ANY FEARS that an expanded Republican majority on Capitol Hill would simply become a larger tool for the Bush administration have already been put to rest in the lame-duck session of the past week. Most notably, Reps. Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and James Sensenbrenner, head of the Judiciary Committee, have exerted their independence in blocking the headlong rush to intelligence “reform” legislation that puts current military operation in Iraq and Afghanistan at risk. For their pains and their real political courage in calling conventional wisdom into question, the two congressmen have been reviled as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. The imperial Senate and the New York Times editorial page agree: No compromise! No quarter! The time for reasoned argument has past!

Yet the proponents of the intelligence bill, propelled by the momentum of the 9/11 attacks, the politically organized 9/11 victims community, and the 9/11 Commission, have no answer for Hunter’s criticisms. The nub of which is that the bill, by creating a national intelligence director with tremendously broad powers, would sever the link between “national” intelligence assets–mostly satellites, now bought, maintained and operated by the Defense Department–and troops in the field. The 9/11 panel and the bill made a false distinction between national intelligence gathering and tactical military operations. If this distinction were ever true, it was only in the depths of the Cold War, when the eyes of satellites were to focus on Soviet missile silos.