[IP] Los Angeles Times: GOP Aims to Add Police Powers to Intelligence Reform
GOP Aims to Add Police Powers to Intelligence Reform
By Mary Curtius
Times Staff Writer
8:08 PM PDT, September 24, 2004
WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders introduced legislation Friday
that grafts broadened police powers onto a plan to reform the nation's
intelligence gathering agencies.
Like a bill passed earlier by a Senate committee, the proposal adopts
recommendations of the Sept. 11 Commission for establishing a national
intelligence director and center for counterterrorism.
But it also calls for new police powers that would, among other things,
set new federal standards for state driver's licenses and step up
inspections of travelers to the United States.
Democrats and some Republicans said the additions needlessly
politicized what had been a remarkably bipartisan effort in the Senate,
dimming prospects that a bill would be signed into law before the
November elections.
But the House Republican leadership said it was confident a bill would
be on President Bush's desk before Nov. 2. They predicted that
Democrats would find it hard to vote against reforms that, by
centralizing authority over the government's intelligence agencies,
would strengthen the nation's ability to defend itself against
terrorists.
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said the bill would go through
half a dozen committees next week on its way to the House floor the
following week.
The House bill would give an intelligence director and a
counterterrorism center less power than the bill passed by the Senate
Governmental Affairs Committee Wednesday. In that respect, the House
leadership more closely reflected the White House vision of the new
director and center than did the Senate or the Sept. 11 Commission.
Under the House bill, like the Senate bill, the director would have
supervisory authority over the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and
the other 15 U.S. spy agencies that do not contribute directly to war
fighting. But the director's authority would not be as broad in the
House approach. He would have less power to set agency budgets, and he
would be less the initiator of top agency appointments than someone who
reacts to the choices of others.
But it is the law enforcement aspects of the 335-page House bill that
quickly proved the most controversial.
The bill would:
-- Make it easier to deport aliens who help or join terrorist groups.
-- Give the government warrant powers to help track "lone wolf"
terrorists unconnected to a terrorist group.
-- Set minimal federal standards for state-issued drivers' licenses and
identity cards.
-- Increase the number of border patrol agents and immigration and
customs agents.
-- Expand inspection by U.S. agents at foreign airports of travelers to
the United States.
-- Establish a national database for government agencies to more easily
share information on citizens.
Some of these measures were included in a Justice Department memo
leaked last year and dubbed "Patriot Act II" by critics who said they
would further erode civil liberties that were weakened by the Patriot
Act, passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Republicans insisted that they were only trying to respond to the bulk
of the 41 reforms urged by the Sept. 11 Commission in its final report,
which delivered a scathing indictment of failures of the intelligence
community.
"Our bill is the most comprehensive effort yet introduced that deals
with the problems uncovered by the 9/11 Commission," Hastert told
reporters.
But Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House
Intelligence Committee, said the bill "has complicated the process."
Harman said she objected to the bill's effort to curb the authority of
the national intelligence director and the counterterrorism center and
to its immigration provisions. Beyond its proposals for intelligence
reform, she said, the bill "has a lot of problems."
Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., who serves on the House Intelligence Committee
and who has opposed creation of a national intelligence director, said
he too, was unhappy with a draft he saw of the House bill Thursday.
"The bill that I saw ... I don't intend to support," LaHood said. "What
will end up happening is we'll pass something in the House that will be
totally different than the Senate, then have the huge train wreck that
we always have here in trying to reconcile the two."
He said he did not believe it would be possible to reconcile the House
and Senate versions of a bill before Congress adjourns in mid-October
for the November elections.
Once the bill was introduced, ebullient Republicans said it would be
hard for Democrats to oppose measures aimed at preventing future
domestic attacks, observed John Feehrey, Hastert's spokesman.
"This clarifies the law so that you can actually get the terrorists,"
Feehrey said. "Would any Democrat want to vote against that?"
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., blasted the bill.
"Instead of acting in a bipartisan manner, the Republican leadership is
introducing a bill, written behind closed doors, that attempts to score
partisan points and goes far outside the recommendations of the 9/11
Commission," she said in a statement. "Unbelievably, the Republicans
claim to have introduced a bipartisan bill, as Senate leaders have
done. It is simply not true."
<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-
intel25sep25,1,2060774,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines>
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