David Ignatius makes some valuable observations in his column about congressional oversight of the intelligence community. Here’s one.
The intelligence committees were meant to be bipartisan. And to avoid the usual congressional logrolling, they weren’t permanent committees at first. Back then, the congressional leadership expected it would be difficult to get anyone to serve very long on the intelligence panels, because the members wouldn’t be able to talk about what they did.
Actually, the committees are still ‘select’ or non-permanent committees. But they’ve been around for thirty years, so I’ll grant the point. Before I go on, here’s some more Ignatius.
When the Senate and House intelligence committees were created in 1975 after exposes of wrongdoing, the premise was that Congress would provide an independent but discreet arm of accountability. Elected officials were to be briefed on the dirty business, with the understanding that they would maintain the same bonds of secrecy as the intelligence community itself.
There are two ways of looking at this. One school of thought is that seniority brings experience, and experience is critical for a couple of reasons. First, once someone becomes familiar with the spooky world of intelligence, they have a better feel for what questions to ask and a keener sense of what should set off alarm bells. Experience also works on a personal level, as intelligence briefers build relationships and trust with their congressional counterparts. The seniority system also assures that the world of people that are in on sensitive operations remains small. People from this first school go so far as to say that the Intelligence Committees should control the purse-strings of the Intelligence Community, both to assure greater compliance and because they alone know what is really going on.
The second school of thought is more like what was initially envisioned. Intelligence oversight should be spread out among a wide swath of Congress. This isn’t accomplished by telling more people in Congress about sensitive operations as they occur, but by rotating people on and off the oversight committees fairly rapidly. This would lack all of the positives listed above, but it would widen the exposure and understanding of intelligence matters in general, would prevent intelligence oversight from becoming a fiefdom, and might dampen partisan bickering.
Ignatius makes another good observation that helps put this in perspective.
Congressional oversight of intelligence was a radical idea. Some experts questioned whether it was realistic to ask elected officials to sign off on the work of intelligence agencies — which, when you strip away all the high-minded language, basically involves the systematic violation of other countries’ laws. Intelligence agencies steal other nations’ secrets, bribe their officials into committing treason, intercept their most private conversations. And that’s just the easy, noncontroversial stuff.
Rotating people through the Intelligence committees would have the additional advantage of limiting members’ exposure and complicity in what is basically legalized crime. Over time such exposure cannot help but dull one’s moral sensibilities.
I am not sure a rotation system is workable, but something needs to change. I recently had a couple of beers with Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA) and talked quite a bit about his experiences with the Intelligence Committee. And while he understandably couldn’t share anything classified and the conversation was off the record, I can tell you that he said the committee wasn’t getting squat in terms of information. What information they do get is interpreted in a highly partisan way. One of the casualties of the Iraq War is trust between the two parties on matters of intelligence.
Nothing will improve the performance of intelligence oversight more than a foreign policy agenda that both parties can share. So long as one party is trying to end a war and the other is trying to expand the war, we are not going to have any bipartisan oversight. But the committees aren’t working for other reasons and Congress should consider some reforms.
To my mind the purpose of Congressional oversight is to have some oversight that might prevent things like the Iran-Contra scandal and the torture that is currently occurring. To do that we need people to be informed of what is going on who are willing to put a stop to the parts that shouldn’t be happening.
Our intelligence community needs to stay within the bounds of the law, morality, and what is best for our country.
The advantage of having some of our legislators involved in that they will then have to protest the worst of the grievances to maintain their own consciences. To effectively protest, they do need to effectively wield the power of the purse and their powers to investigate and prosecute those who violate the structures of the law.
There has to be some mechanism to incentivize the IC to disclose operations to the committees.
But, when they do so and still get slammed something is wrong.
In general, the problem has been lack of disclosure…a point that Ignatius ignores.
Our intelligence community needs to stay within the bounds of the law, morality, and what is best for our country.
Here’s the problem:
Our intelligence community is under the purview of the Executive Branch of government with limited oversight by the Legislative Branch of government.
The Executive Branch (courtesy of the Justice Department) has lawyers that tell the intelligence community what is within the law. The President tells them what’s best for the country. No one polices the morality of it (beyond the morality legislated by law and held by the President).
The limited oversight by the Legislative Brach will only see things that the Executive Branch wants them to see. What’s more, because our elected representatives are not necessarily experts on things such as international law, and because they aren’t allowed to even CONSULT with outside experts on intelligence matters, they end up trusting the judgement of the experts making the presentations – i.e. the intelligence community and the lawyers in the Justice Department who justify what they do. So even in the best case situation, the legislative oversight can only do so much. In the worst case – where the legislators are not willing/able to check the excesses (or worse, see the excesses as “good things” themselves), there’s no check at all.
It’s a mess. It is exactly NOT the kind of thing that a free and open democracy was designed to handle. The system is prone to abuses, and, more importantly to some degree, it relies HEAVILY on the idea that the chief Executive will himself keep the intelligence community in check from any excesses. When the Executive is the one PUSHING for excess, the system breaks down.
I don’t know of any way to fix it either – if I did, I suppose I’d be running for office because if I could fix this I could fix anything. The usualy check against government excess is transparency – people straighten up if they know you’re watching them – but transparency is anathema to the whole idea of national security (not to mention keeping operatives in other countries safe). We can’t count on the moral fiber of the people in charge to keep things in check (as we’ve seen) and we certainly can’t count on the moral fiber of the folks doing oversight to keep things in check (ditto). Just a huge mess.
Please attack us again:
that many members of Congress have even read the Constitution or remember it from their law school days (those that have gone to law school). How many Republicans embarrass themselves with their lack of knowledge on basic, fundamental issues long settled? Democrats have not exactly been carrying their moral or legal torch too high or brightly either.
What kind of test could be used to decide who provides oversight via intelligence committees? Rockefeller and Feinstein come to mind as some that probably would have passed such a test at some point in the past, but no longer either represent the American people or more importantly the Constitution.
Moving from our representative democracy out to the people, how many of our citizens now believe “24” to be realistic and not just entertainment, or that the biggest threat the USA has ever faced is whatever Fox News tells them is “islamofascism”? The Republican debates certainly shine a light on whatever percentage the candidates think they need to win over by torturing more or doubling Guantanamo. How can we turn the tide back to a “beacon on the hill”? Can we ever turn the clock back to true bipartisanship that would best serve our country in not only intelligence matters but budgets and defense to name but two examples?
Since the “Leave it to Beaver” days never really existed outside the nostalgic white male brains who are afraid of differences, maybe instead of turning the clock back it should really be turn the clock forward. I am encouraged by most of what I see and hear from our youth — we have the potential to become the most progressive in our history, if the big corporations will let us or otherwise see it in their best interest to solve issues such as global climate change which will force realistic intelligence and military decisions if we are to survive as a nation.
Wow, what a long post short on solutions — what do other countries do? Not only Europe, but how about China which seems to have quite effectively separated their economic and government entities (even though I have many issues with both of these, I also believe many of our problems are a product of our mixing of the two)?