Congress urged to take more power

September 11 commission members said yesterday that Congress must use their report to justify taking more power and oversight from the White House as the two branches go about reorganizing domestic security and intelligence.

“What Congress needs to do is to see this as a moment when you’ve got to push back on the executive branch. You need more power and authority,” said commission member Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska.

He and John F. Lehman, secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, told the House Government Reform Committee that President Bush’s announcement on Monday that he supports creating a national intelligence director (NID) and a national counterterrorism center is a welcome step, but Congress must make sure that the NID has enough authority to do the job.

The five Republicans and five Democrats on the commission have been pushing to make sure their report, released two weeks ago, spurs action in Congress and from the president.

Yesterday’s hearing on the commission report was the first before a House committee and came as the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee held its second hearing. Because Congress is in recess for August, the crowded hearing schedule is unusual.

Republicans have said they will move quickly but cautiously to review the recommendations, while Democrats have called for them to go faster and further, led by presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry, who embraced the recommendations in total.

That complete acceptance, said John Brennan, director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, would be a mistake.

“Are the recommendations of 9/11 workable, are they doable in totality? I don’t think they are,” Mr. Brennan told the Senate committee yesterday.

“I don’t think we would do a service to this nation if we took these as they’re stated and ran with them with haste. I just don’t think that there is sufficient engineering, design, consideration of all the complexities here,” he said.

So far the major battle appears to be over how much authority the new NID will have. Democrats, the commission’s 10 members and some Republicans say there’s not much point in creating the new position if that person won’t have the authority to hire and fire employees and to control the more than $40 billion that the government spends each year on intelligence activities.

On Monday, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. said the NID would have “an awful lot of input into the development of any budgets in the intelligence community,” although he wouldn’t say the position would have control.

Yesterday, the White House appeared to open itself up to more than that possibility.

“As we move forward with Congress, we’ll be talking in more detail about the authority that this person will have. But the national intelligence director will have the authority he or she needs to do the job,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said yesterday.

Pressed by reporters, though, Mr. McClellan would not say there will be give-and-take with Congress, instead saying the administration will “be providing more detail as we move forward on this.”

“Obviously, when you’re talking about something that requires congressional action, you’re going to work closely with Congress on those matters. But the president made very clear his commitment to making sure that we had a national intelligence director that has the authority and power he or she needs to do the job,” Mr. McClellan said.

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