“There’s no question that Congress was willing to allow the intelligence agencies to do whatever they saw fit without raising hard questions,” said David M. Barrett, a Villanova University historian. “For Democrats and even some Republicans who might have shown some resistance, it took more than a decade for them to flex their oversight role.”
Some historians question whether Congress deserves any role. Stephen F. Knott, an expert in intelligence and the presidency at the U.S. Naval War College, says American allies such as Britain and France “do just fine” with minimal legislative oversight of their secret services. Knott blames the creation of congressional oversight committees in the 1970s, following spying abuses, for restricting intelligence agencies “from doing the dirty jobs that all governments want but nobody wants to take credit for.”
F.A.O. Schwarz Jr. , the former chief counsel for the Church Committee, the 1975 Senate panel that investigated abuses and led to permanent congressional oversight, called last week for a new special Senate panel to look into the CIA and the National Security Agency, whose surveillance programs were exposed in leaks by contractor Edward Snowden. The current system, Schwarz wrote in an op-ed in The Nation magazine, has “become a less reliable check.”
Former ranking House Intelligence Committee member Jane Harman, one of the first in Congress to disapprove of the CIA interrogations, blames the Bush administration’s use of executive authority to cut Congress out of the loop in secret briefings during the early 2000s. Harman, now president of the Wilson Center, a Washington think-tank, said Congress “did think it was a target and felt it would be hit.” Once Bush publicly acknowledged the use of waterboarding in September 2006, she said, “Congress began to push back.”