Welcome, I'm Anastasia Glova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

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Just ahead of confirmation hearings for Air Force General Michael Hayden,

we're here to speak with Cato Director of the Project on Criminal Justice

Tim Lynch. General Hayden's nomination to head the CIA comes on the heels of revelations about the warrantless

eavesdropping program he spearheaded as director of the NSA.

In light of such news, should Americans be concerned about his nomination?

They should be concerned. President Bush has had a about his gave George Tenet, who was the previous director of the CIA, the Presidential Medal of Freedom,

after he said it was a slam dunk that we would find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

He has promoted lawyers who authored the famous torture memos that the administration later disavowed.

He has promoted them to federal judgeships.

And then he made his most peculiar personnel decision by trying to elevate his White House

Council Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court and we all know how badly that went.

So we should be close attention to what General Hayden has to say during his confirmation

hearings.

What do you think are some of the questions the senators will be asking General Hayden?

Well, although this is going to be a confirmation hearing for General Hayden where you would think

they would be asking questions about his background and his knowledge of intelligence, I think

the senators are going to use this hearing as an opportunity to conduct oversight of the administration and some of their intelligence programs.

We've just heard about this massive collection of telephone records of Americans being conferred from telecom companies over to the NSA.

What's on the minds of lots of senators is, you know, they've just heard about this,

...