United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

On Thursday, U.S. President George W. Bush revised Executive Order 12333, which “governs the nation’s 16 spy agencies,” the New York Times reported Friday.[1] -- Scott Shane quoted one insider who said “I don’t see a lot of change here,” but the ACLU “maintained that changes in the executive order raised the specter of greater domestic spying, saying new language shifted the focus of the intelligence agencies to American soil. Michael German, national security policy counsel for the A.C.L.U., pointed to the order’s references to the agencies’ working with ‘private sector entities’ and said, ‘When you have government and private companies operating together in secret, I think that’s very problematic.’” -- The Baltimore Sun quoted Caroline Fredrickson, head of the ACLU legislative office in Washington, who said in a statement: "The most chilling aspect of this executive order is that the director of national intelligence can task any agency of the government to spy on you."[2] -- The Los Angeles Times gave more details than the New York Times or the Baltimore Sun about the dissatisfaction and “disgust” at the lack of consultation with Congress that led a number of representatives, including six Republicans, to “walk out of a closed-door briefing of the House Intelligence Committee by McConnell on Thursday morning.”[3] -- BACKGROUND: This week historian Chalmers Johnson warned about the long-term consequences of privatizing intelligence functions. -- As for the evolution of the intelligence functions of the U.S. national security state, Johnson had this to say in his most recent book: “[T]he Church Committee exposed the CIA’s illegal domestic surveillance, its assassinations of overseas leaders, and its lying to Congress. The committee’s report led Congress to create intelligence committees in both houses . . . Vice President Dick Cheney has made it his personal crusade to try to reverse the Church Committee’s reforms. The irony is that Congress created the ‘central’ intelligence agency in 1947 to concentrate vital information in one place and ensure that it went to the president and all other officials with a need-to-know. Instead the intelligence ‘community’ has become a hotbed of competition, turf wars, and confusion. . . . To further enhance secrecy and add to the confusion, the president and the CIA have increasingly turned to completely ‘off-the-books’ operations. The unsuccessful attempt to rig the Iraqi elections of January 30, 2005, in favor of the White House’s preferred candidate, former CIA operative Iyad Allawi, by using ‘retired’ agents, funds not appropriated by Congress, and other means is but one contemporary example of this phenomenon. The public learns about these operations, if it ever does, only as a result of leaks by insiders. The CIA belongs as much to the president as the Praetorian Guard once belonged to the Roman emperors. Regardless of what it spends most of its time doing, the CIA is still tasked with providing accurate information to the president . . . But the CIA’s mandate to provide such often unrequested (and sometimes unwelcome) information to a president constitutes a potential restraint on the president’s freedom of action. . . . [O]ver the years, the powers of the director of the CIA to compel a president to read and attend to an unwanted intelligence estimate have been systematically diluted” (Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic [New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007], pp. 94-96). -- “My own view is that President Bush’s manipulation of intelligence to deceive the country into going to war and then blaming his failure on the CIA’s ‘false intelligence’ delivered only the final coup de grâce to the CIA’s strategic-intelligence function. Henceforth, the CIA will no longer have even a vestigial role in trying to discern the forces influencing our foreign policies. That work will now be done, if it is done at all, by the new director of national intelligence. The downgraded CIA will attend to such things as assassinations, dirty tricks, renditions, and engineering foreign coups. . . . The reality is that presidents like having a private army and do not like to be contradicted by officials not fully under their control. . . . In May 2006 [when he fired Porter Goss and replaced him with a four-star air force general, Michael Hayden, former NSA director], Bush merely put strategic analysis to sleep once and for all and turned over truth-telling to a brand-new bureaucracy of personal loyalists and the vested interests of the Pentagon” (ibid., pp. 135-36)....

BUSH ISSUES ORDER SEEKING TO UNITE THE EFFORTS OF U.S. SPY AGENCIES
By Scott Shane

WASHINGTON -- President Bush has approved a long-awaited revision of the executive order that governs the nation’s 16 spy agencies, the latest effort to wrestle the competing bureaucracies into a single effort under the director of national intelligence.

The revision, to Executive Order 12333, ratifies the major intelligence reshuffling carried out under a 2004 law that created the post of director of national intelligence atop all the agencies, diminishing the role of the C.I.A. director. The director of national intelligence is now Mike McConnell, whose staff worked for months on the revision, signed by the president on Wednesday.

In an unusual show of displeasure, six Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee walked out of Mr. McConnell’s briefing on the revised order Thursday to protest what they described as inadequate White House consultation with the committee.

The walkout was led by Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the committee’s top Republican, who said he and other members had received the 40-page revised order only minutes before the briefing, held for intelligence-oversight lawmakers of both houses, and had never had a chance to offer their views during the drafting.

“This is a pattern,” Mr. Hoekstra said in an interview, referring to what he said was the administration’s failure to inform the committee of important intelligence findings and policies. “It makes it impossible to do effective oversight.”

Mr. Hoekstra also said he believed that the order left the director of national intelligence with too few powers and too many people, and feared that the office was becoming a bloated layer of bureaucracy.

The committee’s chairman, Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas, said he supported Mr. Bush’s efforts to “end the turf wars that have plagued American intelligence.”

But Mr. Reyes, who did not join the walkout, said in a statement that he was “deeply disappointed” that the president “did not seek Congressional or public input into this document.”

The American Civil Liberties Union was also displeased. It maintained that changes in the executive order raised the specter of greater domestic spying, saying new language shifted the focus of the intelligence agencies to American soil. Michael German, national security policy counsel for the A.C.L.U., pointed to the order’s references to the agencies’ working with “private sector entities” and said, “When you have government and private companies operating together in secret, I think that’s very problematic.”

Administration officials, in a briefing for reporters that was given on condition of anonymity, said Congress had in fact been consulted and noted that the revised order included strong language in support of the protection of civil liberties. It also retains prohibitions on assassination and human experimentation that have been in the executive order since it was first issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

“I don’t see a lot of change here,” said Mark M. Lowenthal, a former assistant director of central intelligence. Mr. Lowenthal described the revised order as an “organizational update” that seemed “underwhelming” after months of speculation inside the government about how the powers of various agencies might shift.

One strong rumor had been that the executive order might explicitly authorize Mr. McConnell, whose official representatives in foreign countries have been the Central Intelligence Agency’s station chiefs, to choose officials of other agencies as his representatives abroad.

But while the order gives the director of national intelligence broad power over intelligence “arrangements and agreements” with other countries, it assigns the management of such relations to the C.I.A., and officials said Thursday that C.I.A. station chiefs remained the director’s representatives to other countries.

The order also leaves the C.I.A. in charge of carrying out covert action overseas, “unless the president determines that another agency is more likely to achieve a particular objective.”

WASHINGTON -- President Bush has broadened the power of the nation's spy chief, the White House announced yesterday, drawing measured praise from intelligence analysts and complaints from members of Congress who said they were not consulted.

In strengthening the role of the director of national intelligence, Bush reduced the authority of the CIA in some areas. Congress created the intelligence director's job after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to help coordinate all of the nation's spying operations, but the director's effectiveness has been hampered by interagency power struggles and a lack of control over spending.

Bush has issued a new executive order, made public by the White House, revising rules issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 that govern the operation of the federal intelligence apparatus.

The Bush order gives the director explicit authority, according to the White House, to "participate more fully" in the hiring and firing of key intelligence personnel. Among the most significant challenges for the director has been creating lines of authority among the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Department, and more than a dozen other intelligence agencies.

"I think you have to have one boss," said Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, a Baltimore County Democrat and member of the House Intelligence Committee.

The Bush order also authorizes the intelligence director, Mike McConnell, to strike cooperative deals with foreign governments, a function previously held by the CIA. The CIA would still carry out information-gathering.

"It sets up a system of cooperation and networking between different agencies" and "legitimizes what we need to do" on intelligence issues, Ruppersberger said.

Senior White House officials said the order -- signed by the president Wednesday evening -- sharpens areas in which McConnell "thought clarifications were necessary," and that the intelligence chief was "fully satisfied" with the outcome of the lengthy review of intelligence operations.

Intelligence analysts said the new rules will strengthen McConnell's ability to provide the president with a balanced view on the quality of information about national security topics.

The order also puts the nation's intelligence chief in a better position to spearhead reforms, such as better information-sharing, which investigations of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks concluded was a major problem among the country's 16 intelligence agencies, analysts said.

"They are really trying to set the next team up to walk in the door and have a functioning government, and they are doing it in a way that's workable for a Republican or Democrat," said James Carafano, a senior counterterrorism researcher at the Heritage Foundation.

Other analysts and former intelligence officials expressed skepticism, noting that the intelligence director will still lack control over how intelligence funding is spent, meaning that conflicts between individual agencies probably would continue.

"There's a lot less there than meets the eye," said Mark Lowenthal, a former high-ranking CIA official and staff director of the House Intelligence Committee. "All it basically does is bring the old executive order up to date with new structure, which is necessary, but it doesn't fundamentally change anything beyond that."

Although the Bush order ostensibly gives the director greater control over some purchasing and personnel, the position "still has very little authority," Lowenthal said.

Lawmakers from both parties said they were angered by how the update was unveiled, noting that the Bush administration started revisions a year ago but did not involve Congress until recently.

Lawmakers did not see a copy until Wednesday, officials said, and they were required to return it after a few hours. They did not see the final version until the White House released it.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top-ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, led a walkout of Republican members of Congress from a briefing by McConnell yesterday.

All but three of the GOP representatives left, according to a congressional official.

The way the review was conducted "cannot be seen as anything other than an attempt to undercut congressional oversight," Hoekstra said.

"After seven years of a go-it-alone presidency, perhaps I should expect nothing more from this White House," Rep. Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. "But this order will be binding on future administrations as well."

Many lawmakers withheld comment as they sorted through the rewrite of U.S. intelligence policy.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said he was "very satisfied" with the new system, which he said came about through unusual cooperation based on personal relationships among him, McConnell, and other top intelligence officials.

"I believe that the authorities of the secretary of defense are adequately preserved in this," said Gates, whose department oversees most intelligence spending.

"One of the reasons why I decided not to be interested in the [director of national intelligence] job . . . 3 1/2 years ago was that I felt that the position didn't have enough power to do the job properly. For example, they had no authority to fire anybody," Gates, a former CIA director, told reporters. The new order, he said, would enable the intelligence director "to do that job better and give him the tools to do that job better."

White House officials contend that the new rules will protect constitutional rights, but the American Civil Liberties Union said the Bush order will allow McConnell to conduct more spying on U.S. residents.

"The most chilling aspect of this executive order is that the director of national intelligence can task any agency of the government to spy on you," Caroline Fredrickson, head of the ACLU legislative office in Washington, said in a statement.

"The next time you're asked to give information to a government agency or official, you not only won't know where that information might go, you may not even know who's really asking the question in the first place."

** The executive order expands the authority of Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell. Lawmakers complain they were excluded from the revision process. **

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration unveiled a long-awaited reorganization of the U.S. intelligence community Thursday, boosting the authority of the director of national intelligence but prompting sharp criticism from congressional leaders who said they were not consulted on the changes.

The executive order signed into law a day earlier by President Bush essentially designated Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell as commander in chief of the CIA and 15 other agencies that constitute the U.S. intelligence community.

Over the three years since Congress created the DNI, as his office is known, McConnell has often lacked the power to make changes among the notoriously turf-conscious intelligence agencies and to force them to work more closely, said Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice).

"I am sure that there was a lot of pushing and pulling to get this thing drafted, but obviously it had to be done," said Harman, an architect of the law that created McConnell's job. "The DNI is firmly in charge now, and that's a good thing."

The overhaul was described by two senior administration officials as the most significant of its kind in more than a generation.

It was the first major revision of an executive order originally issued by President Reagan in 1981 to formally define the roles of the various U.S. spy agencies, place limits on their activities, and address the privacy rights of Americans.

But Harman and other lawmakers complained that they were left out of the revision process and did not receive copies of the new order until after Bush had signed it.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) walked out of a closed-door briefing of the House Intelligence Committee by McConnell on Thursday morning and was followed by several other lawmakers.

In an interview, Hoekstra, the committee's senior Republican, said he told McConnell that he was disgusted with what he described as the Bush administration's continuing effort to undercut any kind of outside oversight.

"This is part of a systemic problem of the administration, and I said I'm not going to take it anymore," Hoekstra said.

The revised blueprint is not expected to prompt immediate or wholesale changes in the way the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies operate, according to officials from the White House and several of the agencies. All of them spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss the document publicly.

Many of the changes simply codified reforms adopted in response to post-Sept. 11 criticism of the intelligence community.

Some changes give the DNI authority over intelligence-gathering policy while leaving operational details to the CIA and military agencies, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, according to the two senior administration officials, who briefed reporters in a conference call.

Those officials, and documents released by the White House, stressed that the new blueprint reinforced long-standing civil liberties protections and continued an existing ban on assassinations.

The revised executive order gives McConnell more authority to integrate and reorganize the collection, analysis and dissemination of intelligence.

For instance, he could order the CIA to share what it considers to be proprietary information with other intelligence agencies. McConnell also will play a more substantive role in filling a host of top-level intelligence jobs.

Drafts of the revised order -- known in intelligence circles by its number, 12333 -- have been circulating among top intelligence officials in recent months, setting off lobbying efforts by affected agencies.

The White House said Thursday that CIA Director Michael V. Hayden and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates played central roles in the revision process, as did James R. Clapper Jr., the Defense undersecretary for intelligence who has headed three other affected agencies.