Lily Fu Claffee, a partner at Jones Day who served as deputy general counsel in the Paulson Treasury Department, also cautions, "When you're trying to assemble an agency from the pieces of other agencies, you risk disrupting the function of the agency you took the power from".
Dreyfus said this was another instance where Brandis had attacked the independent functions of agencies within his portfolio – including the Human Rights Commission, the Australia Council, and simultaneously starving the Law Reform Commission of important references while plying it with ideological ones.
There is an important case to be made for strengthening the leadership and functioning of agencies such as the WHO and World Bank, rather than creating new funds and initiatives in the spirit of targeting specific goals (36).
The function of the agency head, then, should primarily be to manage the far-flung empire and to make the final decision on difficult policy questions.
However, Asis officers are "not subject to any civil or criminal liability for any act done outside Australia if the act is done in the proper performance of a function of the agency", according to the Intelligence Services Act.
"It's a juggling game to use the commissioners' time to review things to meet your goals as well as to keep up with the regulatory function of the agency," said Gene A. Norman, chairman from 1983 to 1989.
"There is nothing that the ISI does in the United States that is not part of the normal function of intelligence agencies," the embassy official said.
The United Nations is keen to protect its mission from activities that might compromise it, and the handling, debriefing and resettlement of defectors is traditionally a function of intelligence agencies.
If a critical function of intelligence agencies is to understand the existing international environment and anticipate how governments are going to respond to future events, it is necessary to find out what world leaders are thinking, saying and doing.
Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, whose office brought the case and investigated the Deutsche Bank fire and the crane collapses, underscored the vulnerability of the department when he said the crime family had "actually sought to place associates in a government agency and influence the routine functions of that agency".
