True, but the people who might be withholding sensitive information in our fictitious “President wants to know” scenarios are almost certainly career bureaucrats - the directors of the CIA, NSA and NRO, for example.
The point still stands that there must be civilian oversight, though - which means the POTUS, since the Senate Intelligence Committee’s proceedings are public record.
Nope. If you check their website, you’ll see that the vast majority of their meetings are closed to the public.
The Director of the CIA (who is appointed by the POTUS, and approved by the Senate) is answerable to the Director of National intelligence (another POTUS appointee confirmed by the Senate).
I don’t see them denying info to the President if he really wants it. YMMV
Well, you really don’t know what I know.
That being said, I presume you do have a way to support all of the various supposed contentions you’ve made, other than your knowledge of how “actual people actually act”?
:rolleyes:
In any event, you must be aware that no “cite” could be provided on a public message board, even if such a thing existed.
All I can tell you is, for the military at least, the doctrine of civilian oversight is well-established, along with the whole “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” oath that is taken by military personnel.
Additionally:
The National Security Advisor is a POTUS appointee (with Congressional approval).
The Director of the National Reconnaissance Office is appointed by the Secretary of Defence (without Congressional approval required), and the Secretary of Defence is another POTUS appointee (requiring Congressional approval).
These positions don’t fit my definition of a “career bureaucrat” either.
All of these folks have their jobs because of the President, and may be replaced by the next Administration.
I don’t think that any of them will withhold info because they think that the President “doesn’t need to know”.
They might keep the minutia to a minimum, but I don’t see that as the same thing.
That was my point (the second part) - that there must be civilian oversight, in the person of the POTUS, which means the POTUS has to know.
the DNI has only been around since 2003 ('04?) so I didn’t really count that. Anyway, while the DIA/DCIA may technically answer to the President, how many have actually been fired, even by Presidents that didn’t appoint them? Two? Three?
For those who think the President doesn’t know the “truth” - who do you think does? Does the Director of National Intelligence? The Director of the CIA? The Deputy Director? The Associate Deputy Director? At what level is there somebody who knows the real deal and is deciding what he can safely tell his boss?
From here: Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency - Wikipedia , it would appear that only the first and the fourteenth survived long under a different President.
My other posts were an attempt to point out that I don’t think the positions mentioned so far are “career bureaucrats”, because of the nature of serving at the President’s pleasure.
I think we are in agreement about the ability of the POTUS to find out what he wants to know, however.
The Supreme World Council of the Illuminati.
Don’t you know anything?
I would still call them “career bureaucrats”, I just wouldn’t call them “career civil servants”.
And yes, we are.
In addition, how do all these nefarious secret activities go on? Who approves their budgets? How do supplies get to them? Who assigns additional personnel? What are their supervisors doing while all this is going on? Where are the station chiefs? The other intelligence agencies? The opposition intelligence agencies? Is the whole world including the enemy in a conspiracy to keep secrets secret?
Beyond a certain minimum, it’s impossible in any hierarchy to keep those above you from noticing your activities. They have effects and the effects have effects. The people who are professionally employed to notice effects will spot them. And they are also professional enough to tell their bosses.
It’s one thing to keep secrets from the public. It’s another to have 17 intelligence agencies and think that at least one of them won’t be able and willing to tell the president anything.
This is precisely what I was thinking of, when I originally posted this topic. Who can say who knows what? The director can tell the president all he knows, but is that all there is to know?
"Among the traditional items that are specifically withheld from the President are names and identifying details of sources who are still in situ. One example would be a colonel in the Polish General Staff who had access to considerable information about Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces and plans in the late 70s and (IIRC) the early 80s. Every detail of his identity, or even the existence of an inside leak, had to be kept secret, lest a crackdown ensue.
President Carter has mentioned this specific exclusion in more than one interview. Bob Woodward (of Watergate fame) mentioned it in Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987 [You may be able to find the specific story of the Polish colonel online. The Washingtom Post excepted it in: Woodward, Bob, and Michael Dobbs. “CIA Had Secret Agent on Polish General Staff.” Washington Post, 4 Jun. 1986, A1.]
Woodward’s book also details some of the internal politics of the CIA. Career staff are actually rather suspicious of the President and the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence], viewing them as “temporary” and “political appointees”. The DDCIs [Deputy Directors of Central Intelligence] for Operations and Intelligence, the second-in-commands of covert actions and analysis, respectively, both generally career CIA, often do most of the heavy lifting in running the Agency. The DCI oversees the actions of all 13 agencies in the US intelligence community, and writes all their budgets.
As to “who would tell the President “No”, I doubt it would come to that. The President generally deals in summaries, not full files, so he is generally not given a great deal of information that would arouse further curiosity. It happens, of necessity, but not terribly often.”
We all can continue to cite law on this matter. But the only real truth here is that no one really knows for sure.
As surely as I cannot state with any certainty that there’s any “top secret” information that has been withheld from any president, no one else here can state, with absolute certainty, that there hasn’t.
We simply do not know.
But hey, I did learn a lot about the law from you all. Gracias!
Heh. I’ve also seen the term “crony” get thrown out there, too. 
Good Grief. Are you kidding?
*"My name is -------- ---------. Department 873-76 was sanctioned – years ago by then CIA director ----------. We are commissioned to work on -------------, a government project designated as “top secret.” All staff are appointed by me and two other senior members. They are sworn to secrecy and as an added measure, all are compartmentalized so that no one individual has complete knowledge of the full nature of the project and all staff members assigned to said project.
Our employees are on 6 month rotation. Any disclosure of any aspect of their project to anyone outside of their department is considered a treasonable act.
Our networks are closed. Our expenditures are off the record. Our employee records are sealed. Nothing, not even as much as a scrap of paper ever leaves this facility.
We neither answer to, nor share information with, any other US intelligence agencies. In fact, the existence of our department is only know to 4 individuals, and none of us are certain of the other’s identity.
We are a completely autonomous branch of the US intelligence community"*
Yes, this seems silly. No, I don’t really believe this exists. But I can’t state with absolute certainty that it doesn’t. I may not be able to conceive of the possibility, but maybe others have and have done so successfully.
It is possible for a government agency to fly beneath the radar. Prior to the 90’s, most americans had probably never heard of the NSA.
Right now, today, most Americans can’t name the Vice President.
Anybody who was paying attention at all to the world knew about the NSA back then, though.
Once again, we’re not talking about keeping secrets from the public. We’re talking about keeping secrets from the President. We all agree that the President does not need to know the name of every covert operative in the world, and virtually all the time there would be no need ever to mention them to him or her.
That’s not the argument. The argument is whether if the President has a need to know that we have a secret agent in the Polish government or wherever, people underneath him in the chain of command would deliberately refuse to tell him or could lawfully refuse to tell him.
Those are also separate arguments. Some have argued that they could lawfully do so or that Congress could pass such a law. Others have argued that the nature of secret operations mean that people would hold these secrets to themselves despite the President’s wishes.
My position is that the former is wrong. You can’t lawfully do so. I think the latter is wrong as well. I can’t prove my side any more than you can prove yours, but anyone in the community has to understand that the President doesn’t casually ask for this kind of information, and that withholding it would have serious consequences that they can’t know of. Nobody has yet said why someone would keep silent in the face of a presidential request, other than mumbling about a secret world and how people are like that. Some people might be, but the entirety of the intelligence community? I don’t think so, and no one has provided any evidence otherwise.
Well, I was the OP on this topic, and my question was what is the president’s level of security clearance and whether or not there was anyone above him who could deny him access to classified info. You and the other posters here have quite aptly answered, no. Legally, he has access to whatever he wants. So that settles that for me.
But there’s another aspect to this question that came to light a few responses in. Although staff may be legally bound to full disclosure, is that what actually happens in the real world, with real human beings and all their flaws?
If the quote I referenced in a post above is correct…
…it would seem that there is a body of information that is withheld from the president on a regular basis (“among the traditional items” implies such).
That poster then goes on to say…
Summaries, not complete information. If true, this also implies that there is information withheld from his office on a regular basis. Whether it’s withheld in order not to encumber the president with unnecessary information or held as to not pique his curiosity and then prompt him to request more, can only be speculation on our part.
So no one is actually silent in the face of his request, but someone may cherry-pick the information that he is given until he makes a demand for more. And the individual(s) providing the info is probably hoping that he won’t make a request for more.
So I thank you all again for clearing me on the law. But I’m also interested in what happens on-the-ground, day to day. And I think I have a better understanding now. The president is given what he needs to know, when he needs to know it. If ever he requests sensitive information outside the parameters of his needs, he may be met with some resistance but will still be given the information as required by law. Career CIA staff may or may not disclose everything they know to his office when requested, due either to their own suspicions or twisted consideration of the law. And in the end, no one on either side of this topic can state their case with absolute certainty.
Look, you’re still attacking this as though there’s a real life conspiracy – stated or unstated – built around denying information to the President. You’re looking through the wrong end of the bottle.
The President is an extremely busy person, so of course he’s going to see summaries of issues, whether it is intelligence reports, his annual budget request, or his Administration’s proposals on Social Security. So does the President ask to see the names of covert agents? Probably not on a regular basis, because it isn’t terribly useful information to policy makers at that level. Can he? Of course. See the Valerie Plame case, in which even White House staff knew the identity of a covert CIA agent.
You have no foundation upon which to level a suspicion of those in the intelligence bureaucracy wanting to withhold information from the White House. Just because things are not routinely reported doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy or unspoken rule to sandbag the Chief Executive. Virtually everyone I’ve met who works in the national security apparatus during my time in Washington is thrilled to serve up what the White House wants to know. I can say with no hesitation that these types of people generally come away with a great feeling of accomplishment for producing items that are actually being used and read by top level policy makers. Years ago, I met someone who said one of the best days on the job was when they got a work product back from the White House that had some notes scribbled on it that the President actually read their report.
But these analysts, too, know that the President’s time is limited, and they won’t bother putting unnecessary details into their products, not necessarily because they are driven to hide certain things from their bosses, but because nobody wants to read a 100,000 word treatise on an international crisis that goes into extreme detail. I can tell you that the intelligence cycle is about getting timely, useful, actionable information to the right people. Just like the program manager of the 777 doesn’t take pains to inform the CEO of Boeing of the names of every supplier of every part for the airplane doesn’t mean that there is an effort to sandbag his boss, neither does an intel analyst need to report every agent’s name to the President. After all, the President may not even WANT to know the agents’ names, unless there’s a reason to, like maybe the case in the whole Iraq Curveball thing.
Of course there are competing priorities within any bureaucracy. Agency A may have a tidbit of information that they may think is too sensitive to share with Agency B. But in terms of reporting up the chain of command, I have no hesitation in saying that intentionally withholding information so it doesn’t get into the hands of an "average Joe " kind of interloper as you seem wont to put it (which anyone else would read: the President) is not a common view in the slightest. I would even hazard to say that even on really controversial issues, there’s not an inclination to protect higher-ups from embarrassment: Oliver North aside, most people don’t want to be left holding the bag should some bad news hit the media. While there’s undoubtedly bad apples out there, there’s not a question in my mind that when the President says jump, the national security apparatus exhibits an undeniable tendency to ask, how high?
Let me add: are there times at which some information is kept from the President? Of course, just like there’s times when you keep something from your boss due to extenuating circumstances. But from everything I can tell, it isn’t a “standard operating procedure” that you seem to think it is.
That’s something I started thinking about after someone mentioned all those POTUS appointees. Then I realized there’s probably no such clear line. Between knowing and not knowing, that is. What I mean is there’s people at the very bottom who’ve seen things with their own eyes and know and there’s people further up who’ve attended briefings held by people who’ve attended briefings, and the fog sets in. By the time you get to a director, he may have heard things pretty much equivalent to rumors, and what’s he gonna say if the POTUS asks?
You have to do research on these things. The information isn’t just immediately available. The first-person truth may be burried in black-and-white in some classified documents, but people, especially those removed, can’t just immediately find them whenever they feel curious. There’s no secretoogle, ignoring the fact that doing research with google is bloody hard.
Now look, I’m not talking about mundane stuff or simple facts like how many spy satellites we’ve got in orbit. I’m saying the obvious. That if Barack Obama became the next president, he couldn’t just open up the big 'ol book of secrets or send a memo to his secretary and get a list of all the people we’ve tortured.* Between these two extremes, there’s a continuum of practical limitation on how much information is immediately available to the president, security clearance or not.
*(it’s hard to come up with an example of something dirt-like or secretive, without someone replying “conspiracies don’t exist!”) Thing is, some of the POTUS’s subordinates (going down all the chains of government) will feel the exact same way, and provide much of the friction due to nothing sinister.
I just want to say I completely agree.
Guys, at no point did I ever state that there was a conspiracy to withhold information from the president. I only stated that perhaps, PERHAPS some employees may be a bit reluctant to share information with his office, due to the kind of suspicions that Bob Woodward spoke about in his book “Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987.”
I mean, no matter how rosy one’s personal experience in Washington may have been, no one can say with certainty that information has ever been withheld from the executive office. You don’t have all the facts, you can probably never get them, so you can never be certain.