U.S. secretary of homeland security Thomas Ridge announced April 19 that he is forming a new task force that “will work with industry, governors and local police to boost security at potential targets and infrastructure, including airports, trains, and chemical plants,” according to the Associated Press.
“Now may be a time to revamp and reform our intelligence services,” said U.S. president George Bush April 12, the day before the 9-11 commission entered its latest two-day session. Following the hearings, Bush said in his weekly radio broadcast that “law enforcement and intelligence personnel must be allowed to share more information, so that we can better pursue terrorists inside the United States.” He urged Congress to reaffirm the USA Patriot Act, which increased police surveillance powers and gave the cops the green light to jail immigrants without charges if they are deemed “terrorism suspects.”
On his campaign web site, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry advocates “reforming domestic intelligence capabilities by immediately making the director of the CIA the Director of National Intelligence, with real control of national intelligence personnel and budgets.”
During an April 18 appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Kerry said, “I think that I can fight a far more effective war on terror. I can build alliances and cooperation. I will make America safer.”
The day after the latest hearings, the New York Times reported that White House officials are discussing the creation of “a powerful new post of director of national intelligence,” which would be given the “management of the government’s 15 intelligence agencies, and control of their budgets.” These powers would be vested in a new official or in the CIA boss, who is already assigned to keep an eye on the activities of the different spy agencies.
Earlier the Times had said that the establishment of a “domestic intelligence agency like the MI5 in Britain” was also under consideration.
The proposal for a director of spy agencies goes back to the administration of William Clinton, who signed a bill creating an “intelligence czar” in his last days in office. The spy chief was supposed to draw together all intelligence agencies and work with private business.
The most recent hearings of the September 11 commission involved officials from the current and previous administrations. These included Attorney General John Ashcroft, CIA director George Tenet, and FBI director Robert Mueller, as well as Janet Reno, attorney general under Clinton, and former FBI director Louis Freeh.
Commissioners criticized the spy agencies for being unable to patch together existing evidence to predict and foil the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Such criticism has been the framework for the body’s push for reinforcement of Washington’s spy networks at home and abroad.
Among the lesser-known figures testifying was Cofer Black, a former CIA “counterterrorism chief.” Black told the commission that the spies “knew what we were up against” in their pursuit of the al Qaeda organization. “We didn’t have enough money—by magnitudes,” he said. The spy operations presently soak up $40 billion a year.
Columnists and editors of big-business dailies, especially liberals, have been pounding away at similar themes.
“We need to restructure the intelligence community so one person really is in charge of all the pieces and budgets,” Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff wrote April 17.
Disputing Bush’s statements that it was impossible to predict and counter the September 11 attacks, Kristoff pointed to what he said was the uncovering of Project Bojinka, an alleged “terror plot in 1995 to blow up” a dozen U.S. jumbo jets over the Pacific.
With Washington’s go-ahead, he said, Filipino police seized a “key figure” in the alleged plot, Abdul Hakim Murad. “We let the Filipinos ‘interrogate’ Murad,” said Kristoff. “After he’d been beaten with a chair, burned with cigarettes and half-drowned, he disclosed a plan for a suicide airplane attack on the CIA’s headquarters.”
Front page (for this issue) |
Home |
Text-version home