The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are off tomatoes and onto jalapeno peppers as the possible source of a recent salmonella outbreak traced to Mexican restaurants, as Jane Zhang and Janet Adamy write in the Wall Street Journal.  Every day that they can’t find the answer is a day for critics of government to rehearse their usual refrains.  The easiest thing is to charge incompetence:  Why can’t those government people find the problem?  What is wrong with these people?  Business are losing money — everyone pities the tomato growers who have, it turns out, been "unfairly charged" and have lost "hundreds of millions of dollars."  But consider the alternative — what if the CDC was doing nothing? (more…)

CIA Director Michael Hayden is trying to improve the agency’s image, but seems reluctant to shed old agency habits and preferences, Joby Warrick writes in the Washington Post.  Hayden has resisted reforms Congress has been encouraging, such as using the Army Field Manual to govern interrogation tactics, or making sure that only government employees — not private contractors — are involved in interrogating terror suspects.  But the spy agency’s director has apparently closed down CIA secret prisons and is working to improve relations with foreign intelligence services.  Warrick notes that more members of Congress are now authorized to know about the CIA’s most sensitive operations information.  Getting Congress involved constructively now may avoid the kind of radical reconstruction — in the form of the Church Committee hearings — that resulted from CIA abuses in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  -NH