WASHINGTON, Aug 24 (AFP) - Leaders of an independent probe into the September 11 attacks said Tuesday that any fix for ailing US intelligence must be bipartisan to work.
"This kind of proposal has got to be taken right out of politics. It's just too important for the country," Thomas Kean, Republican chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, said at a congressional hearing.
Kean made his remarks as opposition Democrats groused about being shut out of a Republican-drafted organization plan circulating in Washington this week.
That plan, unveiled Sunday by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts, would effectively dismantle the Central Intelligence Agency and place its most important functions within a new, consolidated intelligence structure led by a national director.
The GOP blueprint for intelligence reform came in answer to last month's report by the 9/11 panel criticizing US intelligence for failing to preempt the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which killed some 3,000 people.
At Tuesday's hearing of the House International Affairs Committee -- one of dozens on intelligence reform during the usually quiet August break in Congress -- commission members reserved judgment about Roberts' proposal to dismantle the CIA.
"I believe the proposal calls for a much larger adjustment ... of the CIA than we have suggested said Lee Hamilton, the panel's top Democrat, "and he calls for more removal of some of the (Department of Defense) intelligence agencies from the direction of the Pentagon than we do."
Hamilton nevertheless noted "a lot of commonalities between what we have recommended and what he (Roberts) has recommended."
Meanwhile, top Democrats, steamed at having been denied a chance to weigh in on the bill, have said it contains fatal flaws.
"It evidently would do away with the Central Intelligence Agency as we know it, at a time when the agency is leading a global fight against Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations," the Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, John Rockefeller, said in a statement.