Intelligence panelist calls for more aid, better oversight

DALLAS -- Congress must improve its funding and oversight of the nation's intelligence efforts, especially the communications among intelligence agencies, according to a member of the panel that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Too much media attention has focused on the so-called 9/11 Commission proposal to create a Cabinet-level position for an intelligence czar, former Navy Secretary John Lehman, told a luncheon crowd of the nonpartisan Dallas Friday Group. "I don't like to use the word 'czar,'" he quipped. "I think we know how the czars ended up."

The creation of a national intelligence coordinator means nothing if that person cannot streamline the current intelligence-gathering process, Lehman said. The bigger problem is how agencies communicate among themselves and how Congress oversees intelligence, he added.

Lehman said too little progress has been made on the homeland security front, citing that as the major reason he and fellow commissioners are using their own money to crisscross the country over the next 18 months. The commission must "hold congressional feet to the fire," he said.

Lehman's concern is not who runs the intelligence community as much as it is how the dissemination of intelligence can be streamlined.

The intelligence community is filled with good competent people, but many of those people are "locked in amber," Lehman said. He criticized the intelligence community's inability to communicate across agencies, with lines of command that go back as far as Watergate and serve no useful purpose other than defining turf.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge reports to 88 committees and subcommittees in Congress, an impossible task, Lehman said. He said too many lawmakers want access to Ridge in order to get security contracts for back rather than to address the systemic reform of intelligence, Lehman said.

"That's what homeland security has become, just another big revenue-sharing pork barrel," he said, adding that homeland security oversight should be limited to one committee each in the House and Senate for better communication.

One arm of the intelligence community knew that young Arabs were attending U.S. flight schools, Lehman said, while another arm knew that the al Qaeda terrorist network was willing to use airplanes as weapons.

Lehman made a whirlwind tour of Houston and Dallas last week. He said the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission should be implemented and not gather dust on a shelf like the Warren Commission report after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas.