WASHINGTON -
While opinions are divided over whether the revamp of
the US intelligence community laid out in the compromise
bill just approved by Congress will improve the
performance of the relevant agencies, there is little
doubt that the failure of President George W Bush to
push the bill through would have badly damaged his
political credibility.
In the end, Bush was
forced to pressure recalcitrant members of his own
Republican Party - and his own top Pentagon officials -
who opposed the reorganization out of fear that the
Defense Department might have to give up some of its
control over the sprawling US intelligence apparatus to
go along with the reform.
But to rally support,
Bush also weakened some of the most important
innovations in the original bill, notably the authority
of the new director of national intelligence (DNI) to
control the allocation of the community's estimated
US$40 billion budget among its 16 agencies.
"Substantively, the intelligence bill's main
importance is that it serves as an illustration that the
United States government did something in response to
the 9-11 Commission report," said John Prados, an
independent expert on the national security bureaucracy,
referring to last summer's report by the bipartisan
group mandated by Congress to examine why US agencies
failed to prevent al-Qaeda's devastating September 11,
2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
"The
form and content of the commission's idea for the DNI
post were considerably watered down, and, in the final
form, the position's authority remains very much
undefined," he noted. "Ultimately, the problem is that
the commission's recommendations have not really been
acted upon."
But if, as the critics suggest, the
reorganization proves less than sweeping, the bill's
approval puts an end, at least for now, to a
stronger-than-expected challenge to Bush's authority
from within his own party.
Even then, the fact
that one-third of Republicans in the House of
Representatives voted against the bill in spite of
appeals by both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney
suggests the president may have a more difficult time
keeping his party in line behind him during his second
term than he had in the first.
During the
presidential campaign this fall, Bush insisted that he
supported reorganization along the lines proposed by the
9-11 Commission's report when it was released last
August, but his public backing came under question after
the election.
Bush not only appeared unwilling
to lobby on the bill's behalf, but even permitted top
Pentagon officials, including Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, General Richard Myers, to quietly lobby against
it. Indeed, it was primarily the Pentagon's opposition
to the bill that spurred the dissident Republicans to
oppose it.
Failure to force the dissidents and
the Pentagon into line risked inflicting serious
political damage either on Bush's credibility - in this
case on whether he truly supported reform - or on his
ability to deliver Republicans behind a legislation that
he had described as important and that was strongly
supported by Democratic lawmakers and centrist
Republicans, as well.
"Bush, fresh off an
impressive election victory ... declared that he had
assembled a large store of political capital and that he
planned to use it," wrote political analyst Norman
Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) last
week. "But apparently he could not have anticipated the
possibility that he would enter his second term with an
embarrassing public setback engineered by his own party
members in Congress with the active participation of key
members of his own administration."
As
originally proposed by the 9-11 Commission, the
reorganization called for the creation of a
cabinet-level DNI with full budgetary authority over the
intelligence community and the creation of a National
Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to be attached to the
president's National Security Council that would combine
collection, analytical and operational functions of
different US agencies and report to the DNI, who was
also given the power to fire and hire all agency chiefs.
The commission also proposed that the main
components of the intelligence budget, which is
currently classified, be made public and consolidated
into a single appropriations bill rather than the
current situation in which about 80% of the budget is
hidden in the Pentagon's spending and the rest is
scattered around four other departments, including
state, energy and interior.
Bush created what he
called the equivalent of the NCTC by executive order
during the fall, while the Senate and House Democrats
lined up behind the commission's major recommendations.
But right-wing Republicans objected to the
proposals on several grounds. While some called for
enacting some of the immigration and visa restrictions
that had been included in the commission's report but
omitted in the legislation, the more important faction,
unofficially backed by the Pentagon, wanted to include
provisions safeguarding the defense department's control
over agencies that together claim about 80% of the total
intelligence budget: the National Security Agency (NSA),
the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National
Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA).
While under
the 1947 statute that created the modern intelligence
community, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI),
who doubles as the head of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), has ostensible control over the entire
intelligence budget, the Pentagon has controlled those
agencies in practice, in part because the kinds of
intelligence the NSA and NIMA provide - satellite
imagery and telecommunications intercepts - may be
particularly useful for military commanders preparing
for or engaged in battle.
Supporters of the bill
insisted that, just as the DCI had never interfered in
the delivery of tactical intelligence to troops on the
ground, the DNI would be unlikely to do so. As one 9-11
commissioner, John Lehman, noted, "It's a red herring
that has nothing to do with the issues. This is about
control of the money, and money translates to power in
the House."
Indeed, the final version of the
bill goes quite far in insulating the Pentagon from the
impact of the reform. On the purely tactical level, it
makes explicit that the DNI will not be in the "chain of
command" between the Pentagon-run intelligence agencies
and troops on the ground. But even more important, the
DNI, which, in the earlier version, had been given
unlimited authority to allocate resources among
intelligence agencies, will not be permitted to shift
any more than 5% of the funds, or 100 personnel, from
any one of them to any other. In addition, the DNI's
hiring and firing powers were essentially gutted; under
the bill, the position is given the "right to concur in
[their] appointment".
According to some critics,
the main practical result of the reorganization will be
the creation of a new layer of bureaucracy around the
new director who, apart from his cabinet status, will
enjoy no greater powers than those already held,
theoretically at least, by the DCI.
Still, some
intelligence professionals say the bill marks an
improvement over the status quo, particularly in
elevating the importance of inter-agency cooperation by
putting the DNI and the NCTC in the White House and by
ending the conflict of interest that was inherent in the
same person holding the CIA and DCI posts.
"These are real accomplishments," noted Greg
Thielmann, a veteran analyst at the State Department's
Bureau of Intelligence and Research who retired two
years ago. But at the same time, Thielmann said the
legislation failed to address two major, interrelated
concerns: how to insulate the DNI from political
pressures exerted by the White House and how to repair
the failures of intelligence assessments that took place
after September 11, particularly regarding the
intelligence community's mistaken conclusion that Iraq
was producing and stockpiling weapons of mass
destruction. "My real problem is that the legislation
was focused on 9/11, which was basically an operational
intelligence failure," he told IPS on Wednesday.
"Another enormous intelligence failure - the Iraqi
weapons assessment - is not addressed."
