WASHINGTON, June 20 (UPI) -- With Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari visiting Friday, the continuing anti-insurgent offensive on the Syrian border, and the suggestion the United States should set a timetable for the withdrawal of its troops still bubbling on Capitol Hill, this week's national-security agenda is likely to focus on the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Monday's floor debate in the House on the 2006 Defense Appropriations bill is likely to be the first, but not the last, occasion on which the issue will come up.
One Democratic amendment put forward would condition the disbursement of some Defense Department funds on the creation of a schedule for withdrawal. Given the solid Republican majority in the House, the amendment will surely fail -- despite the way the mood of some GOP members is coming to mirror the greater unease polls are detecting in the public at large.
Nonetheless, the issue will not go away.
The ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden of Delaware, who has just returned from Iraq, will address the Brookings Institution Tuesday to lay out what he says is the need for better benchmarks and metrics to measure progress in fighting the insurgency.
One veteran senior GOP House staffer has been telling United Press International for months that "something will have to give" before the end of the year -- "if not an actual drawdown of troops then at least a promise or a timetable or something that looks like one of them."
Although spending on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is funded by supplemental appropriations, the appropriations bill nonetheless provides an unrequested $4 billion in additional funds for force protection for U.S. troops in Iraq. This sum includes $1.2 billion for personnel protective gear such as body armor and $2.8 billion for more up-armored Humvees, night-vision equipment and technology designed to defeat improvised explosive devices.
Also Monday the House Rules Committee is slated to set the terms of Tuesday's floor debate on the 2006 Intelligence Authorization bill.
The committee is expected to adopt a manager's amendment that will strip two provisions from the bill.
One of the clauses to be removed, section 305, states that the new director of national intelligence -- before exercising his authority to reassign intelligence personnel -- would have to, in addition to informing the relevant congressional committees, receive a response from them.
Democrats charged that this provision -- reportedly insisted upon by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif. -- gave his committee what amounted to a "pocket veto" over such transfers.
In addition, Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., told Time magazine over the weekend that he would remove a second provision that reaffirmed the authority of the new director over intelligence operations abroad.
Hoekstra told the magazine he agreed to drop the provision to avoid turf battles and "to give the players the opportunity to work out in practice what (last year's) intelligence reform bill means."
One further amendment that may be discussed is authored by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and aims to restrict the practice known as rendition, by which the United States transfers suspected terrorists to third countries -- some of which are known to practice torture -- without any legal process.
Most of the bill, including the funding levels it authorizes, is classified, but sources tell UPI it represents a big increase over current spending levels. According to the committee, the bill authorizes increased investment in U.S. human intelligence activities and improvements to intelligence analysis.
On the other hand, it also reduces or eliminates funds for some expensive technical collection systems the committee views as redundant or unjustified.
While the House debates the bill Tuesday, committees of both chambers hold simultaneous hearings on the Coast Guard's so-called Deepwater modernization program -- a 30-year, $17 billion effort to replace the agency's aging fleet of deepwater ships and fixed-wing aircraft.
The contract was awarded in June 2002 to Integrated Coast Guard Systems, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Naval Electronics & Surveillance unit in Moorestown, N.J., and Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Litton Ingalls unit in Pascagoula, Miss.
But in the past year the Coast Guard leadership has come under repeated fire from lawmakers for not providing enough information about the costs and progress of the program.
House appropriators angered at what they saw as a news blackout about the program cut more than half the $960 million allocated for Deepwater in the 2006 budget request from their spending bill last month, but their Senate counterparts declined to follow suit last week.
The Tuesday hearings are being held by authorizing committees -- the Commerce Subcommittee on Fisheries and the Coast Guard in the Senate and the Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation in the House -- that have always been more favorably disposed towards the program.
It will be interesting to see whether the Coast Guard uses Tuesday's opportunity to push back against its critics, but it will have to be pretty good to convince them.
The subcommittee chaired by maverick House Republican Chris Shays of Connecticut will hold a hearing Tuesday examining the management of the Development Fund for Iraq, the escrow account into which the United States is placing the revenue from Iraq's oil industry and to which it has committed all the assets of Saddam Hussein's regime that were frozen in the U.S. banking system.
Democrats are likely to use the hearing to push their agenda criticizing the way in which the administration has used private contractors in Iraq.
Tuesday will also see a joint hearing of two House homeland security subcommittees on technology for detecting smuggled nuclear and radiological weapons.
It will be the first outing for Vayl Oxford, acting director of the brand new Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, set up earlier this year as one of the final acts of outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.
Among other questions, say staffers, the subcommittees will be examining whether the office -- designed as the government's "one-stop shop" for developing technology to counter the threat posed by terrorist nukes -- is actually duplicative of longstanding efforts elsewhere.
Finally Tuesday the committee's former majority staff director, John Gannon, returns to testify before a hearing of the Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment about the use of what intelligence types call "open source" materials such as magazines and news broadcasts.
The parade of House Homeland Security Committee hearings continues Wednesday with a meeting to consider the use of biometric identity documents at the border.
The Subcommittee on Economic Security, Infrastructure Protection and Cybersecurity will hear evidence from acting Assistant Secretary for Policy Elaine Dezenski about the plethora of often overlapping initiatives to use biometric identifiers like fingerprints to help stop terrorists and other malefactors from getting into the country.
Among other issues, the hearing will probe the decision last week to effectively extend the deadline for countries in the Visa Waiver Program to start using biometric passports. Attention is likely to focus on the vexed question of standards for electronically readable chips in passports, which became a source of controversy after allegations that the kind adopted by the United States could be "skimmed" -- i.e. have their data read by hackers.
Another issue that may cause Dezenski some discomfort if it comes up is the future of the so-called Western Hemisphere Initiative, a legislatively driven program to phase in the mandatory use of secure ID documents for U.S. citizens entering the country from Canada or Mexico.
President Bush sent ripples of alarm through the department a couple of months ago when, just a few days after a coordinated three-department public rollout of the timetable for the changes, he told a questioner that he had been surprised to read about the new policy in the newspaper and was looking into the issue.
"That to me shows there is something fundamentally broken about either the policy process or the White House," one former senior Homeland Security official said later.
The final homeland security subcommittee hearing this week is on Thursday, when Matt Mayer, who is acting chief of the Office for State and Local Government Coordination and Preparedness, will testify about training for first responders.
Also Thursday, the full Senate Appropriations Committee will mark up the Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations bill. The subcommittee will already have met Tuesday to consider its amendments.
Several members of the subcommittee, including Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and ranking member Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., have made it clear they are unhappy with the administration's proposal to slash grants for state and local law-enforcement agencies.
The President's budget request, for instance, cuts funding for the Community Oriented Policing Services program from $499 million to $22 million, but the administration's prior attempts to de-fund this politically popular program have always been frustrated by lawmakers.
It will be interesting to see what appropriators do vis-à-vis the FBI's allocation for information technology, given that repeated inquiries by committees from both chambers have revealed that the effort to modernize what Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., has called the bureau's "medieval" computing systems is a shambolic and poorly managed process that has wasted tens of millions of dollars on failed projects.
"If I put $170 million of the government's money in a barbecue pit and set it on fire, I'd probably go to jail," remarked one observer, citing the cost of the FBI's disastrous Virtual Case File system, "but those guys on the hill just keep throwing more cash at them."
Away from Capitol Hill Thursday, the Migration Policy Institute will unveil the first major research to examine the impact of the "one face at the border" program under which Homeland Security managers attempted to merge the functions of the customs, immigration and agricultural inspectors at ports of entry.
When it was first introduced, the measure was severely criticized by labor unions, which said it would water down the specialist skills required for each of the three functions, but the Migration Policy Institute's report is the first serious, objective look at what the effect of the reforms has been.
Finally, Thursday is the day when the week's Iraq noise is likely to reach a crescendo as D.C. prepares for the Iraqi prime minister's visit and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
