The Commission by Philip Shenon

Author:Philip Shenon [SHENON, PHILIP]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: CUR001000
ISBN: 9780446511315
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2008-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

THE INSULTS headed Congress’s way from the commission did not stop. If there was one conclusion that the commissioners agreed on virtually from the first day of their investigation, it was the need for Congress to remake itself when it came to intelligence and national security. The House and Senate intelligence committees were poorly informed and, often, poorly led. The committees lacked budget authority over the CIA and other spy agencies; control over the budgets fell instead to the appropriations and armed services committees. The commission’s staff determined that eighty-eight committees and subcommittees in Congress had oversight responsibilities for the newly created Department of Homeland Security, which effectively meant that an agency to deal with domestic terrorist threats after 9/11 had no clear point of contact in the House or Senate.

Slade Gorton had served on the Senate Intelligence Committee in the early 1990s and found it a dismal experience. There was little in the way of true oversight of intelligence agencies because the agencies would share so little of what they knew. He quit the committee in frustration “because I felt it was a useless exercise—I never felt I was being told anything that I hadn’t learned in The Washington Post.”

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