PFIAB and OVP

I’d like to point out a teeny detail in the report that Henry Waxman cites as his source that OVP isn’t providing ISOO with information about OVP’s classification and declassification activities:

PFIAB and OVP did not report data through the SF 311 to ISOO this year. This report, therefore, does not include any data from these two entities.

It was not just OVP that blew off ISOO in 2003. It was also PFIAB.

PFIAB is the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a group of big-wigs providing outside oversight into our intelligence activities:

The President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) provides advice   to the President concerning the quality and adequacy of intelligence   collection, of analysis and estimates, of counterintelligence, and of other intelligence   activities. The PFIAB, through its Intelligence Oversight  Board, also advises the President on the legality of foreign intelligence activities.

In 2003, the board included such luminaries as:

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  1. albert fall says:

    From Joseph Conrad, â€Heart of Darkness,†describing Kurtz:

    â€I had to deal with a being to whom I could not appeal in the name of anything high or low. I had … to invoke him — himself — his own exalted and incredible degradation. There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth. Confound the man! he had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air.â€

  2. prostratedragon says:

    My, as always EW with the telling detail!

    Looks from google as if PFIAB was reporting something duly in 2000 and 2001, but spottily if at all since. Secrecy News Blog has a fresh article about the Cheney-ISOO wars. This article from last year has a few more SNB links, which do indeed make one wonder whose â€IAB†(and for that matter DHS) that is.

  3. prostratedragon says:

    From my second link above:

    Historically, the OVP has â€not reported quantitatively significant data,†according to ISOO. So the Vice President’s current defiance of the executive order does not greatly distort the overall presentation of classification activity.

    And historically average single-family house prices in this country do not decline on an annual basis, to take another currently bitter example. The whole rationale for monitoring concerns the possibility that history might be made on one’s watch.

  4. earlofhuntingdon says:

    Scowcroft was already among only a handful of PFIAB members who had any national security experience. It’s hard to imagine a PFIAB with fewer people that have experience in what they are charged with advising the president about. I mean, just how many credit card billionaires can you fit on the head of a pin?

  5. Flamethrower says:

    Pete Wilson? Jeezus Friggin’ You-know-what.

    No wonder this thing cratered into the sand.

  6. AZ Matt says:

    From War & Piece by Laura Rozen-

    June 24, 2007
    A veteran newspaper editor friend has some sharp observations about the Post Cheney piece:

    http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/006337.html

    â€A careful reading of the story of Cheney’s coup against a feeble executive reveals that paragraphs 7 through 10 were written and inserted in haste by a powerful editorial hand. The banging of colliding metaphors in an otherwise carefully written piece is evidence of last-minute interpolations by a bad editor whom no one has the power to rewrite.â€

  7. Watson says:

    Has there been a US official more powerful than Cheney?

    He appears to combine and surpass the methods of Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover.

  8. alabama says:

    Bush is a creature of bloodlust and a torture-freak, and Cheney is a power-freak who knows how to please the Prince (and I’ve seen no sign that Cheney gets high on torture). Gonzales, of course, did the very same thing in Texas. No wonder Cheney and Gonzales prosper in the face of every revelation!

    Someday, not soon, we will read the graphic testimony of those who have seen Bush ventilate and gratify his bloodlust with their own eyes and ears (talking directly to torturers on the telephone, for example). Not soon, because witnesses are also voyeurs–a perversion to be ashamed of.

    We traded in a brilliant creature of lust (Clinton) for a depraved creature of bloodlust (Bush), and the record was there for all of us to see. It’s something to think about for a while….

  9. Anonymous says:

    Intended composition of PFIAB in 2005, for comparison’s sake:

    Stephen Friedman, of New York
    James L. Barksdale of Mississippi
    Arthur B. Culvahouse of Virginia
    William O. DeWitt, Jr. of Ohio
    Admiral James O. Ellis (Ret.) of Georgia
    Donald L. Evans of Texas
    Martin Faga of Virginia
    Lee Hamilton of Indiana
    Ray Hunt of Texas
    David E. Jeremiah of Virginia
    John L. Morrison of Minnesota
    Elizabeth Pate-Cornell of California
    Stefanie R. Osburn, of Virginia

    Smells of Baker; haven’t checked to see whether these were all confirmed.

  10. morpheus says:

    Well- the Hunt Brothers bagged the Oak Valley project in Calimesa, California in 1990 on a closed bid with the RTC (Resolution Trust Company) to help bail out Savings and Loan scandel debt. They have secured over 25 million dollars from Congressman Jerry Lewis’s ’earmarks’ for Yucaipa Valley Water District creating ’wetlands’ on the property- Ten years later…no wetlands and Jerry is still not in jail???