Why Sunlight Was Necessary To Improve National Security

Posting will be light today and tomorrow as I will be traveling on business, but I wanted to point out an important story in Businessweek. Progressives have long been savaged for their attempts to reform intelligence and defense spending, and force a debate on those issues in general. One specific vote that has come up before and now come up recently was a proposal in the 1990s to declassify some of our intelligence spending. Some progressives voted for it - and have been attacked for it. But after reading the Businessweek piece, it becomes clear they were very right to try to expose some of the flagrant abuse that happens in those bills that are crafted in secret.

The piece details some of the abusive earmarks now-convicted Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) was able to put into the secret intelligence budget. It goes on to note that:

"The top-secret 'black' annex to the annual intelligence-spending bill is kept in a secure room. Only a few staffers are allowed to work on it. Even the members of Congress who vote it into law aren't allowed to read the bill unless they are deemed to have a "need to know," a status limited to a few dozen who oversee the Pentagon and spy agencies. Legislators with access to the classified portion of the bill can earmark spending for favored projects and technologies, say multiple sources. 'These guys can basically give money to whomever their heart desires, and we have no idea who's getting the money,' says Keith Ashdown, vice-president of the conservative watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense...In the hush-hush intelligence world, unearthing earmarks is all but impossible. But classified pork 'is just as wrong as any other earmark,' says Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). 'In fact, it deserves extra scrutiny now because Duke Cunningham was able to perpetrate some of his egregious crimes through exactly that vehicle.'"

That's exactly right - and the courageous lawmakers who were trying to get some sunlight into the process were trying to prevent exactly these kinds of abuses that were diverting money from critical intelligence priorities and putting it into pork.

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