Newsweek
|
|
By Mark Hosenball and Tamara Lipper |
Aug. 16, 2004 issue - In the next few days
President George W. Bush is expected to produce detailed
proposals for implementing key recommendations of the 9/11
Commission. Officials say the president will issue executive
orders for a National Counterterrorism Center, which the
commission says is needed so that information about terrorist
plots is shared among all relevant agencies. This will likely
mean renaming the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, an
interagency unit set up last year under CIA officer John
Brennan, who currently reports to the CIA director. The
president is likely to expand the center's staff and have it
oversee the emergency response to an attack. |
The center is already ensconced in its own
building at a secret location in northern Virginia, where crews
are installing an ultra-high-tech command center (with more than
138 video screens) that was designed with outside advisers,
including the Disney Company. |
Chris Usher for
Newsweek |
Under construction: The Terrorist Threat Integration Center in
McLean, Va. |
|
More problematic is the commission's proposal
for a new national intelligence director. In internal
administration deliberations, the Pentagon, CIA and FBI have all
been cool to this idea, and when Bush announced his initial
endorsement of the recommendation, he was vague about the powers
a new espionage czar should be granted. |
A White House official says the president is
preparing a detailed proposal in which he will spell out what
authority the new intel overlord should have. It's then up to
Congress to decide what to do. Legislators will have to sort out
their own turf wars over intelligence oversight (a problem
heavily scrutinized by the commission) before they reorganize
the information-gathering community. |
Earlier this summer there was much speculation
that the president might tap House intelligence committee
chairman Porter Goss, a former CIA officer, to replace George
Tenet as CIA director. But Goss's chances suffered when Senate
Democrats said they would fight if the Florida Republican were
nominated. The White House made overtures to Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage to see if he wanted the job, but
administration sources tell NEWSWEEK that Armitage wasn't
interested. Some CIA critics, including prominent
neoconservatives, say former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani could
be a great CIA reformer. But there is no indication Giuliani
would take the job. Intelligence professionals think an ideal
new CIA chief would be the professorial Acting Director John
McLaughlin. But McLaughlin, a career intelligence analyst, is
taking nothing for granted. Even though Tenet vacated the CIA
executive suite several weeks ago, McLaughlin has left the
director's chair vacant, preferring to work out of the office he
has occupied for the last four years as CIA deputy director. |
|
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc. |
|