A Beltway Solution

Will the intel bill make us safer?

Who knows?

Having a national intelligence director sounds promising, I suppose. Better coordination among agencies and all that. But can changing the organizational boxes really help prevent another terrorist attack?

It's hard to tell from the coverage, which has focused so heavily on the politics that the debate over the substance--the will-it-work part, as opposed to the can-Bush-round-up-the-votes part--has been overshadowed.

Now that the president has cut his deal with Duncan Hunter--a classic Washington compromise in which "language" is inserted that the bill won't do what the Armed Services chairman fears it might do and what the White House insisted all along the measure wouldn't do--will we have any way of gauging its success?

The bill, which would also create a national counter terrorism center, fund more border control agents and boost airport screening, reflects the best recommendations of the 9/11 commission (the creation of which, you may recall, Bush originally opposed). This was the rare bipartisan panel whose work really made a difference, and without Tom Kean pushing this bill, it would have faded months ago. And the increasingly polished 9/11 widows, who were all over TV, deserve some credit.

Hunter argued that the bill would deprive the military of real-time spy satellite info by routing it through another bureaucratic layer. I could never figure out why the president and the secretary of Defense would support such a move, unless that was a smokescreen for the turf war that would drain some power from the Pentagon. But in its organizational logic, the bill resembles the creation of the Homeland Security Department (which Bush also initially opposed--how come the Democrats never get any credit for these ideas?). That is, you create a new bureaucratic structure with a new czar as a way of preventing the mishaps of the past. But how much safer did Tom Ridge and his color-coded apparatus make people feel?

We can all hope this bill does what it's supposed to do. But the hard, grinding work of changing the bureaucracy, and spending more money on port safety and cargo shipments and protecting the food supply, will be equally important.

The Los Angeles Times chronicles last night's vote:

"The House on Tuesday evening passed the most sweeping overhaul of the nation's intelligence community since the Cold War, setting the stage for the Senate to pass an identical bill and send it to President Bush for signing by the end of the week. The House vote was 336 to 75.

"The long-delayed bill represented a compromise between the Senate's version of intelligence reform, which called for granting a national director of intelligence sweeping authority over the budgets and personnel of the nation's 15 spy agencies, and the House's version, which granted a director more limited authority.

"The House Republican leadership decided to bring the legislation to the floor for a vote after the White House persuaded one of two powerful committee chairmen who had opposed it to support it. But the White House and the House leadership were forced to pledge to House Republicans that they will attach controversial immigration and law enforcement provisions dropped from the bill to the first legislation that is taken up by the next Congress and seems certain to be signed into law."

Not without a fight, of course.

As usual, the media go crazy over whether a bill will pass and, when it does, wonder whether it amounts to a hill of beans. Here's the New York Times:

"The question is whether the changes will make much of a difference in combating terrorism and weapons proliferation, two of the major national security challenges facing the intelligence services. On that question, even some supporters of the legislation to overhaul intelligence acknowledge their own agnosticism. . . .

"The changes that will matter most still lie ahead, Congressional and intelligence officials say, as the agencies and their lawyers wrangle over the division of their new powers and as personnel are installed in the new posts."

The Wall Street Journal concedes this may not be that big a deal:

"While the director has impressive powers on paper, the job's effective control over the roughly $40 billion-a-year intelligence structure may not match the expectations created by its first major overhaul since 1947, some officials and experts say. . . .

"The national intelligence director's clout could depend to a large extent on whom President Bush appoints and whether his choice has stature within the administration. Among those said to be under consideration are Porter Goss, the current CIA director, and White House homeland-security adviser Fran Townsend."

Now we can all start speculating again!

Slate's Fred Kaplan sees a bit of a charade:

"The intelligence-reform bill doesn't really reform much. Certainly it falls far short of the measures urged by the 9/11 commission, which set the legislative process in motion. The basic reason for this shortfall is simple: The Bush White House doesn't want reform.

"The commission's main proposal was to create a new national intelligence director, who would coordinate and control the vast, disparate, and sometimes quarrelsome array of federal departments, agencies, and sub-agencies that comprise the U.S. 'intelligence community.'

"Initially, the Senate passed a bill that closely reflected the commission's suggestions, which a handful of Republicans in the House firmly rejected. House Speaker Dennis Hastert refused even to bring a similar bill to the floor for a vote.

"The compromise bill that's about to pass -- and that President Bush, at last, has endorsed -- establishes a national intelligence director but one with scant authority.

The key passage in the bill making this so notes that this director will not 'abrogate the statutory responsibilities' of the Department of Defense. A story in the New York Times quotes a supporter of the bill who calls describes this language as 'minor.' In fact, it is anything but."

There will be a second chapter to this saga, as the Washington Times reports:

"President Bush is vowing to help House Republicans enact tighter immigration-security controls 'early in the next session' of Congress. The promise -- made in a letter to members of Congress -- was part of the final push by the White House to win support for the massive intelligence-overhaul bill, which was stripped of several key immigration reforms so it would pass more easily."

The Note, rousing itself from a post-election slumber, nearly gives Bush a Standing O:

"With the presumed passage of the intelligence reform bill in the coming days, those who bet against George W. Bush's achieving the very tough twin acts of Social Security and tax reform do so at their own peril.

"You might have thought the farm bill was too expensive and too anti-market.

"You might have thought that No Child Left Behind was too big an expansion of control of education by Washington bureaucrats in sandals and beads and/or too expensive and/or underfunded.

"You might have thought the Medicare/prescription drug bill went too far or didn't go far enough in expanding a huge entitlement program.

"You might have thought it the height of hypocrisy for the President to have strenuously opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, but then not only champion it in back-to-back elections as a political issue."

Finally, someone mentions that!

"You might have thought any and all of these things, but the bottom line from any reasonable standard of analysis is that this president has almost always found a way to achieve his monster legislative objectives, even when the media, the Democrats, and many Republicans are in woe-is-he/perils-of-Pauline mode."

It's the Vince Lombardi approach: "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing."

Remember how the administration pledged to clean up the Abu Ghraib mess? Well, some folks didn't get the memo:

"Two Defense Department intelligence officials reported observing brutal treatment of Iraqi insurgents captured in Baghdad in June, several weeks after disclosures of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison created a worldwide uproar, according to a memorandum disclosed Tuesday," reports the New York Times.

"The memorandum, written by the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency to a senior Pentagon official, said that when the two members of his agency objected to the treatment, they were threatened and told to keep quiet by other military interrogators.

"The memorandum said the Defense Intelligence Agency officials had seen prisoners being brought in to a detention center with burn marks on their backs and complaining about sore kidneys."

This oughta further polish America's image in the Arab world.

Salon's David DeBatto has a scoop on the very same subject:

"On June 15, 2002, Sgt. Frank 'Greg' Ford, a counterintelligence agent in the California National Guard's 223rd Military Intelligence (M.I.) Battalion stationed in Samarra, Iraq, told his commanding officer, Capt. Victor Artiga, that he had witnessed five incidents of torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees at his base, and requested a formal investigation.

"Thirty-six hours later, Ford, a 49-year-old with over 30 years of military service in the Coast Guard, Army and Navy, was ordered by U.S. Army medical personnel to lie down on a gurney, was then strapped down, loaded onto a military plane and medevac'd to a military medical center outside the country.

"Although no 'medevac' order appears to have been written, in violation of Army policy, Ford was clearly shipped out because of a diagnosis that he was suffering from combat stress. After Ford raised the torture allegations, Artiga immediately said Ford was 'delusional' and ordered a psychiatric examination, according to Ford. But that examination, carried out by an Army psychiatrist, diagnosed him as 'completely normal.'

"A witness, Sgt. 1st Class Michael Marciello, claims that Artiga became enraged when he read the initial medical report finding nothing wrong with Ford and intimidated the psychiatrist into changing it."

Club for Growth prez Stephen Moore, on National Review, sticks up for his pal at Treasury:

"If the New York Times is to be believed, someone at the White House is trying to push Treasury Secretary John Snow out the door. One unnamed White House staffer said last week that Snow could 'stay as long as he wants, as long as it's not too long.' The Times says with resolute conviction that 'Snow is on his way out.' The White House has failed to put these rumors to bed with solid denials. The media vigilantes smell blood.

"John Snow has now learned the hard way the truth of the Ronald Reagan maxim about Washington: In this town, if you want a loyal friend, get a dog.

"This is shabby treatment by the White House of a good man and an excellent Treasury secretary. If the president wants Snow out, why the backdoor innuendos and shameless whispering campaign? Snow has been loyal and effective for Bush, and his job performance has been especially glowing given that he succeeded Paul O'Neill, who betrayed Bush at every turn and was never really with the tax-cutting program. Snow deserves gratitude for bringing dignity and sanity back to the Treasury.

"The media doesn't like Snow all that much. They pine for cabinet secretaries like Jim Baker and Dick Darman, people who leak to the papers, assault tax cuts, and can always be counted on to dump on conservatives. That's precisely what is admirable about Snow. He doesn't care what the New York Times and CBS think about him. Why should the White House?"

Gee, I thought Baker and Darman were conservatives.

Salon's Tim Grieve examines the best election in town right now: the ever-intense DNC race:

"Harry Reid says Democrats have to 'swallow their pride' and move toward the middle. Harry Reid says he admires Antonin Scalia's 'brilliance' and could imagine voting to confirm him as chief justice of the United States. Harry Reid says he'd rather 'dance' with George W. Bush than 'fight' him.

"Harry Reid says: 'I'm the face of the Democratic Party today.'

"Harry Reid may be right. For a party that came within 119,000 Ohio votes of ousting a sitting president in a time of war, the Democrats are sounding awfully defeated these days. There's talk of making the most of long-term minority status, of compromising on judicial appointments and 'moral issues' like the rights of gay couples and women -- Reid, the Democrats' new Senate leader, is anti-choice -- and of trying to figure out some way to outflank the Republicans from the red-state right.

"And then there's Howard Dean.

"The once-and-maybe-future presidential candidate has kept a relatively low profile since election night, but that's going to change Wednesday, when Dean delivers what his aides are calling a 'major speech' in Washington. The subject: Dean's vision for the Democratic Party. The not-so-hidden subtext: his role in it.

"'If you want to win, you have to fight, and you have to stand for something,' Dean wrote in a Web column a few days after the election. While centrist Democrats like Reid were scrambling to find common ground with the president and the red state voters who elected him, Dean used his first sustained election postmortem to proclaim his disagreement with Bush 'on almost every direction he takes us in.'"

In the New Republic, Andrew Sullivan is, what's the phrase--cautiously optimistic--on Iraq:

"Something very strange is happening in the news from Iraq: It's not all bad. Don't get me wrong. It's not all good, either--not by any means. Chances for a successful election on January 30 are decidedly iffy. The insurgency is still wreaking barbarism across the country. But in the past few weeks, the case for despair has unmistakably weakened a notch.

"Take the little-heralded breakthrough the week before Thanksgiving, when Iraq's major Western creditors agreed to forgive 80 percent of Iraq's debt. Yes, that includes those prickly states in 'Old Europe,' like France and Germany. Imagine if a president-elect Kerry had announced such a breakthrough. It would have made headlines across the globe. But Bush consigliere James Baker pulled it off--and who wants to celebrate him?

"And there was an even less-noticed development this past month: the relative silence across Iraq after the devastating coalition assault on Falluja. The military campaign led to the deaths of thousands, including civilians caught in the crossfire, and left much of the city in rubble. . . . Did the rest of Iraq rise up in protest, as happened in the spring during a similar aborted attack on Falluja? Not even close. . . . You see the beginning of the new Iraqi reality: a place where 80 percent of the country wants the democratic transition to succeed . . .

"Sure, the odds for success are still long. There will never be an excuse for the Bush administration's undermanning of the occupation, or its reckless disbandment of the Iraqi army, or its being blindsided by a highly predictable insurgency. Many Sunni political parties may still boycott the election. And violence may spike as the election nears. But we are seeing signs that Bush's error-strewn perseverance is starting to pay off."

More anti-Fox propaganda on . . . Fox, as noted by Lloyd Grove in the New York Daily News:

"If you want to make Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes go ballistic - and I wouldn't advise it - just suggest that his broadcast journalists are shills for President Bush and the Republicans.

"Ailes, who in a past life was a media strategist for Richard Nixon and George Bush the elder, has transformed his formerly brass-knuckled, partisan persona into that of a 'fair and balanced' cable-news czar.

"So he couldn't have been happy Sunday night when another member of the Fox television family - 'The Simpsons' - featured a Fox News satellite truck sporting a huge Bush-Cheney bumper sticker while the rock group Queen's classic 'We Are the Champions' blared over the soundtrack. Ailes didn't return my phone call. But my pal Tom Shales, the esteemed television critic of The Washington Post, E-mailed that the wicked sendup was 'pretty ballsy since 'The Simpsons' plays on the Fox network, but it also shows how firm is the image of Fox News as Bush whores.'"

Of course, it is just a cartoon.