by Ritt Goldstein
Copyright June 2009
Reprinted from Wiener Zeitung

“The President's Intelligence Advisory Board and Intelligence Oversight Board (PIAB) provides advice to the President concerning the quality and adequacy of intelligence collection, counterintelligence, and other intelligence activities. The PIAB, through its Intelligence Oversight Board, also advises the President on the legality of foreign intelligence activities”, according to the White House website.

But while the US's Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and other relevant intelligence executives are required by executive order to report regularly to the Board, it currently exists without any members. During a brief conversation with Wiener Zeitung, PIAB counsel Homer Pointer reluctantly confirmed the Board’s condition.

Notably, a committee of the PIAB is the IOB, the Intelligence Oversight Board. The IOB was formed in 1976 by President Gerald Ford following revelations of abuses by US intelligence agencies, with these including activities such as assassinations and domestic spying. The intelligence agency problems surfaced during hearings by the “United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities”, more commonly called the “Church Committee”, after its Chairman, Senator Frank Church.

A number of US intelligence reforms followed in the wake of the Church Committee’s scathing reports.

The PIAB was created in its present form by executive order during February 2008, with its latest incarnation following in the aftermath of the Bush administration's widely publicized intelligence failures. President Dwight Eisenhower founded the PIAB's predecessor in 1956, with President Bush's 2008 order dropping the word "Foreign" from the Board's name. The stated rationale for the PIAB’s recent re-creation was to provide America’s executive branch with “access to accurate, insightful, objective, and timely information concerning the capabilities, intentions, and activities of foreign powers”, the current state of world affairs highlighting some of the problems its vacancies pose.

Mel Goodman, a senior fellow with the Center for International Policy (a Washington area think-tank) and adjunct professor of International Relations with Johns Hopkins University, took a dim view upon the Board’s vacancies. “I interpret this as President Obama knowing an insufficient amount about the intelligence community, and not caring as much as he should about the intelligence community, and not wanting a bothersome group below bringing him information that he doesn’t want to hear about the intelligence community”, he told Wiener Zeitung. But others see this as merely ‘government as usual’.

“New administrations are notoriously slow to fill out all the positions”, noted Charles Knight, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives of The Commonwealth Institute, another think-tank located in Boston’s Cambridge area.

This January, former DNI J. Michael McConnell was named in media reports as tapped by then President-elect Obama for Board service. But at present, the Board yet remains vacant, existing as little more than an empty shell.