Chicago Tribune | Intelligence watchdog slow to bite

WASHINGTON — When a privacy-rights group requested records to show how many times a secretive presidential oversight board had asked the Justice Department to investigate possible violations of intelligence-gathering laws since 2001, the answer that came back last month was as simple as it was startling.

Zero.

One possible reason: For more than half of President Bush’s first term, the Intelligence Oversight Board had no members because Bush did not appoint anyone to it.

Bush didn’t make appointments to the board until March 17, 2003, well after his administration had begun an aggressive post-Sept. 11, 2001, expansion of intelligence-related activity.

Oh, that’s nice. An oversight board that’s been around since the Ford administration, marginalized just when inactivity would be most convenient.

The appointments in 2003 were politicized – some old hands, and quite a few big-money gladhanders and Texas oilman Ray Hunt… get this, he’s a director of Halliburton.

The head of the boards (actually, two boards) resigned in 2005 in what else, a conflict-of-interest scandal. Since October, the board has more or less been de-politicized and turned around, and is actually packed with reasonably well-seasoned members.

But they still hadn’t referred any of the possible violations sent to them by the FBI through the end of last year to the Justice Department for investigation.