Return-Path: <sentto-279987-4790-1023654021-fc=all.net@returns.groups.yahoo.com> Delivered-To: fc@all.net Received: from 204.181.12.215 [204.181.12.215] by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.7.4) for fc@localhost (single-drop); Sun, 09 Jun 2002 13:31:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 6079 invoked by uid 510); 9 Jun 2002 20:27:37 -0000 Received: from n29.grp.scd.yahoo.com (66.218.66.85) by all.net with SMTP; 9 Jun 2002 20:27:37 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-279987-4790-1023654021-fc=all.net@returns.groups.yahoo.com Received: from [66.218.67.193] by n29.grp.scd.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 09 Jun 2002 20:20:22 -0000 X-Sender: fastflyer28@yahoo.com X-Apparently-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_3_2); 9 Jun 2002 20:20:21 -0000 Received: (qmail 32752 invoked from network); 9 Jun 2002 20:20:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.218) by m11.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 9 Jun 2002 20:20:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO web14506.mail.yahoo.com) (216.136.224.69) by mta3.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 9 Jun 2002 20:20:20 -0000 Message-ID: <20020609202020.35924.qmail@web14506.mail.yahoo.com> Received: from [68.100.117.184] by web14506.mail.yahoo.com via HTTP; Sun, 09 Jun 2002 13:20:20 PDT To: iwar@yahoogroups.com In-Reply-To: <advqh1+gvck@eGroups.com> From: "e.r." <fastflyer28@yahoo.com> X-Yahoo-Profile: fastflyer28 Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list iwar@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:iwar-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com> Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2002 13:20:20 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Re: [iwar] Andrew Card briefs the press Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-3.8 required=5.0 tests=IN_REP_TO,FROM_ENDS_IN_NUMS,SUPERLONG_LINE version=2.20 X-Spam-Level: Andy Card has been a very slick politician from his days back in Boston. There is too much money and power to be had with "homeland issues". He was unlikely to just sit aside. While the press has thus far only picked up on the fact that it looks like Bush will make the Director a cabinet level appointee, make a new agencu and create a truckload of redundant bureaucracy, the bralling has hardly begun. The kicker in all of this is Tom Ridge, while being a good soldier may already be out of a job. He has been "kicked upstairs as a Senior Advior without portfolio". He will be a very lucky man if he manages to become the politically appointed person to run this new organization. If you have seen the proposed wiring diagram, what is happening in reality is many folks in a number of agencies are becomming double hatted, thus making this new agency seem enormous. It will be the Trojan Horse agency as very few full time professional staff members will be party to this program. Last week's FBI reorg plan was a great attempt to preemptively strike a blow at the New House/Senate Joint Committee that will examine the events of 9-11. Uneffective as it was, it is a foreboding sign that interagency warfare to control both turf and bucks, has already broken out. What is next, who know, but this is certainly a mess that brings memories of the Church Committee hearings in the mid 1970's. One can only conclude that lawmakers-who have called this an intelligece failure-albeit the IC does not make policy, will have the Roto-Rooter man visiting upon the IC to defeat any reorganization attempts that are on the move at present. What a mess! televr <yangyun@metacrawler.com> wrote: 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 ) ------------------ http://all.net/ Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. --------------------------------- Do You Yahoo!? Sign-up for Video Highlights of 2002 FIFA World Cup [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Which security solution is right for your Web site? Before you decide, request your FREE guide, "Securing Your Web Site For Business," to learn the facts. 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