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Bush Examining Ways to Provide Intelligence Director With Effective Authority, Rice Says
The Bush administration is considering ways to provide a new national intelligence director with “effective” budgetary and management authority, U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said yesterday (see GSN, Aug. 6). The new director would need “to have more effective authority than the director of central intelligence has,” Rice said during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. “We’re discussing the mechanisms by which that might be done,” she added. While President George W. Bush has backed creating a national intelligence director — a key intelligence reform proposal put forth by the Sept. 11 commission — he has differed with the commission over how much authority the new director should have over the intelligence budget and the selection of personnel to head the various intelligence agencies. The only thing Bush has so far committed to, Rice said, is that the new director should not be located in the White House and should not be a Cabinet-level position (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, Aug. 9). On Friday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seemingly reversed himself and came out in support of a national intelligence director, according to the Chicago Tribune. While Rumsfeld earlier said that creating such a director would be a “disservice” to the United States, he said in an interview with the Tribune that his position then was a reference to combining the various U.S. intelligence agencies under one department. The White House has envisioned a director who would have authority over the intelligence agencies, but not combine them. That proposal is “a good idea,” Rumsfeld said. He said, however, that other commission proposals must be examined closely (Stephen Hedges, Chicago Tribune, Aug. 7).
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