Can MPS question the Intelligence Service Heirarchy?
The answer to your question is THEY DO and I find the comments you quote by certain TV journalist hard to believe. You do not seem to be aware, the House of Commons has a number of Select Committees made up of 10 to 15 elected MPs of all parties. These Committees can and does summon “ANYBODY” before them and any MP of whatever Party can ask them any questions they like, and this has on several occasions included questioning the leaders of our Intelligence Services, particularly on matters concerning Iraq and Afghanistan? The Committees that would be most likely to question Intelligence service chiefs is the “Intelligence & Security Committee” which is one of the most powerful in Parliament. But other Select committtees that might also do so are the Constitutional Affairs Committee, the Defence Committee, The Foreign Affairs Committee or the Home Affairs Committee all dependent on what particular matter the all parties Committee are investigating. Although most of the Select Committees
Although there is an Intelligence Committee in the House of Commons which tries to deal with these matters, it is highly unlikely that anything significant by way of actual intelligence would ever be discussed in what is in effect an open court for all the world to know and see. A very difficult area indeed. The SIS [Secret Intelligence Service] of UK is in many ways a law unto itself. It must [for the most part] be allowed to operate freely and without let or hinderance from politicians who may not know what they were reading, even if they were given [unlikely] access to a daily summary of gathered intelligence. The vast majority of intelligence comes from electronic sources; radio intercept, wire tapping, bugging etc. Most of this is best described as gobbledegook – coded junk which has to be sifted through in the hope that a magic ‘word’ may appear in a text somewhere. No group of people, not even a committee of MPs in the House of Commons, could ever totally come to grips with the
