Activities of the Senate Intelligence Committee, 1976-2009
The Senate Intelligence Committee has posted a collection of its biennial public reports on the Committee’s activities, from the first report in 1976 to the latest in 2009, providing a retrospective survey of intelligence controversies past and present.
“The committee has unintentionally produced a profoundly biased political document,” complained the late Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan in a statement appended to the very first report (pdf) in 1976. “The committee reports on a world in which very simply, the values which the United States hopefully stands for do not seem to be threatened by any activity save the activities of the U.S. Government…. Nowhere is the Committee for State Security of the Soviet Union (the KGB) even alluded to. There is a pattern of avoidance of the reality of totalitarian threat throughout this document.”
“I believe that my colleague misses the point,” replied Sen. Joseph Biden in the same 1976 report. “At the heart of what is wrong with the intelligence community and what indeed has caused many of the abuses we have seen is the fact that most officials of the intelligence community do not know what they should and should not be doing…. We will not solve that problem by restating the obvious, that the Soviets operate a very effective intelligence service, unfettered by the restrictions of a vibrant constitution.”
A lack of sustained federal funding, deteriorating research infrastructure and networks, restrictive immigration policies, and waning international collaboration are driving this erosion into a full-scale “American Brain Drain.”
With 2000 nuclear weapons on alert, far more powerful than the first bomb tested in the Jornada Del Muerto during the Trinity Test 80 years ago, our world has been fundamentally altered.
As the United States continues nuclear modernization on all legs of its nuclear triad through the creation of new variants of warheads, missiles, and delivery platforms, examining the effects of nuclear weapons production on the public is ever more pressing.
“The first rule of government transformation is: there are a lot of rules. And there should be-ish. But we don’t need to wait for permission to rewrite them. Let’s go fix and build some things and show how it’s done.”