More on 9/11 Commission

The 9/11 Commission proposed creating a new intelligence director with control over budget and personnel for the 15 intelligence agencies. This proposal superimposes a new layer of bureaucracy above the intelligence agencies. In a time when the U.S. government is trying to counter small, shadowy, agile terror groups, it should be streamlining and consolidating intelligence bureaucracies not adding new ones. More bureaucracies exacerbate the coordination difficulties among them (the original problem). The one good point about the 9/11 Commission report is that budgetary authority and the hiring and firing of intelligence personnel would be consolidated in one person. Of course, this could be done by giving the current director of central intelligence those powers without creating a new national intelligence director and layer of bureuarcracy. (Also, we already have an terrorism threat integration center in the CIA. The president's new proposal combines the worst of all proposals. In response to political pressure generated by the commission and John Kerry's rapid approval of all of the commission's recommedations, Bush has adopted the recommendation of the new national intelligence director without granting him the budgetary and personnel authority to adequately do his job. So we have the new office and the new bureaucracy under the new appointee, but the same old problems with coordination and lack of means of reining in the disparate agencies.