Intelligence-reform bill gains Senate approval

By Mary Curtius
Los Angeles Times

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most read articles Most e-mailed articles

After months of negotiations and predictions that the reform effort would not succeed, the Senate's action — one day after the House passed the bill — was a quiet affair: an 89-2 vote, with Sens. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and James Inhofe, R-Okla., casting the negative votes. Washington's Democratic senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both voted for the bill.

President Bush has promised to sign the legislation into law quickly. He intervened to save the bill after House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., decided not to bring it to a floor vote over the objections of a pair of powerful committee chairmen.

The Pentagon controls 80 percent of the estimated $40 billion annual intelligence budget. The bill would transfer some of that authority to the new national intelligence director, who will write the budgets for those spy agencies that do not provide combat support.

The national intelligence director also will be able to shift limited amounts of money from one program or agency to another, and to reassign some personnel from one agency to another. The director will serve as the president's chief intelligence adviser.

The bill also calls for creation of a civil-liberties board, charged with ensuring that the government's war on terror does not infringe on civil liberties and privacy. Still, the American Civil Liberties Union said it was opposed to the measure.

"This restructuring will centralize the intelligence community's surveillance powers, increasing the likelihood for government abuses, without creating sufficient corresponding safeguards," the organization said.

The bill, which runs more than 600 pages and contains many law-enforcement, border-security and immigration measures, includes provisions to:

• Increase the number of detention beds available to hold illegal immigrants.

• Increase the number of border-patrol officers.

• Make it easier for the government to track suspected "lone wolf"' terrorists believed to be operating independently of any organization.
 
Relatives of some of those slain in the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as members of the Sept. 11 Commission, hailed the bill's passage.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., the ranking member of that committee, said the legislation addresses flaws in the intelligence system detailed by the Sept. 11 Commission.

That panel found that the lack of a single, powerful intelligence director had contributed to a culture in which the nation's 15 spy agencies often hoarded information rather than sharing it.

Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said he was "mystified" that the Senate had agreed to drop several provisions from its version of the bill meant to ensure the independence and objectivity of intelligence gathering. Levin had written several of those provisions in what he said was an effort to stop the politicization of intelligence.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who joined forces with Lieberman after Sept. 11 to push for creation of the commission, said he believed the legislation was "monumental."

Vice President Dick Cheney played a key role in negotiating the final bill. A former House member and former secretary of Defense, Cheney was tapped by Bush to persuade House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., to support the legislation. Hunter had joined forces with House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., to block it last month.

Hunter had argued that the bill could have endangered troops during times of war because it failed to protect the Pentagon's access to real-time strategic intelligence. Sensenbrenner wanted to keep provisions of the House bill that would have made it virtually impossible for states to issue driver's licenses to illegal immigrants and that would have increased the burden of proof on those seeking asylum in this country.

Four Democrats demur over secret program

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Congress' new blueprint for U.S. intelligence spending includes a mysterious and expensive spy program that drew extraordinary criticism from leading Democrats, with one saying the highly classified project is a threat to national security.

In an unusual rebuke, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, complained yesterday that the spy project was "totally unjustified and very, very wasteful and dangerous to the national security." He called it "stunningly expensive."

Rockefeller and three other Democratic senators — Richard Durbin of Illinois, Carl Levin of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon — refused to sign the congressional compromise negotiated by others in the House and Senate that provides for future U.S. intelligence activities.

The compromise noted that the four senators believed the mystery program was unnecessary and its cost unjustified and that "they believe that the funds for this item should be expended on other intelligence programs that will make a surer and greater contribution to national security."

Each senator — and more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials — declined to further describe or identify the disputed program. Thirteen other senators on the Intelligence Committee and all their House counterparts approved the compromise.

The rare criticisms of a highly secretive project in such a public forum intrigued outside intelligence experts, who said the program was almost certainly a spy satellite system, perhaps with technology to destroy potential attackers. They cited tantalizing hints in Rockefeller's remarks, such as the program's enormous expense and its alleged danger to national security.

A U.S. panel in 2001 described U.S. defense and spy satellites as frighteningly vulnerable, saying technology to launch attacks in space was widely available internationally. The study, by a commission whose members included Donald Rumsfeld before his appointment as defense secretary, concluded that the United States was "an attractive candidate for a Space Pearl Harbor."

Sending even defensive satellite weapons into orbit could start an arms race in space, warned John Pike, a defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, who has studied anti-satellite weapons for more than three decades. Pike said other countries would inevitably demand proof that any weapons were only defensive.