Strassel: Congress's NSA Fail

The subheadline of Kimberly Strassel's lates Potomac Watch column is "politicians demand oversight over intelligence, then make it a point not to know what's going on." Writes Strassel:

One of the jokes of today's call for more intelligence oversight is that no country currently has a greater (or more debilitating) amount of it. No effective intelligence service can disclose its secrets to the public. Democracies handle this by entrusting the peoples' representatives—duly elected—with the solemn task of minding the spies.

Western European countries handle this oversight entirely within the executive branch. The U.S. doles it out to all and sundry: executive, legislative, judicial. If you live in Washington and have a pulse, you too can oversee intelligence.

This system was supposed to legitimize intelligence programs. All it has done is reduce accountability. The existence in particular of a court established in 1978 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (and public misperceptions about the FISA court's role) has allowed Congress to pass the buck, freeing politicians from the need to take ownership of intelligence matters.

Congressional abdication was papered over for a time by the public support for intelligence that came from 9/11 and President George W. Bush's robust defense of his programs. Edward Snowden's leaks, and President Obama's own tepid performance, have blown this up, putting Congress's failings in stark relief.

Consider all those members hogging cable-TV time to complain they didn't know about the breadth of the NSA programs. Missing is a forehead sticker that reads: "I don't do my job." Any member of Congress can request documents and briefings on any intelligence issue. Any member who feels a greater duty can work to be on the House or Senate intelligence committees.

The actual members of those committees have been behaving in rare and admirable form throughout the Snowden flap, publicly acknowledging they were fully briefed and defending the NSA's work. Privately, they've simultaneously acknowledged that 95% of their colleagues have proven useless—never familiarizing themselves with the voluminous material the NSA provided, and only now fanning the flames about "privacy."

Strassel gives examples from both sides of the aisle:

• Rep Jim Sensebrenner [R-WI] bragged that he'd skipped the [intelligence] briefings, since his attendance would have barred him from going public with complaints.
• Nancy Pelosi liked enhanced interrogation—right up until the world knew about it. Then she couldn't remember her intelligence briefings.
• West Virginia Senate Democrat Jay Rockefeller once wrote a letter to Vice President Dick Cheney objecting to warrantless wiretapping. He put a copy in a drawer, only taking it out after controversy broke—to claim he'd been opposed all along.
  
  Mr. Cheney this past summer related that he'd briefed congressional leaders in 2004 on an NSA surveillance program and asked if the administration should get Congress's "formal authorization." Their answer, he said: "Absolutely not."
  
  Now that NSA surveillance is public, many members have refused to defend the necessity of those programs, or to even note that there is no evidence of NSA abuse. Polls are bad, so the pols will throw the spies under the NSA supercomputers. Never mind that those polls are a reflection of Congress's failure to defend the programs it authorized. No wonder the public is concerned.