ollowing are excerpts from the final report of the joint Congressional committee investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

Recommendations

Congress should amend the National Security Act of 1947 to create and sufficiently staff a statutory director of national intelligence who shall be the president's principal adviser on intelligence and shall have the full range of management, budgetary and personnel responsibilities needed to make the entire U.S. intelligence community operate as a coherent whole. These responsibilities should include:

¶Establishment and enforcement of consistent priorities for the collection, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence throughout the intelligence community;

¶Setting of policy and the ability to move personnel between elements of the intelligence community;

¶Review, approval, modification, and primary management and oversight of the execution of intelligence community budgets;

¶Review, approval, modification, and primary management and oversight of the execution of intelligence community personnel and resource allocations;

¶Review, approval, modification, and primary management and oversight of the execution of intelligence community research and development efforts;

¶Review, approval and coordination of relationships between the intelligence community agencies and foreign intelligence and law enforcement services; and

¶Exercise of statutory authority to ensure that intelligence community agencies and components fully comply with communitywide policy, management, spending, and administrative guidance and priorities.

The director of national intelligence should be a cabinet-level position, appointed by the president and subject to Senate confirmation. Congress and the president should also work to ensure that the director of national intelligence effectively exercises these authorities.

To ensure focused and consistent intelligence community leadership, Congress should require that no person may simultaneously serve as both the director of national intelligence and the director of the C.I.A., or as the director of any other specific intelligence agency. . . . .

The National Security Council, in conjunction with the director of national intelligence, and in consultation with the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the secretary of state and secretary of defense, should prepare, for the president's approval, a U.S. government-wide strategy for combating terrorism, both at home and abroad, including the growing terrorism threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and associated technologies. This strategy should identify and fully engage those foreign policy, economic, military, intelligence and law enforcement elements that are critical to a comprehensive blueprint for success in the war against terrorism.

As part of that effort, the director of national intelligence shall develop the intelligence community component of the strategy, identifying specific programs and budgets and including plans to address the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and other significant terrorist groups. Consistent with applicable law, the strategy should effectively employ and integrate all capabilities available to the intelligence community against those threats and should encompass specific efforts to:

¶Develop human sources to penetrate terrorist organizations and networks both overseas and within the United States;

¶Fully utilize existing and future technologies to better exploit terrorist communications; to improve and expand the use of data mining and other cutting-edge analytical tools; and to develop a multilevel security capability to facilitate the timely and complete sharing of relevant intelligence information both within the intelligence community and with other appropriate federal, state and local authorities;

¶Enhance the depth and quality of domestic intelligence collection and analysis by, for example, modernizing current intelligence reporting formats through the use of existing information technology to emphasize the existence and the significance of links between new and previously acquired information;

¶Maximize the effective use of covert action in counterterrorist efforts;

¶Develop programs to deal with financial support for international terrorism; and

¶Facilitate the ability of C.I.A. paramilitary units and military special operations forces to conduct joint operations against terrorist targets.