Effective Oversight of the CIA Depends on Congress

By Tobias Gibson, NSN Non-Residential Senior Fellow
December 24, 2014 | The Washington Post

In a recent piece here on The Monkey Cage,  Michael Colaresi discussed the need for change in oversight of the CIA and by extension the entirety of the intelligence community. He suggests that in the wake of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA torture issued Dec. 9, “current and former CIA officials, as well as President Obama, seem bent on missing the relevant lessons to improve governance of national security. The CIA needs more, not less, oversight” (my emphasis).

He then offers details–based on his recent book Democracy Declassified, which I highly recommend—of the benefits of this additional oversight:

…democracies with strong oversight of national security policy win more of their foreign policy crises against non-democracies as compared to democracies that empower their executives with secrecy, but lack strong oversight powers.

Colaresi offers international examples of “expert-led intelligence oversight bodies outside of the executive” that can serve as models for a Congress that lacks experts in intelligence. His book states that “extra-executive bodies that do not rely on the president or prime minister for legitimacy and political power are the only reliable engines of oversight” (133; my emphasis).

But by focusing on oversight beyond the executive branch, Colaresi excludes some other important sources of oversight. For example,inspectors general in the United States, including those within the intelligence community, have been granted increased powers in the same period of times that Colaresi studies. IGs are expected to conduct investigations and audits in order to prevent abuses of power within their agencies. John Rizzo in Company Man notes that “…when the [Central Intelligence] Agency learns about a possible violation of U.S. law… even by someone not affiliated with the CIA, the Office of General Counsel prepares a ‘crimes report’ letter to the head of the DOJ criminal division” (pp.149-150).

I would be cautious about creating new institutions to oversee the intelligence community, as Colaresi suggests. As I have previously written:

the more committees, institutions and individuals share oversight duties, the more acute the collective action problem becomes, leading to a preference that oversight occurs by another actor. Because oversight is costly, increasing the number of principals can decrease the incentive for any one of the institutions to actually perform an oversight role, because each prefers the others to bear the cost of auditing the agent.

Thus, creating new oversight bodies may actually backfire and diminish the influence of the legislative branch on the intelligence community.

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