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U.S. Senate Approves Final Intelligence Reform Bill By Mike Nartker WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly yesterday in favor of legislation that would create a national director to oversee the U.S. intelligence community (see GSN, Dec. 8). The Senate voted 89-2 to approve the bill, which would also create a national counterterrorism center to perform counterterrorism-related intelligence analysis and operational planning. Both the creation of a national intelligence director and counterterrorism center were among the key recommendations put forth this summer by the Sept. 11 commission. “This is an historic day for our country and a great achievement for the American people. We are enacting the most comprehensive overhaul of our nation’s intelligence agencies in more than 50 years,” Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins (R-Maine) and top committee Democrat Joseph Lieberman (Conn.) said in a joint statement yesterday. The bill came under fire yesterday, though, from Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), who reiterated on the Senate floor prior to the vote his long-held stance that Congress was moving too fast on intelligence reform. “Nobody can say with any confidence or certainty as to how this new layer of bureaucracy will affect our intelligence agencies or the security of our country. We don’t know if it will enable them to better guard against a terrorist attack or whether it will cause a host of unforseen problems. And we are failing, in yet another misguided rush to judgment, to take the time and effort to find out,” Byrd said in seven pages of remarks posted on his Senate Web site. Byrd and Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) were the only two members of the Senate to vote against the bill. The House of Representatives on Tuesday voted 336-75 to approve the bill, which was the result of weeks of work by House and Senate negotiators to resolve the differences in their separate measures. With the Senate vote yesterday, the bill has been sent to President George W. Bush for final signature into law. “I commend the Congress for passing historic legislation that will better protect the American people and help defend against ongoing terrorist threats,” Bush said in a statement yesterday. “We remain a nation at war, and intelligence is our first line of defense against the terrorists who seek to do us harm,” he said. “I look forward to signing this landmark piece of legislation into law.” A public signing ceremony is likely to be held next week, according to White House press secretary Scott McClellan. With the bill approved by Congress, questions have begun to arise on its implementation, including who will be chosen as the new national intelligence director. According to reports, a wide range of names has been put forward, including new CIA Director Porter Goss, National Security Agency Director Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, House intelligence committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) and former Sept. 11 commission Chairman Thomas Kean. Hoekstra said yesterday that the new position requires “someone who needs to be able to function as a chief executive officer.” “This is the conductor, the orchestrator of putting this vision for a new intelligence and an effective intelligence community together,” he said. “This is someone who needs to be able to develop a strategic plan and make sure that the people who are reporting to them are working together, are working on implementing this vision that this person has developed in consultation with the president and consultation with Congress.” Senator Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said yesterday that what was needed was someone who would be “viewed by all as a nonpartisan leader of the intelligence community.” “In order to effectively carry out the enormous responsibilities created in this bill, the new director cannot be seen as pursuing a political agenda or forcing the intelligence community to support a particular policy,” Rockefeller said in a statement. “We need a director who will speak truth to power and present what the intelligence community knows, does not know, or believes, in a timely and objective way. I strongly believe the president must nominate an individual to serve as the first director of national intelligence who embodies these qualifications,” he added.
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