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9 george W. Bush Unlike most of his predecessors, President George W. Bush did not issue a new executive order (EO) to establish his President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). Instead, he allowed Clinton’s EO 12863 to carry over through much of his administration. This initial laissez-faire attitude toward the PFIAB left many of Clinton’s appointees in place during the opening year of his administration. Warren Rudman stayed on as chair until late in the autumn of 2001, but there is debate about whether other members remained as well. In April 2006, White House spokesperson Dana Perrino stated that members of Clinton’s PFIAB stayed until Bush named his first set of PFIAB members in October 2001.1 Other sources say that members of Clinton’s PFIAB offered their resignations soon after the elections, never meeting again, and that Bush’s PFIAB was full of vacancies during the first years of his administration.2 Regardless of whether Bush had a fully staffed board, a fully staffed PFIAB that was not meeting, or a ghost PFIAB, all directives were delayed until after new board members were selected. Even in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks—the largest intelligence failure in U.S. history—the president did not task the PFIAB to investigate it. Similarly, he did not staff the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) until March 17, 2003, well after much of the intelligence oversight work on the 9/11 attack had taken place. Rudman supported this decision because he believed that all members of the intelligence community needed more time before the postmortems began.3 He also hoped that, since the country was in the process of responding to 9/11, President Bush would appoint intelligence experts and not political friends to his PFIAB.4 Unfortunately, Bush continued with the practice of using PFIAB membership as a political reward and filled his board with those to whom he owed political favors and large campaign donors. Though this selection practice was commonplace among recent presidents, Bush seems to have taken it to an extreme by placing more financial donors 310 • PRIVILEGED and CONFIDENTIAL on the PFIAB than ever before.5 When naming the second set of PFIAB members in 2005, he appointed nine campaign donors—including three longtime fund-raisers—to fill his sixteen-member board. His early steps with the PFIAB seem to validate the commonly held view that his administration favored cronyism and loyalty to the president over independent expertise.6 To be sure, previous PFIABs have included political appointees, but the majority of those appointed to the board in the early years possessed significant scientific, intelligence, or national security experience. Bush’s PFIAB, according to the director of the Federation of American Scientists ’ Project on Government Secrecy, Steven Aftergood, is the first one to favor friends and supporters over those who have genuine competence in areas relevant to intelligence.7 On May 14, 2003, two years into his first term, Bush finally signed EO 13301, which further amended Clinton’s EO 12863 by expanding the maximum number of members of the IOB from four to five.8 His only other amendments to the legal mandate of the PFIAB occurred when he signed EO 13376 on April 15, 2005. The first amendment replaced the phrase “Director of Central Intelligence (DCI)” with “Director of National Intelligence (DNI)” (the change reflected the newly created post). The second amendment added a concluding section (Section 3.4) to EO 12863 that reads: “This order is intended only to improve the internal management of the executive branch of the Federal Government, and is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity, against the United States, its departments, agencies, or other entities, its officers or employees, or any other person.”9 Other than these small amendments, President Bush did not promote or codify any significant changes to the basic structure of the PFIAB until the last year of his presidency. In an EO issued on February 29, 2008, President Bush reorganized the PFIAB to reflect the new realities of the restructured intelligence community and the amorphous nature of the post-9/11 intelligence issues with which it grappled. His order renamed the PFIAB as the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB). This name change reflected the fact that intelligence no longer starts or ends at the border. To meet terrorist threats and thwart industrial espionage, the line between...

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