Bush To Back Intel Czar
White House officials said Monday that President Bush has decided to support establishing a national intelligence director but not in the executive office of the president, as the Sept. 11 commission had proposed.
Mr. Bush also is embracing the panel's idea for a National Counterterrorism Center, which the commission envisions as a joint operational planning and intelligence center staffed by personnel from all the spy agencies. But again, he does not want to establish the center inside the White House, the administration official said.
Mr. Bush was expected to outline his decisions at a late morning appearance outside the White House.
The president, under election-year pressure to revamp the nation's intelligence-gathering system to help thwart terrorist attacks, was expected to act soon on reforms suggested by the Sept. 11 commission.
He plans to issue orders to implement recommendations outlined in the commission's report, which highlighted lapses in intelligence that left America vulnerable to the 2001 attacks.
Mr. Bush will embrace the recommendations, "but that doesn't mean everything is going to be exactly the same" as the panel has suggested, a senior administration official said Sunday on condition of anonymity.
The subject takes on special currency with the announcement Sunday by authorities that they had uncovered a plot by the al Qaeda terror network to attack five prominent financial institutions in New York City, Washington and Newark, New Jersey.
Currently, the CIA director not only heads his own agency but also oversees the U.S. intelligence community, which has grown to 15 agencies. But the director has neither budgetary authority nor day-to-day operational control of the other agencies, most of which are in the Defense Department.
Much of the discussion so far has centered on where in the government flow chart to place a new national director of intelligence and a National Counterterrorism Center, which the commission envisions as a joint operational planning and intelligence center staffed by personnel from all the spy agencies.
The commission says both should be established within the Executive Office of the President.
But, said another senior official, who also demanded anonymity: "We want to ensure that the intelligence operators and analysts maintain their autonomy," and "that has to be a key consideration at the issue of where you place either of those."
The administration claims it has already taken steps that respond to some of the 40 recommendations the commission outlined in its 567-page report, released July 22, that highlighted intelligence lapses that led to the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
The White House has issued its own 20-page report listing actions the administration has taken consistent with the recommendations.
In addition to proposals for the national director of intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center, it said Mr. Bush's senior advisers were preparing recommendations on how best to move forward in the following areas:
Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, who has given a blanket endorsement to all the commission's recommendations, accused the administration of dragging its feet on intelligence reform.
"I think this administration has dropped the ball on homeland security," Kerry said in a broadcast interview Sunday. "I think they are now moving to catch up. But what America wants is leadership that's ahead of the curve, that doesn't have to be told by an independent commission — which they, incidentally, fought to prevent."
Besides deciding whether to appoint a national intelligence director, the Bush administration must also pick someone to do the job. The CIA is currently headed by an acting director, John McLaughlin, after the departure of George Tenet, who was criticized in a report about errors in intelligence about Iraq.