Intel 'czar' bad idea, Hatch says

President Bush is just wrong to back an "intelligence czar" to oversee all U.S. intelligence/terrorist-fighting operations but not give that person ultimate budget authority, Sen. Orrin Hatch told a teacher seminar Monday.

It's not often that Hatch, R-Utah, a GOP senator for 28 years, disagrees with his party's president.

But Hatch told the Huntsman Seminar for Teachers at the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics that naming an overall intelligence boss without giving him or her the final "power of the purse" — as Bush has suggested — would result in the "czar" having as little power as the current drug czar: A person with a bully pulpit but no real power.

"It would be a big mistake to put a political person" in that new job, in any case, said Hatch.

"We should go slow," said Hatch, in implementing recommendations recently made by a bipartisan 9/11 Commission, which studied failures in the United States intelligence community to stop terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.

"I'm not against the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission," said Hatch, who also hinted that he'd seek re-election in 2006.

"I'd give (the intelligence czar's job) to the CIA director," said Hatch, who said as the only U.S. senator to twice sit on the body's intelligence committees he knows what he's talking about. "But he has to have teeth in it. You can't be like (Democratic presidential candidate) John Kerry and say: Do it," Hatch said snapping his fingers, indicating how some say revamping the huge federal intelligence bureaucracy would be easy.

"President Bush is not right on this one — he's been paying too much attention to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld," said Hatch.

The Pentagon controls nearly 80 percent of U.S. intelligence funds, and Rumsfeld reportedly has lobbied Bush not to take those funds away from the Department of Defense and give such spending authority to the new intelligence czar.

Hatch, who is not up for election this year, noted that at the end of 2004 he loses his chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee because internal GOP rules limit committee chair tenure. (That assumes Republicans keep control of the Senate after November's elections, for he'd lose the chairmanship anyway if Democrats take the majority.)

"But within four years I become chairman of the Senate Finance Committee" because of those same internal rules, Hatch said. That would only happen, however, if he runs and wins another six-year term in 2006.