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For your MI ping list. This is an attempt by the left wing and so called moderates to effectively kill any real military intel.

Question: Who should control those satellites?

Should it be the military commanders of the troops heading into combat? Or should it be a civilian bureaucrat--removed from the military chain of command--sitting in a velvet-draped office in Washington, D.C.?

Right now, the military controls the spy satellites that collect "tactical" intelligence for use in combat. Meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency uses these very same satellites for collecting "strategic" intelligence (about things like those suspected Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction stockpiles that the CIA--while relying on the satellites--did not recruit a single Iraqi spy to track down and verify on the ground).

Licensed Hijackers

The National Security Agency, which intercepts, decodes and translates communications, the National Reconaissance Office, which operates the surveillance satellites themselves, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes and integrates the data gathered into maps and other combat-usable applications, are all part of the Department of Defense. Their budget requests are generated by the military, and their chain of command runs from the commanders in the field, through the secretary of Defense, to the commander in chief in the White House.

Liberal Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, wants to take authority over these satellites away from the military commanders and give it to a newly minted civilian bureaucrat, known as the National Intelligence Director, who will have ultimate administrative authority over all intelligence operations both military and civilian. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D.-Conn.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, wants to do that, too.

House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter (R.-Calif.) is standing up for American warriors in the field by standing in the way of Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman.

Hunter is right. Collins and Lieberman are wrong. This is the main conflict that has held up the "intelligence reform" bill that Congress is currently considering in response to the report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.