“The White House is maintaining extraordinary restrictions on information about the detention of high-level terror suspects, permitting only a small number of members of Congress to be briefed on how and where the prisoners are being held and interrogated, senior government officials say.
Some Democratic members of Congress say the restrictions are impeding effective oversight of the secret program, which is run by the Central Intelligence Agency and is believed to involve the detention of about three dozen senior Qaeda leaders at secret sites around the world.
By law, the White House is required to notify the House and Senate Intelligence Committees of all intelligence-gathering activities. But the White House has taken the stance that the secret detention program is too sensitive to be described to any members other than the top Republican and Democrat on each panel.
The issue is expected to be discussed at a hearing scheduled for Thursday, at which Porter J. Goss, the director of central intelligence, is to testify in closed session before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The detention program remains so highly classified that the members of Congress would discuss the restrictions that surround it only in the most general of terms.…”
When the executive branch decides how the legislative branch will oversee it, we don't have constitutional government.
Since the C.I.A. first took custody of Qaeda members in 2002, other government officials said, the only lawmakers on the House panel and its Senate counterpart whom the White House has permitted to be briefed on the issue have been the chairmen and ranking minority members.…
The limited nature of the C.I.A. briefings has not been publicly disclosed. But Mr. Goss and Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, alluded to them in the Armed Services Committee hearing last month in which they defended the practice as having fulfilled the C.I.A.'s obligations.…
Mr. Roberts said he believed that Congress "has been fully informed of what the C.I.A. is doing in terms of interrogating captured terrorists," through what he called "our ongoing briefings with staff and members as the classification does permit." But he acknowledged what he called "some of the questions raised by members," some of them on the Intelligence Committee.…
A spokeswoman for Mr. Roberts, Sarah Little, said the senator had "occasionally" objected to the degree of access to sensitive information the administration allowed to committee members, and had sometimes won agreement to a change in practice.
A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise, said Mr. Goss, as a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, "takes very seriously his responsibility to keep appropriate overseers informed, and we do so.…"
The authority to classify information rests with the White House and its designees, and the tools of Congress to challenge such designations are limited to the power it controls over the federal budget. The restrictions that the White House has imposed on briefings about the C.I.A. detention program were described by Republican and Democratic Congressional officials as particularly severe.
Since the detention program was established in 2002, the officials said, the C.I.A. detention effort has been classified as a "special access program," a category that puts it off limits even to most of those with top secret security clearances. In general, such restrictions have been applied only to covert operations and ongoing espionage investigations, Congressional officials say.
A former senior intelligence official said the main reason for the secrecy was to prevent information about where the prisoners were being held from being publicly disclosed. Such a disclosure, the official said, would almost certainly cause host governments to force the C.I.A. to shut down the detention operations being carried out on their soil.…
The restrictions also appear to have had the effect of limiting public discussion about the C.I.A.'s detention program. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last month, Mr. Goss turned aside questions about the detention program on grounds that the C.I.A. had already answered them, through the briefings provided to the leaders of the intelligence panel.
"As far as I know, there has been no question that has been asked that has not been answered to the committee," Mr. Goss said, adding that he knew that the chairman, ranking member and some staff members from each panel "have been briefed in on the aspects of the transfer, the detention, the interrogation and the techniques."
The list of those who have been fully briefed on the program may be limited to the eight members of Congress who have served as the chairmen or ranking members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees since early 2002. That list includes all four members who are currently in those positions: Mr. Roberts and Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the Republican chairmen of the two committees, and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia and Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrats.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/06/national/06detain.html?pagewanted=all&position
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