[Infowarrior] - Obama upends WH intel panel

[Richard Forno]

Obama upends intel panel
By: Josh Gerstein
August 15, 2013 05:52 PM EDT
http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=4CF7FB3A-9B6C-4399-B24B-6A7018563F43

The White House dismissed the bulk of President Barack Obama’s premier panel of outside intelligence advisers earlier this year, leaving the blue-ribbon commission largely vacant as the public furor built over the National Security Agency’s widespread tracking of Americans’ telephone calls.

The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board stood 14 members strong through 2012, but the White House website was recently updated to show the panel’s roster shrinking to just four people.

In the past four years, the high-powered group has waded into the implications of WikiLeaks for intelligence sharing, and urged retooling of America’s spy agencies as the United States withdraws from big wars abroad.

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Some analysts say the panel would have been an obvious choice to dig into the profound questions and concerns contractor Edward Snowden raised by leaking details about the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata and internet traffic.

But the board’s thin ranks at present — and the remaining members’ close ties to Obama — may have fueled the decision the president announced last week to turn instead to a brand new and still unnamed body of outside experts to delve into the privacy issues raised by surveillance in the “Big Data” age.

Two PIAB members confirmed to POLITICO this week that they were asked to leave the longstanding panel as part of a broader reshuffle.

“They kicked me off,” said former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.). “I was on it a long time under Bush and under Obama. They wanted to make some changes.”

“I don’t know anything about whether they’ve brought in new members. They thanked me and that’s about all I know,” added Hamilton, widely known for his service as vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission.

The 82-year-old former congressman — who has headed Indiana University’s Center for Congress since 2010 — said he wasn’t upset about being booted from the PIAB, although he remains in the dark about precisely why he was shown the door.

Philip Zelikow, who served as executive director of the 9/11 Commission and later as a top aide to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, was also asked recently to step off the PIAB.

“I’ve resigned from the Board, one of ten of the fourteen earlier members who have done so,” Zelikow said via email. “Four of the earlier members have remained, pending a reconstitution of the Board at some point for the balance of the President’s second term. The White House website displays the current situation, pending that.”

A White House spokeswoman confirmed Thursday that a group of panel members recently concluded their service.

”A number of PIAB members have recently departed their positions and in staffing the Board, we look carefully at the President’s needs and ensure that the group is comprised of individuals with the skills and expertise to meet those needs,” National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden told POLITICO via e-mail.

It’s unclear precisely when the panel was slimmed down, but members’ biographies suggest the departures took place since early May.

PIAB watchers and former intelligence officials said they were taken aback by the scope of the exodus from the board.

“I’m sort of surprised because I follow this very closely. … Four people down from 14 — I can see why this is raising your eyebrows,” said Michael Desch, head of Notre Dame’s political science department and co-author of “Privileged and Confidential: The Secret History of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.”

“If this is as it appears, this is pretty remarkable,” Desch said. “The PIAB doesn’t look fully staffed. … This does look strange.”

A couple of the recent departures from the board came because its members were tapped for full-time jobs in the administration — moves that essentially make it impossible to remain part of a body supposed to provide outside advice.

Panel co-chairman Chuck Hagel was nominated in January as defense secretary and sworn in the following month. Venture capitalist and former lobbyist Tom Wheeler joined the board in 2011, but was tapped by Obama in May 2013 to head the Federal Communications Commission.

And Hagel’s co-chairman and fellow former senator, David Boren, said he asked to leave the panel early this year “because of the demands of my work as president of the University of Oklahoma. My request to the president was made shortly after the first of the year,” Boren said in a statement responding to a query from POLITICO.

Also exiting the board in recent months, according to the White House website: former Securities and Exchange Commission member Roel Campos, international lawyer and philanthropist Rita Hauser, stealth technology pioneer and former Undersecretary of Defense Paul Kaminski, Stimson Center CEO Ellen Laipson, and retired Air Force Gen. Lester Lyles.

The panel itself is currently without a chairman.

The current vacancies on the PIAB — which can include up to 16 members — remain as Obama aides have scrambled in recent days to set up the new, surveillance-and-technology “review group” the president announced Friday. The talk of a new board to dig into intelligence issues quickly raised questions in some quarters about duplication of effort.

“There are already four boards that have jurisdiction here,” House Intelligence Committee member Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Tuesday on MSNBC. “So, the question is what will the mission be here?”

Schiff said he presumes the new review group will have more technology experts than some of the existing panels, but there still could be overlap.

“I think these boards are going to be tripping over each other if they’re not defined in what their scope will be,” the congressman said.

The White House said the new panel has a special, single purpose.

“The PIAB is a standing body, while the Review Group that the President announced last week is being created for a specific task and is not intended to be a permanent advisory element after it has delivered its findings and recommendations,” Hayden said. “Since they  began, we have engaged with the PIAB to hear their views on the recent disclosures.”

Some analysts noted that the Obama administration struggled for almost three years to find a full slate of nominees for the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board mandated by Congress in 2008. It has come up to full speed in only the past few months after confirmation in May of its chairman, David Medine.

The new, ground-up effort Obama announced last week may stem in part from the fact that the current PIAB membership is unlikely to be viewed as robustly independent of the president and his advisers.

Two of the intelligence board’s current four members are former senior officials in Obama’s White House: Harvard law professor Daniel Meltzer was the No. 2 lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office during the president’s first year and a half in office, and Mona Sutphen was Obama’s deputy chief of staff for policy through the beginning of 2011.

The remaining two members are former CIA Deputy Director Jami Miscik and former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig.

All four did not respond to messages seeking comment for this story.

Also raising questions about the intelligence board’s independence in its current formulation: The three Obama-appointed members who also served on the panel during the George W. Bush administration — Hamilton, Hauser and Zelikow — are all among those cast off in recent months.

While the PIAB’s ranks have been dramatically depleted in recent months, the board is supposed to pick up one new member soon.

After passing over Central Intelligence Agency Deputy Director Michael Morell for the top CIA job earlier this year, Obama announced in June that he planned to name Morell to the PIAB once he left government. Morell’s last day at Langley came last week and, according to the White House, he’s expected to join the board this fall.

“Other members may be added,” Hayden said Thursday. She did not say when or whether the board is expected to expand to its previous size.

The PIAB, formerly known as the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (pronounced “PIFF-ee-ab”), dates back to the Kennedy administration. President Richard Nixon drew criticism for appointing wealthy political supporters such as Alfred Bloomingdale to the prestigious panel. Under Ford, it drew attention for a “Team B” exercise in which conservatives on the board concluded that the intelligence community was vastly understating the Soviet threat.

President Jimmy Carter had enough of those kinds of headlines and mothballed the board during his term. President Ronald Reagan carried out a downsizing of the panel in 1985 that bears some similarity to what’s happened in recent months.

”The big PFIAB flap is the famous Halloween massacre during the Reagan administration, when it went from 21 to eight,” Desch said. “That was a huge kerfuffle.”

Over the years, the panel has usually kept a low profile, but the tasks they are handed and the group’s ensuing reports have sometimes been discussed publicly.

After the so-called underwear bomber attempted to blow up a U.S. airliner bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, Obama tasked the PFIAB with examining some of the intelligence failures that led to the would-be bomber boarding the plane.

Obama later said he had asked the panel to “examine the longer-term challenge of sifting through vast universes of intelligence and data in our information age” — a mandate that sounds at least related to the new working group’s focus on big data.

A White House statement in 2010 on the massive leak to WikiLeaks said the PIAB would “take an independent look at the means by which the Executive Branch as a whole shares and protects classified information.”

Obama also asked the panel to assess how the Director of National Intelligence post created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was working. However, the board’s most influential work under Obama may have been a recent report concluding that an intense focus on terrorism and Al Qaeda had distracted U.S. intelligence agencies from obtaining key information about political and military challenges in places like China and the Middle East.

Obama unveiled his co-chairs for the PIAB, Boren and Hagel, in front of reporters and cameras in the White House’s Cabinet Room in October 2009, predicting that the two former senators would prove to be “an invaluable resource” as the administration crafted its intelligence policies.

The president also pledged more transparency about the board’s activities.

“We are off to a good start with this meeting — by welcoming the press, which past advisory boards have rarely done. That’s a reflection of my administration’s commitment to transparency and open government — even, when appropriate, on matters of national security and intelligence,” Obama said.

That commitment to transparency has sometimes seemed to waver.

In 2011, the White House ignored questions from the Los Angeles Times about the membership of the oversight subpanel, known as the IOB.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the membership list and heard nothing for seven months. A week after filing a lawsuit to enforce the request, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed that Boren, Hagel and Lyles were serving on the oversight subcommittee.

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