10 August 2004
[Thanks to A.]
Department of Homeland Security
Washington DC 20528
Federal
|
Department of
|
August 3, 2004
SUBJECT: Suspicious Activity Reporting Criteria for Infrastructure Owners and Operators
FOR: Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs), State Homeland Security Advisors, Government First Responders, Security Managers, and Facility Operators
DHS and FBI encourage recipients of this memorandum to report information concerning suspicious or criminal activity to their local FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) – the regional phone numbers can be found online at http://www.fbi.gov/contact/fo/fo.htm – and the Homeland Security Operations Center (HSOC) or the National Infrastructure Coordination Center (NICC), a sub-element of the HSOC in support of the private sector and critical infrastructures. The HSOC can be reached via telephone at 202-282-8101 or by email at HSCenter@dhs.gov; and the NICC/HSOC can be reached via telephone at 202-282-9201 or via email at NICC@dhs.gov.
Each report submitted should include the date, time, location, type of surveillance, number of people and type of equipment used for the activity, the name of the submitting company and a designated point of contact (POC).
Overview
DHS and FBI request that the owners and operators of the nation’s critical infrastructure/key resource facilities (see Appendix), provide reporting to the above offices on the following types of suspicious activities potentially indicative of pre-operational terrorist planning:
Surveillance/Probing Activity
• Report attempts to test or conduct reconnaissance of security operations at critical infrastructure/key resource facilities, high profile venues or sector-specific events.• Report any persons showing uncommon interest in security measures or personnel, entry points or access controls, or perimeter barriers such as fences or walls.
• Report any persons showing uncommon interest in critical infrastructure/key resource facilities, networks, or systems (e.g. photographing or videotaping assets).
• Report any theft of or missing official company identification documents, uniforms, credentials, or vehicles necessary for accessing critical infrastructure/key resource facilities or sector-specific events.
• Report all suspicious attempts to recruit employees or persons knowledgeable about key personnel or critical infrastructure/key resource facilities, networks, or systems.
• Report any theft, purchase, or suspicious means of obtaining plans, blueprints, alarm system schematics, or similar physical security-related or sensitive information related to a facility with critical infrastructure/key resource facilities and systems.
• Report any discovery of documents (particularly foreign language products) containing pictures or drawings of critical infrastructure/key resource facilities or systems.
• Report any persons near critical infrastructure/key resource facilities who do not fit the surrounding environment, such as individuals wearing improper attire for conditions or not normally present in the area (such as, homeless persons, street vendors, demonstrators, or street sweepers).
• Report pedestrian surveillance near critical infrastructure/key resource facilities involving any surveillance activity of sensitive operations, including photography, videotaping, or extensive note-taking/use of audio recorder (regardless of the number of individuals involved), or mobile surveillance by cars, trucks, motorcycles, boats or small aircraft.
Threats/Warnings
• Report all threats/warnings that could affect the reliability and operation of the nation’s critical infrastructures/key resources.• Report discoveries of website postings which make violent threats specific to critical infrastructures or sector specific events.
For comments or questions related to the content or dissemination of this
memorandum, please contact the DHS/Information Analysis and Infrastructure
Protection Directorate’s Requirements Division at
DHS.IAIP@DHS.GOV.
____________________________________
APPENDIX
CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURES AND KEY RESOURCE FACILITIES1
Critical Infrastructures
• Banking and Finance• Chemical
• Defense Industrial Base
• Electric Power
• Emergency Services
• Food/Agriculture
• Information Technology
• National Monuments and Icons
• Oil and Natural Gas
• Postal and Shipping
• Public Health
• Telecommunications
• Transportation (Rail/Mass Transit, Maritime, Aviation, Highway)
• Water
Key Resource Facilities
• Commercial Facilities• Dams
• Government Facilities
• Nuclear Reactors/Materials
____________________
1 Under the Homeland Security Act, which references the definition in the USA PATRIOT Act, the term “critical infrastructure” means “systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters.” The Act defines ‘key resources” as “publicly or privately controlled resources essential to the minimal operations of the economy and government.”
[Thanks to A2.]
By Miles Benson
Newhouse News Service
08/08/04 "Seattle Times" -- WASHINGTON — The terrorists can't win. They can't wreck the economy or inflict other forms of irreparable damage on the nation, despite their ability to impose great inconveniences, disruptions, expense and occasional scary periods of elevated alert, many experts say.
To be sure, bombs or other forms of attack on the homeland could take lives, and the respite since Sept. 11, 2001, may not last. But the danger of average Americans or their loved ones becoming casualties in the war on terrorism is scant compared, say, to the daily risks they face from automobile accidents, crime or weather-related menaces.
"A false sense of insecurity" grips the nation, spurred partly by war rhetoric from President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, warns John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University.
The election campaign intensifies "a general tendency to exaggerate worst-case scenarios — that terrorists can destroy our way of life," Mueller said. "That strikes me as basically wrong. Most likely there is some destruction here and there, which is very tragic — we can't downplay the horror to the people directly involved — but the idea that a tiny group of terrorists on the run can actually destroy the U.S. is extremely questionable."
Other experts agree that the climate of danger and concern is out of proportion to the reality of terrorist capabilities.
Al-Qaida might target the U.S. financial-services industry — that threat triggered the current elevated alert in New York, Washington, D.C., and Newark, N.J. — but even a successful attack would not bring the nation's economy to a halt.
"Blowing up the International Monetary Fund or the New York Stock Exchange would be calamities, but not in that category, because the economy recovers from personal tragedies quite readily, in a heartless kind of way," said Henry Aaron, an economist at the Brookings Institution.
"We should not be complacent," said Chester Crocker, a former assistant secretary of state under President Reagan, now a professor of diplomacy at Georgetown University. "But there is danger of people who don't know how the world is organized getting spooked and hysterical by the hype and emotional overreaction at the popular level."
Terrorists may attempt to tear the fabric of society, but can they accomplish that?
"No, not tactically," said Frank Cilluffo, associate vice president for homeland security at George Washington University and a former senior terrorism adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. It's not "within the realm of probability. But they are in the business of inflaming fear. They can win battles, but in the long term they cannot overcome our resilience and who we are as a nation."
While there is always the chance of losing hundreds of lives or critical parts of the infrastructure, "there is no danger of massive defeat of the United States" by terrorism, said Anthony Cordesman, a senior defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Factors like the weather attack us all the time and produce casualties, but we are a great deal more resilient than most people understand."
"Terrorism has become one more actuarial risk, like getting out of bed. Americans have shown they can live with the risks of getting out of bed, and terrorism as well, particularly if terrorism is as low as it has been."
The National Center for Health Statistics, which tracks 113 causes of death in the United States, reported that in the same year that nearly 3,000 people died in the Sept. 11 attacks, 43,788 died in motor-vehicle accidents, 30,622 by suicide, 20,306 were murdered (including 11,348 by firearms), 14,078 died by accidental poisoning and 3,021 died as a result of complications from medical care. An additional 700,000 Americans died of heart disease, the No. 1 killer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while 553,768 died of cancer and 32,238 died of blood poisoning.
"It's hard to compare the dangers of terrorism with other threats to life," said Dr. Robert Lifton, a psychiatrist who has studied and written extensively about the ways people react to extreme situations.
"With terrorism, with Sept. 11, there was a shocking experience of violation of America's sense of safety," said Lifton, author of "Superpower Syndrome," a book about the nation's response to the terrorist threat.
Some critics think the Bush administration has manipulated warnings about the timing of possible terrorist attacks for political purposes. Cilluffo, a Republican, dismissed such suggestions as "truly preposterous."
Zbigniew Brzezinski, national-security adviser to former President Carter, is not so sure, and he worries about the degree to which perceived political imperatives drive leaders in both parties.
"My grave concern is that we are hyping ourselves into a state of panic which is going to discredit us internationally even if it has some utility in the short run for the administration," Brzezinski said. "It reinforces the theme that we are at war. In a war you don't change your commander in chief. This is a pretend war. If it was a real war, we would have a draft, special taxes and a sense of sacrifice, posters with Uncle Sam pointing a finger at you and saying, 'I want you.' "
Brzezinski acknowledged that Democratic presidential nominee Kerry also is talking "war" and using other language similar to Bush in describing the terrorist threat.
"I suspect it's unnecessary," Brzezinski said. He blamed other party leaders, including Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and former House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri.
"Democrats were stampeded into supporting Bush and enlarging the scope of the conflict," Brzezinski said.
[Thanks to Paul Wolf.]
From: paulwolf@icdc.com
Subject: Demise of the CIA
Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 10:53:00 US/Eastern
At first glance, the 9/11 Commission recommendations look like the beginning of the end of the CIA. And I'm all for it. The Agency has outlived its purpose and is an anachronism in the post- cold war world. The existence of such a powerul organization, answering to neither Congress, the judiciary, or the public, mocks the nature of our democratic government and presents a criminal mug to the outside world.
"For the world as a whole," wrote Arnold Toynbee some thirty years ago, "the CIA has now become the bogey that communism has been for America. Wherever there is trouble, violence, suffering, tragedy, the rest of us are now quick to suspect the CIA has a hand in it."
This reputation has endured to this day. The solution is to reorganize the CIA out of existence.
The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission will do away with the CIA. The appointment of a National Intelligence Director strips the CIA of its primary responsibility: the coordination and analysis of information from all government intelligence agencies. The CIA will become another in the alphabet soup of intelligence collectors, including the DIA, FBI, G-2, NRO, NSA, and so on.
Another recommendation getting serious attention is to strip the CIA of its role in conducting paramilitary operations. In his book Deadly Deceits, Ralph McGehee, a Phoenix Program veteran turned Agency critic, writes that the CIA is not a central intelligence agency -- it is the covert operations arm of the President's foreign policy. Doing the President's bidding, writes McGehee, politicizes intelligence analysis and inevitably results in telling the boss what he wants to hear. It also makes more sense for the Pentagon to direct these kinds of operations.
The CIA evolved from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a World War II creation that specialized in sabotage, the organization and training of guerrilla forces, and the so-called Morale Operations, designed to generate panic and hopelessness among German and Japanese civilian populations. The collection of "Secret Intelligence" -- what we normally think of as espionage, was an afterthought intended to facilitate those operations.
The OSS was disbanded at the end of the war, its functions scattered among other branches of government. Harry Truman, in particular, wanted no part in "an American Gestapo." The need for the collection and analysis of information remained, however, and after a short period of chaos Congress enacted the National Security Act of 1947, creating the CIA. The CIA inherited the OSS principle of combining Secret Intelligence and Special Operations and applied the hard-hitting approach of the OSS to the post-war era.
Today we see another paradigm shift. No longer do we feel theatened by communism in Vietnam or Central America. Now, as the government continuously reminds us, we are theatened by "terrorist organizations" not affiliated with any government. And although our reaction to the September 11 attacks has been decidedly destructive, I believe there is also an opportunity to make a clean break with our past.
The 911 Commission recommends that the "need to know" philosophy be replaced with a "need to share" information. This is a law enforcement approach, rather than a counterintelligence approach. Normally, it is assumed that foreign intelligence agencies have penetrated our own to some extent, and information is "compartmentalized" to minimize thechance that it will fall into the wrong hands. But if our enemies are international criminals, rather than foreign governments, this is not such an important concern.
And then there is the problem of secrecy and public accountability. Since the passage of the Freedom of Information Act in 1975, the courts have held the CIA above the law, and created for it a "zone of secrecy" that does not exist for any other part of government. Yes, it does release some selected information to the National Archives and to favored reseachers, but this is entirely at its discretion and has little to do with public oversight.
Presumably, the CIA would continue to maintain its labyrinth of front organizations, foundation grants and covert political manipulators. Yet the 9/11 Commission recommendations would go a long way to curtailingthe power of this agency.
Yes, the time has come to reorganize the CIA out of existence. Take away their coordinating role, take away their paramilitary operations, disclose their budget, and start transferring people to another agency with a new name. Sure, there are risks of creating something even worse. But whatever new organization emerges will at least be free of the horrendous legacy of the CIA.
Paul Wolf
[Attachments]
1. A loophole for covert operations
2. The National Director Should Oversee Only the Agencies That Gather Data
3. Congress urged to take more power
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/9344226.htm
By Jennifer Kibbe, Fort Worth Star-Telegram Aug 8, 2004
The 9-11 Commission is to be commended for many aspects of the weighty report it has just issued. The report provides a wealth of detail about the tragic events of that day and of what led up to them. It also provides some thoughtful recommendations on how to fix the very serious problems with the nation's ability to confront the threat of terrorism, including expanding congressional oversight of intelligence.
Which is all the more reason to be shocked and disappointed that in one very important way, the commissioners dropped the ball. Not only did they not tighten up oversight of the crucial area of covert paramilitary operations, but they effectively loosened it, creating the potential for serious problems involving covert actions over which Congress has no say or control.
In its recommendations regarding reorganization of the intelligence community, the commission states: "Lead responsibility for directing and executing paramilitary operations, whether clandestine or covert, should shift to the Defense Department," from the CIA where it has traditionally been housed.
The commissioners' reasoning is sound. They begin from the underlying assumption that against the current enemy, more decentralized and fluid than the Soviet opponent of the Cold War, there will be more call for smaller, paramilitary-type operations. They point out, though, that before 9-11 the CIA did not invest much in developing a paramilitary capability and that it would be redundant and expensive to build one up now when the military already has the Special Forces for exactly that purpose.
The problem lies in the fact that in all their recommendations about strengthening congressional oversight, the commissioners neglected to say anything about oversight of these covert paramilitary operations.
Some context may help highlight the problem. As defined by statute, a covert operation is activity meant "to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly."
Thus, where "clandestine" refers to the secrecy of the operation itself, "covert" refers to the secrecy of its sponsor; the action itself may or may not be secret.
Ever since post-Iran-contra reforms adopted in 1991, all agencies of the U.S. government have had to meet two requirements for covert operations: that they be justified, before the fact, in a written presidential finding, and that the administration notify the congressional intelligence committees.
Although the CIA has apparently met these requirements, there is considerable confusion over whether the military has or should.
For one thing, the law expressly exempts "traditional military activities." In true legislative form, the law itself does not define the phrase, but the conference committee report explained that it was meant to include actions preceding and related to anticipated hostilities that will involve U.S. military forces.
That still leaves open, however, the interpretation of the word anticipated, since if future military hostilities are anticipated, no presidential finding or congressional notification are required.
Although the conference report defines anticipated hostilities as those for which operational planning has already been approved, a knowledgeable Pentagon official maintains that some in the Defense Department believe that the act gives them the power to undertake activities "years in advance" of any overt U.S. military involvement.
The second aspect of the problem is broader and more direct.
Administration officials have been nothing if not consistent in portraying the events since 9-11 as part of a "war on terrorism." The phrase has been repeated so often that it has become second nature to most sentient Americans.
But administration and Pentagon officials mean it quite literally: We are in an active war, they say, and therefore anything the military does, including Special Forces, is a "traditional military activity."
The upshot? Under either one of the above interpretations, the Pentagon reasons that it can send Special Forces on a covert operation to wherever it wants, with Congress having no knowledge, input or recourse.
Although many Special Forces operations are necessary and well-thought out,combining that kind of blank-check authority with a civilian administration that has a taste for pre-emption and whose judgment is already in question is a recipe for potential disaster.
There is, of course, the additional question of who would or should conduct the oversight, since the intelligence committees have traditionally had the responsibility of determining if an operation is covert yet the Special Forces fall within the purview of the more powerful Armed Services committees.
The 9-11 Commission's efforts to strengthen congressional oversight of intelligence are welcome and should be applauded. Nonetheless, by calling for paramilitary operations to be handled solely by the military without providing for the oversight of covert paramilitary actions, the commissioners have, whether knowingly or not, created a dangerous loophole in congressional control of intelligence operations.
With the presidential candidates vying to outdo each other in supporting the recommendations, it is up to the congressional committees holding hearings to identify and close this loophole.
The requirements regarding covert operations evolved over time in response to several dangerous and embarrassing chapters in U.S. history, including the CIA's efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro, Richard Nixon's efforts to overthrow Chile's Salvador Allende, and the Iran-contra affair.
Just because the military may be better suited than the CIA to conduct today's covert paramilitary operations does not mean that military leaders are somehowimmune from the pressures and poor judgment that led to previous mistakes.
Moreover, with the enemy as decentralized as it is, the potential for covert operations has spread to many more countries, meaning that the risk of collateral damage, diplomatic disputes and retaliation is much greater than it ever was in the past.
Jennifer Kibbe is the John M. Olin Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
_________________
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50943-2004Aug8.html
The National Director Should Oversee Only the Agencies That Gather Data
By John Hamre, The Washington Post, August 9, 2004
It's refreshing to have a big debate in Washington. Too often our debates are small and arcane. The Sept. 11 commission has touched off a much-needed debate of constitutional proportions: How do we best organize the intelligence functions of the government to protect the nation, yet oversee those functions to protect our citizens from the government?
The commission has rendered an enormous contribution to the nation. But its recommendations need to be the starting point for a great debate, not the final word. Political passions are rising, which portends danger. The American system of government is designed to move slowly, for good reason. Such a big and complex country needs to fully consider all the implications of major changes. We make mistakes when we move quickly, and we can't afford to make a mistake here.
Good as they are, the commission's recommendations are too narrowly centered on one problem. This is understandable. The commission was established to examine the problems the government had detecting and preventing the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. By definition, that was a matter of coordination among elements of the government, both vertically within organizations and horizontally across institutions. This is often referred to as the "connect the dots" problem.
But that isn't the only trouble with the intelligence community. Before the war in Iraq, the policy and intelligence communities held the near-unanimous conviction that Iraq was chock full of chemical and biological weapons, yet we found nothing. We collectively embraced a uniform mind-set, which is every bit as serious a problem as connecting the dots.
The field of view of our intelligence community is too narrow. The community is relatively small and its component institutions isolated. It is understandably and necessarily preoccupied with protecting sources and methods. And bureaucracies naturally fight for resources. In that environment, intelligence bureaucrats, like bureaucrats in any organization, strive to please their policy bosses. Taken together, these factors contribute to an endemic narrowness of perspective. The shorthand label given to this problem is "groupthink."
We need to fight that narrowness by creating more competition for ideas in the intelligence assessment world. The competition among ideas is improved when different organizations reporting to different bosses compete for better insights and perspectives. Bringing together the entire intelligence community under a single boss who exercises budget and personnel control would further constrain the constructive competition we need within the intelligence community.
The two great problems -- connecting the dots and avoiding groupthink -- are in tension with each other. Implementing an organizational solution to just one of the problems will worsen the other.
The great debate underway in Washington has two camps. The Sept. 11 commission, Sen. John Kerry and many congressional leaders believe a new director of national intelligence (DNI) can succeed only if the person in that job controls the budgets and personnel of the intelligence agencies. People in this camp would leave the agencies with their host departments but give the budgets and control of personnel to the new director.
President Bush chose a different path. His plan would create a relatively weak DNI, whose power would come from managing a set of interagency processes and supervising a set of ill-defined new centers. Unfortunately, if unintentionally, this approach also diminishes the bureaucratic standing of the CIA.
In sum, both approaches are flawed. I know from personal experience in government that ambiguous command authority is dangerous. Keeping intelligence agencies within a department whose budgets and senior leadership depend on people outside the department won't work. Similarly, we have a long history to demonstrate that the power and standing of central coordinators of interagency processes -- Washington policy wonks now call them "czars" -- deteriorate rapidly with time.
More fundamentally, each of these two approaches solves one of the greatproblems but exacerbates the other. The Sept. 11 commission's proposal would improve "dot-connecting" but would threaten competition among ideas. The president's recommendation would better sustain idea competition but do little to solve the problem of interagency coordination.
Frankly, I didn't favor the idea of creating a DNI, but I understand politics. Both political leaders in a hotly contested campaign have endorsed it as a symbol. We will have a DNI. We now have to ensure that we get a good solution. There is a third path.
The new DNI should run the existing interagency intelligence centers or their successors and coordinate the tasking process. But the DNI needs to be undergirded with real institutional power. The technical collection agencies -- notably the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency -- could be transferred to the DNI. The new director would manage the factories that provide raw material and support to the intelligence bureaus, which would remain within the Cabinet departments.
This approach would facilitate the integration of data collection while preserving diversity of perspective across the community for purposes of strategic assessment. Cabinet secretaries could devote their energies to demanding better analysis, rather than managing large bureaucracies that run machines to collect raw material for the intelligence process. This approach also would ensure that oversight of domestic surveillance on American citizens remained a responsibility of the attorney general, who is charged with protecting our civil liberties. Even here, however, the FBI could turn to the central collection agency, but under the attorney general's supervision.
My friends in the Defense Department are shocked that I have suggested this approach. Modern American war-fighting is more dependent on high-technology intelligence than ever before, they note. We cannot decouple the close working ties between our intelligence capabilities and our war fighters.
But there are ways to ensure that we sustain those close working ties. We should continue to send our best military personnel to work in these agencies and to support national collection efforts with tactical military intelligence systems. The DNI should have a board of directors made up of senior operators from the supported departments. And underlying it all is what I know to be true: that all civilian employees in these agencies consider it their highest priority to support the American warrior in combat. That will not change, even if these institutions report directly to a DNI.
Yes, there will be challenges and problems, but they are manageable. It is said that the intelligence community needs a reform like that of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which transformed the Defense Department. In fact, Goldwater-Nichols changed the Defense Department because it institutionalized demand for better capabilities from the military services. The Pentagon fiercely fought Goldwater-Nichols when it was proposed by Congress. Now it swears by its results. We have proved in the Defense Department that we can bring competing institutions together for a common purpose without forcing people to wear a common uniform.
The writer is president and chief executive of the Center for Strategic & International Studies and a former deputy secretary of defense. The views expressed here are his own.
_________________________
http://washingtontimes.com/national/20040803-115712-6618r.htm
By Stephen Dinan, The Washington Times, Aug 4, 2004
September 11 commission members said yesterday that Congress must use their report to justify taking more power and oversight from the White House as the two branches go about reorganizing domestic security and intelligence.
"What Congress needs to do is to see this as a moment when you've got to push back on the executive branch. You need more power and authority," said commission member Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska.
He and John F. Lehman, secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, told the House Government Reform Committee that President Bush's announcement on Monday that he supports creating a national intelligence director (NID) and a national counterterrorism center is a welcome step, but Congress must make sure that the NID has enough authority to do the job.
The five Republicans and five Democrats on the commission have been pushing to make sure their report, released two weeks ago, spurs action in Congress and from the president.
Yesterday's hearing on the commission report was the first before a House committee and came as the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee held its second hearing. Because Congress is in recess for August, the crowded hearing schedule is unusual.
Republicans have said they will move quickly but cautiously to review the recommendations, while Democrats have called for them to go faster and further, led by presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry, who embraced the recommendations in total.
That complete acceptance, said John Brennan, director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, would be a mistake.
"Are the recommendations of 9/11 workable, are they doable in totality? I don't think they are," Mr. Brennan told the Senate committee yesterday.
"I don't think we would do a service to this nation if we took these as they're stated and ran with them with haste. I just don't think that there is sufficient engineering, design, consideration of all the complexities here," he said.
So far the major battle appears to be over how much authority the new NID will have. Democrats, the commission's 10 members and some Republicans say there's not much point in creating the new position if that person won't have the authority to hire and fire employees and to control the more than $40 billion that the government spends each year on intelligence activities.
On Monday, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. said the NID would have "an awful lot of input into the development of any budgets in the intelligence community," although he wouldn't say the position would have control.
Yesterday, the White House appeared to open itself up to more than that possibility.
"As we move forward with Congress, we'll be talking in more detail about the authority that this person will have. But the national intelligence director will have the authority he or she needs to do the job," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said yesterday.
Pressed by reporters, though, Mr. McClellan would not say there will be give-and-take with Congress, instead saying the administration will "be providing more detail as we move forward on this."
"Obviously, when you're talking about something that requires congressional action, you're going to work closely with Congress on those matters. But the president made very clear his commitment to making sure that we had a nationalintelligence director that has the authority and power he or she needs to do the job," Mr. McClellan said.
Mr. Lehman said he thought the administration eventually will embrace budget authority for the NID. He said the problem is that Mr. Bush must placate some members of his own administration right now.
"By the end of the process, I'm confident that the word 'coordinate,' while it might still be there, will be subservient to 'direct' in the executive sense, because those powers must be given. And I don't believe the president will oppose them," Mr. Lehman said. "I think, unlike the rest of us, he has a whole administration that he's got to kind of herd along and keep consensus in."
Mr. Kerrey said every government board that has studied the issue has concluded that there should be an intelligence chief with more authority, but the recommendation never goes anywhere because of turf battles with the military committees in Congress and with the Department of Defense (DOD), which controls a sizable portion of intelligence gathering outside of the CIA's purview.
"If they win one more time, if the DOD wins one more time, then next time, there's a dust-up and there's a failure, don't call the director of central intelligence up here. Kick the crap out of DOD, because they're the one with the statutory authority over budget," Mr. Kerrey said.
The outstanding question is how dug in the White House is over protecting its authority. Although the commission laid out a broad blueprint for reforms in the executive branch, Mr. Lehman and Mr. Kerrey made it clear yesterday that Congress also must reform itself to take a more intense role.
"The most important thing to do is to fix the congressional issues," Mr. Lehman said.
The two men want Congress to create a joint House-Senate committee to oversee intelligence. Right now, each chamber has its own. "It is a much stronger position, Congress versus the executive branch, than perhaps the executive branch would want," Mr. Kerrey said. "But from my evaluation, the stronger, the better."
He said the executive branch needs that oversight and added that, in recent months, that role was being filled by the September 11 commission and now must be turned over to Congress.
That's one reason why Mr. Kerrey disagreed with those, chief among them Democratic nominee Mr. Kerry, who are calling for the commission's term to be extended.
"I love John Kerry, and I intend to vote for him. My confidence in him was shaken when he said that we ought to work for 18 more months," Mr. Kerrey said.