I posted yesterday about

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I posted yesterday about the Pentagon’s role in clandestine activities being used by the Bush Administration as a way to work around congressional oversight requirements. National Journal has a piece out suggesting impetus for changes to the Defense Department’s intelligence apparatus may be in the works and comes from within the Pentagon itself:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is considering a plan to curtail the Pentagon’s clandestine spying activities, which were expanded by his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, after the 9/11 attacks. The undercover work allowed military personnel to collect intelligence about terrorists and to recruit spies in foreign countries independently of the CIA and without much congressional oversight.

Former military and intelligence officials, including those involved in an ongoing and largely informal debate about the military’s forays into espionage, said that Gates, a former CIA director, is likely to “roll back” several of Rumsfeld’s controversial initiatives. This could include changing the mission of the Pentagon’s Strategic Support Branch, an intelligence-gathering unit comprising Special Forces, military linguists, and interrogators that Rumsfeld set up to report directly to him. The unit’s teams work in many of the same countries where CIA case officers are trying to recruit spies, and the military and civilian sides have clashed as a result. CIA officers serving abroad have been roiled by what they see as the Pentagon’s encroachment on their dominance in the world of human intelligence-gathering.

Let’s be clear here though. Reducing the Pentagon role in human intelligence gathering is not the same thing as closing the purported loophole that the Bush Administration is reportedly using to circumvent the congressional intelligence committees.

Late update: The New York Times has more on some of the intelligence-related changes (many of them merely cosmetic) being undertaken by Bob Gates.

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