WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 (UPI) -- The annual legislation that governs the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies and their new boss, the director of national intelligence, is stalled again in the Senate, where efforts to pass it in the last two years died also.
"We're still working it," a senior staffer from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which voted the bill out 12-3 last month, told United Press International, adding that new committee Chairman Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.V., continued to hope the bill could be passed after the President's Day recess.
The staffer, who was authorized to speak only on condition of anonymity, said committee members were working on a so-called Unanimous Consent agreement, a procedural measure whereby uncontentious bills can be brought to the floor of the Senate and voted on without time-consuming debate.
"It's cleared on our side," said the staffer of the committee majority, adding that a provision in the bill temporarily suspending some federal privacy protections would be removed as part of the deal. Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Russell Feingold, D-Wisc., said in additional views submitted with the bill that they believed this provision "merit(ed) further study and debate" before being passed into law.
The staffer said other Democrats had been prevailed upon not to force the issue of Congressional access to the Presidential Daily Briefs about pre-Iraq war intelligence.
But a Unanimous Consent agreement, as it name implies, can be halted by any objection, and the Senate's arcane rules allow the objector to remain anonymous.
For the last two years, under the chairmanship of Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the committee's efforts to move the bill have been stymied by holds from GOP Senators.
The same issues are behind the hold-up this year, according to sources from both sides of the aisle: concern at what some GOP Senators see as the bill's excessive reporting requirements, both on intelligence agencies about their detention and interrogation of terror suspects, and on the administration as a whole, which the new law would require to give much wider Congressional briefings.
The law seeks to limit use of the most restrictive kind of briefing: the ones given orally only to the so-called Gang of Eight -- the chairmen and ranking members of the two intelligence committees and the leaders of both parties from both chambers.
Even where these restricted briefings can be employed, the law states, the membership of the whole committee has to be notified that they are taking place.
"Rather than ensure that members (of the committee) receive the information they are seeking, (this) section could instead merely provoke a stalemate" with the administration, warned Sen. John Warner, R-Va., "My foremost concern is the prospect that the president could veto this legislation," he said in additional views filed with the bill.
The bill would also require within 60 days a secret, detailed report on all U.S. clandestine detention facilities that have ever held detainees in the global war on terrorism.
The law says the report must include the location and size of each facility and a description of the interrogation procedures used there at such facilities, and whether they were in compliance with U.S. obligations under the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture.
"The level of detail required by the report ... is simply not necessary for effective oversight, and will likely be resisted," wrote the committee's senior-most Republican, Sen. Christopher Bond of Missouri in his additional views. "Moreover, such disclosure to Congress could have a negative impact on current and future relationships with certain allied foreign intelligence services and governments who have cooperated in this program with the understanding that their assistance would remain completely confidential," added Bond.
The staffer said the committee leadership hoped to address those concerns by "tweaking the language" in a couple of parts of the bill, "to make clear that sources and methods will be protected."
"Our Republican colleagues (on the committee) are working on" overcoming GOP objections, said the staffer.
Bond was traveling in East Asia this week and could not be reached. His staff declined comment.
Although U.S. intelligence activities are funded from a special secret annex of the vast defense appropriations act, the authorization law is the only vehicle for public legislative oversight and guidance to the sprawling and sometimes fractious collection of agencies dubbed by insiders the U.S. Intelligence Community.
The hiatus in the legislation has meant, for instance, that lawmakers have not yet been able to make a series of fixes and adjustments to the new intelligence structure they put into place in the huge 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act.
The 2007 authorization bill contains additional clarified budget re-programming authority for the new director of national intelligence and new powers for him to control access to human intelligence information. It also creates an inspector general for his office.
