To the frustration of many a cabinet secretary, the Obama administration is a little behind on its appointments. At this point—with only five weeks to go before the Senate breaks for recess—a little over half of the 514 positions that need filling have been filled. Some jobs are really important: The nominee for the Office of Legal Counsel has been held up for months. Obama’s choice for a USAID director came down just today. U.S. attorney nominations have slowed to a crawl.
Other jobs? Not as important.
Take, for example, the eight-person Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the five media entities—Voice of America foremost among them—tasked with broadcasting American culture and journalism around the globe. In theory, the board is supposed to serve as a “firewall” between the broadcasters’ mission of journalistic objectivity and the political whims of legislators, who would often rather see taxpayer dollars go towards burnishing America’s image abroad. By statute, the president and minority party nominate four governors each to keep a bipartisan mix. But right now, the BBG is only half full. The four currently serving members were all appointed in 2002, and have overstayed their terms by three years—if anyone left, the board would no longer have a quorum to conduct business. Journalistic wise man Walter Isaacson is rumored to be the administration’s choice for the vacant post of chairman, and it’s hard to imagine him being held up for any substantive reason. It’s also hard to imagine the administration nominating him between now and when Congress leaves town in December.
The sad saga of the BBG began almost as soon as it was created in its current form, when the U.S. Information Administration was dissolved in 1999. As this magazine documented in 2005, Bush partisan Kenneth Tomlinson turned the board into an ideological battleground—purging people whom he saw as insufficiently conservative—that hamstrung the broadcasters’ operations and drove morale into the toilet. After Tomlinson was ousted, the well-respected editor James Glassman restored the board to some order, before he was tapped as Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy in the dying days of the Bush administration.
The New Yorker's Jeff Toobin offers a good response to my open question about how we should be handling Najibullah Zazi, an accused al Qaeda terrorist who may be in league with men still on the loose:
Time to break the waterboard out of storage?
I think not—and not just because it’s illegal. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Brooklyn which is bringing the case (and where I was a prosecutor in the early nineties) filed a brief where it outlined the reasons why Zazi should be detained rather than released on bail. The brief strongly suggests that our government has been tracking Zazi for months—that investigators have tapped both his computer and his phones, in Pakistan as well as the United States. According to the brief, Zazi has been discussing bomb-making with confederates, sharing information about how to make a bomb, and generally making plans for a terrorist attack. All of this surveillance means that the government has good information about Zazi’s confederates—their phone numbers and email addresses. This information can, of course, be traced back to identify further possible associates. It’s investigative gold.
A rough interrogation of Zazi, Toobin concludes, "would be both immoral and counterproductive."
It's a well-argued case, and I think I agree. But, let's play Devil's Advocate:
