Intelligence_ From Secrets to Policy - Mark M. Lowenthal [168]
HOW DOES CONGRESS JUDGE INTELLIGENCE? An important but little-discussed issue is how Congress views and judges intelligence, as opposed to the criteria used by the executive branch. No matter how much access Congress has to intelligence, it is not a client of the intelligence community in the same way that the executive branch is, even as congressional requests for specific analytic products have increased. Congress never achieves the same level of intimacy in this area and does not have the same requirements or demands for intelligence.
The budget is one major divide. No pattern has been set as to which branch wants to spend more or less. The Reagan administration favored spending more on intelligence than Congress did and was allowed to, up to a point, after which Congress began to resist. However, the Reagan administration did not want to buy the additional imagery satellites demanded by the Senate Intelligence Committee. During the Clinton administration, it was Congress, after the Republican takeover in 1995, that was willing to spend more than was requested. Congress takes the firm view that all budget requests from the executive are just that—requests. They are nonbinding suggestions for how much money should be spent. To put it succinctly, the executive has programs, Congress has money.
The second major divide is the intimacy of the relationship that each branch has with intelligence. Executive officials may have unrealistic expectations of intelligence, but over time they have far greater familiarity with it than do the majority of members. Thus, the possibility of even larger false expectations looms in Congress. Moreover, having provided the money, members may have higher expectations of intelligence performance. At the same time, members may be more suspicious of intelligence analysis, fearing that it has been written largely to support administration policies. Members and staff have rarely heard of intelligence that questions administration policies, even when such intelligence exists. Thus, the Congress-intelligence relationship is fertile ground for doubts, whether justified or not.
The relationship between Congress and the intelligence community has undergone a change in recent years. Both before and after the modern oversight system was created, the main requests Congress made of the intelligence community, other than testimony at hearings, were for briefings. Congress has had access to some intelligence products on a regular basis, but they were written for the executive branch. In the mid-1990s, Congress began to take a greater interest in the substance of intelligence analysis. Dissatisfaction among some members with an NIE about missile threats to the United States led Congress to create a commission headed by Rumsfeld, which came to different conclusions about the nature of the threat.
More significant, in the period prior to the onset of the war in Iraq (2003- ), members of the Senate Intelligence Committee requested that a new national intelligence estimate on Iraq’s WMD programs be written, so that senators could have the benefit of reading it before they considered voting on a resolution authorizing the president to use force against Iraq. This took the intelligence relationship with Congress into a new and difficult area. Although the National Security Act states that the National Intelligence Council “shall prepare national intelligence estimates for the Government,” it is also understood that the intelligence community is part of and works for the executive branch. Meanwhile, the intelligence community finds it difficult to refuse such a request for both professional and political reasons. The resulting NIE became controversial after the war started, when surveys of Iraq did not discover the programs that were said to exist. Many senators questioned the quality of the analysis and the underlying reasons for