Checks and balances for dummies
by digby
Brian Beutler has published a fascinating look at the congressional oversight system and how it (doesn’t) work. I urge you toe read the whole thing to catch the full flavor of just how dysfunctional the committees are and how they often end up knowing less than they started:
Depending on which elected official you asked this week or last, the revelation that the NSA regularly collects U.S. phone records, and can easily access some private content like emails and chat transcripts from Internet companies, was either no big deal, an enormous shock to the conscience, or an “I told you so” moment.
For most members who don’t serve on one of the secretive intelligence committees and aren’t among the four highest ranking officials in Congress, the scope if not the existence of the programs came as a surprise. Those members weren’t prohibited from receiving official briefings about classified collections programs. But even if they took unusual interest in the issue, they had to seek out information, without easy access to the subject-area knowledge required to decipher what they’d learned, or the authority to share it with their staffs or other elected officials. The administration didn’t volunteer information, and these members’ generally don’t have aides with top-secret security clearances, let alone expertise in signals intelligence.
But even though intelligence committee members, along with the top four bipartisan legislative leaders, had much more detailed knowledge about all intelligence matters than most members, they too have differing accounts about the scope of these programs, the accuracy of the stories written about them, and even their own ability to conduct oversight of the NSA and the country’s most secret surveillance activities.
This is not an accident. The system is obviously designed to obscure rather than reveal. And I would guess a lot of that is because the security apparatus doesn’t trust certain people in congress and wants to ensure they do nothing that could impede them.
I’m reminded again of this little anecdote that The Hill oddly stuck on the end of an article last week:
Disputes between senior intelligence officials and members of Congress over who was told what, when, have been going on for years.
During the Reagan administration there was a fierce debate between administration officials and senators about whether Congress was informed about the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors.
Gary Schmitt, an AEI scholar who served as Democratic staff director on the Senate Intelligence Committee from 1982 to 1984, said then-CIA director William Casey had told members of the committee about the covert action but couched it in such a way as to minimize notice.
“The mining was mentioned but it was mentioned in the context of a very long briefing that Casey was giving and it was done in passive voice and in such a way as to make it sound like an ongoing program,” he recalled. “It was a case of writing it in such a way as to obscure the fact that the agency was directly involved in the mining.”
This and a secret court that’s been hamstrung by the congress and filled with a bunch of right wing throwbacks is what is being represented as transparency and oversight. Pardon me for being a little bit suspicious that it might not be on the up and up.
.