Intelligence community oversight
Arguably, issues of security in the world are considered to play a tremendous role in a progress of a nation. To oversee intelligence is often controversial, perplexing as well as difficult responsibility to undertake. The conditions and difficulties of the intelligence community oversight arise as a result of sensitivity and secrecy that surround intelligence conclusion, sources, methods, findings, dissemination, as well as the competition that exist between the executive and the legislature on issues of accessibility and influence. As a matter of fact, the duties of the intelligence community oversight are shared by the legislature and the executive branches of government. In this case, the oversight entails the supervision of various agencies of intelligence and making them liable for their actions. Perhaps, the intelligence community oversight focuses on general issues, which include quality analysis, legality of actions, policy maker needs, as well as operations. Intelligence is multi-faceted phenomena making the process of intelligence oversight so critical and complex. Intelligence overlaps various issues both domestic and foreign, such areas include a diversity of procedures, subjects and agencies.
Undeniably, the process of the intelligence community oversight depends on the coordination of the responsible stakeholders. These include the intelligence agencies, executive and the legislature. The sufficiency of these processes is not up to the expected standards. Perhaps, there are various loopholes and intelligence lapse in various sectors of security services. In such situations, the entire body of executive, intelligence agencies and legislature. The process of intelligence oversight sufficiency is questionable due to the fact that there are various unsolved issues that pertaining accountability. The issue of accountability in the intelligence oversight is attached to the executive branch, intelligence community and the military as the intelligence agency.
The decision making process has hindered the sufficiency of intelligence oversight. The major decisions made in the intelligence community oversight are based on information from the congress instead of focusing it based on information from the public. In most scenarios, the public always has the clear information on issues of security, whereby decisions in the intelligence oversight could be made from. In addition, the decisions and directions that were supposed to be delivered by tt been the congress has not yet been cleared. This implies that the decision making process in the intelligence oversight is always slow. The issue of accountability can play a tremendous of role in improving the sufficiency of intelligence oversight and national security. The intelligence oversight becomes sufficient in undertaking its mandates if the process of oversight is clearly followed. The intelligence agency is accountable to the congress, and on the other hand the congress is accountable to the public.
The sufficiency of intelligence oversight is tremendously influenced by the executive powers on issues of oversight. The executive focuses on espionage and covert actions, which include the appointment of intelligence commission. The fact that there is overlap of responsibilities adversely affects the sufficiency of intelligence community oversight. The competition is generated due to overlapping of the roles between the executive and legislature leading to tension in the entire process of intelligence community oversight. In this perspective, intelligence community oversight has become one of the challenging issues due to difficulties in power separation between the executive and the legislature.
The redundancy in the oversight process also has influenced the sufficiency of the intelligence community oversight. For example, during the 9/11there was tremendous redundancy in the side of congressional oversight. The committee during this time had multiple responsibilities, which adversely affected the entire intelligence oversight process. The issue of secrecy among the responsible stakeholders is not up to date, leading to lack of sufficiency in the oversight process and attainment of oversight objectives. In general perspective, it is evident that the intelligence community oversight process is not sufficient.
Bibliography
Baldino, Daniel. Democratic oversight of intelligence services. Annandale, NSW: Federation Press, 2010.
Halchin, Elaine& Kaiser, F. Frederick. Congressional Oversight of intelligence Current Structure and Alternatives. Congressional Research Service, 2012
