Retired Air Force Gen. James Clapper is the current under-secretary for intelligence at the Pentagon, where more than two-thirds of intelligence programs reside.
Clapper had a tough task explaining how he would streamline the massive flow of information from the intelligence community’s 16 agencies. He has already answered more than 80 questions from the Intelligence Committee, providing some 90 pages in responses that were posted to the committee’s website at the start of the hearing.
Arguably one of the most powerful and influential members of the intelligence community, Clapper faced a whole new set of questions after The WP series on the US intelligence community called “Top Secret America.”
Reporter Dana Priest, who investigated the story for two years before releasing it, said too many agencies are doing too many reports about the same thing. Priest said no one she spoke to in the intelligence community could answer a simple question: Are we safer today than we were nine years ago after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks?
Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, spoke on the WP’s findings Monday, saying the issue of redundancy within the intelligence community is a “well known” problem.
“We’ve been fighting two wars since 9/11, and a lot of that growth in the intelligence community has come as a result of needed increases in intelligence collection and those types of activities to support two wars,” Lapan told reporters.
Congress created the DNI post in 2004 because of a perceived lack of coordination that preceded the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
But critics from the White House to the intelligence community say the intelligence chief’s role is ill-defined because lawmakers did not want to give the director the authority to override decisions made by the agencies under his or her purview, and whose real authority rests on the ability to persuade others to listen to his or her recommendations.
On Tuesday, the WP series focused on outside contractors who it said are doing sensitive work they are not supposed to be doing:
To ensure that the country’s most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation’s interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called “inherently government functions.” But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to The WP.
''We have seen a lot of disorganization in the intelligence community,'' said Republican Christopher Bond, vice-chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, which is holding Clapper's confirmation hearing.
Clapper also faced hard questions over a memo drafted by his Pentagon staff that expressed concern that some authority that would be given to the DNI in the 2010 intelligence authorization bill could encroach on the Defense Department’s authority.
Clapper’s hearing was delayed as part of a debate within Congress over whether to prevent the nomination from going forward until the White House signed off on that bill.
Passed in the Senate, the 2010 bill is still in a holding pattern on the House side, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., bargains with the administration over further expanding intelligence oversight.