Scuppered

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

No tears need be shed for the intelligence reform bill that now appears to have been scuppered by conservative Republicans in the dying days of the 108th Congress. Most of the leadership on Capitol Hill, along with the White House, had agreed on compromise legislation that derived much of its inspiration from the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Its most important recommendation was the creation of the post of national intelligence director to superintend the diverse spy agencies and their budgets. But the backwoodsmen, led by a Vietnam combat veteran, Rep. Duncan Hunter, who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, concluded that the new Director of National Intelligence’s powers would add a potentially fatal layer of extra bureaucracy for front-line troops, who need to make lightning-fast decisions on the basis of real-time intelligence. No less important, they also deemed the bill too lax on the security procedures required for dealing with certain illegal immigrants.


Democrats are now urging that the president stand up to the “far rightists” in the Republican caucus and a supposedly “turf-obsessed” Pentagon that, the Democrats suggest, would not relinquish control of its operations for the common good. Like that of the Democrats who urged Mr. Bush’s father to raise taxes, this is mischievous advice. The Pentagon only expressed its own view, via General Myers, because it was required to do so by law, namely the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act that was specifically lauded in the report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. In any case, the real energy for rejection came from grassroots Republicans.


The compromise legislation, and both the earlier House and Senate versions, missed the point of what is wrong with the intelligence community and above all with the CIA. There is no use in reconfiguring the management flow charts with all sorts of new posts and chains of command if the cultures of those organizations remain unaltered. There is little even in the widely praised commission report about the nature of the disease. What kind of people are we recruiting as officers to the Agency? What makes or breaks careers there? What are the residual restrictions from the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate Church-Pike Committee witch hunts? And what can we learn from foreign precedents in fighting terrorism, such as the British victory in Malaya in the 1950s or the more recent Israeli successes against the second Intifada?


What we need to be doing as President Bush prepares for his second term is to empower our departments assigned to fight the war America has long since declared against Islamic terrorism. At bottom, what became clear in the Congress in recent days is that this was not the agenda of this bill.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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