Lawmakers back 9-11 panel’s intelligence advice

WASHINGTON – A powerful senator’s plan to break up the CIA and rearrange the Pentagon’s spy agencies under a single national intelligence director is “very bold” and wasn’t considered by the Sept. 11 commission because members saw it as too difficult, the commission’s vice chairman said Tuesday.

“Maybe the question is how much change can the system tolerate,” former Rep. Lee Hamilton told senators.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate announced they would push for adoption of all the Sept. 11 commission’s recommendations for revamping the intelligence community as a means to deter terrorist attacks.

“This bill would enact bold and comprehensive reform that changes the status quo, because the status quo in intelligence and diplomacy has failed us,” said Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who introduced the 280-page legislation along with Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana and Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

Reps. Chris Shays, R-Conn., and Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., will introduce a House version.

However, Senate Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., wants Congress instead to transfer the nation’s major intelligence gathering from the CIA and the Pentagon to control by a new national intelligence director, a plan he himself said Tuesday “has been deemed by some as radical and others as bold – not as many ‘bold’ as ‘radical.”‘

But Hamilton did not reject the idea when asked about it at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, calling the idea “a very bold move. It’s a lot bolder than we made.”

The commission wanted “achievable and pragmatic” goals, and didn’t consider change on the scope that Roberts did, Hamilton said.

“We just didn’t look at it that boldly,” Hamilton said. “What we said was the NID needs to control the budget of these groups and we thought that was sufficient. And we did not recommend pulling these agencies out of the DoD because we thought that was too much of a change.”

Congress is working on several different bills inspired by the Sept. 11 commission, making it unlikely that it will just accept legislation based strictly on the commission report.

Senate Governmental Affairs Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, and her committee are drafting legislation that Lieberman, the committee’s ranking Democrat, predicted would be ready for a committee vote in two weeks.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine and a member of the Intelligence Committee, on Tuesday renewed her call for the creation of a director of national intelligence and said congressional oversight of the national intelligence community must be improved.