Senate panel agrees on defense budget blueprint (AP)

WASHINGTON – A blueprint for defense programs approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee would write into law the handling of captured terrorist suspects, including a permanent ban on building facilities in the United States to house those currently at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"We are in the middle of a war that doesn't have an end," said the committee's chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. It's important that the law cover the people who are captured, he said.

The panel completed work on the $683 billion spending blueprint Thursday at a closed meeting. Details of the legislation, which now goes to the Senate floor, were outlined Friday.

Levin said that the compromise on detainees would write into law a requirement that al-Qaida members and those engaged in attempted attacks against the United States must be kept in military detention. It would also put into the law books restrictions on the treatment of foreign militants that Congress in the past has mainly attached to annual defense and other spending bills.

It would establish permanent limitations on transferring Guantanamo detainees to foreign countries, to ensure that steps are taken to prevent those released from resuming terrorist activities. The Pentagon would be required to provide a military judge and a military lawyer for determining the status of detainees subject to long-term custody.

It does not address the issue of closing the prison at Guantanamo. "Because I believe Guantanamo Bay is the appropriate place to detain and try terrorists, I will continue my legislative efforts to keep the facility open for current and future terrorist detainees," said committee member Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H.

The bill, which comes in at $6 billion under what President Barack Obama requested in his budget proposal and $7 billion under the defense bill passed by the House last month, also puts some spending restraints on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, the largest defense acquisition program in history.

It requires the defense secretary to come up with a fixed price contract for the next production stage of the project under which the contractor absorbs 100 percent of the costs above the target cost. There is no money in the bill for an alternative engine for the fighter plane that the Pentagon says is unnecessary, but Levin said there was still room for competition in the future. The maker of the terminated second engine, General Electric/Rolls Royce, said last month it would spend its own money to build the engine.

That wasn't enough for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the top Republican on the committee, who said the panel "rejected my efforts to stop the out-of-control cost overruns of the F-35 program."

McCain wanted to put the entire F-35 program on probation if the current stage of production was 10 percent over cost at the end of this year and to terminate the program if the costs were still 10 percent above target at the end of next year.

Since the program began in 2001, the cost of each aircraft has gone from $69 million to $133 million.

The committee, in approving the bill unanimously, avoided some of the divisive issues that made it into the House bill. The House called for a delay in implementing the policy of allowing gays to serve openly in the military, criticized the Obama administration's military actions in Libya, and would put conditions on the carrying out of the new nuclear warhead reduction treaty with Russia called New START.

Levin said there were provisions in his bill requiring the administration to report on New START activities, but nothing that would limit its ability to reduce the number of nuclear weapons.

Once the Senate passes a defense bill, lawmakers will have to reconcile differences between it and the House version.

Levin expressed frustration with the administration for not giving more guidance on how Congress should begin to achieve Obama's goal of cutting $400 billion in spending over the next 12 years from defense, security and intelligence programs.

The Senate bill reduces the White House budget proposal made last February by $6 billion, including a $1 billion reduction in spending for military construction and a $400 million cut to terminate the Medium Extended Air Defense System.

The measure meets the president's request for a 1.6 percent pay raise for members of the uniformed services, and increases by 6 percent, to $10.4 billion, funds for the U.S. Special Operations Command.

The bill includes $547 billion for the base budget of the Pentagon, $117 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and $18 billion for national security programs under the Department of Energy.

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Report warns against cutting intelligence budget (AP)

By KIMBERLY DOZIER, AP Intelligence Writer Kimberly Dozier, Ap Intelligence Writer – Tue May 24, 6:26 am ET

WASHINGTON – With America's top terror target eliminated, the nation's intelligence agencies fear they will look like a fat target for budget cuts. Their chief argument: Gutting intelligence budgets led to the shortfalls that allowed Osama bin Laden to carry out attacks in the first place.

Lawmakers say they are well aware that the terror war is not over but warn that cuts are coming.

Congress approved an intelligence budget of $80.1 billion in 2010, but lawmakers are keeping that roughly the same, slightly north of $80 billion for the next two years — and south of the White House's request, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified budget figures.

Those who lived through the purge of what is known as human intelligence — on-the-ground spies, informants and go-betweens — after the fall of the Soviet Union fear a rerun of the 1990s. Then, the spy world saw across-the-board cuts, agency by agency, on the theory that their main reason for being had ceased to be.

"There was very little effort to look across the community and say if one organization is cutting analysts deeply in one area, let's make sure another organization isn't doing the same," said former Pentagon intelligence official Joan Dempsey.

The last time the budget masters took a buzz saw through the intelligence agencies, the White House was blindsided by al-Qaida's strike on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Dempsey said. She's among a wide spectrum of intelligence professionals warning against a repeat of such cuts, in a report released Tuesday by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.

"After the victory against the Soviet Union, we cut deeply across our capabilities in Africa, because people said we were in Africa because of the Soviet Union," Dempsey said. That left the intelligence community practically blind during "an entire decade of unrest, and turmoil, in which U.S. troops had to intervene" in fragile states like Somalia, and al-Qaida built in strength, she said.

The former chairman of the House intelligence committee, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., agrees. He remembers meeting resource-starved CIA officers in his first trips in 2001.

"They told me they had no capability," Hoekstra said, in a continent where the human intelligence needed to penetrate tribal and gang-supported unrest far outweighed the usefulness of the satellite and signals intelligence that was so popular at the time. "We let human intelligence die on the vine."

After al-Qaida attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, "we tried to hire quickly to make up for the damage," he said, "and sent a lot of people on dangerous assignments with not enough mentoring."

But Hoekstra also warned against cuts to satellite and signals intelligence investment, citing the lead time needed to develop and launch satellites to replace an aging fleet. New satellite systems are attractive to cut in the short term, because a single system often runs into the billions. But when the older satellites start failing, leaving gaps, the rush to replace them quickly can cost even more, he said.

"I had about $2 for every dollar (former CIA Director George) Tenet had when al-Qaida struck on Sept. 11," said retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who led the CIA from 2006 to 2009. Hayden oversaw one of the largest periods of expansion the intelligence agencies have ever seen.

"So the record shows it paid off, but everyone recognizes it would be hard to sustain," Hayden said.

James Clapper, director of national intelligence, told Congress in February that he'd be making cuts across the community, signaling that the post-Sept. 11 rate of growth had come to an end.

Several DNI officials were part of a task force that helped write the industry report released Tuesday.

Clapper was careful not to identify what areas he has been thinking of cutting, Dempsey said, for fear the power of his suggestion might drive congressional committees to beat him to it.

The intelligence budget has risen steadily since the Sept. 11 attacks, according to two U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the precise figures are classified. Clapper published the 2010 figure, at $80.1 billion, up from $75 billion the year before.

The current version of the 2011 intelligence authorization act does cut some of the personnel requests made by the CIA, but adds millions of dollars and thousands of civilian positions, including "critical counter-terrorism positions at the CIA and a significant increase to the National Counterterrorism Center," said a House intelligence committee member, Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I.

Key programs like the CIA unit that hunted down bin Laden have been funded, but the lawmakers have started weeding out what they've decided are unnecessary duplications, said Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., the intelligence committee's minority chairman: "There is duplication of programs. There are some programs we can't afford, or that might have to be delayed for a few years."

Hayden said the cuts to the military make it all the more important to guard against cuts to intelligence, after Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned that a budget-reduced U.S. military may no longer be able to fight a two-front war.

"If forces are going to be drawn down, then how you use those forces will be much more limited," Hayden said. "So strategic intelligence is all the more important."

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