I have long argued that the way to address the big problems our government is currently all-but-ignoring, not least jobs and climate change, is to talk about how our current policies put us at significant national security risk. If nothing else, by demonstrating how these are national security issues, it’ll provide a way to reverse [...]

Apparently, the Jan Schakowsky’s House Subcommittee completed its investigations of all the times the CIA failed to inform the Gang of Eight about covert ops and in other ways broke the law. Apparently, that investigation found “several instances” where CIA failed for follow the law procedures. But you can’t know precisely what those violations are, [...]

Jeff Stein had a piece on the response to the WaPo article on intelligence contracting the other day that started with this question: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has long wanted more members of Congress to know what’s going on at the CIA, but why doesn’t she announce a full-fledged investigation into the intelligence contractor mess, [...]

In a an interview with me on intelligence reform on Saturday, Speaker Pelosi suggested that the White House should either accept real reform of the oversight function–including some version of House amendments on GAO review of intelligence programs and expanded intelligence briefing beyond the Gang of Four–or accept full responsibility if anything goes wrong with [...]

In his review of the Wikileaks material on Afghanistan, Marc Ambinder notes that John Kerry referred to “serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan.” Will it raise skepticism in Congress? Absolutely. The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, said in a statement that “[h]owever illegally these documents came [...]

My takeaway of the first of two hearings on Toyota’s unintended acceleration problem (the other will be at 11:00 today) is that Toyota has locked away the answers in Japan. By design. Recalls A key to understanding how this worked is how recalls were decided. In response to a question from John Dingell, Toyota US [...]

Leonard points out that Congress needs to amend the National Security Act if it wants to get serious about forcing the executive to inform Congress of covert activities.