The United States Congress voted on Tuesday to adopt the September 11 commission’s recommendations for sweeping reform of America’s intelligence services, after the White House intervened to reach a compromise with Republican dissidents.
The intelligence reform bill, broadly modelled on the findings of the independent commission, will unite America’s 15 spy agencies under a national intelligence director.
The Bill passed a vote in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives late on Tuesday night. The Republican-controlled Senate plans to pass it tomorrow and send it to George Bush for his signature.
Susan Collins, the Republican senator who co-wrote the Bill, said it encompassed ”the most significant reforms of our intelligence community in more than 50 years”.
The impetus for those reforms emerged from the commission which investigated the September 11 attacks, and whose report last July said that the intelligence services were beset by infighting and incompetence that prevented coordination of information.
The commission called for a powerful intelligence director, who would report directly to the White House, and control an annual $40-billion intelligence budget. The proposal became the centrepiece of the 800-page Bill, which envisages a national intelligence director with control over budgets as well as senior personnel, and with responsibility for ensuring that America’s 15 agencies share information to prevent terrorist attacks.
The Bill will also create a national counter-terrorism centre to coordinate intelligence, and an independent civil liberties review panel to monitor government policies.
But while the commission’s recommendations were popular with the public, efforts to secure passage of the bill exposed a rift between Republican members of Congress and the White House that was only resolved after entreaties from Bush, and the Vice-President, Dick Cheney.
Although initially opposed to the commission’s creation, Bush had endorsed its recommendations, and it was feared the mutiny could put other elements of his second term agenda in peril. In an appeal to Congressional leaders on Monday night, Bush told them it was ”imperative” that the Bill was passed this week.
But it took the personal intervention of Cheney to win over the majority of the dissidents. The vice-president brokered Monday night’s compromise with a group of Republicans closely connected to the Pentagon, who had argued that the reforms could deny US troops real-time information on the battlefield from spy planes and satellites.
They were eventually mollified with a four-word amendment reaffirming the primacy of the military chain of command, and a closed door meeting of House Republicans voted to approve the Bill on Tuesday morning.
A number of prominent Republicans had continued to threaten to withhold their support yesterday, led by the house judiciary chairman, James Sensenbrenner, from Wisconsin, who had lobbied strenuously for a crackdown on asylum seekers as part of the intelligence overhaul.
In the end the vote was 336 to 75. – Guardian Unlimited Â