President Bush said Monday he is asking Congress to create the position of a national intelligence director to serve as the president's principal intelligence adviser.
"We are a nation in danger," Bush said as he referred to the elevated terror levels in three regions of the country.
The national director of intelligence will report to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Bush said.
Wait ... wasn't the point of the national intelligence director supposed to be that the person would sit both on top of and somewhat outside the existing intelligence structure to coordinate between the CIA, FBI, DIA and all the other IAs running around the government? Wouldn't it be flying in the face of the recommendation to put the national intelligence director under the CIA? (As well as exposing the CIA to intelligence information to which the agency is currently barred by statute.)
To be sure, this gets around two terribly problematic aspects of that recommendation from the 9/11 Commission: that a national intelligence directorate actually inside the White House would wind up politicizing the intelligence it receives, and that creating a directorate by necessity creates an entirely new layer of bureaucracy. Keeping the directorate in the CIA would keep it out of the administration's direct line of fire somewhat, and putting it inside the CIA would keep the creation of bureaucracy to a minimum (Or has the hope of doing so, anyway.) However, putting a person whose job it will be to review and critique CIA intelligence and methods directly under the head of the CIA would seem to be spectacularly unwise, to put it mildly.
Posted by iain at August 02, 2004 12:02 PM
