Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [156]
Hearings are not necessarily hostile, but they are adversarial; they are not objective discussions of policy. Each administration uses hearings as a forurn for advancing its specific policy choices and as opportunities to sell policy to Congress and to interested segments of the public. Congress understands this and is a skeptical recipient of information from the executive branch, regardless of party affiliation. Intelligence officials are somewhat exempt from selling policy, in that they often give Congress the intelligence community’s views on an issue without supporting or attacking a given policy. They gain some protection from congressional recriminations because of the line separating policy and intelligence, unless they are perceived as having crossed that line. Again, this was a concern for some members in the case of Iraqi WMD. (Executive branch policy makers may perceive the intelligence community’s congressional testimony as unsupportive or as undermining policy, even if that was not the intelligence community’s intent.) However, when intelligence officials testify about intelligence poticies—capabitities. budgets, programs, intelligence-related controversies—they are also in a sales mode vis-à-vis Congress.
Hearings are often followed by questions for the record (QFRs or “kew-fers”) submitted to the witnesses and their agencies by members or their staffs to follow up on issues that surfaced during the hearings. Although QFRs give the executive an opportunity to make their case again or to add new supportive information, the requests are often viewed as punitive homework assignments. QFRs can also be used by Congress as a tool (or weapon) in a struggle with an agency that seems unwilling to offer information or is stubborn about certain policies.
NOMINATION. The ability to confirm or reject nominations is a profound political power, which resides in the Senate. Nominations for the DCI were not controversial until 1977, when President Jimmy Carter’s nominee, Theodore Sorensen, withdrew his nomination after appearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and responding to a number of issues that had been discussed publicly about him. The issues included Sorensen’s World War Il status as a conscientious objector, which raised questions about his willingness to use covert action: and the possible misuse of classified documents in his memoirs as well as his defense of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked to the press the classified Pentagon Papers (a DOD study of the Vietnam War), which raised concerns about his ability to protect intelligence sources and methods.
Since 1977 the Senate has held several other controversial DCI nominee hearings. Robert M. Gates withdrew his first nomination in 1987 as the Iran-contra scandal unfolded. His second nomination, in 1991, featured a detailed investigation of charges that Gates had politicized intelligence to please policy makers. In 1997, Anthony Lake withdrew his nomination at the onset of what promised to be a grueling and perhaps unsuccessful series of hearings.
Critics of the nomination process—not just of intelligence positions but across the board—charge that it has become increasingly political and personal, delving into issues that are not germane to a nominee’s fitness for office. Defenders of the process respond that it is a political process, that the Senate is not supposed to be a rubber stamp, and that careful scrutiny of a nominee may preclude embarrassments later on. Regardless of which view is correct, the nomination process has become so formidable that it has convinced some potential nominees to decline office.
One of the tools available to senators that some find objectionable is the ability to put a “hold” on any pending Senate matter, effectively suspending action until the hold is lifted. Since all Senate business requires unanimous consent