From combined dispatches
The chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff has asked lawmakers to give less budget authority to the national intelligence director than has been proposed by the commission that investigated the September 11 attacks and backed publicly by the White House.
Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers’ apparent break with the White House came in an Oct. 21 letter, obtained by Reuters yesterday, lobbying in favor of a Republican proposal in the House of Representatives that would keep much of the power over the purse in the hands of the defense secretary.
“It is my understanding that the House bill maintains this vital flow through the secretary of defense to the combat support agencies. It is my recommendation that this critical provision be preserved,” Gen. Myers wrote.
Gen. Myers’ stance runs counter to the White House, which earlier this week issued its own letter to congressional negotiators backing the Senate’s plan to give the new national intelligence director “clear authority” over much of the intelligence budget.
Democratic congressional aides said the mixed signals could undercut final negotiations over legislation to overhaul U.S. spy agencies as proposed by the commission that investigated the September 11 attacks.
Yesterday, the House-Senate conference on the intelligence reform bill failed to reach an agreement on the legislation, as four Republican senators came out in support of much fought-over immigration provisions in the House bill.
The Republicans urged that several provisions in the House version not be struck from the final bill, including one section related to asylum, which civil liberties groups aggressively oppose and the White House has raised “concerns about.”
“We urge you to retain these provisions, which are based on the 9/11 commission’s recommendations and which begin to close the remaining gaps in our immigration and travel systems that jeopardize our homeland security,” the Republicans wrote in an Oct. 20 letter to Sens. Susan Collins, Maine Republican, and Joe Lieberman, Connecticut Democrat, who drafted the Senate version of the bill.
The letter, a copy of which was obtained yesterday, is signed by Sens. Charles E. Grassley, of Iowa, Jon Kyl, of Arizona, Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, and James M. Inhofe, of Oklahoma. It maintains the Senate version of the reform bill “does not adequately address” border security and terrorist travel recommendations made by the panel that investigated the September 11 attacks.
Among the provisions at issue is Section 3008 of the original House version, which would require individuals seeking asylum to produce corroborating evidence for their asylum justification. The Senate Republicans specifically defended the section as a way to “make it more difficult for alien terrorists to abuse our nation’s generous asylum laws.”
Rights groups argue otherwise. The section “would actually encourage repressive governments to label democracy activists and political opposition figures as ’terrorists,’ by ensuring that anyone who is so accused would have a harder time finding protection in the United States,” said Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First.
Leaders of the House-Senate conference, meanwhile, indicated something of an impasse over the overall legislation yesterday. It remains to be seen whether a final version of the bill will reach the president before the Nov. 2 election.
“We still have some very contentious issues that we still have some differences to work through,” said the conference’s chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican, who replaced Porter J. Goss of Florida as head of the House intelligence committee after Mr. Goss was picked as the new director of the CIA.
While the House and Senate are still working out differences over the call for a new national intelligence director and National Counterterrorism Center, the biggest roadblock in the legislation apparently stems from Title III of the House version, which includes the immigration-related provisions.
In his letter, Gen. Myers said the budgets of the “combat support agencies should come up from the agencies through the secretary of defense to the national intelligence director” in order to ensure that “required warfighting capabilities are accommodated and rationalized.”
He said appropriations — funding for the military approved by Congress — should also be “passed from the national intelligence director through the [Defense] Department to the combat support agencies.”
Gen. Myers sent the letter to the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican, and other congressional negotiators.
In contrast, President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the White House budget director, Joshua Bolten, told lawmakers in an Oct. 18 letter that “the administration supports the strong budget authority provided to the NID [national intelligence director]” in the Senate plan.
“To be effective, the NID must have clear authority to determine the national intelligence budget, strong transfer and reprogramming authorities, explicit authority to allocate appropriations, and the ability to ensure execution of funds by national intelligence agencies consistent with the direction of the NID,” they wrote.
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