If the CIA is ignoring democratic oversight in its engagement with countries with whom it shares intelligence - including Australia - can we really have any idea what is being done in our name? David Forman writes.

A healthy democracy is built in part on a constant power struggle between institutions.

It is the arm wrestle between almost equal and occasionally opposing institutional forces that creates compromise, balance, transparency and prevents the system sliding into dictatorship.

It is inelegant, it can be messy, but it conforms to the idea that a contest of ideas and everyone looking over everyone else's shoulder is the best way of maintaining honesty and integrity in government.

Which makes the extraordinary stand-off and public brawling presently gripping the US Senate and intelligence community a frightening state of affairs.

This is a debate, in the most powerful country in the world, about nothing less than who is in charge and who answers to whom - the Congress or the CIA.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, one of the most senior and experienced members of the Democrats' Senate team, this month made a blistering attack on the CIA in the Senate, accusing it of interfering with and impeding the work of the Senate Committee created to oversee its activities.

The very existence of secret intelligence services presents a challenge to the principles of democracy. If democracy works on the basis that citizens make individual, informed choices about who they want to run the country via open and fair elections, how can the system countenance publicly funded agencies running around engaged in secret activities within and outside the jurisdictional borders?

Democracies resolve this problem by having institutional oversight of the agencies.

There is the executive - ministers and senior public servants - which usually keep their interactions under wraps. And there is the legislature, which usually has overseeing committees receiving some evidence in public and some in camera.

Many have argued that these arrangements are inadequate - too "clubby" and too full of like-minded, powerful people too ready to accept the proposition of the nation's spies.

In the wake of revelations in recent years about the extent of surveillance in western democracies of their own citizens, these criticisms have a new cogency.

Feinstein chairs the Senate Intelligence committee in the US Senate. She is in the mainstream of politics, and regarded as a supporter of the intelligence community. She is not a notorious conspiracy theorist or vocal anti-CIA activist.

Her committee is investigating the detention and interrogation programs run by the CIA since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001 - specifically whether they have been legally conducted.

But she has accused the CIA of:

Deliberately searching for and removing documents from secure computers containing information the committee had been provided by the CIA, but which indicated that the CIA had found wrongdoing in an internal review of its behaviour;

Deliberately searching for and removing documents from secure computers containing information the committee had been provided by the CIA, but which indicated that the CIA had found wrongdoing in an internal review of its behaviour; Destroying information, including video tapes, despite being told not to by the Bush White House;

Destroying information, including video tapes, despite being told not to by the Bush White House; Breaching the Constitution and the doctrine of the Separation of Powers; and

Breaching the Constitution and the doctrine of the Separation of Powers; and Engaging in an "un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation".

She also went on to call the events a "defining moment" that will determine whether the Senate can perform its duty of providing independent oversight of intelligence agencies without being "thwarted by those we oversee".

Powerful, even shocking, words.

Words that suggest one of the most senior politicians in the US believes the intelligence community has spun out of control.

And words with global implications. If the CIA has no regard for the democratic oversight mechanisms in its own country, why would they be expected to have regarded to the rights of the citizens of other countries or even of other nations?

And if the CIA is acting in this way in its engagement with the intelligence agencies of other countries with whom it shares intelligence - including Australia's - can we really have any idea what is being done in our name?

And if we can't, what does it say about the health of our democracy itself?

David Forman is managing director of government relations at issues management firm Communications and Public Relations. View his full profile here.