Intelligence director

York (Pa.) Daily Record

First of all, let's stop calling it a czar.

Wrong country. Wrong connotation.

But let's do call the proposed new position a Cabinet member.

Probably the most important suggestion from the bipartisan 9/11 Commission's exhaustive and unanimously endorsed study of anti-terrorism efforts was that we need one person in charge of America's 15 intelligence-gathering agencies.

One person to coordinate the spy efforts of the CIA, the FBI and the Defense Department, which controls the majority of the intelligence budget. One woman or man who can sift through the mountains of information collected, make sure the various agencies are sharing and cooperating, and find the terrorist needles in the haystack before they find their targets. ...

He or she would be in charge of the CIA, the FBI and various other agencies _ or at least the intelligence aspects of their budgets. That person would have budgetary control, the ability to hire and fire certain directors. In other words, the juice to get things done. ...

What good is a national intelligence director who doesn't have the power to make turf-guarding bureaucrats work together? Isn't that what we already had with Richard Clarke? President Bush should open up his Cabinet, rearrange some of the canned goods, and make room for an intel chief.