Like Ken Layne, I’m not real excited about Presdient Bush’s announcement that he intends to cave into the 9/11 Commission’s recommendation on creating a new Intel Czar:
WASHINGTON – President Bush on Monday endorsed the creation of a national intelligence director and a counterterrorism center ? his first steps to revamp the U.S. intelligence-gathering system to help prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
In asking Congress to create the center and a national director who would oversee all 15 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community, Bush embraced key recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission’s report.
“The work of security in this vast nation is not done,” Bush said, standing in the Rose Garden with the administration’s top national security officials.
Bush resisted the panel’s recommendation that the director control all intelligence budgets, and he also disagreed with the commission’s idea for placing both the counterterrorism center and the director post within the White House.
The actual serious issue here is that dissenting views on the nature of terrorist threats need to be heard and evaluated at the highest level of government, and the consolidator function proposed by the Commission prevents that from happening. While Bush’s plan is not as radical as Kerry’s (who wants to make intel subservient to politics by design), it’s still a step in the wrong direction. The Homeland Security director and the Intel director will step on each other’s toes, and the CIA and the FBI and the DIA and the NSA will continue to play cloak-and-dagger games against one another.
We need an intelligence agency that’s insulated from politics, and we need to reduce the number of agencies, not increase it.