Understand that the CIA's capacity to commit abuses is anything but theoretical. As Obama well knows, its history is rife with examples of its personnel using the cover of secrecy to do things that the American people and their elected representatives would have never willingly permitted. CIA abuses inspired the creation of the very same Select Committee on Intelligence in 1976. It began after the Church Committee discovered and revealed abuses as varied as secretly opening the mail of American citizens, attempting to assassinate foreign leaders, trying to monitor private citizens who opposed the Vietnam War, and illegal wiretapping.

Even after Congress committed to more vigilant oversight of the CIA, it continued to operate with far less transparency than other federal agencies. Little wonder that it continued to commit abuses. During the Reagan Administration, for example, the executive branch approved a CIA plan to secretly mine the most important harbor in Nicaragua. Members of the Senate committee claimed that they weren't sufficiently notified and won a promise of greater cooperation.

Though the Iran-Contra affair was run out of the White House, the CIA was complicit in parts of it, and several agency staffers were disciplined in its aftermath for withholding information. Twelve CIA employees were disciplined in the mid-1990s for failing to adequately inform Congress of its activities in Guatemala. In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the 9/11 Commission cited insufficient oversight of the CIA as a significant problem. And during the Bush Administration, CIA officers tortured prisoners by blindfolding them, strapping them to a board, and repeatedly forcing water into their lungs so that they'd be so terrified of drowning that they'd talk. Obama has acknowledged that waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" institutionalized under his predecessor were torture, a judgment that hasn't stopped him from nominating Brennan, then at the CIA, who has defended all but waterboarding.

The evidence is incontrovertible: On numerous occasions in recent American history, the executive branch and the CIA have used to cover of secrecy to commit immoral and illegal acts.

The law is clear too: In order to balance the CIA's need for secrecy and the prudential need for oversight, Congress created a Senate committee and an analogue in the House. Later, "the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, as the law was known, established general reporting requirements for the Intelligence Community vis-à-vis the two oversight committees. The basic obligation imposed by the new law was the same one Carter had imposed on intelligence agencies earlier by executive order: to keep the two committees 'fully and currently informed' of their activities."