For the first time in six years, the Government Accountability Office has been asked by a congressional intelligence committee to perform an intelligence oversight-related function.

On March 11, Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), an intelligence subcommittee chairwoman, called upon the GAO to review security clearance processes in the intelligence community and to examine the DNI’s pilot project on security clearance reform.

The new assignment potentially represents a breakthrough in the longstanding stalemate over GAO’s role in intelligence oversight. Opposition to GAO oversight in the intelligence community combined with resistance from the congressional committee leadership have effectively sidelined GAO since the intelligence committees submitted their last intelligence-related request to GAO in 2002.

Proponents of an increased intelligence oversight role for GAO (including FAS [pdf] and GAO itself [pdf]) have argued that not only does GAO possess relevant expertise, but that by sharing the oversight burden GAO can free the intelligence committees to focus on more specialized oversight functions.

The new GAO assignment was described in a March 12 news release from Rep. Eshoo.

It was also noted by me in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post on “Extending the GAO’s Reach,” March 31.

The potential role of the GAO in intelligence oversight was addressed in a February 29 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chaired by Senator Daniel Akaka.

The likely responses of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey to Iranian acquisition of a nuclear weapon were considered in a new staff report (pdf) from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“How are these three countries responding today to the Iranian nuclear program? How would Riyadh, Cairo, and Ankara respond if Tehran were to cross the nuclear threshold and acquire nuclear weapons? Would they pursue nuclear weapons of their own? What factors would influence their decisions? What can the U.S. do now and over the coming years to discourage these countries from pursuing a nuclear weapon of their own?”

“Based on 5 months of research and interviews with hundreds of officials and scholars in the United States and seven Middle Eastern countries, this report attempts to answer these questions.”

See “Chain Reaction: Avoiding a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee print, February 2008.

“Far too often, court-approved secrecy agreements hide vital public health and safety information from the American public, putting lives at stake,” observed Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI).

“The secrecy agreements even prevent government officials or consumer groups from learning about and protecting the public from defective and dangerous products.”

“Legislation that I’ve introduced… seeks to restore the appropriate balance between secrecy and openness. Under our bill, the proponent of a protective order must demonstrate to the judge’s satisfaction that the order would not restrict the disclosure of information relevant to public health and safety hazards.”

Sen. Kohl’s proposed remedy, the Sunshine in Litigation Act, was the subject of a recent Senate hearing that has just been published. See “The Sunshine in Litigation Act: Does Court Secrecy Undermine Public Health and Safety?” (pdf), Senate Judiciary Committee, December 11, 2007.

In what might seem like an April Fool’s Day indulgence but isn’t, the New York Times today probed further into the emblems that circulate officially or unofficially around classified Defense Department programs.

The emblems and patches, gathered by author Trevor Paglen, “reveal a bizarre mix of high and low culture where Latin and Greek mottos frame images of spooky demons and sexy warriors, of dragons dropping bombs and skunks firing laser beams.” Several of them are featured in a Times graphic supplement.

See “Inside the Black Budget” by William J. Broad, New York Times, April 1.

The U.S. Marine Corps has agreed to restore public access to unclassified doctrinal documents on its web site.

The official Marine Corps doctrine web site remains inaccessible. But in response to a Federation of American Scientists request (pdf) under the Freedom of Information Act, the Marine Corps said that all releasable contents would soon be made publicly available through the Publications directory of the main USMC web site.

“Publications are actively being loaded with the goal of having all distribution A publications (approved for public release) loaded onto this site as soon as possible,” wrote Captain E.C. Snyder on March 19.

The move follows a similar action by the Army’s Reimer Digital Library last month. The Army had barred public access to its unclassified holdings, but then relented in response to a Freedom of Information Act action by the Federation of American Scientists.

A selection of U.S. Marine Corps documents on intelligence and security doctrine may be found on the FAS web site.

Last month the Director of National Intelligence issued a new Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) on “Technical Surveillance Countermeasures” (pdf) (TSCM).

TSCM “represents the convergence of two distinct disciplines — counterintelligence and security countermeasures,” the directive explained. Its purpose is “to detect and nullify a wide variety of technologies used to gain unauthorized access to classified national security information, restricted data, or otherwise sensitive information.”

The directive was released (in a fuzzy, not very well scanned copy) by the ODNI Freedom of Information Act office.

See “Technical Surveillance Countermeasures,” ICD 702, February 18, 2008.

To its credit, the Defense Intelligence Agency promptly withdrew an official DIA history that mistakenly described the 1981 Israeli attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in the 1980s as an attack on Iran. As soon as the error became public, DIA replaced the entire document with an updated account.

In an email message yesterday to Israeli author Gideon Remez, who discovered the error, DIA webmaster David Baird wrote: “You are correct that the historical fact is wrong. We did not realize it until you pointed it out. We are taking steps to correct it.”

By yesterday afternoon, the 1996 “Defense Intelligence Agency: A Brief History” (pdf), which contained the error, had been replaced on the DIA web site by a 2007 “History of the Defense Intelligence Agency” (pdf). Both documents can be found on the FAS web site.

Noteworthy new reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following (all pdf).

“Enlargement Issues at NATO’s Bucharest Summit,” March 12, 2008.

“The NATO Summit at Bucharest, 2008,” March 24, 2008.

“Selected Federal Homeland Security Assistance Programs: A Summary,” updated January 31, 2008.

“Selected Laws Governing the Disclosure of Customer Phone Records by Telecommunications Carriers,” March 10, 2008.

Updated below

In a memorable TV interview with former Secretary of State James Baker, prankster “Ali G” (Sasha Baron Cohen) wondered about the possibility of confusing “Iran” and “Iraq.”

“Do you think it would be a good idea if one of them changed their name to make it very different sounding from the other one?” he asked Secretary Baker.

“Ain’t there a real danger that someone give like a message over the radio to one of them fighter pilots whatever saying bomb ‘Ira…’ and the geezer don’t hear it properly and bomb Iran rather than Iraq?”

“No danger,” Secretary Baker gamely replied.

In an official history (pdf), however, the Defense Intelligence Agency really has confused Iran and Iraq.

Among the “world crises” that transpired during the 1980s, the DIA history cites “an Israeli F-16 raid to destroy an Iranian nuclear reactor.” See “Defense Intelligence Agency: A Brief History” at page 14. (The document, originally published on the DIA web site here, has now been replaced. See update below.)

But there never was an Israeli attack on an Iranian nuclear reactor.

Rather, “The description appears to match Israel’s raid on Iraq’s [Osirak] nuclear reactor” in 1981, observed Gideon Remez, an Israeli scholar who is co-author of the recent book Foxbats Over Dimona (Yale, 2007).

“Today’s preoccupation with Iran’s nuclear program seems to have been projected onto the events of 27 years ago,” Mr. Remez suggested this week in an email message to DIA public affairs.

“If that is indeed the case, I’d recommend a correction,” he wrote.

Update: The DIA webmaster acknowledged the error in an email message to Gideon Remez today:

Thank you for your inquiry. You are correct that the historical fact is wrong. We did not realize it until you pointed it out. We are taking steps to correct it.

In fact, the document on the DIA website has already been modified and corrected. The uncorrected original is still available here.

Close examination of several recent volumes of the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series has turned up errors and questionable editorial judgments.

The record of conversations between Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-lai and Henry Kissinger that was published in FRUS last month failed to include what is arguably among the more sensitive and significant discussions that they held, regarding Kissinger’s offer to establish a US-China “hotline,” development of contingency plans for accidental or unauthorized launch of nuclear-armed missiles, and provision of warning information in the event of Soviet moves against China. That discussion, which does not appear in FRUS, was memorialized in this document (pdf).

Fortunately, this memorandum and many more of comparable significance were collected and published by William Burr of the National Security Archive in his 1999 volume “The Kissinger Transcripts.”

In another surprising editorial lapse (in Nixon FRUS volume XXIX on Eastern Europe, document 77, page 203, footnote 2), the editors state that “On January 17 [1969] student Jan Palach set himself on fire in the center of Prague to protest the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia.”

“Anyone who knows this subject is aware that Palach immolated himself on the 16th of January, not the 17th,” said Mark Kramer, editor of the Journal of Cold War Studies at Harvard. “This date is very well known in Czech society, and no one would confuse it with the 17th.”

Interestingly, while the State Department got this date wrong, Wikipedia got it right.

Needless to say, everyone makes errors. The FRUS series remains a crucial resource for historical understanding, even with the occasional error. And a robust FRUS publication schedule with some errors is vastly preferable to a gridlocked schedule with no errors. Still, there may be room for improvement in the editorial process.

The Homeland Security Council (HSC), a White House agency that advises the President on homeland security policy, has become one of the darkest corners of the U.S. Government.

The Council was established by President Bush shortly after September 11, 2001 and it was chartered as an agency within the Executive Office of the President in the Homeland Security Act of 2002.

“Thereafter, the HSC disappeared from the public record,” a new report from the Congressional Research Service (pdf) noticed.

In particular, according to CRS: The Homeland Security Council “does not appear to have complied with requirements for Federal Register publication of such basic information as descriptions of its central organization.”

It has never disclosed “where, from whom, and how the public may obtain information about it.”  Nor has it published the required “rules of procedure, substantive rules of general applicability, and statements of general policy.”

Moreover, “No profile of, or descriptive information regarding, the HSC or its members and staff has appeared, to date, in the annual editions of the United States Government Manual.”

This peculiar state of affairs was described by Harold C. Relyea of the Congressional Research Service in “Organizing for Homeland Security: The Homeland Security Council Reconsidered,” March 19, 2008.

Last week, President Bush appointed assistant attorney general Kenneth L. Wainstein to be homeland security adviser and chair of the Homeland Security Council, succeeding Frances F. Townsend.

Legislation pending in the Russian Duma [parliament] would impose new Russian government controls on online content, according to an analysis of Russian news reports from the DNI Open Source Center.

Boris Gryzlov, speaker of the Duma, was quoted as saying:  “We know that the Internet is all too often used as an instrument for destabilization and for terrorism. That kind of use of the Internet must be stopped.”

“Bloggers expressed varying degrees of alarm over the potential danger the law would pose to their community, with some alleging [that a sponsor of the legislation] is trying to use the law to silence his opponents and dismissing the law as unlikely to be passed,” according to the OSC report.

See “Russia–Increased Attempts to Regulate Internet,” DNI Open Source Center, March 24, 2008.