CIA Gets New Internal Watchdog To Hate
David B. Buckley, you lucky ducky, you just got one of the most thankless jobs in government. Buckley came on board yesterday as the new CIA inspector general, the internal-affairs watchdog for the nation's chief spy agency. If history is any guide, he's in for a world of bureaucratic pain. CIA Director Leon Panetta was […]
David B. Buckley, you lucky ducky, you just got one of the most thankless jobs in government. Buckley came on board yesterday as the new CIA inspector general, the internal-affairs watchdog for the nation's chief spy agency. If history is any guide, he's in for a world of bureaucratic pain.
CIA Director Leon Panetta was all smiles about Buckley in a statement released this afternoon. Not only did he praise the "absolute integrity and commitment to the rule of law" of the ex-Treasury Department inspector and longtime Hill staffer, but he said a "robust, independent" inspector general is "essential to our success."
Sure, he says that now. But for practically Panetta's entire tenure, the agency has been without an inspector general. During that time, the CIA massivelyupped its drone strikes against terrorist targets in Pakistan, an operation that United Nations officials and some U.S. law professors consider legally dubious.
And the reason why there hasn't been a CIA inspector general for the last 14 months is instructive when considering the headaches that Buckley is likely to inherit. The last inspector, John Helgerson, conducted a thorough investigation into the CIA's "enhanced interrogations," finding that agency interrogators waterboarded a top terrorist 183 times in a single month and staged mock executions to get others to talk.
That didn't earn Helgerson any fans in the agency. In 2007, then-director Michael Hayden took the rare step of opening his own inquiry into the inspector-general, thinking Helgerson had a vendetta against the interrogators and overstepped his bounds by looking into the legality of torture. The Project on Government Oversight called it an "unusual and highly troubling move." Ultimately, Hayden's inquiry didn't push Helgerson out: he retired on his own in February 2009. But it was one of several reasons why Helgerson's report wasn't released to the public until a judge demanded it in August 2009, some five years after its completion.
So good luck to Buckley. He's got one early institutional advantage: from 2005 to 2007, he was the Democratic staff director on the House intelligence committee. While Hill staffers haven't had good fortunes at the CIA -- ex-Director Porter Goss's underlings, for instance -- the committee's top lawyer at the time was Jeremy Bash, who's now Panetta's chief of staff. Still, unless he wants to test Panetta's commitment to a "robust, independent" watchdog, he may not want to look too closely at those drones.
Photo: CIA
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Danger Room senior reporter Spencer Ackerman recently won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Reporting in Digital Media.
TopicsCIAdronesLeon PanettaSpies, Secrecy and Surveillance