WHITE HOUSE "STRONGLY OPPOSES" INTEL BUDGET DISCLOSURE
The Bush Administration formally notified the Senate this week that it objects to a provision in a pending bill on homeland security that would require publication of the annual intelligence budget total.
"The Administration strongly opposes the requirement in the bill to publicly disclose sensitive information about the intelligence budget."
"Disclosure, including disclosure to the Nation's enemies and adversaries in a time of war, of the amounts requested by the President and provided by the Congress for the conduct of the Nation's intelligence activities would provide no meaningful information to the general American public, but would provide significant intelligence to America's adversaries and could cause damage to the national security interests of the United States,"
the White House statement said.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2007/02/sap022807.pdf
It is hard to find a serious intelligence professional who agrees with this White House view.
Because the intelligence budget total is a high-level aggregate of spending levels in more than a dozen different agencies, its intelligence value to U.S. adversaries is practically nil, since funding for any particular program is insulated many layers beneath the enormous top-line figure. On the other hand, disclosure of the total figure would provide the public with a reliable index of the magnitude of intelligence spending to compare with spending on other national priorities.
To critics and other observers, intelligence budget secrecy is the preeminent example of unnecessary and inappropriate classification.
For that reason, the 9/11 Commission recommended that budget disclosure is the best way to begin reversing the spread of bureaucratic secrecy that has undermined the performance of U.S.
intelligence agencies. The 9/11 Commission recommendation was incorporated into the Senate bill (S.4), which is expected to pass the Senate next week.
In other important disputes, the new White House statement also took sharp exception to provisions in the bill that would strengthen the Public Interest Declassification Board, enhance whistleblower protections for intelligence community employees, and require increased intelligence and information sharing with state and local officials.
Republished from the Secrecy News blog at http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy, a project of the Federation of American Scientists. Discuss the social, security and political implications of science and technology at the Science Policy group on Gather, at FAS.gather.com
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Comments: 35
Finding out this information could make a HUGE difference for all parties involved..
What if its too little...? could demand more be given...
What if its too much...could make the other side reconsider what they are planning...
This makes NO sense at all....
this is the type of thing we need instant reply or comment by ALL presidential candidates....an immediate reply - they support or they don't support...I don't want to read it in next weeks paper where it will get lost.....in the other headlines.
Thank you for sharing...!!!!!
My, my, what an interesting paragraph! Let me see if I can parse its logic.
Publishing the aggregate budget is of great value to our citizens but it is useless to our adversaries. One wonders how a simple number can hold within itself both value and uselessness. Perhaps only a "scientist" could comprehend the quantum nature of such a contradiction.
One needs to ask why not the other way around? Why would the budget figure not be useless to the public but of great value to our adversaries?
I could think of a historical case when this would be true, The Corona Project. From the late 1950's to the early 1970's our intelligence agencies constructed the world's first satellite surveillance system -- off budget.
The project was so expensive, and so valuable, that simply posting the raw numbers as an aggregate would have tipped off the Soviets that the Americans were building something of extra-ordinary expense. That in itself is information.
Meanwhile, we pay a terrible price for unchecked secrecy. Not only does budget secrecy foster corruption -- Rep. "Duke" Cunningham, now thankfully in jail, was a longtime opponent of intelligence budget disclosure -- such secrecy also undermines the performance of U.S. intelligence agencies.
That's why the 9/11 Commission recommended, on a bipartisan basis, that intelligence agency budgets be published annually.
According to the Commission final report (at page 416), publication of the budget figures would help "judge priorities and foster accountability." At the same time, it would "provide little insight into U.S. intelligence sources and methods."
In other words, it would be valuable in one context, and useless in another context.
Truly pathetic.
Focusing on outrage, helplessness, illegality, brokenness, lying, disappointment etc
will get us more stuff to be outraged by, disappointed in, and so forth.
Using our higher human gift of Imaginal Power to FOCUS on SEEING the USAmerican Intelligence System working to help all humanity clear the wars and hells from the planet, and help all humanity reforest the planet, and to help all humanity honor the Rights of the Child [U.N.convention] - THERE ARE SOME THOUGHT-PICTURES WE CAN FOCUS ON WHICH WILL MOVE MOLECULES IN A POSITIVE WAY REALLY FAST.
We need the info in the article above to tell us where the sickness in our groupmind body lies - But then we need to get out of the stuck-place of believing that's the place we have to be in. Healing Power of Visualization - 5 minutes per day - Try it.
Again, you have done nothing to explain away the contradiction in your article. You argue that revealing the aggregate amount spent on intelligence is useful because it is useless.
If the aggregate amount is useless to our enemies how can it be helpful to anyone attempting to analyze whether the money is well spent?
Your conclusions are simply bizarre.
How exactly is publicly revealing the aggregate amount spent on intelligence going to stop the specific theft of funds from someone like "Rep. "Duke" Cunningham"?
Please explain.
Certainly you know that a tool that is useful for one application is not necessarily of any use to another application? You would have an awfully hard time using a screwdriver to dig a hole for a rosebush, but it's almost impossible to use a garden spade to tighten your eyeglasses, right?
So a tool that might be useful to an accountaint might... JUST MIGHT... be useless to a spy? Maybe? In your wildest imagination?
"For that reason, the 9/11 Commission recommended that budget disclosure is the best way to begin reversing the spread of bureaucratic secrecy that has undermined the performance of U.S."
A bi-partisan Commision of leading intelligence experts believes that the information of how U.S. taxpayers dollars are being spent by our government should be made public.
Let's apply Ronald Reagan's dictum to budget secrecy and I acknowledge that this is a bit of a streatch: "Are you better off today then you were yesterday" (I may be off on the exact qoute as well)...what increased security has $5 billion or $10 Billion or is it $100 Billion brought to the citizens of the United States?
The debate that needs to take place is on the allocation of resources - - how much money spent = safety (or, something to close to that) and, how much should be spent domestically to ensure that all Americans have access to health care and our kids have access to a good education and etc.
The larger point for me is that we can't have an educated debate because we just don't know where the money's going. True conservatives should be outraged that the government is keeping this information to themselves.
Okay jeff, let's have you give us an illustration of exactly how that works. The 2007 aggregate budget proposal for the Department of Health Education and Wefare is approx. $123 Billion.
Now that you know that number, please tell me how much of that is being spent on the needless spread of bureaucracy?
I am awaiting your answer.
Joan, you take a crack at using that number to divine bureacratic waste -- too.
Keep me posted with your efforts.
Yes, we were hit hard in 9/11, but I get tired of all these mousie people hiding in their homes and seeing enemies in their own shadows. Justifying anything the government may impose on them to "protect" them. Let's hide the budget, let's hide the illegal torture, let's hide the obscene amounts of money we pay Haliburton and spend in the Irak war, let's hide the coffins of our sons killed in the war, let's hide detention without legal cause, let's hide in our homes and under our wive's skirts.........What a bunch of cowards!
The White House must disclose the intelligence budget.
Ironically, instead of protecting national security, the failure to disclose significant cuts to overall intelligence spending in the early 1990s probably damaged U.S. intelligence. Had such cuts been disclosed, people would have been able to ask-- does this make sense? But secrecy concealed bad budget choices.
Other advanced democracies, including major U.S. allies such as Canada and the United Kingdom, routinely disclose their annual intelligence expenditures without compromise of their intelligence programs.
It's going to happen here too.
Thank you Steve for honest about your agenda. The entire purpose for PUBLICALLY posting the aggregate number is so liberals can try grab that money to feed their constituencies rather than defend our country.
I thought as much when I first spotted the reference to the "Federation of American Scientists" which little less than a progressive social activist group whose members happen to be employed in the sciences.
I understand what you're saying. However, we do know the breakdown of the budgets of each domestic agency that you've noted above and we know how much is $$ is allocated for each & every program they run. This knowledge then fuels the debate on the utility of spending those dollars from both the left and the right about the usefulness of spending those dollars and on the outcomes of these programs.
Based on an understanding of the overall budget numbers, I'm hoping that we citizens can communicate with our elected representatives and ask them to (internally) conduct a cost benefit analysis of these programs and report to us that yes these programs are worth the current funding, should be increased or should be decreased.
The "big" question is: At what cost (dollars and spiritually) do we wage the "war on terror", (which I take very seriously by the way )and at what cost do we suffer government on "faith" and not knowledge?
It's noteworthy that the U.S. Constitution explicitly requires that an accounting of "all" budget expenditures shall be published from time to time (in Article I, section 9). Simply put, budget disclosure is built into the DNA of the United States of America. In our country, it's meant to be.
If FAS truly believes that the secrecy of the intelligence budget violates the constitution then I recommend that FAS prepare a case and bring it before a court of law.
But may I suggest something else first?
Rather than focus on raiding the intelligence budget to purchase progressive constituency, why not have FAS devote its considerable analytical abilities to making the social programs we have more efficient and effective?
I have worked in city, county, state and federal government for well over two decades, and while I cannot say that I have seen every trick in the book to pad accounts, inflate budgets and bloat staff, I have seen enough of them.
What I have rarely seen, and to be frank, never seen in social services are sensible metrics to evaluate the efficacy of social programs.
This country spends well in excess of $1 Trillion annually on the city, county, state and federal level on social programs. I would suggest that we find a way to make those expenditures worthwhile before devoting ourselves to raiding other pools of funds to enlarge the wastage there.
No one suggested that the intelligence community is immune from waste, fraud and abuse but then no one has offered a sensible explanation how publishing the gross cost of intelligence gathering would addresse this problem any better then publishing the gross cost of the HEW budget.
Again we should focus on making the programs we have work rather than the petty politics of raiding the budget next door to buy constituency.
No, you did not, I did. The ONLY purpose hehind this initiative is to find another pool of funds for the Democratic Congress to buy constituency with.
Not on this thread. Perhaps you did that somewhere else. Please post it here.
Find me a single management expert anywhere who would support the notion that a summary budget number on that scale is meaningful.
On the other hand, those numbers would have made the old-time KGB and other intelligence agencies salivate.
Nonsense, this is just liberal politics at its worst.
I stand corrected.
The notion that intelligence budget disclosure is some kind of scheme advanced by liberals or Democrats fails to account for the fact that such disclosure was endorsed on a bipartisan basis by members of the 9/11 Commission as an essential first step towards removing unnecessary secrecy in intelligence. Commissioners of both parties thought it was "meaningful" enough to make it one of their 41 recommendations for improving national security.
Anyway, your whole thesis is mistaken. We did sue the Central Intelligence Agency in 1997 under the Freedom of Information Act and the budget total for that year was disclosed for the first time as a result. (It was officially disclosed for the second and last time -- so far -- in 1998.) The budget figure was $26.6 billion in fiscal year 1997. Far from being raided for other purposes, intelligence spending has gone UP every year since then.
And here I thought that we elected people to Congress to do that. You do know of course that select members of Congress are made aware of these numbers?
Please sue under the Freedom of Information Act and disclose which partisans voted for what and what the trade-off's of recommendations were.
There is an old saying that three things people should never see being made are sausage, laws and commission decisions.
Then I fail to see what your complaint is: sue away.
What Greg and I and others on this thread are doing is not "getting upset" (which presumably is something to be avoided). We are exercising our minds in an attempt to clarify an important issue of public policy.
The ability to perform such acts of clarification, even if they involve occasional displays of temper, is the indispensable basis of democracy. We wouldn't wish it away, even if we could.
To often we let ourselves forget just how much we have in common. Most of us, here in Gather, share the love of ideas. We need to celebrate that more.
Obviously the current appearance, or material facts, which ARE upsetting to all of us, are something that most of the responders to this article are invested in, yourself included. To be invested in an appearance takes emotion AND it takes visualization.
Everyone here IS visualizing: visualizing negativity.
My suggestion is to take five minutes to "send" [visualize] healing energy to the appearances. Instead of staying stuck, for instance, in the thought-picture/emotional upset of our agents torturing citizens of other countries, or our young people murdering women and children by bombing their living areas,
perhaps SOME people might be interested in stopping that visualization for just a few minutes, and focusing on a "healing picture."
I'm not a guru of anything. Norman Cousins, however, did prove himself a "guru of visualization" by the accomplishment of self-healing through visualization.
One self-healing multiplied by many of us might =group healings, even planetary healings.
Respectfully -
Carolion
I thing you have gone too far. You are the one that has blamed everything on the liberals and democrats and put a political spin on this conversation. Anybody with a half brain knows where the blame really resides.
I am sorry to say, but you are not a very kind or a very smart person.