Via War and Piece, comes this little nugget of bureaucratic craziness:
Republican members of Congress say there are signs that the Defense Department may be carrying out new intelligence activities through programs intended to escape oversight from Congress and the new director of national intelligence. (link)
(snip)
"We see indications that the D.O.D. is trying to create parallel functions to what is going on in intelligence, but is calling it something else," Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview. Mr. Hoekstra said he believed that the purpose might be to obscure the extent of Pentagon intelligence activities and to keep them outside Mr. Negroponte's designated orbit.
Three comments:
First, what the heck is the Pentagon doing? What are they trying to create? One of the causes of 9/11 and the Iraqi intelligence failure was the bureacratization of intelligence - too many, too scattered, too confused. I'm not a huge fan of Negroponte (head of the new intelligence oversite department; linked to death squads in Guatemala when he was ambassador there, and didn't seem to accomplish much in his short term in Iraq) and no fan at all of Porter Goss (head of the CIA, has fired a bunch of experienced people and replaced them with what look to be partisan hacks), but at least centralizing intelligence made some sort of sense. Now it looks like the Pentagon is trying to start up a whole new intelligence channel/operation. I'm very nervous about this.
Second, why is this Pentagon operation trying to duck Congressional oversight? It's never, ever a good sign when an executive department won't tell Congress what it's doing; it's even less of a good thing when that deparment has guns and is trying to combine them with secret agents (does anyone remember Ollie North? What happens when you have a whole department of them?). I'm certainly in favor of covert operations and intelligence, but there must be oversite. I'm very, very nervous about this.
Third, if that doesn't scare you enough, realize that the rubber-stamp, see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, no-accountability Republican Congress is throwing up red-flags over this. These people have consistently rolled over and died for this President over everything he's asked of them. If they are concerned over this, that seems like a big deal. I'm very, very, very nervous about this.
Posted by baltar at September 29, 2005 11:34 AM | TrackBack | Posted to International Affairs