House Passes Bill to Overhaul Intelligence

A divided House approved an intelligence agency overhaul bill Friday that differs sharply from a Senate version passed earlier and sets up a showdown between the two chambers over the shape of the final bill.

Opponents said the House bill, which passed 282 to 134, was laced with anti-immigrant provisions that had little to do with intelligence or national security.

GOP leaders said their bill would not only reform intelligence gathering, but also strengthen border security, help prevent identity theft, improve the ability of the Homeland Security Department to block terrorist travel and create a new post inside the department to head up cyber security.

The bipartisan Senate version of the bill passed Wednesday on a vote of 96 to 2.

House Republican leaders beat back attempts to make their bill conform more closely to the Senate version, saying it was not as tough or broad as the House version. Differences in the two versions raise questions about whether a compromise can be ready for President Bush’s signature before the Nov. 2 elections.

The vote in the House was largely along party lines, with eight Republicans voting no and 69 Democrats voting in support.

All 20 California Republicans voted for the bill. They were joined by three of the state’s 33 Democrats: Dennis A. Cardoza of Atwater, Calvin Dooley of Hanford and Adam B. Schiff of Burbank. Democrats Robert T. Matsui of Sacramento and Bob Filner of San Diego did not vote.

“This bill makes difficult choices,” said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas). “And it will reaffirm the one fact that too often is ignored by too many: We are at war. And the first priority in this war is the protection of Americans.”

Like its Senate counterpart, the House bill would create a new national intelligence director in charge of the country’s 15 domestic and international spy agencies. The Sept. 11 commission, whose July report inspired the legislation, had found that poor intelligence coordination among these agencies had made it easier for Al Qaeda to carry out its 2001 attacks.

Both bills would also create a national counter-terrorism center to coordinate intelligence collection and analysis.

However, the House would have the intelligence director’s budget go through the Defense Department, which now controls about 80% of intelligence spending. The Senate version would give budget authority to the intelligence director.

The Senate version would also declassify overall U.S. spending on intelligence, though it would not specify any details. The House would keep the intelligence budget a secret.

“We believe that telling our enemies how much we spend on certain intelligence programs diminishes our national security,” said House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) “Why should we give those who want to harm us any information that might help them?”

The House Republican leadership pledged to promptly name a delegation to a conference committee of House and Senate members to negotiate a compromise bill. Some House members saw tough negotiations ahead.

“We clearly need to have it done as soon as possible, but first and foremost, we have to make sure it makes America safer,” said Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), one of the eight Republicans who voted against the bill. Diaz-Balart said he reluctantly decided to oppose the bill after the House defeated two amendments to delete provisions that were denounced as anti-immigrant.

The provisions would make it easier to deport without judicial review illegal immigrants who have been in this country less than five years, and it would raise the standard of proof required of such immigrants trying to claim refugee status.

“There’s a lot of things to like in this bill,” Diaz-Balart said. “There are a few issues I think just shouldn’t be in here.”

Deleted from the original House bill was a provision opposed by the White House as well as the American Civil Liberties Union. It would have allowed the deportation of terrorism suspects to countries where they might face torture.

In a last-minute compromise, the House passed an amendment by Rep. John N. Hostettler (R-Ind.) to bar the deportation of non-U.S. citizens to countries where they might face torture unless the secretary of State received diplomatic assurances that they would be protected.

Supporters said the bill would prevent what Democrats have denounced as the “outsourcing of torture” from the United States to its allies that used torture in interrogating suspects. But the American Civil Liberties Union said the Hostettler amendment had fatal flaws.

Diplomatic assurances not to torture deported immigrants were “meaningless” and have been violated, said ACLU legislative counsel Timothy Edgar.

The amendment allows the secretary of Homeland Security to detain any illegal immigrant who cannot be deported and specifically disallows judicial review. This “court-stripping” provision is “an egregious assault on the right of the courts to review basic issues regarding the rights of a person who’s been in detention,” Edgar said.

Diaz-Balart said the detentions would apply only to suspects sentenced to prison terms of at least five years. “Without this, you cannot detain, you must release into the streets of the U.S., murderers, rapists, child abusers and terrorists” who are illegal immigrants but who could not be deported to their home countries, he said.

Opponents said that the Senate bill had more fully implemented the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission. Of the 41 recommendations in the Sept. 11 report, only 11 were reflected in the House bill, said California Democrat Ellen O. Tauscher of Alamo, who voted against it.

Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) argued the opposite, saying the bill embraced “the full scope of the 9/11 commission’s recommendations.”