[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Unfinished Intelligence Work

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Unfinished Intelligence Work

October 11, 2004
 


 

Congress has rushed home to politick, but voters should not
be fooled by lawmakers' claims that they have successfully
overhauled the nation's tattered intelligence system. Vital
work on a final compromise remains to be done, and the
leadership of President Bush, a latecomer to full-scale
intelligence reform, is needed to make it a reality. 

Rival measures were passed in the final hours of the Senate
and the House, leaving conference and White House
negotiators to settle such crucial questions as to how much
power the new national director of intelligence will
actually have. The House measure, pushed through in a
blatant exercise of Republican control, nips those powers
while adding irrelevant and retrogressive moves to increase
police powers unnecessarily and single out innocent
immigrants more than terrorists. 

The bipartisan Senate bill does far more to fulfill the
9/11 commission's mandate for overhauling the intelligence
agencies that so gravely failed the nation before the Sept.
11 attacks and the parlous decision to invade Iraq. The
White House hopes to proclaim reform and showcase a bill
signing by the president by Election Day, perhaps on the
eve of the vote. It will be hard to begrudge him that
photo-op if he does the work needed to purge the bill of
the House's negative efforts and unrelated add-ons. 

One of the worst of these was an original House proposal to
allow rapid-fire deportation of aliens on unproven
suspicions, even back to homelands notorious for torture.
The White House noted that this violates the world
antitorture treaty. So G.O.P. leaders retreated, but have
hardly eased human rights concerns by approving powers for
the secretary of homeland security to indefinitely detain
alien suspects without recourse to federal courts. Mr. Bush
should demand that this be eliminated; the administration
already has a black eye in this area. 

The nation requires a far stronger intelligence shield, but
the House measure would give the new director much less
budget and personnel powers than the Senate plan. This is
key as to whether the director will be able to exercise
independent control over the conflicting agencies and
quickly shift priorities as new threats arise. The final
bill must also guarantee that a new counterterrorism center
will have real power to focus on evolving threats. 

In judging this issue, voters must score both houses for
defaulting on the 9/11 panel's call to end Congress's
dysfunctional oversight of intelligence by streamlining its
confusion of committees. The House has yet to make any
change, while the Senate's chairmen finessed a cosmetic
package of relabeling to protect the committee status quo. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/11/opinion/11mon2.html?ex=1098513279&ei=1&en=a1353fd959f1675b


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