Bush rejects accountability, guts the Intelligence Oversight Board

March 4, 2008

The Intelligence Oversight Board probably isn’t one of the better known executive branch agencies, but that’s largely because it has an important job that’s done almost exclusively in secret — the IOB helps police the government’s surveillance activities. If the White House goes too far, the IOB is responsible for reining the president back.

So, I suppose it shouldn’t be too big a surprise that the president issued an executive order — late on Friday afternoon — gutting the Intelligence Oversight Board. (via TP)

The White House on Friday gave the national intelligence director some of the powers of an advisory board created in 1976 to serve as the president’s watchdog for illegal intelligence activities, a move meant to bolster the role of the intelligence chief in relation to the 16 agencies he oversees.

A senior White House official said the shift is intended to force the intelligence agencies to report to McConnell in one more way. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak for the president.

Congress created the intelligence director position in 2004 to oversee and coordinate the work of the agencies but it came with little budget authority, the traditional means to power in federal Washington. The fledgling office has struggled to assert itself over the spy agencies ever since.

A new White House executive order splits the watchdog duties of the Intelligence Oversight Board, a five-member panel of private citizens, with National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell. Rather than intelligence agencies reporting their activities to the board for review, they will now report them to McConnell.

The effect, predictably, is far greater power for McConnell, who will now be helping to police himself.

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, an advocacy group, said the move appears to dilute the independent board’s investigatory powers in favor of a member of the president’s administration.

“It makes the new board subordinate to the (national intelligence director) in a way that the old board was not subordinate to the director of central intelligence,” he said. […]

The Intelligence Oversight Board was created in 1976 in the wake of widespread abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies. The five member-board comprised of private citizens was given full investigative powers and the authority to report potentially illegal activities to the attorney general. In a rare public report in 1996, the board chastised the CIA for not informing the State Department that its foreign operatives in Guatemala were involved in kidnapping, murders and other human rights abuses.

Those investigations will now be largely handled by the national intelligence director, and he will report potential crimes to the attorney general. The board will report to the president if it feels illegal activities are not being adequately addressed.

Yes, I can’t wait to see how that’s going to work. Bush’s DNI and Bush’s AG will check themselves for intelligence abuses, and then let Bush know if there are any problems.

What could possibly go wrong?

When will the enablers in Congress pass retroactive Bush Administration immunity?

  • JKap said:
    When will the enablers in Congress pass retroactive Bush Administration immunity?

    No need to. When the President does it (and by extension all of the executive branch) it’s legal;>

  • I believe that sometime in the next few weeks Pelosi and Reid will introduce legislation, co-sponsored by the rest of the Democratic “leadership”, granting everyone in the Bush Administration full and complete pardons for whatever they may have done or yet may do.

  • Via Secrecy News:

    Although U.S. intelligence community leaders say they oppose a GAO role in intelligence oversight, I noted that GAO oversight staff have in the past been permanently stationed at NSA, where they successfully conducted audits and investigations.

    Questioned on that point by Senator Daniel Akaka, Comptroller General David M. Walker, the outgoing director of GAO, confirmed that it was true.

    “We still actually do have space at the NSA. We just don’t use it and the reason we don’t use it is we’re not getting any requests, you know. So I don’t want to have people sitting out there twiddling their thumbs,” Mr. Walker said.

    One of the scarier parts of this is the “outgoing” part. One can only imagine the ethical commitment of any individual that President* Bush (read: Richard Cheney) will put forth.

  • Dismantling democracy, one brick at a time. Okay, bombing it a city block at a time.

  • Then:

    “The Intelligence Oversight Board was created in 1976 in the wake of widespread abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies.”

    Now:

    “The Intelligence Oversight Board was castrated in 2008 in the wake of widespread abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies.”

    We need to fix the statement Bush made a while back. When he looked into Putin’s eyes, he didn’t see Putin’s soul; he saw his (Bush’s) ideological twin.

  • Government oversight pretty much seems to count on the fact that at least one powerful person or branch of government is loyal to the Constitution and acting on behalf of the interests of the nation and not one political party or individual. It appears that no one in the past developing these forms of oversight ever counted on a corrupt President, even more corrupt Veep, a thoroughly cowed AG and Justice Dept., an entire intelligence apparatus functioning as personal hit man for the president, a Supreme Court in the president’s pocket and a complacent and fearful Congress doing whatever the president wants. How will the Republicans and loyal Bushies be able to walk away from such a thoroughly corrupted machine?

  • Oh, the Bush administration doesn’t need an indepent committee to oversee them.

    It”s seeping with the honesty and intregrity it promised to bring back to the White House, remember?

  • Question for the group. When the new president comes in, can they just overturn or make new executive orders undoing all the crazy shit that Bush has put in place?

  • I’m still trying to figure out why anybody would think this matters? I thought it was the job of Congress to provide oversight, and for the FISA court to review surveillance related to foreign intelligence gathering making sure that’s what it is (and, yes, the FISA court will still be doing that after updates to FISA are made).

  • Some say this is a christian nation , christians believe all people are sinners therefore all politicians are sinners .How can we trust sinners to do what’s right ?

  • A new president can countermand any Executive Order. But what are the odds any new president is going to voluntarily relinquish his/her powers as the “unitary executive”, as created by Cheney and Co.?

    My liberal friends are mostly convinced that a Democrat will certainly be in the White House come 20 Jan. 2009, and everything will right with the world in short order, but that’s how traditional liberals think. In the absence of impeachment no future government is going to be any more accountable than this one has been. What’s the penalty for misbehavior? I realize Democrats will be held to a different, not to say higher, standard, but even so the bar is now so low, and the forces resisting it being raised are so strong, that the damage is more than likely permanent.

    The last time anything like true accountability occurred was Nixon’s resignation under threat of impeachment, and the prosecution of his underlings. When Reagan got away with iran-Contra the game was afoot. No one, and certainly not Reagan, was held truly accountable in that treasonous episode. Now, in the aftermath of Bushco, anything goes.

    It was an interesting experiment in constitutional government for 232 years. But it’s over.

  • Information of wrongdoing will go to one man loyal to the president who will then decide whether or not to pass the info to an idependent oversite board . Not all intelligence is foreign .

  • Obviously, Bush is setting the stage for the horrendous, unconscionable abuse of power a Democratic Administration. Can we trust them with the powers Bush gave them?

  • That Russian joke from the other day applies here:

    Bush and McCain are in a restaurant ordering dinner. “I’ll have the steak,” says Bush. The waiter asks, “And the vegetable?” Bush replies, “He’ll have the steak, too.”

    I do believe Bush was right when he said he looked in Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw a “soul partner.” They’ve both done everything they could to destroy the possibility of freedom and democracy in their respective countries.

  • This is another issue people have blown out of proportion to make Bush look bad. I don’t agree with everything he does, but when it comes to this I actually agree with him. I have been waterboarded…I am in the military and have undergone survival training and will go through the SERE III school in September. Yes it feels horrible…a lack of control, panic, etc; but other than a sinus infection, there were no ill effects. We haven’t had any attacks since 9/11 and caught many of the al Qaeda leaders.

  • President Bush’s veto of anti-torture legislation is a moral outrage! After all, we’re supposed to be “The Good Guys”. As such, we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard, otherwise we are no better than the scum that sanctions attacks against innocent men, women and children. Shame on you Mr. Bush! Sadly, I voted for you twice.

  • Please continue to water-board! I hear they hate dogs too, so maybe we should start using them again to scare the crap out of them. The Middle East is a crap hole, so as quickly as we can we should get the oil, use it, then leave. They have always hated Western culture, so lets do them a favor. We’ll give them billions of dollars for oil, while we make the majority of the profits, then we’ll leave and they can continue to kill eachother and act like cavemen. My opinion of that part of the country and the religion it generally practices is so low I’m not sure it can be measured. I could care less about how ignorant I sound on this particular issue, the world would be a far safer place without the ME, tell me I’m wrong, you can’t.

  • As a woman who lost her husband to some unique VC torture, whose son served 8 years in the Navy and who experienced SERE, POW and other unimaginable forms
    of torture to see if he would break during this 2nd war in Iraq, I don’t see how anyone
    could possibly think that any of our men/women captured; military or civilian are not
    tortured in some way. Some of them horrifically. Some just disappear. These are documented cases! Their captors don’t pat them on the head and hug them.
    They don’t give them warm fuzzies.

    I don’t care much for Mr. Bush. Frankly, I’m ashamed of our current government.
    These people think only about themselves, how much they can get and keep on getting.
    This beautiful country and the beliefs it was founded on, is being made a laughing stock
    around the world. But I do agree with this veto.

    Waterboarding is nothing compared to some of the other stuff that is dished out! And
    not by us. Ask Mr. McCain. He had a close up and real personal affair with torture.
    We are not just talking about Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan anymore.

    Terrorism is the name of the game these days and we better play hard ball just as fast
    and as hard as the other guys and gals do, or we’re going to find ourselves in a world
    of hurt in this very country.

    Use any force that is necessary.

    • Comments are closed.