LOS ANGELES, Aug. 30 (UPI) -- Congress finally won a two-year battle last week, forcing CIA Director Michael Hayden to declassify a summary of the Sept. 11 accountability review by the agency’s inspector general. But don’t go thanking your legislator just yet: Six years after Sept. 11, the least reformed part of our intelligence system sits not in Langley, Va., or the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building, but on Capitol Hill.
Congressional oversight of intelligence ain’t pretty. When the CIA was created in 1947, "oversight" consisted of a few senior legislators turning a blind eye in smoke-filled rooms. Hard questions weren’t asked because no one wanted to hear the answers. It took nearly 30 years and revelations that the CIA and FBI were out there assassinating foreign leaders and spying on Americans before the House and Senate finally established permanent intelligence oversight committees to provide some adult supervision.
But these committees have never worked well. Three reasons explain why: politics, expertise and turf.
The basic laws of politics encourage neglect: Intelligence Committee members get rewarded for airing dirty laundry, not cleaning it.
The Bay of Pigs, the scandals of the 1970s, Iran-Contra, Sept. 11 -- all of these episodes created high-profile hearings, but little real change.
It doesn’t take a blue-ribbon commission to see why: As Mark Twain once said, the best time to kick a man is when he’s down. It is easy and beneficial to beat up on intelligence agencies when times are tough and the cameras are rolling. But real oversight is a long and thankless slog, involves work that legislators can’t talk about publicly and takes precious time and attention away from all the other issues that constituents back home care about more.
Intelligence reform never won any election, and legislators know it.
As if that were not bad enough, for years congressional rules have limited the amount of time any member could serve on the intelligence committees. These term limits are good politics -- enabling senators and representatives to rotate off and join more attractive pork-laden committees after a few years. From a national security standpoint, however, they are disastrous -- ensuring that our nation’s intelligence oversight committees are stacked with short-termers and intelligence amateurs. Although the Senate did away with Intelligence Committee term limits after Sept. 11, the House still has them, ensuring that members get kicked off just as they actually get a handle on what they are doing.
And then there’s the dirtiest four-letter word in Washington: turf.
Oversight of intelligence agencies is split between roughly 10 different committees. A system that fragmented invites disaster, because everybody thinks oversight is someone else’s job.
Among the critical programs that fell between these gaping cracks before Sept. 11 was the FBI’s counter-terrorism program. In 1998 the Bureau’s own strategic plan presciently declared counter-terrorism a top-tier priority, and senior FBI officials began racing against time to beef up the FBI’s capabilities.
But they were racing alone. Congressional intelligence committees thought the counter-terrorism program was a judiciary issue, and the judiciary committees thought it belonged in intelligence. The result: Between 1998 and 2001 no committee undertook a serious examination of how well the FBI was implementing its own strategic plan.
Indeed, counter-terrorism was considered so tangential for Judiciary Committee members that when FBI Director Robert Mueller faced Senate confirmation hearings six weeks before Sept. 11 only a single senator -- John Edwards, D-S.C. -- bothered to ask him about it.
This fragmented oversight system also stacks the deck against intelligence reform. Why? Because each committee has a dog in the fight and a veto over the outcome. Twice before Sept. 11, the intelligence committees pushed hard for overhaul. Both times they were blocked by colleagues in the armed services committees who stood to lose their own turf, power and control over 80 percent of the intelligence budget that went to the Pentagon.
As one Intelligence Committee staffer complained to me, “We just don’t have the juice to get much done."
All of these oversight problems have been well known for years. In the 1990s, 12 different blue-ribbon reports examined U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism capabilities. Nearly all of them found Congress to be a big part of the problem and recommended various reforms.
Chief among them were merging the House and Senate intelligence committees, streamlining other oversight committees and ending Intelligence Committee term limits.
Nobody listened. In fact, the only organization in the federal government that implemented exactly none of the 340 suggested intelligence reforms before Sept. 11 -- that’s right, none -- wasn’t the CIA or FBI. It was the U.S. Congress.
Congress’s track record since Sept. 11 isn’t much better.
For all that hoo-hah about implementing the Sept. 11 Commission’s recommendations, the fact is nearly all of the commission’s proposals to reform Congress have gone nowhere, despite the commission’s dire warning that congressional oversight was "dysfunctional" and vital to intelligence reform.
Today there are more committees involved in intelligence oversight than ever. Committee term limits in the House remain. And radical intelligence overhaul still requires battling, and defeating, the powerful armed services committees.
The "Implementing Recommendations of the Sept. 11 Commission Act," passed last month, tackled just about everything else, but only suggested -- not required -- that any ideas about how to improve congressional oversight be "considered" and "reviewed this year." Whoopee.
It is all well and good for Congress to be demanding accountability from the CIA and other intelligence agencies. But accountability starts at home. Until Congress overhauls itself, intelligence reform will remain elusive.
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(Amy Zegart is associate professor of Public Policy at UCLA and the author of “Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of Sept. 11.”)
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(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)
