Several nuggets of interest are presented in the latest biennial report
from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, summarizing the
Committee's oversight activities in the 112th Congress:
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2013_rpt/srpt113-7.html
* The Director of National Intelligence abruptly cancelled a multi-year
effort to establish a single consolidated data center for the entire
Intelligence Community a year or so ago, in favor of a migration to cloud
computing.
* Under criticism that the number of intelligence contractor personnel has
grown too high, too fast, intelligence agencies have been cutting the
number of contractors they employ or converting contractors to government
employees. But some of those agencies have continued to hire additional
contractors at the same time, resulting in net growth in the size of the
intelligence contractor workforce.
* A written report on each covert action that is being carried out under a
presidential finding is provided to the congressional committees every
quarter.
The March 22 report also provides some fresh details of the long-awaited
and still unreleased Committee study on CIA's detention and interrogation
program. That 6,000 page study, which was completed in July 2012 and
approved by the Committee in December 2012, is divided into three volumes,
as described in the report:
"I. History and Operation of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation
Program. This volume is divided chronologically into sections addressing
the establishment, development, and evolution of the CIA detention and
interrogation program."
"II. Intelligence Acquired and CIA Representations on the Effectiveness of
the CIA's Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. This volume addresses the
intelligence attributed to CIA detainees and the use of the CIA's enhanced
interrogation techniques, specifically focusing on CIA representations on
how the CIA detention and interrogation program was operated and managed,
as well as the effectiveness of the interrogation program. It includes
sections on CIA representations to the Congress, the Department of Justice,
and the media."
"III. Detention and Interrogation of Detainees. This volume addresses the
detention and interrogation of all known CIA detainees, from the program's
inception to its official end, on January 22, 2009, to include information
on their capture, detention, interrogation, and conditions of confinement.
It also includes extensive information on the CIA's management, oversight,
and day-to-day operation of the CIA's detention and interrogation program,"
according to the report's description.
"I have read the first volume, which is 300 pages," said CIA Director John
O. Brennan at his February 7 confirmation hearing. "There clearly were a
number of things, many things, that I read in that report that were very
concerning and disturbing to me, and ones that I would want to look into
immediately, if I were to be confirmed as CIA Director."
"It talked about mismanagement of the program, misrepresentations of the
information, providing inaccurate information," Mr. Brennan said then. "And
it was rather damning in a lot of its language, as far as the nature of
these activities that were carried out."
The Committee said it is awaiting comments on the study from the White
House, the CIA and other executive branch agencies, and that it will then
"discuss the public release of the Study."
On February 15, 2013, Republicans who were members of the Committee in the
last Congress formally filed dissenting comments opposing the study and its
conclusions, the report said.
For its first couple of decades, the Senate Intelligence Committee held
that "even secret activities must be as accountable to the public as
possible," as Sen. Daniel Inouye stated in the Committee's first biennial
report in 1977, and that "as much information as possible about
intelligence activities should be made available to the public," as
Senators Richard Shelby and Bob Kerrey wrote in the 1999 version of the
report.
But in the past decade, the Committee seems to have reconceptualized its
relationship with the public. It no longer promises to make "as much
information as possible about intelligence activities" available to the
public. The notion that "secret activities" could be "accountable to the
public" is now evidently considered a contradiction in terms (although
release of the report on CIA interrogation practices, if it ever came to
pass, would nullify and transcend that contradiction).
Today, as the latest report states, the Committee aims merely "to provide
as much information as possible to the American public about its
intelligence oversight activities." (Intelligence Oversight Steps Back
from Public Accountability, Secrecy News, January 2, 2013).
Even within the narrowed horizons to which it has limited itself, however,
the report presents a rather attenuated, "skim milk" account of the
Committee's work. Judging from the new report, intelligence oversight
consists of frequent briefings, followed by numerous "evaluations" and
"reviews."
The report provides no indication of any conflict between the Committee
and the intelligence agencies. Consequently, there are no significant
victories (though the successful passage of four consecutive intelligence
authorization bills is a notable achievement), and no meaningful defeats.
At the Brennan confirmation hearing on February 7, Committee chair Sen.
Dianne Feinstein said: "I have been calling, and others have been
calling--the Vice Chairman and I--for increased transparency on the use of
targeted force for over a year, including the circumstances in which such
force is directed against U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike." And to its
credit, the Committee conscientiously posed a pre-hearing question on
classification reform to Mr. Brennan (which he deflected).
But the new report does not identify any such effort by Committee
leadership to promote increased transparency on targeted killing during the
past Congress. It does not reference the failure to accomplish the
declassification of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions, as
the Committee had been promised in 2011. Nor does the report address the
abuse of classification authority or cite what the President called "the
problem of overclassification" at all.
_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.
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Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
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