The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States will release its final report tomorrow. The commission is expected to recommend creating a new, single Cabinet-level post to oversee America’s 15 intelligence agencies and control their budgets. The acting director of central intelligence, John McLaughlin, doesn’t like the idea. “The director of central intelligence could carry out that function well and appropriately,” Mr. McLaughlin said on “Fox News Sunday.”

It’s true that the National Security Act of 1947 empowers the director of central intelligence both to direct the CIA and to coordinate the activities of the rest of the intelligence community. But a recent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report indicates that that structure hasn’t been working well lately. The committee’s report, a study of the Intelligence Community’s prewar assessments concerning Iraq, concluded that “this arrangement actually undermined the provision of accurate and objective analysis by hampering intelligence-sharing and allowing CIA analysts to control the presentation of information to policymakers, and exclude analysis from other agencies.”

The committee further found that “while the DCI was supposed to function as both the head of the CIA and the head of the Intelligence Community, in many instances he only acted as head of the CIA.”The Central Intelligence Agency is a bureaucracy with its own entrenched interests, and the Senate found that the agency “abused” its leadership position within the Intelligence Community to suppress the views of other agencies that disagreed with CIA assessments and to keep valuable information from reaching analysts outside the agency.

The upshot of all this is that officials from the Central Intelligence Agency could “provide the agency’s intelligence analysis to senior policymakers without having to explain dissenting views or defend their analysis from potential challenges from other Intelligence Community agencies.”

Part of the problem may have been personnel, but the September 11 commission may be on to something when it suggests tinkering with the structure as well as with the personnel. Senator Kerry last week endorsed the idea of a new Cabinet post along the lines of what is expected to be recommended by the commission.”We need to create a true Director of National Intelligence with the ability to manage and direct the myriad components of the intelligence community, including authority over the budget, operations, personnel and the exchange of information,” Mr. Kerry said.

The Kerry solution, however, would reproduce the same problems all over again, and compound them by adding a new layer of bureaucracy. He should read his colleagues’ report. “The Committee believes that policymakers at all levels of government and in both the executive and legislative branches would benefit from understanding the full range of analytic opinions directly from the agencies who hold those views,” the senators concluded. The problem is that intelligence is too centralized. Mr. Kerry’s suggestion that the intelligence community be further centralized under some mega-director of intelligence with total control over operations and budgets fails to grasp this problem.

The Senate committee speaks of “a broken corporate culture and poor management.” Only the most faithful liberal hack would try to solve this problem by reinforcing a centralized command-style bureaucracy. The rest of the world has learned to flatten out corporate structures, move decision-making closer to the consumer, and encourage competition.

Mr. McLaughlin complains that the Pentagon controls 80% of the intelligence budget. We see no reason, however, for the Central Intelligence Agency to control the budget for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Secretary Rumsfeld and his team at the Pentagon — and their troops — are the ones who are going to be blamed for winning or losing the war on terrorism. They’ve been more successful so far than the CIA has. So there’s plenty of reason to leave them some latitude over their own intelligence support.

More broadly, no structural tinkering short of a constitutional overhaul is going to change the fact that the final responsibility for defending America and making judgments on the threats that face us lies not with any intelligence tsar but with the president and the Congress.