Do you really think this president would appoint a board of

" Wise Men and Women who have high level security clearances, a history of crediblity and national leadership, a proven stature and integrity that transcend party affiliation and political ideology, and an understanding of the roles of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government." ??

Why wouldn't he just appoint capitains of corporate power and crony capitalists and business friends as he has on most of his other government appointed boards?

Mr Bush is spying on his domestic political opponents. He lacks adequate oversight to prove that he is not.

Bush keeps saying the argument is whether or not he is allowed to wiretap terrorists. This is blatantly false. Mr Bush claims he is allowed to wiretap many people without oversight. Since the FISA oversight process has NEVER denied the power to wiretap terrorists, we can only wonder why Mr Bush would want to wiretap without oversight.

The only reason to refuse oversight is to gain information on domestic political opponents to be used for political purposes. Our constitutional system is built on checks and balances, not on trust. Our system requires us to assume that without oversight, Mr Bush is indeed using his powers for political purposes.

Your commission is unnecessary if Congress does its job. The Constitution gives this power of oversight to Congress only Congress is neglecting its constitutional resposnibility. The intelligence committees of Congress are THE appropriate oversight organization. It is not constiutional for Mr Bush to withhold information from the people's representatitves. Congress is spineless and enabling this president to usurp their responsibility. Forget adding another layer to government. We must elect a Congress that does its job and protects our liberties from abusive executive actions.

Sadly, I would be hard pressed to name half a dozen "wise" senators or congressmen from today's Republican party. It's been so profitable and electorally powerful to be a party hack that the number of independent thinkers (and voters) is near zero. I don't see a Warren Rudman or Howard Baker in the bunch. How could you plan a bipartisan council of wise men when your pool of candidates on the Republican side is shrinking and aging?

Ah Steve. Always the optimist. Even if the President DID agree to form something like this, and could, at least on paper, look at anything, the President would definitely not provide any relevant documentation when requested, and he would no doubt name a head of the committee who would place the administration's interests first well before the public's interests.

bubba -- I agree with you about Bush. I'm not all that hopeful he'll comply, but what you achieve is yet another institutional embarrassment of Bush's intransigence....and in the end, public trust in the intel/national security bureaucracy is not restored.

If you want it restored, cooperation with something along the lines Budowsky is suggesting makes sense.

I like your post -- but don't confuse my argument as suggesting that Bush will naturally comply with such a Commission. He probably has to be shamed into complying....and that may not be possible.

Steve Clemons

Steve:

Isn't this what PFIAB is supposed to be?

Charlie

Pie in the sky.

Good idea, esp. since bush threatened the Dems on the oversight committee he let know about part of the spying with jail if they mentioned it to anyone.

We need to know how we can fight the threats to Congresspersons on national security grounds if they try to find a way to stop bush from breaking the laws.

I think the Constitutional AmendmentWar Powers Act that is being floated is another way to prevent bush from his spin but it is true that the Constitution should be enough to stop this presidential power grab but Congress does not appear to have the enforcement capabilities which would probably get down to sending the Federal Marshalls or the military to arrest bush. I would like to know what means of enforcement are available to Congress even if they follow through with Rep. Conyers 3 bills of beginning the Impeachment Inquiry.

Please sign the citizen co-sponsors letter on http://www.johnconyers.com/ Rep. Conyers has 17 Congressional co-sponsors to begin the Impeachment Inquiry but only 35,000 citizen signatures. Conyers After Downing Street petition got half a million signatures and we should be able to do this again for the Congresspersons who are willing to go on record as supporting an Impeachment Inquiry as the beginning of reining in this run-amuk executive branch.

Conyer's Action Items

Conyer's Blog

Bipartisan National Security Commission, hmm? Sounds a bit hokey to me. Who trusts who these days? This group empowered to see all and with the hope of unanimous agreements?? Sounds long on the empowerment and short on anything beyond that. Too much partisanship and too much corruption going around. This group would be populated with political hacks or biz magnate plants who will lobby thier causes. There is no bi-partisanship in Washington.

Can you trust a War Criminal on anything? Yes, you probably can on some things, but on intelligence, at the heart of all his war criminality, No!

Steve, I understand. I also agree, I would love to see it done. But I do question whether it will end up being as useful as it can be, or, as other things have worked out in the past, where the public gets confused and thinks that the hearings/findings exonerate this administration when they in fact do the opposite.

Does anyone else think it is very strange--and suspicious--that Saddam Hussein's secret office tapes are in the hands of a private contractor? This really does seem to indicate that the Iraq War, and Global War on Terror, is being run by private interests with no responsibilities under the Constitution.

Steve,

All this discussion and examination about the "national intelligence industry" is based on premise of "trust" and "competence" in the so-called intelligence community (IC as it is benevolently known). What say you about these 2 articles in the Baltimore Sun 'bout a $B's new system non-capability and appearance of close relationship between gov and SAIC who got the $B's contract (which ---- by the way, have not seen hide nor hair in the Wa. Po. or NY Times).

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.saic29jan29,1,5221259.story

Little-known contractor has close ties with staff of NSA

By Siobhan Gorman
Sun reporter

January 29, 2006

When the National Security Agency went shopping for a private contractor to help it build a state-of-the-art tool for plucking key threats to the nation from a worldwide sea of digital communication, the company it chose was Science Applications International Corp.

More than three years later, the project, code-named Trailblazer, still hasn't gotten off the ground. And intelligence experts inside and outside the agency say that the NSA and SAIC share some of the blame.

Investigations of Trailblazer's early years by Congress and the NSA inspector general criticized the agency for its "confusion" about what Trailblazer would ultimately accomplish and for "inadequate management and oversight" of the program to improve collection and analysis of mountains of digital information.

----- go to link for full article
+++++++++++++++++++++++ here's the 2nd article

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.trailblazer29jan29,1,7228842.story

A Sun special report

System error
The NSA has spent six years and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to kick-start a program, intended to help protect the United States against terrorism, that many experts say was doomed from the start.

By Siobhan Gorman

January 29, 2006

A program that was supposed to help the National Security Agency pluck out electronic data crucial to the nation's safety is not up and running more than six years and $1.2 billion after it was launched, according to current and former government officials.

The classified project, code-named Trailblazer, was promoted as the NSA's state-of-the-art tool for sifting through an ocean of modern-day digital communications and uncovering key nuggets to protect the nation against an ever-changing collection of enemies.

Its main goal when it was launched in 1999 was to enable NSA analysts to connect the 2 million bits of data the agency ingests every hour -- a task that has grown increasingly complex with the advent of the Internet, cell phones, and instant messaging -- and enable analysts to quickly pick out the most important information.

The stakes could scarcely be higher.

A major failure leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, involved communications intelligence, investigators found.More than 30 hints of the impending attack had been collected in the previous three years but had sat, unnoted, in the NSA's databases, according to a joint congressional inquiry into pre-Sept. 11 intelligence operations.

Unsolved problems
When SAIC came on board as the lead contractor in 2002, NSA had not solved those problems, said intelligence officials with extensive knowledge of the program.
---------- go to link for full article

"... a Bipartisan National Security Committee of Wise Men and Women ..."

* Why BI-partisan? What about NON-partisan? Suspect the "wise" are non-partisan

* Recommended list of names: With the exception of O'Conner, the rest are all re-treads. Several of them come out of the old Cold War paradigm.... and that's a major problem. Furthermore, they all come with a Western-Christian civilization paradigm, all white and with exception of o'conner, all male. They come from a tradition of war-making vs peace-making and experience with complex social problems.

How 'bout Gary Hart?

I would encourage people to drill down deep into the Intelligence Summit website, and judge for themselves about the group's claim of "neutrality". Particularly, browse through the list of speakers which includes figures like Laurent Murawiec, Michael Ledeen and Richard Perle, and is top-heavey with American and Israeli professionals.

As Steve says points out, there is something decidedly fishy about the sensationalized treatment of the alleged Saddam tapes. The fact that these tapes are being released by a brand-spanking-new non-profit private "forum" suggests to me that whatever they have is something that no repectable agency would sign off on, or something that they have not bothered to share with any experts outside their group. The whole thing smells like Son of Niger Forgeries to me.

The advisory council for the summit consists of eight Americans, three Israelis, and one very hawkish and conservative Brit - Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, the new head of the Conservative Party policy group on national and international security. Yet this group portrays itself as the advisors to a forum that "uses private charitable funds to bring together for the first time the intelligence agencies of the free world and the emerging democracies." What free world? There are no advisory council members from France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia, Norway, Sweden or anny "emerging democracy" - nor are any speakers from any of these places announced (although perhaps I missed one). I guess the free world now consists of just three countries.

The impresario of the affair is John Loftus, who has a rather interesting biography and slate of interests, almost all of which seem connected with Daniel Pipes-like obsessions with the various evils of the Arab and Muslim world.

The main financial backer of the summit is the Michael Cherney Foundation. Apparently Cherney himself is not permitted by the state department to travel to the US. There is a very extensive and passionate essay by Loftus himself posted at the site, alleging an elaborate frameup of Cherney. If nothing else, this essay makes for fascinating reading, involving some scintillating cloak and dagger stuff: allleged skullduggery by YAHBAL, the Israeli Police International Crime Unit; Russian mafiosi; Israeli intelligence operations and Jewish philanthropy in Russia; allegedly false accusations of assination attampts against a Bulgarian cabinet minister; accusations of an assasination for hire attempt against Cherney by retired rogue Israeli intelligence agents; false testimony by members of the "Chechen-Wahhabist mafia"; YAHBAL wiretapping and transcribing of the private conversations of prominent Israeli politicians, including Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, Natan Scharansky, and Avigdor Liberman going back to the Barak administration.

I'm in no position to say what is true or what is false here, but it all sounds like some sort of intramural fight between the Israeli right and the Israeli left, with the activities of Mr. Cherney as a football. While purporting to expose this framework, Loftus offers no explanation of the motive of this framers.

Loftus also possesses an interest in the Jonathan Pollard matter, the convicted spy, and a favorite obsession of Israeli hawks - one that even most American right wingers won't touch.

Two of the advisory council members, Rachel Ehrenfest and James Woolsey, are members of Benador Associates. Here is what the site RightWeb says about that outfit:

Benador Associates is a public relations firm that was founded by Eleana Benador, the former director of Daniel Pipes's Middle East Forum, a hard-line think thank whose members have urged for wider U.S. intervention in the Middle East. Benador's list of experts reads like a who's who of heavy hitters in the neoconservative advocacy world. Clients include Frank Gaffney, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, and James Woolsey.

Why appoint a Commission accountable to whom to take over which real governing functions?
Let's agree instead to do the really hard work to fix the governance and oversight of the intelligence community. Make the responsible parties do what they are supposed to do. Way harder, lower probability of early success but it is a better use of energy for the long term since it fixes what is wrong.

Systems based on personalities -- wise men and women, in this case -- will fail. All you have to do is stack the commission in your favor and, voila, you get a meaningless, rubber stamp commission. Dividing power and providing oversight through organizational structure reduces the tendency, and we used to have that. Three branches of government and a free press. Reconsitute those and you may have something.