Julian Sanchez at Cato with some
bitter but worthwhile examples of how checks and balances
really work when it comes to congressional oversight on executive
action, especially when “national security” is (supposedly)
involved:

Blogger Mike Masnick recently came across a series
of talking points that the National Security Agency
provided its putative “overseers” on the congressional intelligence
committees back when it first became known that President George W.
Bush had authorized an unlawful warrantless surveillance
program.  (These talking points have apparently been publicly
available for some time, but have escaped attention.)

Some pieces of NSA’s script for its legislative vassals are
merely humorous. For instance:

I have personally met the dedicated men and women of
the NSA. The country owes them an enormous debt of gratitude for
their superb efforts to keep us all secure.

One perk of this sort of ventriloquism, I suppose, is that you
can dispense entirely with modesty when heaping praise on
yourself.

Other points on the list, however, appear to be outright
falsehoods.  For instance:

I can say that the Program must continue. It has
detected terrorist plots that could have resulted in death or
injury to Americans both at home and abroad.

As best we can tell from the unclassified version of the
Inspectors General’s Report
on the President’s Surveillance Program, this is not
true.  Rather, while it appears to have
had somevalue, the program “generally played a
limited role in the FBI’s overall counterterrorism effort,” and
“was rarely the sole basis for an intelligence success.” On the
whole, it “was not of greater value than other sources of
intelligence,” and “most [intelligence] officials had difficulty
citing specific instances where [the program] had directly
contributed to counterterrorism successes.” …..

Returning to the talking points, there’s this:

The Program is not “data mining”; it targets only
international communications closely connected to al Qai’da or an
affiliated group.

Two deceptions for the price of one! As we now know, the
original “Stellar Wind” program did
indeed involve data mining as well as
warrantless wiretapping. Once the program was revealed, however,
intelligence officials retroactively decided to make up something
called the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” as a label for only the
warrantless wiretapping component of the program. Then, even though
the NSA surveillance program did involve data
mining, they could claim that the “Terrorist Surveillance
Program” didn’t use data mining, because they’d
defined it (without telling anyone) as the non-data-mining parts of
the real larger program….

Also, as the Inspectors General concluded, “most [of the
surveillance program’s] leads were determined not to have any
connection to terrorism.” 

Reason
on the NSA.

I wrote for Reason all the way back in 1992 on
Congress’ general tendency to become ideological
prisoners of what they tend to hear from lobbyists of all
sorts; and the most dangerous lobby in Washington is, as always,
the government itself.