Study Of U.s. Congressional Intelligence Oversight System

U.S. intelligence community was established after World War II. As the most importantcore of U.S. intelligence community, Central Intelligence Agency has been playing a leading role in intelligence collecting, analyzing and producing, which is a matter of life and death to U.S. national security. U.S. political system is characterized by a balance-check system, so by the same token, congressional surveillance is greatly needed to supervise the activities (especially convert actions) conducted by CIA. Congressional surveillance mechanism was started from "select sub-committees on intelligence" to "select investigation committees on intelligence" and was finalized as "standing select committees on intelligence". This process was characterized as institutionalization. Since congressional surveillance mechanism came into being, the efficiency of this mechanism varied according to different stages. Although other congressional committees such as the Appropriation Committees and the Armed Services Committees, to some degree, share part of surveillance, the Intelligence Committees are the dominant players in supervising U.S. intelligence community.Since the end of cold war, great changes have taken place to our world. The nature of U.S. national security has changed and terrorism has taken the place of Soviet Union as the major threat to this country. The anti-terrorism issues top U.S agenda. The present intelligencecommunity should be completely reformed instead of just getting a minor mending. 9*11 attack exposed the defuction of intelligence community and relevant surveillance mechanism and led to the 9 · 11 commission report which gave its advice on the reform.From the evolution of congressional surveillance mechanism on intelligence community, this mechanism seldom worked well in the long run. Due to lack of efficient surveillance, many intelligence failure and misconduct happened. The inefficiency of congressional surveillance mechanism is owed to the "surveillance dilemma" which is the dilemma of "open surveillance" vs. "secrecy of intelligence". The future of congressional surveillance mechanism will be decided by the appropriate solution of this dilemma.