Goss's Wish List

[ Ridiculous. ]

     Goss's Wish List
     By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
     Newsweek

     Wednesday 11 August 2004

     Rep. Porter Goss, President Bush’s nominee to head the CIA, recently 
introduced legislation that would give the president new authority to direct 
CIA agents to conduct law-enforcement operations inside the United 
States—including arresting American citizens.

     The legislation, introduced by Goss on June 16 and touted as an 
“intelligence reform” bill, would substantially restructure the U.S. 
intelligence community by giving the director of Central Intelligence (DCI) 
broad new powers to oversee its various components scattered throughout the 
government.

     But in language that until now has not gotten any public attention, the 
Goss bill would also redefine the authority of the DCI in such a way as to 
substantially alter—if not overturn—a 57-year-old ban on the CIA conducting 
operations inside the United States.

     The language contained in the Goss bill has alarmed civil-liberties 
advocates. It also today prompted one former top CIA official to describe it 
as a potentially “dramatic” change in the guidelines that have governed U.S. 
intelligence operations for more than a half century.

     “This language on its face would have allowed President Nixon to 
authorize the CIA to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters,” 
Jeffrey H. Smith, who served as general counsel of the CIA between 1995 and 
1996, told NEWSWEEK. “I can’t imagine what Porter had in mind.”

     Goss himself could not be reached for comment today. But a congressional 
source familiar with the drafting of Goss’s bill said the language reflects a 
concern that he and others in the U.S. intelligence community share—that the 
lines between foreign and domestic intelligence have become increasingly 
blurred by the war on terrorism.

     At the time he introduced the bill, Goss thought the 9/11 commission 
might recommend the creation of a new domestic intelligence agency patterned 
after Britain’s M.I.5. The commission ended up rejecting such a proposal on 
civil-liberties grounds. But in his bill Goss wanted to give the DCI and a 
newly empowered CIA the “flexibility”—if directed by the president—to oversee 
and even conduct whatever domestic intelligence and law-enforcement operations 
might be needed to combat the terrorism threat, the congressional official said.

     “This is just a proposal,” said the congressional official familiar with 
the drafting of Goss’s bill. “It was designed as a point of discussion, a 
point of debate. It’s not carved in stone.”

     But other congressional staffers predicted that the Goss bill, even if it 
has little chance of passage, is likely to get substantial scrutiny at his 
upcoming confirmation hearings—in part as an opportunity to explore his own 
attitudes toward civil liberties.

     Those hearings are already expected to be unusually contentious—partly 
because of concerns among Democrats that the Florida Republican, a former CIA 
officer himself who has chaired the House Intelligence Committee, has been too 
partisan and too close to the Bush White House. But so far, most staffers 
expect Goss to be confirmed eventually—if only because Democrats are loath to 
appear overly obstructionist on a matter that might be portrayed as central to 
national security.

     The Goss bill tracks current law by stating that the DCI shall “collect, 
coordinate and direct” the collection of intelligence by the U.S. 
government—except that the CIA “may not exercise police, subpoena, or law 
enforcement powers within the United States.”

     The bill then adds new language after that clause, however, saying that 
the ban on domestic law-enforcement operations applies “except as otherwise 
permitted by law or as directed by the president.”

     In effect, one former top U.S. intelligence community official told 
NEWSWEEK, the language in the Goss bill would enable the president to issue 
secret findings allowing the CIA to conduct covert operations inside the 
United States—without even any notification to Congress. The former official 
said the proposal appeared to have been generated by Goss’s staff on the House 
Intelligence Committee, adding that the language raises the question: “If you 
can’t control a staff of dozens, how are you going to control the tens of 
thousands of people who work for the U.S. intelligence community?”

     A CIA spokeswoman said today that, while familiar with the provision, she 
was not aware of any agency official seeking such a modification to the 
longstanding ban on the CIA from conducting domestic law-enforcement 
operations. (Ever since the creation of the CIA in 1947, the agency has been 
excluded from federal law-enforcement within the United States. That function 
was left to the FBI—which must operate in conformity to domestic laws and, in 
more recent years, under guidelines promulgated by the attorney general 
designed to insure protection of the rights of citizens.)

     Sean McCormack, a White House spokesman, said the president’s own 
proposal for the creation of a national intelligence director—separate from 
the director of the CIA—to oversee the entire U.S. intelligence community does 
not envision any change along the lines called for in the Goss bill. “I have 
not heard any discussion of that,” said McCormack about the idea of allowing 
the CIA to operate domestically.

     Some congressional staffers speculated today that Goss most likely had 
reached an understanding with President Bush that, if Congress does create the 
new position of a national intelligence director, he would move into that 
position rather than serve in the No. 2 position of CIA director. Asked if 
such a deal had been reached, McCormack responded: “Nothing has been ruled in 
or out.”

     Goss introduced his legislation, H.R. 4584, on June 16—before the 
September 11 commission issued its own recommendations for the creation of a 
national intelligence director as well as a new National Counterterrorism 
Center that would conduct “joint operational planning” of counterterrorism 
operations involving both the FBI inside the United States and the CIA abroad. 
The congressional official familiar with the Goss bill pointed to that 
proposal as a recognition of the increasingly fuzzy lines between foreign 
intelligence operations and domestic law enforcement.

     The proposal comes at a time when the Pentagon is also seeking new powers 
to conduct intelligence operations inside the United States. A proposal, 
adopted last spring by the Senate Intelligence Committee at the request of the 
Pentagon, would eliminate a legal barrier that has sharply restricted the 
Defense Intelligence Agency and other Pentagon intelligence agencies from 
recruiting sources inside the United States.

     That restriction currently requires that Pentagon agencies be covered by 
the Privacy Act, meaning that they must notify any individual they contact as 
to who they are talking to and what the agency is talking to them about—and 
then keep records of any information they collect about U.S. citizens. These 
are then subject to disclosure to those citizens. Pentagon officials say this 
has made it all but impossible for them to recruit intelligence sources and 
conduct covert operations inside the country—intelligence gathering, they say, 
that is increasingly needed to protect against any potential terror threats to 
U.S. military bases and even contractors. But critics have charged the new 
provision could open the door for the Pentagon to spy on U.S. citizens—a 
concern that some said today is only amplified by the language in the Goss bill.

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