89 Days Left
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Set up your own campaign headquarters, motivating and enabling your friends and colleagues to join this important fight by donating their time and dollars to the cause. Every hour – and every dollar – will make a critical difference in determining our victories. Will you volunteer and bring 1, 2, or 10 or your friends for the final weekend before Election Day? Can you give / raise $100, $500, $1,000 or more. WE NEED YOU!
In a guest post on our blog last week, Maura Keaney, one of the five Majority Makers contest winners who accompanied us to Boston noted: “The energy in the Fleet Center is amazing. As you can imagine, Al Gore, President Carter, and President Clinton fired up the room last night.” Now it is our turn to do the same. Join us by becoming a Majority Maker today!
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Defending America: Taking the Lead on Intelligence Reform
On the day the 9/11 Commission released its long awaited report, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi made clear the issues at hand:
“The purpose of the 9/11 Commission was not to assign blame, but to find answers for the families and to reduce risk to the American people. We must take the Commission's work and use it to make certain that such horrific attacks never occur again.”
But on the other side of aisle, Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert was arguing that nothing would likely be done before the next Congress entered in 2005. Further, a joint press conference held by Hastert, GOP Leader Tom DeLay, and other Republican Leadership struck such a partisan discord that a reporter was forced to ask:
“Mr. Speaker, the commission this morning pushed emphatically for the Congress to act in a bipartisan fashion. They placed blame for the -- squarely across all officials of the federal government of this and the former administration. Yet in this press conference you seem to be talking about what great things Mr. Bush and you guys have done and the terrible things that happened in the '90s. What should the American people expect in terms of bipartisanship?”
In light of this reaction from the GOP it became clear that serious leadership was necessary in order to address the urgent recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, many of which had already been known but awaited action until the final report was released. In an attempt to make it a bipartisan effort, Leader Pelosi wrote a letter to Speaker Hastert:
“I urge you to use the authority under the adjournment resolution to reconvene the House in August so that we are in the best possible position to conduct the review of the Commission's recommendations.”
When days went by with no response, Leader Pelosi took the initiative herself, calling Democrats to forgo their normal break and reconvene on August 10th, shortly after the Democratic Convention. In preparation, Pelosi and the Members of the Democratic Caucus heard an analysis of the recommendations from Homeland Security Committee ranking Democrat Jim Turner of Texas, who earlier this year co-authored a “Plan to Win the War on Terror” with Democrat Jane Harman of the House Intelligence Committee. Following the briefing, Leader Pelosi issued another statement:
“Democrats are moving quickly but carefully to give the Commission's recommendations the consideration they deserve. Today's presentation by Congressman Turner was helpful in bringing definition to the issues raised by the Commission's report.”
Democrats continue to work in examining and evaluating the Commission’s recommendations, and will get to work on August 10th, with or without the rest of the House, to make our country safer - quickly and carefully.
Defying the Commission
Reading the headlines on Tuesday one might have gotten the impression that President Bush had accepted all but a few trivial details of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations. However, Josh Marshall, a columnist for The Hill takes a close look at the administration’s proposal to “accept” the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission and comes to the conclusion that, “in fact he was doing close to the opposite, doing more or less what they said shouldn't be done.”
His analysis, posted on his blog talkingpointsmemo.com, stands on its own, so we offer this extended excerpt:
The key point made by the commission, you'll remember, is that the new NDI would have to have budgetary authority across the various intelligence agencies and the ability to hire and fire senior managers. As the Times makes clear, the president's proposal does none of those. Indeed, the dailies do a pretty good job making this clear. The Post says that ...
“Bush's statement embraced the two most significant of the 37 recommendations by the commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but with significant limitations. Under his plan, the new intelligence chief would lack the authority over budgets, hiring and firing that the commission had envisioned.”
But as Marshall notes, that is only the beginning:
You'll remember that we already have a national director of intelligence, someone in charge of overseeing the work of all the various American intelligence agencies. That person is the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence.
The only problem is that for a variety of reasons, some intentional, some historical and some incidental, the DCI does not really serve that function. In fact, the current set-up can reasonably be viewed as a worst of both worlds scenario since the DCI doesn't have this broad supervisory function and yet -- as we saw in the Iraq WMD debate -- the DCI can improperly tilt joint national intelligence findings in favor of his agency, the CIA. Now, if you go back and read the actual 9/11 Report you'll see that the commissioners description of the organizational shortcomings of the DCI post reads more or less exactly like the description of the new post the president outlined today.
I quote from page 410 ...
“The current DCI is responsible for community performance but lacks the three authorities critical for any agency head or chief executive officer: (1) control over purse strings, (2) the ability to hire or fire senior managers, and (3) the ability to set standards for the information infrastructure and personnel.”
And it gets better.
The Times article notes that the president said that while the new NID wouldn't have full control of the purse strings, he or she would have a 'coordinating' role in budgeting. Yet, in the very next paragraph of the report, the commissioners note how this doesn't cut it.
Again on page 410 (emphasis added) ...
“The only budget power of the DCI over agencies other than the CIA lies in coordinating the budget requests of the various intelligence agencies into a single program for submission to Congress. The overall funding request of the 15 intelligence entities in this program is then presented to the president and Congress in 15 separate volumes.”
Democrats are determined to use the invaluable and expert work of the 9/11 Commission to make America safer. Lip service, and claims to be abiding by the recommendations are not enough, and Nancy Pelosi continues to urge a special session of Congress.
Quick Links: The Loss of Credibility
Mixing Politics with Terror Alerts: Nobody outside the administration has access to the information they have, so the country depends on the administration’s credibility. But in what has become a routine, Tom Ridge undermined our confidence in his recent alert by mixing serious warnings with campaign rhetoric: “We must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president's leadership in the war against terror.” In addition, although Ridge told us many specifics, and many more were leaked by the administration, we only found out two days later that “most, if not all, of the information about the buildings seized by authorities in a raid in Pakistan last week was about three years old, and possibly older.”
Capturing the Source: The source of the information on which Ridge’s recent alert was made was a Pakistani Al Qaeda suspect captured last week. While that capture was more than welcome, it reminded many of a story that appeared in The New Republic last month which predicted the exact timing of such a capture based on information from Pakistani intelligence sources. An editor’s note to that story explains, “The timing of this announcement should be of particular interest to readers of The New Republic. Earlier this month, John B. Judis, Spencer Ackerman, and Massoud Ansari broke the story of how the Bush administration was pressuring Pakistani officials to apprehend high-value targets (HVTs) in time for the November elections--and in particular, to coincide with the Democratic National Convention. Although the capture took place in central Pakistan ‘a few days back,’ the announcement came just hours before John Kerry [gave] his acceptance speech in Boston.”
Not the First Time: In May, John Ashcroft drew fire and raised eyebrows from newscasters when he appeared for a dramatic press conference announcing a terrorism warning, but eventually made clear that he had no new information to report. The terrorism alert system was not raised, and law enforcement agencies reported receiving no additional instructions. According to the New York T imes, “‘There is absolutely nothing specific enough’ that warrants a change in the alert level, Mr. Ridge said on NBC's ‘Today.’” The press conference came just as President Bush’s poll numbers dropped to their “lowest point ever.”
