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Bush Offers Intel Director Plan
U.S. President George W. Bush yesterday offered a plan for a national director with significant budgetary and personnel control over the U.S. intelligence community, but stopped short of backing the Sept. 11 commission’s full recommendations for the position (see GSN, Sept. 7). “We believe that there ought to be a national intelligence director who has full budgetary authority. We’ll talk to members of Congress about how to implement that. I look forward to working with the members to get a bill to my desk as quickly as possible,” Bush said yesterday at the White House. The intelligence director would serve as the head of the U.S. intelligence community — establishing standards, policies and programs; determining its priorities; and ensuring agencies share information, particularly related to terrorism. Work is also expected to include supervising a national counterterrorism center and a possible national center to counter WMD proliferation, according to a White House release. The director would control more than two-thirds of the intelligence budget, roughly $40 billion annually split among 15 agencies, the Washington Post reported today. Under the president’s plan, any intelligence agency head would have to receive the director’s approval to appoint a person to a post within the organization. The director would also be able to offer recommendations on intelligence appointments made by the president. Bush did not follow the commission’s recommendation to place the position within the executive office, the Post reported. He also proposed giving the job budget control only over foreign intelligence work not related to tactical military operations, while the commission backed full budgetary authority. The presidential campaign of Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) knocked the Bush plan as inadequate. “If George W. Bush were serious about intelligence reform, he’d stop taking half-measures and wholeheartedly endorse the 9/11 commission recommendations and work for their immediate passage by Congress,” said Rand Beers, Kerry’s national security adviser (Pincus and Milbank, Washington Post, Sept. 9). A bipartisan group of senators, including John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) have introduced a bill that would implement the Sept. 11 commission’s 41 recommendations on intelligence reform. “With the introduction of this bill, the Senate now has before it legislation that addresses each of the commission’s 41 recommendations, which together are designed to build unity of effort across the U.S. government — all in an effort to prevent future terrorist attacks,” McCain said yesterday on the Senate floor. Other members of Congress have also backed the commission’s entire report, but Republican leaders in the House of Representatives plan to present their own bill based largely on their expertise, the Post reported. “I think it was highly inappropriate to call for immediate passage of the 9/11 commission recommendations,” House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said yesterday (Charles Babington, Washington Post, Sept. 9).
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