Word: one
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...undigested and conflicting intelligence from Panama was "stovepiped" straight to the Chief Executive and his top aides, bypassing lower-level experts who would normally sort it out. Some Bush aides now admit privately that this practice confused the U.S. response to the Panamanian coup. The compartmentalization of information, says one senior Administration official, is "a destructive trait in any President. The information the President has is not shared with enough people to allow him to head off bad ideas...
...details emerged about covert U.S. plans aimed at overthrowing Noriega in July and October 1988. These plans, the Administration noted, were blocked by some of the same Senators who last month criticized Bush as timid. Members of the Senate intelligence committee, both Democratic and Republican, defend their caution. One congressional source described the October plan as an ill-defined "hodgepodge." Committee spokesman James Currie added that conducting any high-risk covert operation just before a presidential election could unduly and unpredictably influence the election if the operation became public. Said Currie: "No matter what side you're on, you probably...
...members of Ecoglasnost were later released, but the crackdown was a crude warning to Bulgarian political activists to watch their step. It was one more indication of just how nervous Eastern Europe's remaining hard-line regimes have become as a result of the year's dramatic political changes elsewhere in the bloc. The obdurate rulers in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Rumania refuse to imitate their reformist neighbors but can't help looking anxiously over their shoulder. "They are all worried about the fallout from change elsewhere," said a Western diplomat in the region. A Bulgarian proverb captures the fears: "When...
...characterize sentencing decisions in the U.S. Despite efforts at reform, much of the nation's criminal sentencing system is still based on an idiosyncratic set of decisions made by crime-busting legislatures and individual trial judges. New York State law, for example, sets extremely broad parameters for various crimes -- one to 25 years for a bank robbery, 1 1/2 to 15 years for first-degree assault -- but leaves it to the discretion of each judge to fix the actual sentence. The theory behind this system is that punishment should be tailored to such factors as the circumstances of a crime...
...problem, of course, is that a case-by-case approach can easily create inconsistencies. For one thing, legislatures are not always careful to calibrate each offense according to its severity; this can lead to situations in which an armed assault can draw the same penalty, say 15 years, as a simple robbery. In recent years, moreover, disparities in the punishments prescribed for various crimes have been exaggerated by legislators' tendency to enact mandatory minimum sentences, particularly for drug crimes...