WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 (UPI) -- Senior Bush administration intelligence officials, given their first chance Tuesday to testify before lawmakers about the wholesale re-organization of their agencies proposed by the Sept. 11 commission, by and large embraced reform but disagreed with key details of the panel's recommendations.
In turn, lawmakers leading the congressional effort to implement the panel's blueprint for intelligence reform got their first chance to comment on the president's version of reform, released Monday. Republican members broadly welcomed the president's initiative but some Democrats showed concern that the White House-suggested changes might be merely cosmetic.
The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee has been tasked by congressional leaders to develop legislation implementing the commission's two biggest recommendations: a senior-level intelligence director with budget authority and hire-fire power over the nation's 15 intelligence agencies and a national center with planning authority over all counter-terror operations, at home and abroad.
Many of the differences over the president's and the commission's proposals turned on the question of authority: Should the intelligence director have budget authority over the agencies, as the commission proposed, or merely coordinate their budgets as the president has suggested? Should the new fusion center direct counter-terror operations or coordinate them?
The Senate panel heard evidence from senior counter-terror officials at the CIA and FBI; the senior intelligence official in the Department of Homeland Security and the director of the new multi-agency intelligence fusion endeavor called the Terrorist Threat Integration Center.
John Brennan, who has run the new center since it went online May 1, 2003, was the most aggressive in challenging the commission's proposals, which many politicians, including the Democratic nominee for president Sen. John Kerry, have rushed to embrace.
"Are the recommendations of (the Sept. 11 commission) workable?" he asked, "Are they doable in totality? I don't think they are," he told the panel.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., who has been a leading advocate for the commission and its reform plan, said he was worried that, absent budget authority, the new director would be "a kind of Potemkin national intelligence director, where you see the facade but there's not real authority behind it."
Sen. Dick Durbin, R-Ill., accused the president of merely "dusting off the old press release" about the formation of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center in his announcement Monday. "I cannot see a dime's worth of difference between what the president endorsed yesterday and what (the Terrorist Threat Integration Center) did -- or was created to achieve over a year ago."
Brennan repeatedly stressed what he said was the complexity of the inter-relationships between the agencies and their activities and accused the panel of failing to "provide the detailed type of engineering blueprint that we need" for reform. The commission, he said had "got it right at the 100,000-foot level" but "really just skims the surface of a lot of these very important and complicated issues."
The point was picked up on by other officials testifying. Like Brennan, they were keen to say that they supported reforms, but equally at pains to suggest that the devil was in detail.
The commission's reform plan envisages three deputies for the new director, who would manage the domestic, overseas and military agencies. But the deputies would also have roles in relation to, respectively, the FBI, the CIA and the Department of Defense.
Discussing this so-called "dual-hatted" role, John Pistole, head of the FBI's counter-terrorist division, told lawmakers there was a need for "precision" in the role of the deputies, because if they were expected to be full-time officials in their own department "and have a full-time job of reporting to the director of national intelligence, that's problematic."
Brennan also sought to drive home the danger of unintended consequences in reform.
"What we have found out," he told Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., "is that if you move something in one part of that architecture, it has an impact somewhere else where you may not have even anticipated. So you have to make sure that you understand the totality of what is being affected."
This point was also echoed by other officials. Retired Gen. Patrick Hughes, who once ran the Defense Intelligence Agency and is in charge of the Department for Homeland Security's Information Analysis division, reminded the panel that form follows function. "If we (re)make the form, we might change some of the functions," he said.
He suggested that "some of these functions are not well understood yet, and some of the ideas behind the structure haven't yet been completely formed or understood, and they should be before we put the form in place."
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