The Daily Background
| Post-Nixon oversight board was strangely silent during early Bush abuses
by Arlen Parsa
The Post on one strangely “mute” oversight agency:
An independent oversight board created to identify intelligence abuses after the CIA scandals of the 1970s did not send any reports to the attorney general of legal violations during the first 5 1/2 years of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism effort, the Justice Department has told Congress.
[…]
The President’s Intelligence Oversight Board — the principal civilian watchdog of the intelligence community — is obligated under a 26-year-old executive order to tell the attorney general and the president about any intelligence activities it believes “may be unlawful.” The board was vacant for the first two years of the Bush administration.
Clearly, the only possible explanation for this is that this Administration has done absolutely nothing wrong.
No, but seriously. This is pretty sketchy; it seems that the Board had secret discussions with president about potential wrongdoing but that’s where they stopped– instead of forwarding the violations to the Department of Justice like they’re supposed to, they never made it out of the White House. There was literally no information flowing from Board to the Attorney for years, a departure from how the Board has operated in previous administrations.
If you want