Its failure—along with recent new appointments to cabinet posts by President George Bush and the resignations of liberal “analysts” in the CIA—are indications of the shifting relationship of forces in the ruling class since the U.S. elections toward the course the Bush administration has charted the last four years and continues to pursue.

The legislation collapsed “as conserva tive Republicans refused to embrace a compromise because they said it could reduce military control over battlefield intelligence,” said an article in the November 21 Washington Post. The bill was drafted largely as a result of the conclusions of the 9/11 bipartisan commission.

Democrats, in particular, used the commission’s hearings to paint themselves as the foremost champions of “homeland defense” and advance their charges that “intelligence failures” under the Bush administration were the reason the government was unable to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Such charges were used to boost the unsuccessful presidential bid of Democrat John Kerry.

The measure would have created a Director of National Intelligence (DNI). It would also have given the new spy chief authority to set priorities for the CIA and 14 other spy agencies, including several at the Defense Department.

Its two chief opponents were reportedly House Armed Services Committee chairman Duncan Hunter, and Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner.

According to the Post, Hunter said he opposed the bill “because Senate conferees had removed a White House-drafted section ensuring that tactical or battlefield intelligence agencies would still be primarily directed by the secretary of defense, even as they report to the new intelligence director.” Hunter told the Post that the version of the bill he helped kill “was elevating for the DNI but detrimental to the defense secretary…a change that would make war fighters not sure to whom they report and translate into confusion on the battlefield.”

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly sent a letter backing Hunter’s position.

The U.S. government has been shifting the focus of its spy operations to direct infiltration of adversaries and real-time battlefield intelligence—such as that used in the recent assault on Fallujah by U.S. troops, who called in air strikes and artillery bombardment as they pinpointed enemy positions during battle. CIA “analysts” working largely from their desks in Washington, D.C., have been losing clout.

This process goes along with the “transformation” of the U.S. military posture worldwide toward smaller, more agile, and more lethal units that can move quickly around the globe using bases closer to the theaters of conflict. Within the administration, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been one of the main spokespeople for this course, along with Bush.

An article in the November 21 New York Times noted that “some legislators said…Rumsfeld had made clear his opposition to the proposed overhaul, which would have stripped the Pentagon of some budgetary control over its vast intelligence operations.” The disputed provisions were seen by the Pentagon as “threatening its budgetary control over intelligence-development, and thus its ability to generate the intelligence needed in war-fighting,” it said.

Statements by many Democrats showed that liberal politicians thought they had a pre-election deal that would sail through Congress and were flabbergasted by this turn of events, claiming that Hunter led a rightist rebellion against a bill that the White House had strongly backed. “I thought it was a fair, tough compromise—the stars and moon were aligned, and these few folks embarrassed the Speaker of the House, embarrassed the President of the United States, and set us back,” said Jane Harman, a ranking Democrat from California on the House Intelligence Committee.

An editorial in the November 23 Investors Business Daily had a different take on the bill’s failure. After the scuttling of the bill, “media wags immediately began talking about a ‘defeat’ for President Bush. It was nothing of the sort,” it said.

“Yes, Bush backed the bill—but he did so in a lukewarm way …. Remember, reform was rushed onto the national agenda shortly after the release of the 9-11 commission’s report last summer,” the big-business daily said.

“Also, the Pentagon hated the bill—and rightly so,” the editorial continued. “It would have deprived them of the ability to run their own spy operations. Why should military chiefs have to beg a new Washington bureaucracy for the intelligence they need to protect us? It makes no sense.”

The Pentagon currently controls roughly 80 percent of the $40 billion budget for U.S. government spying operations.

Other developments indicate that Rumsfeld’s course is right in step with that of his commander in chief. “President Bush has ordered an interagency group to devise a plan that could expand the Defense Department role in covert operations that have traditionally been the specialty of the Central Intelligence Agency,” said an article in the November 23 New York Times. The focus of the review, it continued, “will be whether the military’s Special Operations forces should have a role in paramilitary operations that a special CIA unit carries out.”

The Investors Business Daily editors urged taking time to make changes in the structure of the government’s spy operations.

“Besides,” they said, “new CIA Director Porter Goss is in the midst of a top-to-bottom shake-up of the CIA.… Why not give Goss, a former spy and congressman who knows something about both the conduct of spying and the policy issues involved, a little time to do his job?”

According to a front-page article in the November 17 New York Times, Goss told CIA employees that their job is to “support the administration and its policies in our work” in a recent internal memorandum. “As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies,” the memo said.

This was directed against numerous CIA operatives who banked their careers on support for Kerry, and who tried to aid the Democratic Party election campaign over the last year through “leaks” and “revelations” that could damage the Bush administration.

Michael Scheuer, for example, is one such “senior CIA analyst.” A 22-year CIA veteran who served as the chief of the Bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999, Scheuer wrote a book that was published this year titled Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. Originally released under the authorship of “Anonymous,” the book attacked the Bush administration and was used by liberals to buttress the Kerry campaign. The author’s identity was revealed last June, and Scheuer resigned from the CIA.

Scheuer’s resignation was followed by that of higher-ranking CIA officers. The head of the CIA’s clandestine service, Stephen Kappes, and his deputy, Michael Sulick, resigned November 15. According to the Times, they became casualties of Goss’s efforts to “overhaul the agency’s spying operations.”  
 
 
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