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US President George W. Bush has decided to support the creation of a national intelligence director, a central recommendation of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, White House officials said Monday.
The officials said Bush would formally back the establishing of the post on Monday, which would not be included in the executive office of the president as the commission proposed.
Bush is expected to make the announcement after a cabinet meeting Monday morning.
The president would also support another proposal by the panel to establish a national counter terrorism center, a joint operational planning and intelligence center to be staffed by personnel from all the 15 US spy agencies, outside the White House.
Bush's decision to implement the two recommendations, with certain changes, would be his first step to overhaul the country's intelligence system to help foil terrorists' plot of attacks.
The government warned Sunday of possible terror attacks on significant financial centers in New York City, Washington and north New Jersey, and raised the terror alert level for some financial centers.
In its final report released on July 22, the Sept. 11 commission listed a series of failures in the intelligence community to detect and thwart the attacks in 2001, and made 37 recommendations to revamp the US intelligence system.
Senator John Kerry, Bush's Democratic rival for the White House, has criticized the president's handling of national security issues ahead of the Nov. 2 elections.
In his speech to accept the party's presidential nomination last week, Kerry pledged to implement the commission's recommendations. He said that if he was elected president, he would immediately reform the intelligence system, "so policy is guided by facts, and facts are never distorted by politics."
Currently, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency is the head of the agency and also the nominal overseer of the entire US intelligence community, but he has no budgetary authority over and little control of the operations of other intelligence agencies.
(Xinhua News Agency August 3, 2004)
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