Obama names Senate veterans to intelligence board

Republican Chuck Hagel and Democrat David Boren will both serve as co-chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

US President Barack Obama on Wednesday named two distinguished ex-senators to a board tasked with providing him with objective advice in intelligence matters free of political bias.

Republican Chuck Hagel and Democrat David Boren will both serve as co-chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which offers oversight of the quality, effectiveness and performance of US intelligence agencies.

US intelligence agencies have endured a grim few years following the failure to disrupt the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the botched classified assessments on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.

Agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency have also faced outrage following their use of interrogation tactics like simulated drowning or waterboarding on terror suspects, which many people equate to torture.

Obama welcomed Hagel and Boren, both of whom worked on intelligence matters in the Senate, at a meeting involving senior representatives of most of the 16 US government intelligence agencies at the White House.

- Under Chuck and Dave's leadership, I will be looking for the board to provide me with objective, independent and nonpartisan counsel as we work to strengthen our intelligence community and our national security - Obama said.

- The organizations represented here have made real progress in recent years - Obama said.

But the president said more needed to be done to improve the collection of intelligence, to get it to top officials quickly, and to ensure it was produced in line with US ideals and democratic values.

Hagel, a wounded Vietnam-war hero who represented Nebraska in the US Senate until earlier this year, is a friend of Obama, and toured Afghanistan and Iraq with him before he was elected president.

Boren, from Oklahoma, served in the Senate from 1979 to 1994 and was the longest-serving chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

He is a friend of former CIA director George Tenet, who was blamed by many for the faulty intelligence that led to the US invasion of Iraq.

The New York Times reported in 2007 that Boren told Tenet before the invasion that the White House would make him a scapegoat if things went badly in the war.