In Intelligence World, A Mute Watchdog

President Gerald R. Ford created the board in the mid-1970s after the Church Committee identified numerous abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies. President Ronald Reagan made the board permanent with an executive order in 1981 and gave it the mission to identify legal violations.

Harrington said that under President Bill Clinton, the board promptly sent reports of legal violations by intelligence agencies to the attorney general. Officials said the panel concluded that the administration showed poor judgment in supporting Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia, and it complained about the CIA's policy of employing known torturers or killers as informants in Latin America.

Perino said that during the first two years of the Bush administration, a career intelligence officer at the White House collected and reviewed reports in which the FBI and other intelligence agencies self-disclosed violations of civil liberties and privacy safeguards.

The board's three or four members -- the number has alternated over the years -- are usually drawn from the larger President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which advises the commander in chief on U.S. intelligence policy and performance. The oversight board has been a mix of intelligence experts, such as George H.W. Bush's choice of former Air Force Gen. Lew Allen, and civilians from other walks of life, such as Clinton's choice of Philadelphia investment banker Harold Pote.

The board now in place is led by former Bush economic adviser Stephen Friedman. It includes Don Evans, a friend of the president and a former commerce secretary; former Adm. David Jeremiah; and lawyer Arthur B. Culvahouse.

Perino said the board's "original unique mission and primary oversight role has been supplemented" in recent years by new layers of government. To watch for abuses, the administration now relies on the director of national intelligence -- a job created in 2005 -- along with presidentially appointed inspector generals. As a result, Bush is considering changes to Reagan's executive order, Perino said.

A Clinton-era deputy national security adviser, James B. Steinberg, said, however, that "you have to have a civilian proxy who on one hand can be trusted with these secrets and can still call the operator on the carpet when they go astray. If you neuter these internal mechanisms, then you are basically saying there is no one watching the henhouse."

On Friday, the FBI and the Justice Department announced several changes meant to strengthen internal oversight, including the creation of a legal "compliance office" inside the bureau and a review office inside the department that will regularly examine all violations.

Separately, Gonzales wrote the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), on Friday to defend his 2005 testimony that there had been no verified civil liberties abuses during the first three years of the efforts against terrorism. The Washington Post reported last week that the FBI had sent Gonzales a half-dozen reports of violations of civil liberties and privacy safeguards before his testimony.

Gonzales wrote that he did not consider the conduct in those reports to be abuses because the violations involved mistakes, not deliberate misconduct. "My testimony was completely truthful, and I stand by that testimony," he wrote.

Leahy scoffed at Gonzales's explanation. "The American people deserve an attorney general who will fully and accurately inform the Senate and the public about violations of civil liberties. Instead, they have one who misleads Congress and then hides behind dictionary definitions," he said.