US intel activities have been a closed book filled with black pages since WWII. Overthrowing Iran in 1953, the Bay of Pigs, Iran-Contra and other outrages march thru our history.
These outrages reached their zenith under George W. Bush, who gave us doctored intel on WMD's, torture, warrantless wiretapping and more . . . all for the most part without effective oversight by Congress.
Now it appears we are due for more of the same.
Congressional Democrats have tried since the middle of last year to address these issues through legislation severely narrowing the President's power to conceal intelligence activities from the Senate and House.
And now President Obama threatens to veto intelligence legislation to preserve the status quo:
[the Senate and House Intelligence Committees] were created in the wake of the intelligence abuses uncovered by the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, and their purpose is to provide vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws of the United States. But if they're not even told about what the Executive Branch is doing in the intelligence realm, then they obviously can't exert oversight and ensure compliance with the law -- which is the purpose of keeping them in the dark, as the last decade demonstrated.
Yet these efforts to ensure transparency and oversight have continuously run into one major roadblock: Barack Obama's threat to veto the legislation. Almost immediately after leading Democrats on the Intelligence Committee unveiled their legislation last year, the Obama White House issued a veto threat with extremely dubious (and Bush-replicating) rationale: such oversight would jeopardize secrecy and intrude into "executive privilege."
As Walter Pincus reports:
The White House has renewed its threat to veto the fiscal 2010 intelligence authorization bill over a provision that would force the administration to widen the circle of lawmakers who are informed about covert operations and other sensitive activities.
When the bill passed the House on Feb. 25, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.), hailed it for improving congressional oversight by strengthening certain disclosure requirements of intelligence activities to the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Glenn Greenwald weighs in with his take in Salon today:
. . . the Obama White House . . .does not want any meaningful oversight (i.e., briefings beyond the absurd Gang of Eight sham) on whether it's breaking the law in the conduct of its intelligence activities. . . It's critical to note that this is far from an abstract concern, because the Obama administration has almost certainly been hiding intelligence activities from the Intelligence Committees, thus ensuring it operates without oversight.
Greenwald then references Russ Feingold's continuing opposition to administration intel secrecy:
While Feingold has applauded the efforts the Obama administration has made to end torture, he has repeatedly complained that the Obama administration has failed to provide enough disclosure to members and staffers on the Intelligence committees. While he has said the new administration is clearly more open than the Bush regime, earlier this year he accused the intelligence community of continuing to stonewall and roadblock information to the Intelligence panels.
Greenwald then wraps up with:
the administration is also threatening to veto the bill because it contains funding for a new investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, on the ground that such an investigation -- in the administration's words -- would undermine public confidence in the FBI probe of the attacks and unfairly cast doubt on its conclusions.
Howzat change workin' for you?