by emptywheel
I'd like to point out a teeny detail in the report that Henry Waxman cites as his source that OVP isn't providing ISOO with information about OVP's classification and declassification activities:
PFIAB and OVP did not report data through the SF 311 to ISOO this year. This report, therefore, does not include any data from these two entities.
It was not just OVP that blew off ISOO in 2003. It was also PFIAB.
PFIAB is the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a group of big-wigs providing outside oversight into our intelligence activities:
The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) provides advice to the President concerning the quality and adequacy of intelligence collection, of analysis and estimates, of counterintelligence, and of other intelligence activities. The PFIAB, through its Intelligence Oversight Board, also advises the President on the legality of foreign intelligence activities.
In 2003, the board included such luminaries as:
- [Brent] Scowcroft
- Pete Wilson
- Cresencio Arcos, an AT&T executive and former US ambassador
- Jim Barksdale, former head of Netscape
- Robert Addison Day, chairman of the TWC Group, a money management firm
- Stephen Friedman, past chairman of Goldman Sachs
- Alfred Lerner, chief executive of MBNA; Ray Lee Hunt, scion of the Texas oil fortune
- Rita Hauser, a prominent lawyer and longtime advocate of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation
- David Jeremiah, a retired admiral
- Arnold Kanter, a Bush I national security official and a founding member of the Scowcroft Group
- James Calhoun Langdon, Jr., a power-lawyer in Texas
- Elisabeth Pate-Cornell, head of industrial engineering and engineering management at Stanford University
- John Harrison Streicker, a real estate magnate
- Philip Zelikow, a National Security Council staffer during Bush I.
(Two members of this group--Day and Langdon--were Bush campaign "pioneers," meaning they collected at least $100,000 for W.'s presidential bid. Barksdale raised money for Bush in Silicon Valley. Lerner's MBNA was the single biggest source of contributions for Bush in 2000, and he and his wife each donated $250,000 to the GOP. Hunt, too, rounded up bucks for Bush. Friedman gave $50,000 to the Republican Party in 2000. Streicher is a Democratic contributor.)
Also in 2003, PFIAB was working on its own review of Iraq intelligence, which concluded in December 2003 that Bush should not have used the 16 words. At the end of 2004, after growing incresingly critical of Bush, Brent Scowcroft was basically fired from his position as Chair of PFIAB. Since that time, Bush has been accused of stacking PFIAB with more big money donors.
Now PFIAB is normally very secretive (no, really). And I have no idea whether this was a one-time thing, refusing the detail its classification and declassification activities. But it may be noteworthy.
From Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness," describing Kurtz:
"I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I had ... to invoke him -- himself -- his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air."
Posted by: albert fall | June 24, 2007 at 17:35
My, as always EW with the telling detail!
Looks from google as if PFIAB was reporting something duly in 2000 and 2001, but spottily if at all since. Secrecy News Blog has a fresh article about the Cheney-ISOO wars. This article from last year has a few more SNB links, which do indeed make one wonder whose "IAB" (and for that matter DHS) that is.
Posted by: prostratedragon | June 24, 2007 at 17:40
From my second link above:
And historically average single-family house prices in this country do not decline on an annual basis, to take another currently bitter example. The whole rationale for monitoring concerns the possibility that history might be made on one's watch.
Posted by: prostratedragon | June 24, 2007 at 17:50
Scowcroft was already among only a handful of PFIAB members who had any national security experience. It's hard to imagine a PFIAB with fewer people that have experience in what they are charged with advising the president about. I mean, just how many credit card billionaires can you fit on the head of a pin?
Posted by: earlofhuntingdon | June 24, 2007 at 19:27
Pete Wilson? Jeezus Friggin' You-know-what.
No wonder this thing cratered into the sand.
Posted by: Flamethrower | June 24, 2007 at 22:40
Marcy: YGM
Posted by: Rayne | June 24, 2007 at 23:08
Philip Zelikow? Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission Philip Zelikow?
Posted by: Kagro X | June 24, 2007 at 23:13
From War & Piece by Laura Rozen-
June 24, 2007
A veteran newspaper editor friend has some sharp observations about the Post Cheney piece:
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/006337.html
"A careful reading of the story of Cheney's coup against a feeble executive reveals that paragraphs 7 through 10 were written and inserted in haste by a powerful editorial hand. The banging of colliding metaphors in an otherwise carefully written piece is evidence of last-minute interpolations by a bad editor whom no one has the power to rewrite."
Posted by: AZ Matt | June 25, 2007 at 00:17
Has there been a US official more powerful than Cheney?
He appears to combine and surpass the methods of Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover.
Posted by: Watson | June 25, 2007 at 07:55
Bush is a creature of bloodlust and a torture-freak, and Cheney is a power-freak who knows how to please the Prince (and I've seen no sign that Cheney gets high on torture). Gonzales, of course, did the very same thing in Texas. No wonder Cheney and Gonzales prosper in the face of every revelation!
Someday, not soon, we will read the graphic testimony of those who have seen Bush ventilate and gratify his bloodlust with their own eyes and ears (talking directly to torturers on the telephone, for example). Not soon, because witnesses are also voyeurs--a perversion to be ashamed of.
We traded in a brilliant creature of lust (Clinton) for a depraved creature of bloodlust (Bush), and the record was there for all of us to see. It's something to think about for a while....
Posted by: alabama | June 25, 2007 at 09:19
Intended composition of PFIAB in 2005, for comparison's sake:
Stephen Friedman, of New York
James L. Barksdale of Mississippi
Arthur B. Culvahouse of Virginia
William O. DeWitt, Jr. of Ohio
Admiral James O. Ellis (Ret.) of Georgia
Donald L. Evans of Texas
Martin Faga of Virginia
Lee Hamilton of Indiana
Ray Hunt of Texas
David E. Jeremiah of Virginia
John L. Morrison of Minnesota
Elizabeth Pate-Cornell of California
Stefanie R. Osburn, of Virginia
Smells of Baker; haven't checked to see whether these were all confirmed.
Posted by: Rayne | June 25, 2007 at 09:32
Well- the Hunt Brothers bagged the Oak Valley project in Calimesa, California in 1990 on a closed bid with the RTC (Resolution Trust Company) to help bail out Savings and Loan scandel debt. They have secured over 25 million dollars from Congressman Jerry Lewis's 'earmarks' for Yucaipa Valley Water District creating 'wetlands' on the property- Ten years later...no wetlands and Jerry is still not in jail???
Posted by: morpheus | September 12, 2007 at 16:56