Domestic Spying? Be Wary

America’s sprawling intelligence apparatus is a wreck in need of a complete makeover -- quickly. Unfortunately, CIA chief George J. Tenet and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III seem more interested in defending their turf than in demanding the tough changes needed to make their agencies capable of fighting terrorists. And, though the newly established Homeland Security Department will help protect America’s borders and improve medical responses to terrorist attacks, it wields little authority to coordinate the intelligence work of the Pentagon, FBI and CIA.

It’s no wonder that lawmakers are rushing forward with ideas to close the intelligence breach. Two high-profile government reports have even inched open the door to something whose very idea the nation has long abhorred: a domestic intelligence agency. Now the administration and Congress need to take a deep breath and scrutinize just what such a move would accomplish -- and at what cost.

One report comes from a 19-member federal commission headed by former Virginia Gov. James S. Gilmore III. This fourth annual report by the commission attempts to deal with the potential threat to civil liberties by suggesting that information gathering and arrest powers be kept separate. Concerned that the FBI not become something akin to the old Soviet KGB -- and worried that it isn’t up to the task anyway -- the report recommends creating a national “counter-terrorism center” that would coordinate information gathered by various agencies and report directly to the president.

The other report comes from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has recently finished its investigation of Sept. 11 intelligence failures. It calls for creating a director of national intelligence, a Cabinet-level position. That would curb the power of the head of the CIA and allow a single person to oversee the welter of civilian and defense intelligence agencies. Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R.-Ala.) has appended to the report an 85-page proposal to create a new domestic intelligence-gathering agency -- a move clearly based on skepticism that the existing agencies will ever overcome their aversion to reporting to a director of national intelligence.

Both the FBI and CIA stubbornly deny that any fundamental changes are needed. Mueller insists that the FBI can make the transition from fighting crime to battling terrorism, while the CIA’s Tenet dismisses as second-guessing suggestions that his agency ignored the looming terrorist threat. But something is clearly amiss when Tenet, at the same time, declares that the nation remains pretty much as vulnerable as ever to terrorist attack.

Neither the Gilmore commission nor the Senate reports go into enough detail about how to improve the intelligence services or guarantee that civil liberties are preserved. They do provide a starting point. The 9/11 commission headed by former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean almost surely will build on them to investigate whether a new agency would really help prevent attacks.

If the 9/11 commission concludes that the nation needs a domestic spy agency, the president will have to weigh in. He and his attorney general have yet to meet an incursion into domestic freedoms that they didn’t deem necessary. So it may be up to Congress, which has been inexcusably remiss in defending civil liberties since Sept. 11, to make sure the nation does not move an inch in this dangerous direction without full public debate.