The White House held out hope Tuesday that a compromise could be reached on legislation to overhaul U.S intelligence, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has been accused of working secretly to scuttle the bill, vowed his support for President Bush’s position.
In a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld denied exerting his influence to protect the Defense Department’s sweeping budgetary powers over American intelligence, but he noted that even the administration’s views on the legislation could shift as congressional negotiators seek compromise language.
“I’m a part of this administration,” Rumsfeld said. “I support the president’s position.”
In Crawford, Texas, a White House spokeswoman said that Bush’s stance remains unchanged but that the administration is working with Congress on legislative language that could accommodate the concerns of House Republicans.
“The president’s views remain that he believes we should have a strong national intelligence director with full budget authority that also preserves the chain of command,” said Claire Buchan, a spokeswoman for Bush.
White House officials said there are “ongoing discussions” about the intelligence bill with Congress, and that the talks would continue.
Standing at Rumsfeld’s side, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not waver in expressing his opposition to any bill that did not preserve Pentagon control over intelligence funds for information needed by combat commanders in the field.
His concerns were exactly echoed in congressional testimony last week by the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps service chiefs. Taken together with Rumsfeld’s earlier public statements cautioning against a rush to reorganize U.S. intelligence, some in Congress saw a coordinated Pentagon effort to scuttle a bill endorsed by Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Rumsfeld said his words of caution and even criticism of efforts to create a new national intelligence director to control budgets and the flow of intelligence were offered early in the debate. Those statements, he emphasized, were made “well before the president established a complete position on intelligence reform.”
Any member of Congress who is “saying that I had blatant opposition to the bill is incorrect because the bill didn’t exist in the form that it currently is, and the president didn’t have a position on the bill at the times that I was briefing him.”
Rumsfeld noted that negotiations on possible compromise language continue and that “the president’s position is evolving as the negotiation evolves.”
Also Tuesday, the White House announced that Bush has ordered up new measures to bolster the CIA in combating weapons of mass destruction, directing the agency to present “diverse views” to policymakers.
The steps came as part of a response to the Sept. 11 commission’s report of last summer.
Bush ordered the CIA to bolster its ability to combat weapons of mass destruction through analysis that “routinely considers, and presents to national security policy-makers, diverse views.”
The intelligence community was highly criticized in a Senate Intelligence Committee report on its estimate about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
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Senators concluded that the CIA kept key information from its own and other agencies’ analysts and engaged in “group think.”
Bush also said in the new directives that the CIA should increase the number of “fully qualified, all-source analysts” by 50 percent.