Senate Intel Committee will get oversight....

From Secrecy News:

INTELLIGENCE OVERSIGHT DEFLECTED BY APPROPRIATORS

The efficacy of intelligence oversight in the Senate has been
repeatedly undermined by procedural hurdles that enable the Defense
Appropriations Subcommittee to overrule actions taken by the Senate
Intelligence Committee, Senators complained earlier this month. To
remedy this concern, a new bill has been introduced that would transfer
budget appropriations authority to the Intelligence Committee.

This year, the Senate Intelligence Committee presented "four major
oversight initiatives in its [authorization] bill," said Sen.
Christopher S. Bond (R-MO) at a Committee hearing on November 13. But
in each case, "actions by the appropriations committee were completely
dissimilar."

A Memorandum of Agreement between the Committees that was supposed to
improve coordination between the authorizers and the appropriators has
failed in every significant respect, he said.

In a written statement, Sen. Bond referred obliquely to several
attempted actions by the Intelligence Committee that had been
overridden by appropriators to the detriment of national policy.

For example, because of resistance from appropriators, "It took until
recent time to end a program that, at the least, should have been
terminated a few years ago. Unfortunately, all told, the loss to the
taxpayers is astronomical, in the billions of dollars." This appears to
be a reference to the Future Imagery Architecture program.

See Senator Bond's November 13 statement here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2007_hr/111307bond.pdf

Related statements and testimony from the SSCI hearing on intelligence
oversight are here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2007_hr/index.html

The proposed Senate Resolution 375 that would grant appropriation
authority to the Intelligence Committee is here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2007_cr/sres375.html

The recent decision to declassify the annual budget of the National
Intelligence Program now makes it possible to remove the intelligence
budget from concealment in the defense budget and to appropriate it
independently, thereby strengthening oversight and accountability.

For this and other reasons, budget declassification is the most
important involuntary public disclosure of intelligence information at
least since declassification of the August 6, 2001 President's Daily
Brief item "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

But significantly, the intelligence oversight committees, which have
been criticized for ineffective leadership on several controversial
policy fronts, did not play a leading role in intelligence budget
disclosure either.

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