As noted, the bounds of Congressional oversight are defined and limited by statute, namely, NSA 1947 and IOA 1980. If it doesn’t fall into the mandatory-reporting area and they actually don’t want it on the front page of the NYT, the CIA is wise to not tell Congress, which leaks like a sieve on GOOD days. Sound intel compartmentilization procedure, supported as a positive exemption in NSA 1947. Now if it DID fall into the mandatory-reporting area, that’s a much different story, though prosecutions could be a real political loser if the program was targeted as (perhaps falsely and certainly very sketchily) reported.

The Veep’s job in modern times is largely to do what POTUS tells him to, so if that’s what he was tasked to do, it’s as legit as any properly delegated POTUS authority. Like all the Czars Obama keeps creating.

I greatly appreciate the leaky-Congress argument, but only up to the letter-of-the-law bounds of that mandatory reporting. I see Hoekstra is bitching in the NYT article. Hoekstra himself proved the leaky-Congress theory last year by Tweeting about a hush-hush trip of the House Intel Committee to Iraq, complete to real-time itinerary. I’m sure his fellow committee members on that trip REALLY appreciated that! “Hey, Pete, did ya run out of neon bull’s-eyes?”

I’m for both.

That being said, Congress has a role in overseeing these guys. And by the way, since when is the Veep in the intel chain of command?

The battle between Congress and the executive over intel and war powers has been ongoing for over two centuries, since the founding of the Republic. Congressional Democrats’ whining in this case (and Holder’s handily-timed rumbling about possible new “investigations” of the previous admin) suspiciously coincide with Obama’s recent steep drop in popularity, the reality-stalling of uber-expensive Democratic legislative dreams, the worsening of the unemployment numbers, and Speaker Pelosi’s attempts to rehab her own image after being caught in her own lies. “Look, Buzz, a spaceship!”

That battle betweeen Congress and the executive will NOT stop just because Obama’s in office. It may get worse. It’s part of the big grey area between the Constitutional authorities of the legislative and executive branches.

I have yet to hear any mainstream media Pundit even mention that this particular CIA program had nothing to do with waterboarding or interrigation of detainees.

Indeed, the NYT article spends most of its time and verbiage re-hashing such old flaps, conflating the previous with the current, and guaranteed to stoke up some renewed BDS in the frothing base. But that’s not media bias, of course. Nope. Uh uh. :-)

Not so super-secret after all, sicne the NYT reported on it in 2002. Come on, Nancy. Is your reputaion as a bold-faced liar so bad that you have to get your friends in Congress to make a big stink about this?

I have yet to hear any mainstream media Pundit even mention that this particular CIA program had nothing to do with waterboarding or interrigation of detainees. Its as if the producers at MSNBC are deliberately keeping their viewers in the dark about the details of the program in question, so that people would just assume that the whitehouse lied about waterboarding to Nancy Pelosi.

( – drumroll please – )

A top secret plan to assassinate Al-Qaeda leaders. Oh Noez! America has lost its moral high ground, or something.

A program that never goes operational is categorically NOT “significant anticipated intelligence activity,” per the statute. Not unless and until it is proposed to go operational need it be briefed to Congress. That is indeed a valid judgement call, right up until it is set to go operational. And the one thing that is clear from the NYT article, which is mostly a re-hash of past BS, is that the program never reached that stage.