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.
