Senate Passes Major Overhaul of U.S. Intelligence

The Senate, determined to galvanize the nation’s intelligence-gathering capabilities for the war on terrorism, on Wednesday approved a far-reaching restructuring of the nation’s spy agencies.

Little more than two months after the Sept. 11 commission said that poor intelligence coordination made it easier for Al Qaeda to carry out its 2001 terrorist attacks, the Senate adopted its core recommendation: to give a new national intelligence director authority over the budgets and senior personnel of most of the nation’s 15 domestic and international spy agencies.

The bill would also create a national counter-terrorism center to coordinate the agencies’ intelligence collection and analysis. And it would establish a board to ensure that the war on terrorism did not infringe on civil liberties or privacy.

The vote was 96 to 2, with California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer voting with the majority. The two dissenters were Sens. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.).

The Senate bill must still be reconciled with the very different version of intelligence reform that is moving through the House and is expected to come to a vote this week.

Congressional leaders hope a compromise bill can be passed and sent to the White House before election day on Nov. 2.

Like its Senate counterpart, the House bill would create a national intelligence director and a counter-terrorism center.

But it would give the intelligence director less authority over budgets and personnel than the Senate bill. And it includes controversial new powers for law enforcement officials to track suspected terrorists and new measures that would make it easier to deport foreigners.

“I think we’re quite close to the end,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former governor of New Jersey who chaired the Sept. 11 commission. “But having said that, the hardest part may be still to come.”

Kean and former Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), the commission’s vice chairman, welcomed the passage of the Senate bill, which they said more closely tracks the commission’s recommendations than the House version. Both men said they believed it was public pressure that moved Congress to respond quickly to the commission’s recommendations.

“There is tremendous demand by the public to have the president sign a bill that is going to make them safer,” Kean said.

Republicans and Democrats praised the Senate’s work as a rare feat of bipartisanship pulled off in the heat of national elections, singling out for credit the bill’s coauthors, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.).

They prevailed over Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) and Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who wanted the Pentagon to retain control over most of the estimated $40-billion intelligence budget. Warner and Stevens voted for the final bill.

In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union said it was disappointed with the Senate bill because it would create an information-sharing network that would link different government databases for easier access by law enforcement.

The ACLU said the provision lacked privacy and civil liberties safeguards and contained provisions establishing a national standard for states to issue driver’s licenses, a move the ACLU said “would lead to the back-door creation of a national ID card.”

The action shifts to the House, where the Republican leadership is under increasing pressure from the White House to strip some of the more controversial measures out of the bill before it comes to a final vote. The House leadership hopes to begin debate on a bill today.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) has said that all the provisions of the House bill respond to the Sept. 11 commission’s report and are necessary to bolster national security. In a news conference Wednesday, he and other key House Republicans criticized the Senate bill, which they said failed to deal with some of the commission’s recommendations.

Hamilton said he believed the politics of the national election may prove powerful enough to push Congress to wrap up a bill and get it to President Bush for signing before Nov. 2.

“I think the leadership in both houses and the White House want a bill before the election,” Hamilton said. “That’s very important. They do not want to go back to the people and say we passed it in the House and the Senate but no law.”

Pressured by families of victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Congress created the Sept. 11 commission more than two years ago to investigate the events leading up to the attacks.

In its final report, the panel detailed intelligence failures that had left the nation unable to defend against the attacks. It made 41 recommendations for restructuring government to cope with the threat of global terrorism.

Senate leaders asked the relatively obscure Governmental Affairs Committee, whose turf would be unaffected by a restructuring of the intelligence community, to fashion a bill.

Collins, the committee’s chairwoman, and Lieberman, the ranking Democrat, won a unanimous vote from their committee on the bill, then steered it through eight days of sometimes passionate debate on the Senate floor.