![handle is hein.journals/pclscceqry126 and id is 1 raw text is:
The Domestic Politics of Irrational
Intelligence Oversight
AMY B. ZEGART
Nine years after September 11, the least-reformed part of America's
intelligence system is not the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI), but the U.S. Congress. Although the House and
Senate enacted sweeping changes to the executive branch, including restructuring
intelligence agencies under a new Director of National Intelligence and creating
the Department of Homeland Security, Congress has been largely unable to
reform itself. In 2004, the 9/11 Commission called congressional oversight dys-
functional, and warned that fixing oversight weaknesses would be both essen-
tial to American national security and exceedingly difficult to achieve.' One
year later, the Commission's report card gave efforts to improve intelligence
oversight a D.2 By 2007, Lee Hamilton, who served as the Commission's Vice
Chairman and earlier as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence, was angry. Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, he delivered an ominous warning:
To me, the strong point simply is that the Senate of the United States and the
House of the United States is [sic] not doing its job. And because you're not doing
the job, the country is not as safe as it ought to be.... You're dealing here with the
national security of the United States, and the Senate and the House ought to
have the deep down feeling that we've got to get this thing right.3
'The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon
the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 419-423.
29/11 Commission Public Discourse Project, Final Report on 9/11 Commission Recommendations,
5 December 2005, accessed at http://www.9/11-pdp.org, 4 August 2009.
3 SSCI Hearing on Congressional Oversight, 110th Cong., 1st sess., 13 November 2007.
AMY B. ZEGART is an associate professor of public policy at the University of California, Los
Angeles, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. She is the author
of Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and Origins of 9/11 and various articles on international security
in leading journals.
Political Science Quarterly Volume 126 Number 1 2011](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/pclscceqry126&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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