Word: nid
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...President Bush supports an overhaul of the nation's intelligence community--including the creation of a national intelligence director (NID) with broad powers over the CIA and the Defense Department--why is his Defense Secretary dragging his feet? In testimony before congressional committees and a classified discussion with Senators last week, Donald Rumsfeld apparently left a bad taste in some legislators' mouths. His recalcitrance has rankled at least one key Senate Republican, Susan Collins of Maine. "I am disappointed with Secretary Rumsfeld's comments," she told TIME. "[They] do not seem to be consistent with the strong position taken...
...opportunity to champion reform. Bush has asked chief of staff Andrew Card to head a working group to look at how to best assess and carry out the recommendations. The Administration has been cool to the panel's proposal, long debated in intel circles, that a National Intelligence Director (NID) oversee all 15 intelligence agencies, including the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency. But after John Kerry declared that "when I'm President, it's going to happen," Bush aides hinted that Bush too may back the idea of a new intelligence czar. "Nothing's off the table...
Even if the panel's recommendations are acted upon, would it make a difference? Could such changes actually enable the intelligence community to uncover and prevent the next 9/11? Backers of the panel's call for a single NID say the move would reduce the bureaucratic logjams that have contributed to the intelligence community's string of failures, from its inability to track the hijackers before 9/11 to the fruitless hunt for bin Laden to the missing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. "You need someone who can give orders," says Lawrence Korb, a former Assistant Defense Secretary, "telling...
...while the advent of an NID would recast the intelligence community's pecking order, it could also make things worse. "There's too little competition for ideas already in this business," says John Hamre, Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration. "That's what happened with WMD. If you have one guy for whom everybody works, then you're going to start getting a homogeneous view." And despite its calls for sweeping organizational change, the 9/11 panel offers few specific suggestions for how the U.S. and its allies can improve in the most critical area of all: getting actionable...
...personal belongings of his wife and daughters. He also said that one of the inspectors, an American, suggested that she could help him to accompany his wife out of the country to seek medical aid. Now Sheik Qutaiba Sa'adi Amash, a Shia cleric of the blue-domed Al Nid'a Mosque in Baghdad says that the visit of the bare-footed inspectors - and their rather innocuous questions about the area and construction of the structure - was an insult to Islam. "Mosques in Iraq contain nothing that they are looking for," he complained indignantly. "All they will find...