Democracy in the Dark by Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr

Author:Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. [Schwarz, Frederick A.O.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620970522
Publisher: New Press, The
Published: 2015-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

There are times when a decision not to investigate speaks as loudly as disclosures of hidden information. Early in his first term, President Barack Obama squelched a drive to investigate the post-9/11 antiterror policies of the Bush-Cheney administration. This left many questions unanswered. Were the policies consistent with American values? Were they lawful? Did they harm America’s standing in the world? Did they thwart terrorism? Or did they fuel terrorist recruitment instead? Should so many of these actions have been concealed? What don’t we know at all?

An investigation free from retribution and focused on the big questions could have helped America learn from its recent secret past. Two days after he won reelection in 1864, Abraham Lincoln suggested such a prudent approach, saying, “In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this history as philosophy to learn wisdom from and none of them as wrongs to be revenged.”76 But while President Obama released the Bush administration’s torture memos, and banned torture’s future use,77 Obama said he was “more interested in looking forward than . . . looking backwards.”78 In response, Patrick Leahy, Senate Judiciary Committee chair, quipped, “We need to be able to read the page before we turn it.”79 Obama’s view prevailed.

Someday, however, there will be—and should be—a comprehensive investigation of the post-9/11 period. Most likely, it will reveal more than we know and be worse than we thought. Moreover, when this investigation comes, it will cover more than one administration and more than one party. That greater breadth will make an investigation more likely. It also will make its results more convincing.

Oversight

While investigations are episodic, oversight is meant to be more sustained.80 A history of the CIA by its inspector general noted that after the Church Committee, “Virtually everything changed once the [Senate and House] select committees [on intelligence] were created.”81 Instead of oversight of intelligence agencies being superficial and sporadic, at its best it became regular, and sometimes rigorous. Instead of being handled individually by a few congressional barons, oversight became collegial, by committee. While the new oversight still has significant limits, “the two intelligence committees have, since their inception, provided the only significant check and balance outside the executive branch” of covert action by the CIA.82

The two intelligence committees deal with sensitive secrets all the time. They review agencies’ classified budgets and programs and assess their effectiveness. Although the committees have generally been kept informed, members sometimes express frustration or anger about lack of disclosure by the executive branch. For example, Peter Hoekstra, then the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee, wrote President George W. Bush that Congress “simply should not have to play Twenty Questions to get the information that it deserves under our Constitution.”83 Two decades earlier, when CIA Director William Casey withheld information from the Senate Intelligence Committee about the mining of Nicaraguan harbors

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