As the civil liberties community endeavors to stem the tide of threats to the Constitution posed by John Ashcroft's Justice Department and new Department of Homeland Security, some in Washington policy-making circles watched with trepidation on November 13 asCongress gave Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld permission to create a new Under Secretariat for Intelligence at the Pentagon. According to some observers, not only does the move have the potential to obscure Congressional oversight of much of the nation's intelligence apparatus, but it could result in analysis increasingly politicized and slanted toward reporting what the most hawkish officials want to hear.

To be sure, some observers see the change as nothing more than a simple but long-overdue bureaucratic reform; in fact, it was originally conceived as a kind of "reinventing government" idea under the Clinton Administration. In this view, it's simply an attempt to bring order to the organizational and budgetary chaos of the myriad intelligence agencies that operate under the Defense Department's aegis--from high-tech-oriented outfits like the National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office to the specialized intelligence units of each uniformed service. One popular Pentagon anecdote attributes the move to Rumsfeld's frustration at having representatives from nearly a dozen different military intelligence organizations in his office at the same time during the EP-3 spy-plane crisis in China: "All I want is one dog to kick," he reportedly said, angrily noting that instead of one dog, "right now I have a whole kennel."

Yet to others, there's much more--and much more that's troubling--to the creation of a Pentagon "intelligence czar." Some veterans of the national security establishment see it as part of the Administration hawks' plan to institutionalize a serious counterbalance to the CIA, which has not produced the analysis the hawks want to hear: namely, that there are real, substantial links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. "This is basically showing the following: If you don't get the intelligence you want, you create something that will give it to you," says Mel Goodman, a former senior CIA analyst who now teaches at the National War College.

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