israelis are typically identified. The Asian intelligence source provided documents which the US has now come out and claimed to be forgeries.

The Israelis want to push for military action against Iran. The US wants more time to negotiate. No matter what’s true or false, one can see how a state can use a media outlet to push its agenda. When the US needs to change or bolster public opinion, look for its message first in a big-time leak in the New York Times or The Washington Post.