Thursday, June 10, 2010
If there’s one agency in the federal government whose secretive nature cries out for internal oversight, it’s the CIA. And yet it is this very same spy operation that has gone without an inspector general for more than a year.
Former CIA watchdogs and current members of Congress have grown concerned over President Barack Obama’s failure to appoint an IG for the CIA. “I am disturbed that it has not been filled up to this point,” Fred Hitz, who served as the CIA inspector general for eight years until 1998, told the Associated Press. “I am wondering what is going on.”
The ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California and Republican Kit Bond of Missouri, wrote to the White House urging the president to fill the position. Bond admitted to a “real sense of frustration” when asked about the subject.
Deputy IG Patricia A. Lewis has been filling in for the CIA’s inspector post since the previous inspector general, John Helgerson, left office in March 2009. Helgerson wasn’t afraid to investigate some of the CIA’s most controversial activities under the Bush administration, including its use of secret “black site” prisons to hold suspected terrorists and the torturing of detainees.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
CIA Goes 14 Months Without Internal Watchdog (by Adam Goldman, Associated Press)
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