While watching the House and Senate "debates" on the Conference report of the Intelligence Reform Bill (S2845) on C-SPAN two thoughts came to mind.
The first was a line from the movie "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." Big daddy (Burl Ives) says, "There is a smell of mendacity in the air."
The second is advice that was given to my former Congressional Representative (a Democrat) when she first went to Washington. Their leader told them, "The Republicans are the opposition, and the Senate is the enemy." The Senate certainly lived up to that designation in the conference to reconcile the Senate bill with the House version (HR10) passed last month by a 344-51 vote.
We only have space to consider a few of the provisions in the 615-page combination of the House and Senate bills. Actually two of the more controversial provisions were in the bill as passed by the House but were taken out in the conference.
The conference committee members were appointed by House Speaker Hastert and Senate majority leader Frist. Senator Susan Collins (R. Maine) who chairs the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee was designated chair of the conference with Sen. Joe Lieberman as co-chair. The two controlled the content of report.
The "missing" provision that generated the most, at times acrimonious, debate was one that would have denied drivers, licenses to illegal aliens and required licenses issued to aliens on temporary visas or other temporary status to expire on the date the visas expired.
The Senate conferees claimed they were using the forty some recommendations of the 911 Commission as their guidelines for the legislation and because the license provision was not included in the commission's recommendations, it was removed from the final bill according to Senator Collins.
However Collins' assertion is belied by the fact three immigration related provisions were included in the bill. One provision would finally require that all visa applicants be interviewed by an American official. This was prompted by the "Visa Express" program instituted by Colin Powell's State Department on July 1, 2001. It applied only to Saudi Arabia and allowed travel agencies there to issue visas to applicants coming to the U.S. from Saudi Arabia. Except for the pilots, most of the 19 involved in the hijackings had been in the U.S. less than two months. We have not been told how many, if any, came in under the Visa Express program.
A second immigration "reform" provided 40,000 beds for aliens claiming asylum from persecution in their home countries. Although by law they are supposed to be held in detention until their cases are decided most had been released into the general population because of lack of facilities and dropped off the radar screen.
The third provision authorized an increase of 10,000 in border patrol personnel who would be assigned by the INS under the control the Secretary of Homeland Defense.
The only recommendation of the commission report regarding driver's licenses was a requirement for standardization of information on the licenses (a step toward a national I.D. card begun with the recent requirement that social security numbers be shown on drivers, licenses.)
Drivers' licenses can be used to obtain other I.D's like social security numbers and are indispensable to the ability to fly on commercial airlines. The 911 Commission (whose obvious mission was to provide cover for legislation wanted by the executive and Congress) did mention that the 19 hijackers among them had 63 drivers, licenses with various aliases. Five had actually used the licenses to register to vote.
Senator Collins gave the (specious) rationale for its removal that it was an immigration issue and did not belong in the Intel bill, ignoring the fact that the provision had sailed through the house with 344 votes. Lieberman's lame explanation was that they were protecting "states rights" by preserving the right of the states to say who gets a license.
However syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin may have been closer to the real reason. She says senators were under pressure from immigration lawyers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and large corporations not to include anything that would discourage the influx of cheap labor.
A second provision deleted by Collins and Lieberman would have fixed a three and one half mile gap in a 14-mile fence on the border between California and Mexico. The reason, the fence might have disturbed five of the over 2,000 identical plants in the area on the endangered species list.
Opposition to a third provision is perplexing, profoundly troubling and so far anonymous. As the senate bill (2485) was being written, the Whitehouse drafted a provision that would ensure that images from satellites and unmanned planes taken over battle zones would go directly to battlefield commanders in combat areas. This came to be known as the "protection of chain of command provision".
When S2485 went to the floor for a vote, the provision was missing. Senator John Warner, chair of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, offered the provision as an amendment, which was rejected!
When the two bills went into the conference, Senator Warner joined with his counterpart in the House, Duncan Hunter who chairs the House Armed Forces Committee. They drafted a "protection of chain of command provision and virtually forced the conferees to accept it. Under Senate rules a single senator can delay a vote almost indefinitely. Warner and Hunter then dropped their opposition to the bill. Senator Warner was so incensed by the unreasoning resistance that he prepared a step-by-step chronology and inserted it into the record of the conference.
Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R. Wisconsin) who led the fight to include the provision denying illegal aliens drivers, licenses had no such ally in the Senate. However he did extract a promise from the leadership to take the question up early in the next session. Nevertheless, over 70 House Republicans (and 4 Democrats) voted against the conference report primarily because the drivers, license provisions were not included. A companion provision in the house bill would have made it possible to search state data bases to compare license holders with names on the list of suspected terrorist and known persons in the country illegally as well as holders of licenses in more than one state That provision was also deleted from the final bill.
Two senators voted against the report. Jim Imhoff (R. Oklahoma) because of the license provision, and Robert Byrd (Dem. W.Virginia) who thought the bill needed more discussion and was being rushed through when none of the senators knew everything that was in the bill.
The conference report passed by a 336 to 75 vote in the House and an 89 to 2 vote in the Senate, a triumph of image and expediency over national security.
The bill creates the position of Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The position has been described as the most powerful in the country, second only to the power of the president. It also authorizes the creation of a National Counterterrorism Center (NCC) under the DNI. The NCC will collect and control dissemination of intelligence from all agencies with the exception of the "chain of command" tactical military intelligence. The NCC can develop policies and missions for all agencies but strangely cannot tell them how to execute the mission. However, this is negated by the fact that the NCC will control the money (budgets) for all intelligence operations including the military. It is no comfort that Arlen (magic bullet) Spector will chair the terrorism subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The bill authorizes surveillance of "suspected" terrorists regardless of whether the person has ties to a foreign country or terrorist organization. The current definition of "terrorist" disseminated to local law enforcement includes persons who often cite the Constitution, especially the second amendment.
Section 1015 of the bill provides that the DCI (currently Porter Goss) automatically becomes the DNI without any further action by Congress (including a confirmation hearing or a vote), unless President Bush nominates someone else for the position of DNI.
It was painful, and at other times maddening, to listen to various politicians dissembling on various provisions, both those deleted and others included. Except for those in leadership roles, most of the Congressmen and women had the mindset that a bill had to be passed before the end of the session. In other words do something, even if it is wrong.
In this writer's opinion the final product is nothing more than another layer of bureaucracy in which important intelligence will be buried, mistranslated delayed or misrouted to those who need it. Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds detailed the incompetence, deliberate sabotage by mistranslating or burying crucial intelligence and espionage and treason within the FBI's translation section. No one has been held accountable and some of the worst perpetrators have been promoted. Edmonds is being muzzled by the Attorney General.
FBI Director Meuller remains in place probably because he knows "where the bodies are buried" in the BCCI investigation he helped kill. Another holdover from the Clinton administration was Mary Jo White, U.S. Attorney for the southern district of New York who remained in office until she had helped in killing the BCCI investigation along with the Teamsters/DNC campaign fund swaps and investigation of the Marc Rich pardon.
Perhaps the most shameful part of the entire deception is the attempt by the 911 commission members, especially its chairman, and several politicians to manipulate the members of the organization of families of the victims of 911 for their political agenda.
Without doubt, there would have been no 911 Commission without the pressure the family group applied to Congress. The families were steadfast in their demand for accountability and changing the status quo. Ultimately they were betrayed. As the commission confirmed in its report, it was not interested, not did it try, to affix responsibility (blame they called it) to any individuals. This was perfectly clear to this writer when the one person most responsible for the disconnect within the FBI where law enforcement and counterespionage were not allowed to trade information, was appointed as a member of the Commission.
Upon publication of the 911 Commission report, the prestige of the families group was used to pressure the Congress to translate the Commission's recommendations into law.
On the final day of passage, Senators Collins, Lieberman and Schumer (D. N.Y.) heaped praise and accolades on "families" of the victims of 911, virtually crediting them with adoption of the bill. What none of them mentioned was the fact that over three hundred members of the family group had formed an organization, "911 Families for a Secure America", which was actively lobbying against passage of the bill without the drivers, license provision.
Mendacity indeed! Big daddy was right!
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
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Past Medium Rare articles back to October 2001 are archived at:
http://www.worldnewsstand.net/MediumRare/Archives.htm The author is a freelance writer based in Romulus, Michigan. He is a former newspaper editor and investigative reporter, a retired customs administrator and accountant, and a student of history and the U.S. Constitution.
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