With Washington currently abuzz about the revelations regarding electronic surveillance by the NSA, the conflict between the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the CIA over a forthcoming report on ”enhanced interrogation,” and various other controversies, what better time to consider how Congress has sought to oversee the intelligence community in the past? This was the subject of the Congressional Briefing that the National History Center held on Monday, June 9, in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill.

The briefing was conducted by Laura Donohue, director of Georgetown University’s Center on National Security and the Law and author of The Cost of Counterterrorism: Power, Politics, and Liberty, and Mark Lowenthal, former assistant director of Central Intelligence for analysis and production, current adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, and author of the textbook Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, now in its fifth edition. Both speakers hold history degrees. James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association and chairman of the board of the National History Center, chaired the session. It attracted a full house and was filmed by C-SPAN.