June 10, 2006 – 12:26 a.m.
A member of Congress hasn’t clubbed another to the floor since 1856, but rancor on the Hill over the NSA may bring us a smackdown yet.
Here is Rep.
“He’s a wimp.”
And here is Simmons, in a keynote luncheon address last week to information-industry executives.
“There are some who politicize intelligence, and she’s one.”
Nyah-nyah.
In his speech, Simmons saved his fire for the CIA, which has yet to put his pet proposals for the exploitation of open information — newspapers, books, scientific journals, and the like — on an equal par with spying.
“Bullshit,” he declared. “Is there any press here? That’s b-u-l-l-s-h-i-t.”
Simmons is what was once called a “man’s man.” He’s a restless fellow with a graying face a waiter would forget, and at 63 still wears on his sleeve his service with Army intelligence in Vietnam, followed by a decade with the CIA.
His inclination to talk like a soldier can be as engaging to some as it is mystifying to others — including the ballroom full of information-industry executives and agency intelligence types that he addressed last week.
A top Army official, he complained, dissed his advocacy of Open Source Intelligence, which has become respectable enough to earn its own acronym, OSINT, but lacks recognition as a distinct discipline.
“I said bullshit — he’s an Army guy, he understands that language,” Simmons told the crowd, which listened respectfully. “He wrote back and said, ‘You’re right, we’re gonna change it.’
“I haven’t heard back from him since then.”
Lofgren wonders why Simmons won’t use his well-honed BS detector to cut through what she calls the Bush administration’s “intentional obfuscation” on the extent of the NSA’s eavesdropping and what it’s doing with the information.
Oversight “is an art, not a science,” she said in an interview, pointing to House Judiciary Chairman
Since DHS doesn’t know what happens to the NSA information it distributes to the hinterlands, where police intelligence units work with few of the restrictions supposedly applied to the feds, “there is potentially the exposure of prosecutions” to invalidation by the courts on constitutional grounds.
“There are serious questions about the constitutionality of using the product of the NSA wiretaps if they result in arrests and prosecutions,” Lofgren said.
Lofgren even walked out of a hearing a while back, frustrated with Simmons’ refusal to hold hearings on the issue.
Eventually, Simmons relented a whit, and invited DHS intelligence chief Charlie Allen to give a closed-door briefing to the subcommittee on what it does with the fruit of NSA wiretaps.
In an open hearing the next day, May 24, Simmons let Lofgren have her question.
And Allen parried it with the deftness of someone who spent nearly a half century at the CIA.
“We receive information from all of the collection agencies of the U.S. intelligence community, and we also receive information of a law enforcement nature,” he said, adding, “We believe that all of the information collected from these other agencies is lawfully obtained.”
End of story.
“I don’t understand why he is covering up for them,” Lofgren said of Simmons.
“Simmons won’t do anything,” she complained at another point.
They’re like that farm couple in the famous Grant Wood painting, American Gothic, who look like they’re forced to stay together, hating every minute.
I asked Simmons if he was the wimp Lofgren made him out to be.
He seemed taken aback.
“The Homeland Security Committee has no jurisdiction over these sensitive sources and methods,” he said. Lofgren, he said, was a politicizer.
A moment later, he still seemed jarred by the question.
“I’m a wimp — I got two Bronze Star medals for being a wimp . . .”
He’ll need more than Bronze Stars to stave off Lofgren, though, who grew up on the dim side of the California Dream, only minutes but a world away from the ocean in South Palo Alto, the daughter of a truck driver and a school-lunch cook.
Lofgren hit the books instead of the surf and won a scholarship to Stanford, graduating in 1970. She forced her way into a car jammed with better-heeled students heading for posh internships in Washington, then made a cold call on the congressman from her district, Rep. Don Edwards. She talked the crusading former FBI agent into giving her a job.
After a detour for a law degree, she was back, holding the seat from which he retired.
Tough. Maybe even as tough as Simmons, the Vietnam vet and ex-CIA agent.
And so they are stuck with each other, a snapshot of a divided, soured Congress.
The panel they share is the subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment.
But there’s no sharing between Simmons and Lofgren, who has been going directly to the Pentagon for details about the Army’s domestic surveillance of protesters. In letters to her, the Pentagon seems sincere about eliminating any spying on free-speechers. But without hearings, who knows?
As for the rest of intelligence oversight, Lofgren and the Democrats are getting their information from the news media.
Now that’s what you call Open Source Intelligence.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.