9/11 commission members want recommendations kept intact

Two senior members of the 9/11 commission on Tuesday urged members of Congress to keep their recommendations intact while reorganizing the U.S. intelligence community, contending that doing anything less might make the country worse off.

President Bush on Monday endorsed two of the commission's key recommendations: creating a new national intelligence director and a national counterterrorism center. Bush did not, however, say that the director would have authority over the estimated $40 billion spent each year on intelligence, or the power to hire and fire key personnel within the 15 intelligence agencies.

"Creating a national intelligence director that just superimposes a chief above the other chiefs without taking on the fundamental management issues we identify is a step that could be worse than useless," Philip Zelikow, the 9/11 commission's executive director, told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.

Bush also does not support placing the new director within the executive office of the president, as the commission recommends.

Zelikow said, however, that he viewed Bush's comments as the beginning of a process to make reforms.

"We prefer to think of what they did as a constructive beginning in a situation where they haven't really made up their own minds what they want to do," Zelikow said. "To be fair to them, they've had this now for about 10 days. Everybody agrees this needs to be handled thoughtfully … We would rather encourage them to sit down and focus on the details and see where we go from there."

Christopher Kojm, the 9/11 panel's deputy executive director, said Bush's support for the commission's two main recommendations represents "fundamental breakthroughs."

"I think we heard ice breaking yesterday," he told the committee. "But even though the ice broke, there's still a lot of water that you have to paddle, and it's pretty dangerous to get across."

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said he believes the intelligence director would need budget and personnel authority in order to be effective.

"If you don't have the budget authority, how can you set priorities?" Specter asked. "If you don't have the authority to pick the people, isn't the national director just a shell game in a shell operation?"

A panel of managers from U.S. intelligence agencies also testified Tuesday before the committee during a separate session. They expressed differing opinions on several of the commission's recommendations, but generally urged Congress and the Bush administration to be cautious about making reforms.

John Brennan, director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, and Philip Mudd, deputy director of the CIA's counterterrorist center, said they do not believe the recommendations can be implemented as they are.

Brennan said, "The commission got it right at the 100,000-foot level," but did not provide enough details about how the intelligence community should be reorganized and managed.

"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," Brennan said. "I have tremendous respect for what the commission has done and the scholarship shown in the report … but moving precipitously does not take into account the tremendous interconnectedness that is the result of legacy practices and procedures and statutes of the past years."

"What I don't want to do is to move and to have a dropped piece of information because, in fact, we went through rapid change very quickly," he added. "Quite honestly, the 9/11 commission report [does not] provide the detailed type of engineering blueprint that we need in order to undergo that transformation."

Zelikow later defended the recommendations. "Look, it's hard," he said. "If they have a better solution that they would like to propose, if they have a chart of their own-even at the 100,000-foot level-we'd welcome examining constructive alternatives."

Brennan also disagreed with a statement made last week by Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 commission. During a congressional hearing, Kean said, "The present system is unacceptable and doesn't work."

"The system today works better than it ever has before," Brennan asserted. "The bumper sticker comment that we're not sharing information doesn't take into account the complexity of the issue."