Repubs See Signs Pentagon evading Oversight on Intel (gee,yathink?)

[katty]

continued at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/politics/29intel.html?ex=1128657600&en=f138cba2c0bd1443&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Republicans See Signs That Pentagon Is Evading Oversight

By DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: September 29, 2005
WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 - Republican members of Congress say there are signs that the Defense Department may be carrying out new intelligence activities through programs intended to escape oversight from Congress and the new director of national intelligence.

The warnings are an unusually public signal of some Republican lawmakers' concern about overreaching by the Pentagon, where top officials have been jockeying with the new intelligence chief, John D. Negroponte, for primacy in intelligence operations. The lawmakers said they believed that some intelligence activities, involving possible propaganda efforts and highly technological initiatives, might be masked as so-called special access programs, the details of which are highly classified.

"We see indications that the D.O.D. is trying to create parallel functions to what is going on in intelligence, but is calling it something else," Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview.

[rodeodance]

1. rather late on the draw!