I don’t like the Obama administration’s plan to vastly increase the spying role of the Defense Intelligence Agency. I don’t particularly care whether the DIA or the CIA conducts this operation or that. What I care about is oversight. The Intelligence Committees in Congress have a pretty good idea what the CIA is doing in terms of covert operations. They have no idea what the Pentagon is doing.
If we’re going to rely much more heavily on the Pentagon to spy on other countries, we need to update the law so that at least some members of Congress are aware of what is being done in our name.
I wouldn’t care if Obama shredded the CIA into a thousand pieces and scattered them to the four winds, but at least the CIA has to submit to oversight. The Pentagon does not. And that needs to change.
