Reflections on CIA Analysis: Is it Finished?

Despite the CIA's improved analytical tradecraft and increased resources, the future of its analytic mission remains in doubt. Post-9/11 improvements have been coupled with a continued focus on current intelligence priorities that minimize attention to the development of strategic research and deeper knowledge. Simply increasing the number of analysts has not produced deeper expertise. The CIA's traditional recruitment and training methods, as well as its rewards and promotion system, encourage analysts to avoid concentrating on any single area of regional or functional expertise in favor of moving around the agency to build a successful career. A continued reliance on risk-avoidance security practices also restricts analysts' contact with non-government and foreign experts who often have needed political and cultural knowledge of intelligence topics. To rectify these inadequacies, the CIA's analytic directorate needs to develop incentives for analysts who wish to develop more strategic analysis and remove the security barriers to closer collaboration with experts outside the US government. Developing cross-agency analytic collaboration would also maximize expertise and would benefit from intelligence community-wide training programs similar to what the US military does at its senior service colleges.     

The Seventeenth-Century Origins of Modern Salvage Law

Reginald Marsden argued that Sir Henry Marten, while judge of the High Court of Admiralty, had in 1633 entertained the first action for civil salvage ‘in the modern sense’. But Marsden could find little evidence among the formal Admiralty decrees of the seventeenth century that sea-coasters or mariners had regularly used this new plea in the central court to seek rewards for saving ships and cargoes. A sampling of the court's Act Books, however, reveals that Admiralty judges may well have ruled in more than 200 salvage cases from the time of Sir Henry's innovation until the end of the century. In some of these cases, moreover, Sir Richard Lloyd, a late-Stuart judge, abandoned the ancient custom of rewarding salvors with half of what was saved and developed instead the modern and equitable practice of adjusting awards according to what salvors had done and risked in rescuing the property of others.     

Allele frequency distribution for 21 autosomal STR loci in Bhutan

We studied the allele frequency distribution of 21 autosomal STR loci contained in the AmpFlSTR^® Identifiler™ (Applied Biosystems), the Powerplex^®16 (Promega) and the FFFL (Promega) multiplex PCR kits among 936 individuals from the Royal Kingdom of Bhutan. As such these are the first published autosomal DNA results from this country.     

The Value-Added Tax in Ghana

Ghana's Parliament enacted a value-added tax (VAT) in December 1994, with collection to begin on March 1, 1995. The short preparation period proved fatal for the tax. However, the nation's fiscal problems continue and the government is resolved to reintroduce the tax in 1998. This article reviews the structure of the failed tax, showing how it would have been a more effective general consumption tax than the system it would have replaced, examines the reasons for its untimely demise, and considers prospects for a successful reintroduction of the tax. Ghana's experience with the VAT can hold important lessons for countries contemplating the introduction of such a tax.     

Fixed Content of Political Obligations

An aspect of political obligations that has received little attention is the means through which their content, i.e., exactly what is required of their bearers, is determined. An adequate moral basis for political obligations must account for this requirement, which is closely linked to the concept of authority, the state's right to substitute its judgement in various areas for the subjects' own. The problems faced by theories of obligation based on gratitude and tacit consent in fixing the content of obligations are examined, while I show how a theory based on the principle of fairness is able to overcome them. As long as a cooperative enterprise supplies public goods that are indispensable to minimally acceptable lives and require 'regulated cooperation' for their supply, it is able to ground obligations with fixed content under the principle of fairness.     

Block grants and state discretion: A study of the implementation of the partnership for health act in three states

This article examines the use of federal funds provided to state health departments under a grant consolidation of eight previously categorical health programs in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Alabama in a comparative context. The primary question addressed is why the three states chose to describe their allocations of funds within the total health department budget differently, and what political, administrative, and bureaucratic factors explained the differences. Although certain factors were found to be at work in all states (e.g. each had an incentive to concentrate the reported use of federal funds to simplify federal audits) these factors combined with circumstances unique to each state to produce different expenditure patterns. After examining the experience of three states, general hypotheses are developed. For example, it is hypothesized that more volatile changes in allocations will result from grant consolidations in policy areas which do not address basic service needs. Finally the decision-making process with respect to block grant funds is characterized as one in which a small group of professionals determined allocations autonomously with relatively little input from interest groups or other actors within state government; nevertheless, the external political and administrative environment severely limited the possibilities of realistic choice in each of the three states studied.I wish to thank the National Center for Health Services Research which supported this study under grant HS 01495. I am indebted to the state health department officials in Alabama, Michigan, and Pennsylvania who made this research possible. I would also like to thank Leonard Robins, Janet Shikles, William Schmalzreid, Bruce Vladeck, John Kingdon and Robert Baitty for comments on an earlier draft. Of course the views expressed are my own and in no way reflect the positions of the Department of Health and Human Services.