[iwar] Andrew Card briefs the press

From: televr (yangyun@metacrawler.com)
Date: 2002-06-09 07:59:45
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In Big Shuffle, Bush Considered Putting F.B.I. in His New Department
By DAVID E. SANGER
NYTimes
June 9, 2002

WASHINGTON, June 7 — As President Bush and his aides narrowed their
options last month for a major reorganization of the country's
domestic defense, they briefly considered a radical change: pulling
the much-criticized Federal Bureau of Investigation out of the Justice
Department and making it the centerpiece of a new Department of
Homeland Security.

The idea had some obvious advantages, participants in the debate said.
It would force the hidebound agency to rapidly reorient itself toward
preventing another terrorist attack, and clearly make the missions of
the J. Edgar Hoover era — catching spies, investigating bank robberies
and kidnappings — a secondary priority.

"But we decided it would have been a bad idea," Andrew H. Card Jr.,
the president's chief of staff and the lead architect of the proposed
Department of Homeland Security, said in an interview today. "Whatever
the benefits, the F.B.I. is a critical arm in law enforcement, and it
had to serve under the chief law enforcement official of the United
States, and that's the attorney general."

Similarly, Mr. Bush considered and rejected pulling the National Guard
out of the Department of Defense, stripping the State Department of
its powers to issue visas and putting the Federal Aviation
Administration into the new department. But the first move, he
determined, would undermine the military, and the second would risk
deep conflict with the countries that negotiate reciprocal visa
arrangements with the United States. Moving the F.A.A. would distort
the mission of the agency overseeing the nation's airlines, officials
concluded.

Such choices were on the table in critical moments of a secretive
internal debate within the White House over how to orchestrate and
sell the biggest reorganization of the federal government since Harry
S. Truman created the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence
Agency and the National Security Council to prepare the United States
for the cold war. It was a debate that took place in a tight circle of
aides and left Mr. Bush's own cabinet members largely in the dark, the
participants said.

While Mr. Bush rejected a more sweeping plan that would have given the
new department much more far-reaching powers by putting a secretary of
homeland defense directly in charge of F.B.I. agents and National
Guardsmen alike, he clearly felt compelled to act after the
intelligence apparatus failed so spectacularly last summer.

The initial White House plan was to study the problem at greater
leisure. Tom Ridge, the director of homeland security, told reporters
last month that he would not be submitting his recommendations to the
president until July 1. But as Congressional inquiries mounted and the
public clearly began to lose confidence in how the administration had
handled the issue, a task force organized by Mr. Card moved into high
gear, resulting in Thursday's speech to the nation by the president.

Mr. Bush made his final decisions on the structure of the
reorganization in his private cabin aboard Air Force One on May 22, as
he was flying to Berlin for the first leg of his tour through Europe.
But it was nearly two weeks later — last Tuesday night — before Mr.
Card called members of the cabinet and told them they were about to
lose significant elements of their departments and big chunks of their
budgets.

"We consulted with them, but without their really knowing about what
we had in mind," Mr. Card said. "We asked them what they do," he said,
but never revealed the president's grander plans.

It was a comment that revealed a lot about how the Bush White House,
which came to office declaring that it would decentralize power,
putting it in the hands of autonomous cabinet officers. But in this
case they were left out.

One official of the Treasury, which would lose the Customs Service and
the Secret Service to the new department as proposed, said only half
in jest today that he felt like "a factory manager who just received
the surprise notification that his entire plant was moving to Mexico."

Not surprising, the White House insists — both on the record and in
background sessions for reporters — that the president neither changed
his view when he decided to create a cabinet-level department nor
acted under political pressure.

"We presented this report to the president when it was ready," Mr.
Card said today, arguing that Mr. Bush had always "left open the
option" of reorganizing America's domestic defenses when he brought
Mr. Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania, into the White House to
harden America's defenses and study its vulnerabilities. "If we
dillydallied," Mr. Card said, the administration would be criticized
for failing to solve a central bureaucratic problem. "Until last week,
when we formally changed the mission of the F.B.I., there was not one
agency of government whose main mission was the protection of the
homeland."

But this is not a White House unmindful of politics, and it was
telling that the first person Mr. Card briefed on the plan after Mr.
Bush approved it on May 22 was Karl Rove, the president's top
political adviser, who was also aboard Air Force One during the trip
to Europe.

After that Mr. Rove became involved in selling the strategy, both to
the public and to Congress — an effort that begins in earnest now, as
Mr. Bush presses for action on a far faster schedule than that of
Congress in the mid-1940's, when it took years to put all the elements
of the Truman plan in action.

One senior administration official said that it was important to move
quickly, before "some more extreme measures in Congress" gathered a
head of steam, including proposals to revamp the intelligence
community that Mr. Bush views as unwise.

The final decisions were made by the president and a small working
group including Mr. Card, Mr. Ridge and Condoleezza Rice, the national
security adviser. While that group gradually expanded, it was kept
small to deter leaks.

Mr. Card was clearly upset about what happened in March when Mr. Ridge
proposed a far more modest combination of the Immigration and
Naturalization Service and the Customs Service. News of his
recommendation to Mr. Bush circulated around Washington within hours,
causing an uproar among angry cabinet members and Congressional
committee chairmen who saw Washington's most precious commodities —
bodies and budgets — slipping out of their hands.

In what Mr. Bush himself said he expected would be "a good turf battle
fight," he will have to deal with another critique: that his new
department does not address the central communications failures that
have dogged the F.B.I. and the C.I.A, and that many in Congress
believe made it impossible to connect the disparate clues that each
agency developed before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The administration never considered moving the C.I.A. into the new
department, aides said. The C.I.A.'s charter forbids it from engaging
in domestic operations, and Mr. Bush prefers that it continue to
report directly to him, not through a new cabinet officer.

The C.I.A. director, George J. Tenet, and the F.B.I. director, Robert
S. Mueller III, frequently brief the president on terrorist threats,
foreign and domestic. Mr. Bush seems to believe that morning sessions
will create a culture of cooperation that will seep through the
bureaucracy. He argues that the new department will aid that process
by putting an additional set of eyes on the intelligence generated
across the United States government. "The president will see if the
dots connect," Mr. Card said, "and so will the new department of
homeland security."

But many in Congress are unconvinced that the plan would address the
intelligence gaps that preceded Sept. 11, and Senator Dianne
Feinstein, Democrat of California, said today she would try to push
Mr. Bush to go farther. She plans to introduce legislation to change
the workings of the C.I.A., splitting the director's current broad
responsibilities so that one person runs the C.I.A. itself and another
oversees all the government's many other intelligence operations,
including the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence
Agency. Otherwise, she fears, the new department will be better
organized but not better warned.

"The president's proposal announced yesterday focuses mostly on
homeland security," Ms. Feinstein said, "and I am concerned that it
does not do enough to address the structure of our intelligence
community." She added, "Put bluntly, without good intelligence our
homeland defense will likely fail."

But Mr. Bush seems to have silenced, at least for now, another group
that might have been expected to show displeasure with a new
government department: conservatives who spent much of the 1990's
trying to kill off the Commerce Department, the Department of
Education and other agencies.

"Since 9/11 people understood you needed a bigger government, or at
least a stronger government," said Eliot Cohen, a professor at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies at Johns Hopkins
University. Professor Cohen is the author of a new book, "Supreme
Command: Soldiers, Statesman and Leadership in Wartime" (Free Press,
2002), which contends that assertive civilian leadership in wartime is
more important than giving freer rein to the military. "The good news
about this plan is that it is a civilian agency. There was a lot of
concern at the Pentagon a few months ago that this mission would be
given to them."

Mr. Card said that when he and the president discussed what to include
in the new department, they examined the primary mission of the agency
involved. "Customs probably sees its top priority as collecting
tariffs," he said, "when it should really be stopping that bomb from
coming into a harbor. That's how times have changed."

---

( Bush connecting the dots? Seems like a gift to Doonesbury )


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