Dodging a Bullet
The intel-reform bill may not make us safer, but Congress averted a disaster.
BY BRENDAN MINITER
- Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
The sky isn't falling after all. Congressional leaders have reached a deal on reforming the intelligence community. Sen. Susan Collins has come around to Rep. Duncan Hunter's position on protecting the military chain of command. This deal not only props up the sky but also protects Congress from feeling it'll have blood on its hands should al Qaeda pull off another deadly attack inside the United States. What's more the we must do something crowd can go home now. Congress is doing what the 9/11 Commission wanted.
Pardon the rest of us, however, for not feeling any safer. A new Washington deck chair for an intelligence czar isn't going to harm national security. But the battle over this reform reveals that more than a few policy makers in Washington were all too willing to make it harder for our soldiers to fight the war on terror.
There have been many interesting twists and turns as this bill wound its way to this compromise. Not least was the spectacle over the weekend of Democrats--who only weeks ago were claiming that George W. Bush had no popular mandate--rushing to invoke the president's name and cash in on his political capital to get the intelligence bill passed. In the process they tried to strip out the very provisions the White House wrote into the bill. But to understand what happened here and what near calamity it was, consider one of the final sticking points: protecting the chain of command. In the end, Ms. Collins was fighting to insert the intelligence czar somewhere between the president and secretary of defense and his combat commanders in the field. And if not for Mr. Hunter, she might have succeeded.
Heretofore Mr. Hunter and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner have been portrayed as essentially lone obstructionists. The media have insisted that the White House, the Senate, the majority of the House, the 9/11 Commission and the American people were all in favor of passing the Senate's version of this bill. Not true. Immediately before Election Day, an independent poll revealed that while a majority of the political establishment believed that not passing intelligence reform would prove fatal for Republicans at the ballot box, a majority of voters preferred for Congress to take its time and get these reforms right. Armed with that knowledge, the House adjourned and went home to campaign in confidence--a confidence rounded out by the results on Nov. 2.
Meanwhile, resistance was brewing in the Senate. Last week the media finally reported on this when Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, publicly backed Mr. Hunter. But what the press has missed is that Mr. Warner is not alone. A lot of senators have been frustrated over not only what was in the intelligence bill, but the way senators on the Armed Services, Intelligence and International Affairs committees were relegated to the sidelines.
As I first reported in Political Diary, OpinionJournal.com's premium e-mail newsletter (subscribe here), seven of these senators, including Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens and Democratic icon Robert Byrd, joined with Mr. Warner in sending a letter before Thanksgiving to Majority Leader Bill Frist and outgoing Minority Leader Tom Daschle. The compromise on the intelligence bill will "differ substantially" from what the Senate passed, the senators wrote, and it "will be legislation of enormous complexity, scope, and importance to the Nation's security. Therefore, we request that we be consulted prior to any Senate action in relation to this [compromise bill], including unanimous consent requests, time agreements, or waiver of any procedural rule." That's Senatespeak for "include us, or we'll stall this bill."
Set aside for a minute Mr. Sensenbrenner, who had serious concerns about immigration provisions in the bill. It's true that Mr. Hunter was instrumental in holding up this legislation. But it is not true that he was a lone wolf. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote a letter supporting the House bill. The top officers of each of the four main military branches--Gen. John Jumper, Gen. Michael Hagee, Gen. Peter Schoomaker and Adm. Vern Clark--also stressed the importance of protecting the chain of command in sworn testimony to Congress last month.
What's more, the chain-of-command provision on which Mr. Hunter stood firm actually came from the White House. House members along with administration officials were concerned that the intelligence reforms would sow confusion over who controlled intelligence assets--such as satellites--at key moments in a crisis. Depriving combat commanders in, say, Fallujah access to real-time intelligence could prove disastrous. Further, the Senate wanted to give the intelligence czar "operational authority" over covert missions and the power to move money and personnel around. That could lead to a situation in which military personnel were being pulled out and used without the knowledge of the secretary of defense.
To overcome these problems, earlier this year House members sat down with Condoleezza Rice's deputy (now soon to be national security adviser), Stephen Hadley, and another administration official to hammer out compromise language. The clause they came up with stated that nothing in the bill could be "construed" to interrupt the military chain of command. In October Ms. Rice publicly endorsed that provision. Yet it was that clause that became a major sticking point in House-Senate negotiations. And it was Ms. Collins's acceptance of that clause (reworded) that finally allowed a deal to be struck.
The spin, of course, is just now beginning. So when you hear that it was the House hardliners who caved in under pressure, remember it was Mr. Hunter--whose son served two tours in Iraq as a U.S. Marine--who won over the support of a majority of House Republicans by pointing out all these facts in an impassioned speech in a closed-door meeting last month. After that meeting, Speaker Dennis Hastert walked out and announced that the intelligence bill was all but dead.
I caught up to Mr. Hunter on his cell phone on Sunday while he was trying to catch a flight out of El Paso, Texas. At times the connection was spotty and at one point he put me on hold to field a call from Vice President Dick Cheney. But throughout our conversation, he was resolute in sticking up for the troops and stressed that the White House was not pressuring him. "Everyone has a job to do," he said, adding that everyone understands "we take casualties on the battlefield when it is not clear who is in charge."
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