Who Watches the Home Front?
*Cross-posted from The Huffington Post
Oversight is the rallying cry of the new Democrat Class of '06. But
there's a danger that the policy area most obviously in need of real
accountability - our domestic national security agenda - will get short
shrift in the rush to address the Iraq debacle.
Legislators moved quickly on Iraq. Legislation to revive the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has already been flagged
for the lame-duck Congress. Inquiry into the myriad iniquities that
make out America's Iraq policy is a no-brainer for the new Congress.
And Rumsfeld's "resignation" is a sure sign that the Administration is
battoning down the hatches in preparation for some heavy weather.
While Iraq is of unquestionable importance, there's also a pressing
need for oversight on domestic security issues: How are our
intelligence agencies and military behaving closer to home? So far, too
little attention has been paid to this question.
For at least the past three years, the American public has been
hearing stories of torture, the "extraordinary rendition" of suspects
to torture, disappearance, detention, and warrantless surveillance. But
to date, Congress has conducted no substantial inquiry into the full
facts around any of these policy areas. In consequence, the executive
branch has been able to control the narrative.
For example, with respect to torture, a plethora of internal
executive branch investigations have produced fragmentary, and likely
misleading, reports on the connection between political appointees in
Washington, who developed legal justifications for torture, and
interrogators out in the field, who put those justifications into
practice. There is a need for sustained oversight that goes beyond the
current quagmire in Iraq. We need to know not only how we have gone
wrong - and violated core individual rights - of innocent men and women
over the past five years, but also how we can avoid those same mistakes
in the future.
This oversight is especially important because the policies at issue
- torture, "extraordinary rendition," wiretapping - were fashioned
without congressional input or oversight: So they will likely continue
unabated, with the attendant harms this causes, until Congress steps in.
At a minimum, we need serious and substantial inquiries soon into the following topics:
- The activities of all military intelligence
gathering agencies in the United States. It's not just the NSA we need
to worry about. Several months ago, Walter Pincus of the Washington
Post wrote a series of superlative articles about a military agency
called CIFA, or the "Counter-Intelligence Field Activities." This
agency had been collecting reams of data on civilians in the United
States, including anti-war protesters. There has never been a full
accounting of CIFA's role or responsibilities - let alone the kind of
synoptic overview of what military intelligence is doing in the United
States, which the American public are long overdue. - The actual interrogation policies of the CIA, and any
military intelligence agencies that are engaged in detention and
interrogation policies. Startling, the White House continues to resist
disclosure of even the most generic documents on this matter, documents
whose disclosure poses no risk of compromising national security. For
example, there is an August 2002 Justice Department memo, a sibling to
the infamous "torture memo" of the Office of Legal Counsel, which
analysis a series of specific interrogation tactics (Waterboarding?
Cold cell? "long time standing"? Is this where the Vice President gets
his impression that waterboarding is just dandy--and legal?). Did the
Justice Department find these tactics all legal? Ethical? Did it even
ask the ethical question? We don't know until we see the memo and see
how it was operationalized. - Our relations with foreign intelligence
agencies: The Who's, the What's, and the How's. It is by now clear that
the United States maintains standing relationships with the world's
most brutal and anti-democratic intelligence agencies, including
Syria's, Egypt's, and Jordan's. There has been virtually no disclosure
- and scant public debate - about what we are doing supporting the
least democratic elements in countries we are supposed to be supporting
democracy in.
These are the tips of the proverbial iceberg. Finding out how deep
the iceberg runs is the task of oversight. It's about time we started
getting some answers.
