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http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/12/08/MN138698.DTL
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Hill leaders urge intelligence czar
Panel's probe of 9/11 is expected to call for anti-terror coordinator
James Risen, David Johnston, New York Times
Sunday, December 8, 2002
�2002 San Francisco Chronicle.
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/12/08/MN138698.DTL
Washington -- The Republican and Democratic leaders of the congressional investigation
into the Sept. 11 attacks plan to issue a final report this week calling for the
appointment of
a new Cabinet-level director of national intelligence who would outrank the director of
central intelligence, government officials say.
But the congressional leaders have agreed not to assign blame to any individual
government officials for the intelligence failures before Sept. 11, and, instead, will
emphasize proposals for changes to make sure that such devastating attacks never happen
again.
The final report, summing up the joint panel's nearly yearlong inquiry into the
government's
performance before Sept. 11, is based on evidence of missed signals at the CIA, the FBI
and other agencies, and will include many of the findings that the panel's staff made
public
in interim reports released at hearings this summer and fall.
The report is coming just days after President Bush signed legislation creating an
independent commission to investigate the attacks. Bush named Henry Kissinger, the
former
secretary of state, as chairman of the commission, which will pick up the case just as
Congress is dropping it off. The independent commission is certain to plow through
much of
the same material already reviewed by the congressional panel, which collected hundreds
of thousands of pages of documents from the CIA, the FBI and other agencies.
After extended private negotiations last week, the four top lawmakers on the joint
inquiry
agreed among themselves on the most important recommendations to include in the final
report. They now tentatively plan to present a draft to the full panel for a vote as
early as
Tuesday. The four lawmakers -- Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla.; Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.;
Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla.; and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco -- are expected to
confer
again on Monday to review a written draft of the report that includes the
recommendations
they settled on last week.
Officials cautioned that it was unclear how their draft would be received by the
committee's
other members, or whether it would be revised as they sought a consensus.
The leaders stopped short of endorsing one of the most contentious ideas for
intelligence
change being widely debated in Washington -- the creation of an additional domestic
intelligence agency like the British MI-5 -- even as they recognized the FBI's
weaknesses in
conducting domestic counterterrorism operations.
The idea of creating an American version of MI-5 has gained support as the Bush
administration, Congress and outside experts have all tried to grapple with the
difficulties of
tracking terrorists once they are inside the United States.
Widespread criticism of the FBI's performance before Sept. 11 raised questions about
whether counterterrorism operations should be stripped from the bureau and turned over
to an independent agency. But deep concerns over civil liberties and other
constitutional
issues have made the administration and Congress reluctant to endorse the idea.
The proposal to create a director of national intelligence closely mirrors legislation
introduced last summer by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Feinstein said in June that a
director of national intelligence was necessary to "coordinate our intelligence and
anti-
terrorism efforts" and to make certain that "the sort of communication problems that
prevented the various elements of our intelligence community from working together
effectively before Sept. 11 never happen again."
One person, the director of central intelligence, is supposed to have authority over
the
entire American intelligence community, including the CIA. In reality, however, the
director
is most directly responsible for managing the CIA, while other agencies within the vast
intelligence community have day- to-day managers of their own. Many of those agencies
are part of the Defense Department, and so the secretary of defense controls their
purse
strings, drastically limiting the intelligence director's influence over them.
There have been many proposals from Congress and independent commissions in recent
years calling for changes in the role of the director of central intelligence. Some of
those
have called for addressing one of the major complaints of central intelligence
directors in
the past -- that they had responsibility for the entire intelligence community but
lacked
budget power over most of it.
The proposal to create a director of national intelligence tries to address the
problems by
splitting the job in two.
The national intelligence director would have authority over the broad intelligence
community, including the allocation of resources. The central intelligence director,
meanwhile, would be responsible only for the CIA itself.
That would free the central intelligence director to concentrate only on whether the
agency
was doing the hard day-to-day work of counterterrorism.
But questions remain over just how powerful a new director of national intelligence
would
be. The leaders of the joint inquiry plan to propose that the new national intelligence
director would review and approve budgets for the intelligence community, but it is
unclear
whether that would reduce the secretary of defense's budget authority over military
intelligence agencies.
Officials at the CIA and the FBI said they had not yet seen the recommendations
proposed
by the congressional leaders, and so could not comment.
�2002 San Francisco Chronicle. Page A - 6
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