There is paper flying here in brisk winds of fall here in the city of marble. The old newspapers and memoranda are blowing across the river with the prevailing winds from the Pentagon to the foot of Capital Hill.

One bit of paper has the signature of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on it. It is a Chairman-to-Chairman note addressed to Duncan Hunter (R-CA), who heads the House Armed Services Committee. He is a nice enough guy, San Diego laid-back when I met him on an issue worth a couple billion of your dollars. But that was when he was a junior Member and didn’t own the whole DoD and a couple billion dollars still seemed like a lot of money.

General Myers’ note was intended to be helpful, albeit carefully, in the process of conference on the warring Senate and House versions of the intelligence re-organization. The words on his note stated that he opposed the position of the President on the budget authority to be granted to the proposed new Director of National Intelligence.

He wrote the note last Thursday, the second day of the Conference, a thoroughly gray day when reasonable people should have been worried about the National League Championship.

The pleasant fiction is that Duncan asked the General for his advice, seeking his professional military opinion as the Senior military advisor to what used to be called the National Command Authority, or NCA. Like Mr. Hunter was undecided, and needed some help in making up his mind.

Mr. Rumsfeld told us to stop using the NCA term, but that is still the function of the Joint Chiefs, whether he likes it or not. Taking issue with the President’s position in support of the Senate bill is thin ice for a military man to be skating on, but this is an important issue for Defense.

The General recommended that the negotiators preserve the Pentagon’s control over the flow of money programmed through the National Foreign Intelligence Program. We are talking about budget authority of something over $30 billion dollars here. This is serious.

Besides, if the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs can’t say what he thinks, who can?

It is not like he has to worry about promotion. There is no place for him to go but home. A copy of the letter was leaked by Senate staffers to the New York Times in order to put pressure on the House negotiators.

The Conference on the intelligence re-organization is grinding on through the weekend and that is what the note was really about.

Make or break by Monday, is what the insiders say. It is hard with some of the major players distracted by their re-election activities back home. Congress blew out of town on the 8 th , most of them, and the staffers they left behind began to try to make sense out of the dueling bills passed by the Senate and the House.

It was slow going. A full transcript of the Senate bill was reportedly not available, and there was posturing over who was trying to put what over on whom. The Grownups were supposed to come back and start negotiations on Wednesday, but the staff could not reconcile the versions.

The House bill is chock-full of other issues, including the establishment of a de facto national identity card. There is a provision that mandates the removal of the National Intelligence Director’s staff from the CIA campus at Langley, where it is hostage to the Directorate for Operations.

This is high stakes for everyone: The President, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate, the Victims Families, the Pentagon and, incidentally, you and me.

The White House was on the spot, since to seem supportive of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations before the election it had endorsed provisions of the Senate bill. Making the situation more complex was the fact that Commissioners and members of the victims families were in town, watching the process like hawks for signs of deviation.

Politics is a process of compromise and negotiation, not unlike three card monte.

And like the street card game, it is hard to compromise when someone is watching the cards as they are dealt.

The victims’ relatives are all over this. They are accusing the House Republicans of placing ”poison pills” in the bill to ensure it will never see the light of day. The White house is alarmed. The President is simultaneously trying to stay above the fight while dispatching Andy Card down to Capitol Hill to make everyone placy nice with one another. 

Publicly, Mr. Bush called for speedy Congressional action during a speech this week in New Jersey. It was odd that he stopped there, since the Garden State is solidly Democratic, and not one of the borderline red-and-blue. Perhaps he thought no one was listening.

The Senate side is united behind the work that Senator Susan Collins did in crafting the bill.. Confronting the senate is Representative Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), who is chairman of the Conference Committee. He said the combined staffs are going to work through the weekend, taking a break only for the Michigan-Purdue game on Saturday. I used to live in the district he represents, a solid constituency of placid Dutch-Americans who delivered Gerald Ford to Congress for thirty years. Pepter may be a voice of moderation.

Representative Jane Harman (D-CA) is the ranking minority member on the House Intelligence Committee and she is not. She is hell on wheels, if you have not met her. She is a carefully coiffed woman in sensible heels and grim visage. I have given informal testimony before her, and ridden on an elevator as she provided specific direction for her staff.

That is not someone I would want to be married to. She had her own version of a bill that got hamburgered by the House Republican leadership. She sides with the more bi-partisan approach of the Senate, considering some of the unresolved issues non-negotiable. They include, in no general order, the powers of the national intelligence director, the creation of a special civil liberties oversight board, and the removal of the Republican provisions on immigration and law enforcement.

Harman is saying if things are not sorted out by Monday for a vote, the re-organization is going to be Dead on Arrival. She has the grit to get the House Democrats to walk out of the Conference in protest, and then the President will not have a bill to sign before the election, and the 9/11 victims are going to howl.

Not a pretty thing the week before the election. So my hat is off to those who will toil in the marble corridors of power this weekend, and salute the pizza-delivery people who will keep them sustained in their deliberations.

I do not intend to work through the weekend. I had a relatively tough week, and have to travel again in the next. Consequently, I was looking at a richly earned glass of amber beer at the Capital Brewing Company after work yesterday. I was talking to a Senior Official of the Department of Defense.

He said he had already voted, and voted in a surprising way. I asked him why, since I am so thoroughly sick of the whole process that I haven’t made up my mind what to do.

He looked at me with a sly grin. ”It is the only way to stop Hillary,” he said.

Thunderstruck, I realized he was right. I ordered another beer, and considered how complicated it is to be undecided.

Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra

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