|
|||||
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
 |
 |
    |
|
|
|||
 |
|
||
|
|||
|
|
|
|
||||||||
|
First Congressional Hearing Held on Sept. 11 Report By Joe Fiorill WASHINGTON — Key U.S. senators from both major parties today endorsed major intelligence and antiterrorism reforms recommended in the final report of the federal commission that studied the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks (see GSN, July 29). In the first of a series of congressional hearings on the commission’s conclusions, the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee’s chairwoman, Susan Collins (R-Maine), and its top Democrat, Joe Lieberman (Conn.), praised the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States for recommending a new national counterterrorism center and a national intelligence director to oversee 15 existing agencies. Collins said “the intelligence failures” that allowed the attacks to happen “were not the result of individual negligence but of institutional rigidity,” adding that “turf battles” and “power struggles” among agencies “cannot be allowed to doom needed reform.” “Massive reorganizations of government are always controversial,” she said, but “for the American people, it is results that count.” Sept. 11 commission Chairman Thomas Kean and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton presented to the committee an outline of their proposals for the counterterrorism center, the intelligence “czar,” a multiagency information-sharing program and FBI reforms. The commission has endorsed the latter instead of the oft-proposed creation of a new domestic intelligence agency to take on some FBI responsibilities. The civilian-led counterterrorism center would deal with both intelligence and operations and would report to the intelligence director, who in turn would report directly to the president. The new structure, as described today by Hamilton, would involve intelligence agencies’ taking on roles like those of the various armed services within the Defense Department. Each agency would report to one of several “joint mission centers” set up by the national intelligence director to address specific areas of concern. “A joint mission center on WMD and proliferation, for example,” Hamilton said, “would bring together the imagery, signals and HUMINT [human intelligence] specialists, both collectors and analysts, who would work together jointly on behalf of the mission. All the resources of the community would be brought to bear on the key intelligence issues as identified by the national intelligence director.” The committee members and commission leaders portrayed the existing intelligence agencies as scattered and secretive. Before the attacks, Kean told the senators, “No one was able to draw relevant intelligence from anywhere within the government, assign responsibilities across the agencies ― and that’s foreign or domestic ― track progress and quickly bring these things forward so they could be resolved.” “In other words, as we’ve said, no one was the quarterback. No one was calling the play. No one was assigning roles so that government agencies could execute as a team and not as individuals,” Kean said. “The intelligence community,” Hamilton added, “isn’t going to get its job done unless somebody is in charge. That is just not the case now, and we paid the price: Information wasn’t shared; agencies didn’t work together.” “We support a national intelligence director,” Hamilton said, “not for the purpose of naming another chief to sit on top of all the other chiefs. We support the creation of this position because it is the only way to catalyze transformation in the intelligence community and manage a transformed community afterward. … We see it as the only way to effect what we believe is necessary: a complete transformation of the way the intelligence community does its work.” President George W. Bush has already set up a working group on the commission’s recommendations and is apparently planning to issue executive orders to implement some of the proposals. Today’s hearing appeared to signal that Congress, too, would prove receptive to much in the panel’s report. Lieberman said the document “presents us this — committee and the Congress — with one of the most important opportunities that any of us will have to be of service to our country.” “You have created the model Congress must follow,” he said.
| ||||||||||
Back to top
