You Call That a Reform Bill?

Fred Kaplan at Slate says that the new national intelligence director will be a toothless figurehead. I tend to agree...More to follow//JW sends.

The intelligence-reform bill, which the House and Senate seem finally on the verge of passing, doesn't really reform much. Certainly it falls far short of the measures urged by the 9/11 commission, which set the legislative process in motion. The basic reason for this shortfall is simple: The Bush White House doesn't want reform.

The commission's main proposal was to create a new national intelligence director, who would coordinate and control the vast, disparate, and sometimes quarrelsome array of federal departments, agencies, and sub-agencies that comprise the U.S. "intelligence community."

Initially, the Senate passed a bill that closely reflected the commission's suggestions, which a handful of Republicans in the House firmly rejected. House Speaker Dennis Hastert refused even to bring a similar bill to the floor for a vote.
The compromise bill that's about to pass—and that President Bush, at last, has endorsed—establishes a national intelligence director but one with scant authority.

The key passage in the bill making this so notes that this director will not "abrogate the statutory responsibilities" of the Department of Defense. A story in today's New York Times quotes a supporter of the bill who calls describes this language as "minor." In fact, it is anything but.

The Defense Department's "statutory responsibilities" for intelligence matters—which the bill says the new NID may not abrogate—are laid out in Title 10 of the U.S. Code (Chapter 21) and in DoD Directive 5100.20. They cover the personnel, operations, and budgets of not just the Defense Intelligence Agency (and its Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine sub-branches), but also the National Reconnaissance Office (which controls all spy satellites), the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (which selects the routes for those satellites), and, most critically, the National Security Agency (the largest U.S. intelligence apparatus, which handles electronic and communications intercepts).

All told, these activities comprise about 80 percent of the U.S. intelligence community's budgets. In short, this "reform" bill places about 80 percent of the entity that's supposedly being reformed outside the control of the official—the new national intelligence director—who is supposedly the reform's centerpiece.