Wednesday, August 04, 2004
Editorial: Undermining the point of intelligence reform
President Bush has so eviscerated a central recommendation of the 9/11 commission that he might as well have rejected it.
From the RoundTable blog
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President Bush opposed creating a Department of Homeland Security. Then, yielding to public pressure, he embraced the idea - while insisting on terms, such as removing many of the department's employees from their previous civil-service protections, guaranteed to impede its implementation. The president opposed establishing a 9/11 commission. Then, yielding to public pressure, he went along with it - while throwing up roadblocks, such as denying access to documents and agreeing to testify only under severely circumscribed conditions, guaranteed to hinder the commission's work.
And now, again yielding to public pressure, he has accepted the commission's recommendation for a new national intelligence director to better connect the kind of dots tragically left unconnected before 9/11 - while changing the job description in a way that eviscerates the very point of the reform.
The office of the new intelligence director, said the commission, should be in the White House. Above all, he or she should have budgetary and personnel authority over the 15 federal agencies with intelligence responsibilities.
None of that holds under the Bush version.
Rather, the new office would be precisely what the 9/11 commission sought to avoid. It would be simply another layer of bureaucracy, adding virtually nothing to either the better coordination of intelligence or the smoother communication of it to the president.
The office would duplicate work already performed by the director of central intelligence, but with even fewer tools to do the job. The director of central intelligence at least has real authority over the Central Intelligence Agency portion of the intelligence community.
The CIA, however, is only a small portion. Most of the estimated total of $40 billion each year for intelligence goes to agencies under the purview of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who should have been canned months ago for gross incompetence.
That's a clue as to where powerful resistance to the commission's recommendation may be coming from. It is also a reminder that structural reform of the coordination and communication of intelligence, however helpful, can be no better than how policymakers choose to use or abuse it.
