The Church Committee and It's Legacy: How Congress Can Once Again Investigate the Secret Government
5 views
Skip to first unread message
Christopher Hayes
Aug 27, 2009, 9:07:19 AM8/27/09
to Chris' Distribution List
I've got a cover story in this week's Nation. (Up on the web today,
available in print in a few days). It's a look back at the legacy of
the Church Committee of the 1970's, and an argument for why we need
Congress to undertake something similar today:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090914/hayes
Here's an excerpt:
Public debates over intelligence are qualitatively different from
other policy discussions. In a debate over whether, say, the economic
stimulus has been effective, there is a presumption that all
participants are working from a common set of data--GDP growth,
unemployment, government spending, etc.--but with different
interpretations and emphases. Such is not the case when the issue is
the effectiveness of intelligence programs or the scope of covert
activities. Those debates are conducted on fundamentally unequal
footing. Critics may charge that torture is counterproductive and
produces bad intelligence, but defenders of the secret government can
wave away such concerns by saying, more or less, You don't know what
we know.
What the Church Committee did was to eliminate this inequality by
wrenching an entire segment of the state into the light of day. It
created a universally accepted set of facts, a canonical public record
that turned the secret conversations of the powerful and initiated
into the material for a broad debate. It brought the world of
intelligence into the public sphere, the place where self-governance
ought to take place.
Full text of the article follows below.
Hope everyone is enjoying summer and getting at least a little
vacation.
All best,
-c
The Secret Government
By Christopher Hayes
This article appeared in the September 14, 2009 edition of The Nation.
August 26, 2009
It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed
objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost.
There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human
conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-
standing American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered.
Though these words echo his famous endorsement of working "the dark
side" in order to triumph in the "war on terror," they were not, in
fact, written by Dick Cheney. They come from the Doolittle Report,
which was commissioned by President Eisenhower in 1954 to craft an
intelligence strategy for winning the cold war. From a strategic
perspective, the threat posed by global communism, headquartered in a
massive, nuclear-armed superpower with almost 6 million men under
arms, and Al Qaeda, a networked, globally distributed group of
thousands of nonstate actors, could not be more different. But the
national security state's understanding of each as an existential
threat was, and continues to be, nearly identical. The enemy is
ingenious, relentless and unencumbered by the procedural and moral
niceties that hamstring the bureaucrats of a liberal democracy.
Victory--indeed, survival--requires us to become more like them.
And so: the CIA contracted a Mafia boss to murder Fidel Castro, sent
biotoxins to the Republic of Congo with orders to poison Patrice
Lumumba and tested LSD on unsuspecting citizens (one of whom jumped
out of a window to his death). It fomented coups and bloodshed against
democratically elected governments, while the National Security
Agency, in coordination with the major telegram companies, read every
single telegram coming in or going out of the country for three
decades. The FBI infiltrated peaceful antiwar groups, breaking up
marriages of activists with forged evidence of infidelity, while
surveilling civil rights leaders with an assortment of bugs and break-
ins. It even attempted to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into
committing suicide, shipping him tapes of him midcoitus with a
mistress and a note that said, "There is but one way out for you. You
better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared
to the nation."
We know all this (and much more) thanks to the work of the Church
Committee. Chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church in 1975-76, the
Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to
Intelligence Activities labored for sixteen months to produce a 5,000-
page report that is a canonical history of the secret government. Over
the past three decades the Church Committee has faded into relative
obscurity. (I was somewhat surprised to discover how few people my age
had heard of it.) But in the wake of further disclosures of crimes and
abuses committed by the Bush administration and the escalating war of
words between the CIA and Congress over just how much Congress knew
about (and approved) these activities, the specter of the committee
has begun to haunt Capitol Hill.
Mostly, the Church Committee is invoked by conservatives as a
cautionary tale, a case of liberal overreach that handicapped the
nation's intelligence operations for decades. Dick Cheney bemoaned the
fact that his time as President Ford's chief of staff was "the low
point" of presidential authority, thanks to a feckless Congress "all
too often swayed by the public opinion of the moment."
But a growing chorus of voices, some of whom served on the original
committee and some of whom currently occupy oversight positions in
Congress, have begun to refer to the Church Committee as a model for
the kind of sustained inquiry needed today. Congressman Rush Holt, a
New Jersey Democrat, has served on the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence since 2003. When I met him recently, his
office had a table full of books and papers about intelligence
oversight and the Church Committee's legacy. "The intelligence
community has not undergone comprehensive examination since then," he
said, "and it needs it."
In a recent interview with the Washington Independent, former Senator
Gary Hart, who served on the Church Committee, said there are
"sufficient parallels" between the abuses of the cold war and those
revealed in the past few years to "warrant a kind of sweeping
investigation." Senators Pat Leahy and Russ Feingold have expressed
support for a commission of inquiry. Even former White House
counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who previously criticized the
post-Church intelligence community's risk-averse ways, is on board.
"In a democracy with Congressional oversight...when you've had this
period where there appears to have been excesses, [where] there
appears to have been illegality," he told me, "you need a
comprehensive checkup."
The original Church Committee ushered in an era of reforms that we've
come to take for granted: the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts and executive orders
banning assassinations. But it's hard to survey the legal and moral
wreckage of the "war on terror" and conclude that those reforms have
stood the test of time. When the country faced another "implacable"
enemy, the reforms of the Church Committee were subverted,
circumvented, rolled back and outpaced.
To take just the most recent examples, press reports indicate that the
CIA may have been training agents to conduct assassinations of Al
Qaeda leaders during the first six months of the Obama administration,
before either CIA director Leon Panetta or Congress was notified.
What's more, according to reports in the New York Times and this
magazine, the CIA outsourced parts of an assassination program to the
private security firm Blackwater. As this article goes to press,
Attorney General Eric Holder has appointed a special prosecutor, John
Durham, to determine if a criminal investigation should go forward
against CIA agents and contractors for torturing detainees. Durham's
narrowly defined inquiry targets fewer than a dozen cases and falls
far short of the "sweeping investigation" called for by Hart, Clarke
and others.
Once again, it seems a comprehensive accounting is long overdue.
On December 22, 1974, the New York Times published an explosive front-
page story by Seymour Hersh. Drawn from leaked portions of a 704-page
internal CIA review of covert activities, known within the agency as
"the family jewels," the article detailed the activities of a massive
domestic spying program called Operation Chaos. "Huge CIA Operation
Reported Against Antiwar Forces and Other Dissidents During the Nixon
Years," read the headline.
The article created an uproar. In the wake of Watergate and the
revelations of Nixon's recklessly lawless executive branch, the public
was primed to think the worst. Church, a liberal, saw an opportunity
to ferret out abuses, rein in an out-of-control intelligence apparatus
and give himself a prime platform from which to run for president. He
advocated for a special committee to investigate the activities of the
various intelligence agencies. Senate Republicans objected, and the
White House sought to cut off momentum by establishing its own
commission of inquiry, chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.
But the press didn't let up. Hersh published more startling
revelations, and CBS's Daniel Schorr began airing reports of the CIA's
involvement in international assassinations. For a nation that had
suffered the traumatic deaths of JFK, RFK and MLK in the past dozen
years, this was the last straw. "Murder," playwright Lillian Hellman
wrote in a New York Times op-ed. "We didn't think of ourselves that
way once upon a time."
On January 27, 1975, the Senate voted to create the Select Committee
to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence
Activities. (The committee also had a House counterpart, chaired by
Otis Pike.) Each of its eleven members, six Democrats and five
Republicans, appointed a staff liaison. The committee was given broad
latitude, subpoena power and, crucially, a staff of 150. "We were in a
huge auditorium in the new Senate office building," recalls Barbara
Banoff, who joined the staff of the committee as a young attorney from
New York. "They were just little cubicles with office dividers; if
somebody was yelling at one place in the auditorium, everyone else
could hear them."
The staff was impressive. Chief counsel Frederick "Fritz" A.O. Schwarz
was a top-flight litigator at a white-shoe New York firm. Other
positions were filled by career intelligence officers, attorneys and
academics. "I thought the committee was outstanding," says Loch
Johnson, who served as Church's special assistant on the committee and
now edits the journal Intelligence and National Security. "I was kind
of amazed by that.... Usually in committees you get a hodgepodge....
Look at the résumés of the people: a lot of great attorneys and social
scientists with well-regarded credentials."
Immediately, Schwarz says, it became apparent that the magnitude of
the task before them was overwhelming. "We had to pick a few subjects
and look at the subjects in real depth because if we didn't do
that...there were so many things that were coming in as tips that we
could never get any of them well."
The committee broke its staff up into task forces, each focusing on a
discrete area, such as the CIA, assassinations and the FBI's domestic
spying. Sensing the particularly acute outrage over revelations of the
CIA's assassination plots, the committee worked hard to produce an
interim report on the matter, which it released on November 20, 1975.
It contained many of the more lurid examples of CIA high jinks--
including plans to kill Castro with poisoned cigars--that would come
to define the agency's image for an entire generation of Americans.
As the staff dug deeper, they came to realize that something was very
rotten indeed at the heart of the national security state. "I think we
were all shocked at the extent of the abuses of power by these
agencies," says Johnson. "We had, of course, read Sy Hersh's piece.
Cointelpro--that was not a part of Sy Hersh's article, and that was
simply shocking. Not only did it involve domestic surveillance but
domestic covert action. There were a number of things that were really
eye-opening."
The committee's investigations had a radicalizing effect on even the
top staffers like Schwarz and minority counsel Curtis Smothers. "As
they were reading our reports," says Banoff, "we'd hear from Fritz,
who had just read some draft report on some particularly outrageous
misdeed: 'Goddamn it!' And he'd pound the desk. And then from Curtis:
'Those bastards!' Pound the desk. It was like a counterpuntal hymn."
Contrary to right-wing caricature, the committee was not staffed with
crusading liberals. Indeed, almost every former staff member I
interviewed made a point of emphasizing that the staff was not
particularly ideological and operated without fear or favor. "The best
thing they did," says Banoff, was "they didn't have separate majority
and minority staff. I never got asked what party I belonged to, at
all. That wasn't what Fritz was looking for. The staffs were
integrated; we all worked together. We really did. We didn't have any
obstructionism from a senator or a senator's designee."
Bill Bader, a former CIA analyst and naval intelligence officer chosen
to run the committee's CIA task force, doesn't quite agree. "John
Tower and Barry Goldwater [Republican senators on the committee]
didn't think there should be anything at all," says Bader. "That was
their whole view of the whole thing, and they made Church and [fellow
committee member Walter] Mondale's life kind of miserable." That said,
at the staff level Bader says his relationships inside the CIA helped
a great deal. "But most of the analytical world was very happy for me
to have that role because they knew me, because they knew I was fair,
serious and I didn't have an ax to grind."
Particularly crucial was the reluctant compliance of CIA director
William Colby. Colby's predecessor, Richard Helms, was of the old
school: blatantly contemptuous of oversight of any kind. According to
Bader, Helms felt that "this investigation was traitorous, pure and
simple; you don't do things like that." Colby, on the other hand, was
committed to reforming the agency and, some say, privately feared that
if he fought Congress, there was a possibility it would try to get rid
of the agency altogether.
Colby's attitude proved crucial to the committee's success. Though
endowed with subpoena power, it had no enforcement capability to
compel the Ford administration to turn over relevant documents, and at
first the administration stonewalled. But the Church Committee
benefited greatly from playing good cop to the House Pike Committee's
bad cop, which quickly became embroiled in an escalating series of
showdowns over testimony and disclosure, which Henry Kissinger also
tried to stonewall. The Church Committee emerged as a kind of middle
path--the sober, responsible investigators the administration could
work with. "One of the reasons that the Senate committee got along
well [with the White House]," says staff member Richard Betts, now a
professor of political science at Columbia University, "is because
[White House officials] were really pissed off at the Pike Committee,
which they considered partisan and more flaky."
Committee investigators ultimately read through thousands of
previously unreleased files. Without this access, the Church Committee
couldn't have exposed what it did. Which prompts the question: were
Congress to undertake a similar inquiry today, would the White House
cooperate?
So far, the White House's record on disclosure has been disappointing.
With the notable and admirable exception of its decision to release
the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel's (OLC) memos
authorizing torture, the Obama administration has largely continued to
fight against disclosure of everything from photos of detainee abuse
to even the most basic facts about the US detention center at Bagram
Air Base in Afghanistan. It has invoked the state secrets privilege in
federal court to keep hidden details about the Bush administration's
wiretapping program and what exactly happened to detainees at
Guantánamo. (Full disclosure: my wife works in the White House
counsel's office.)
In these and other cases, however, the White House is fighting outside
groups like the ACLU, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
Washington, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which it can try
to stonewall in the courts with relatively little press attention. In
the case of Congressional subpoenas, it would be impossible to
replicate that strategy without provoking a serious political outcry.
Indeed, the partisan incentives in such a scenario may work in favor
of disclosure. As unlikely as it may seem, Republicans on such a
committee might find themselves zealously pursuing more disclosure.
When the White House released the notorious OLC torture memos, Dick
Cheney responded with an uncharacteristic push for more disclosure,
arguing that releasing other documents would show the effectiveness of
torture in foiling terror plots.
There was a somewhat similar dynamic in effect with the Church
Committee, one that helped create momentum for greater levels of
transparency. Since the committee began in the wake of Nixon's
resignation and revelations about his deceptions, abuses and
sociopathic pursuit of grudges, Church and many Democrats had every
reason to believe they would be chiefly unmasking the full depths of
Nixon's perfidy. Quickly, however, it became clear that Nixon was a
difference in degree rather than a difference in kind. Kennedy and
Johnson had, with J. Edgar Hoover, put in place many of the illegal
policies and programs. Secret documents obtained by the committee even
revealed that the sainted FDR had ordered IRS audits of his political
enemies. Republicans on the committee, then, had as much incentive to
dig up the truth as did their Democratic counterparts.
As historian Kathy Olmsted argues in her book Challenging the Secret
Government, Church was never quite able to part with this conception
of good Democrats/bad Republicans. Confronted with misdeeds under
Kennedy and Johnson, he chose to view the CIA as a rogue agency, as
opposed to one executing the president's wishes. This characterization
became the fulcrum of debate within the committee. At one point Church
referred to the CIA as a "rogue elephant," causing a media firestorm.
But the final committee report shows that to the degree the agency and
other parts of the secret government were operating with limited
control from the White House, it was by design. Walter Mondale came
around to the view that the problem wasn't the agencies themselves but
the accretion of secret executive power: "the grant of powers to the
CIA and to these other agencies," he said during a committee hearing,
"is, above all, a grant of power to the president."
A contemporary Church Committee would do well to follow Mondale's
approach and not Church's. It must comprehensively evaluate the secret
government, its activities and its relationship to Congress stretching
back through several decades of Democratic and Republican
administrations. Such a broad scope would insulate the committee from
charges that it was simply pursuing a partisan vendetta against a
discredited Republican administration, but it is also necessary to
understand the systemic problems and necessary reforms.
Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit and
author of several books sharply critical of Bush's management of the
"war on terror," says he would be "happy" to testify before such a
committee to explain the rendition program he designed and supervised
under Clinton. That program allowed the United States to capture
wanted terrorists and send them back to other countries to face
prosecution and, in some cases, likely torture and mistreatment. It
was this program that would come to serve as the foundation for the
Bush policy of "extraordinary rendition," which amounted to the
extralegal disappearing of suspected terrorists around the world.
We don't know much about what other secret programs Clinton and other
former presidents implemented, but it's possible that under sustained
scrutiny the sharp division between the Bush administration and its
predecessors will begin to blur.
The Church Committee's final report was released on April 26, 1976, in
six books. Its recommendations laid the groundwork for a series of
reforms that more or less constitute the current architecture of
intelligence oversight. Before the Church Committee, there was no
stand-alone intelligence committee overseeing the executive. Whatever
communication there was between the two branches of government was
decidedly one-way. "[CIA director] Allen Dulles would come up himself
to the Hill," Bill Bader told me, "not to a committee room. And he
would sit down with [lawmakers] out in the Congressional corridors and
whisper things into their ears and say, Can't tell anyone about them.
And then he would go back up to the CIA."
In 1976 the Senate created the Select Committee on Intelligence, and
the House followed suit with its own Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence a year later. Also in 1976 President Ford signed
Executive Order 11905, which flatly stated, "No employee of the United
States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political
assassination." Two years later, Congress passed and President Carter
signed FISA, which provided clear procedures for covert action,
surveillance and oversight. The law created the special FISA court,
which grants warrants for wiretapping and surveillance of anyone on
American soil as well as Americans abroad. The Church Committee's
revelations also had a profound effect on the bureaucratic culture of
the CIA, NSA and FBI. At all three agencies, internal legal controls
were put in place requiring layers of attorneys to sign off on any
possibly questionable activities.
But for all these needed reforms, it's impossible to look at the past
eight years and conclude they were sufficient. If cold war presidents
were surreptitious and/or cavalier about the lawlessness of their
actions, the Bush administration perfected a kind of perverse
legalism, using sympathetic lawyers to decree legal that which was
manifestly illegal. It was an ingeniously devious approach. By relying
on John Yoo, a loyal ideologue inside the OLC, Cheney et al. were able
to perform an end run around the extensive legal checks and restraints
created precisely as a response to the Church Committee's findings.
Indeed, the reason the infamous OLC memos are so garishly specific is
that CIA lawyers, still operating with a memory of the Church
Committee, were insistent on obtaining explicit sign-off for every
action and technique that they (quite rightly) believed to be of
dubious legality.
Similarly, Congressional oversight proved no match for a determined
executive. Many critics from across the ideological spectrum, from
Clarke to Scheuer, note that this is at least partly because Congress
often would rather not know what is going on behind the curtain. But
the controversy over just what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew about
the CIA's use of torture, and when she knew it, underscores how
dysfunctional the notification system has become. Created as part of
the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, the so-called Gang of Eight
system allows a president, under emergency circumstances, to restrict
briefings on covert activities to the leader of each party in both
houses and the top member of each party of the House and Senate
intelligence committees. What was intended as a limited briefing to be
given only temporarily during crises has emerged, instead, as the
standard.
Clarke explained its shortcomings to me this way: "Essentially what
happens, you're a member of the Gang of Eight. You get a phone call:
'We have to come and brief you.' They ask you to go to the vault. They
brief you. You can't take notes, you can't have your staff there and
you can't tell anybody." In addition, each member is briefed
separately and individually, so they can't even discuss the briefing
and ask questions in a group setting. "That's oversight?" Clarke asks.
"That's a pretense at oversight. That's a box check. The law required
us to do that, and we did this."
That "box check" allowed the Bush administration to claim that
Democrats in Congress signed off on many of the most obviously illegal
programs, from warrantless wiretapping to torture. Democrats can
counter that they were barred by law from acting on whatever they
knew. In other words, both sides can claim they fulfilled their legal
duties.
"One of the things that would be interesting for a modern version of
the Church Committee," says Robert Borosage, who worked at the Center
for National Security Studies to help publicize the original
committee's findings, "was that they'd be forced to confront the fact
that a lot of the reforms passed after the first one have failed. So
the question becomes, What do we do now?"
While many of the legal and institutional reforms ushered in by the
Church Committee have been degraded and evaded, I believe it would be
a mistake to argue that the committee failed. Its most enduring legacy
is the political and cultural understanding of the relationship
between secrecy and abuse; it narrated a moral fable about absolute
power corrupting absolutely.
Public debates over intelligence are qualitatively different from
other policy discussions. In a debate over whether, say, the economic
stimulus has been effective, there is a presumption that all
participants are working from a common set of data--GDP growth,
unemployment, government spending, etc.--but with different
interpretations and emphases. Such is not the case when the issue is
the effectiveness of intelligence programs or the scope of covert
activities. Those debates are conducted on fundamentally unequal
footing. Critics may charge that torture is counterproductive and
produces bad intelligence, but defenders of the secret government can
wave away such concerns by saying, more or less, You don't know what
we know.
What the Church Committee did was to eliminate this inequality by
wrenching an entire segment of the state into the light of day. It
created a universally accepted set of facts, a canonical public record
that turned the secret conversations of the powerful and initiated
into the material for a broad debate. It brought the world of
intelligence into the public sphere, the place where self-governance
ought to take place.
Selling a contemporary inquiry modeled on the Church Committee won't
be easy. Since the mid-1970s the right wing has crafted a deeply
distorted but potent fable about its impact and legacy. The tale goes
like this: the inquisition pursued by the Church Committee subjected
intelligence agencies to scorn and burned the agents and analysts. "In
the years that followed, it was extremely difficult to get FBI agents
to volunteer for counterterrorism assignments," argued two ex-FBI
officials in a March op-ed in the Washington Times. "The risk-
avoidance culture and excessive restrictions on gathering intelligence
that resulted from the Church hearings and other congressional attacks
on the intelligence community were major factors in our failure to
prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.... [A] new Church Committee-like public
inquiry might easily have a similar chilling effect on our ability to
recruit good people for future counterterrorism activities."
It's not hard to find lots of people within the intelligence community
who will give you more or less the same line. Richard Clarke has
little patience for it. "What bothers me," he says, "is the CIA's
tendency whenever they're criticized to say, If you do your job, if
you do oversight seriously--which Congress almost never does--then
we'll pout. Some of us, many, will not just pout; we'll retire early.
Our morale will be hurt." And if morale is hurt and the agencies are
gutted, they argue, the country will be exposed to attack. In other
words: "If you, Congress, do oversight, then we'll all die. Can you
imagine FEMA or the agricultural department saying we're all going to
retire if you conduct oversight?" Clarke asks in disbelief.
The principle of oversight aside, the right-wing story about the
committee ruining intelligence capabilities for a generation posits a
golden age of über-competent intelligence-gathering that simply never
existed. The activities described in the committee report, more often
than not, have a kind of Keystone Kops flavor to them. "From its
beginning," says Clarke, "when [the CIA] does covert action as opposed
to clandestine activity...it regularly fucks up. I remember sitting
with [Defense Secretary] Bob Gates when he was deputy national
security adviser, and he said, I don't think CIA should do covert
action; CIA ought to be an intelligence collection and analysis
[agency]."
At the peak of its cold war powers, the American security apparatus
was able to attain all kinds of information about the Russians (secret
information that KGB files have subsequently shown the Russians knew
we knew) but was unable to learn the most basic facts about "the
enemy." We failed to anticipate the invasion of Afghanistan and
routinely overestimated the strength of the Soviet economy. Indeed,
the failure to understand and foresee the internal pressures on the
Soviet Union may be the greatest failure of US cold war intelligence,
one that had absolutely nothing to do with the Church Committee and
its aftermath.
In his insightful 1998 book Secrecy, neocon patron saint Daniel
Patrick Moynihan argues that by cordoning off discrete pieces of
information, secrecy actually impedes intelligence-gathering rather
than facilitates it. "Secrecy is for losers," Moynihan concludes. "For
people who don't know how important information really is. The Soviet
Union realized this too late.... It is time to dismantle government
secrecy, this most pervasive of Cold War-era regulations."
It's hard to imagine that the White House would be enthusiastic about
such an undertaking. Obama has insisted, routinely, unwaveringly, that
he is "more interested in looking forward than...in looking
backwards." At one level this seems a shocking abrogation of the
executive branch's chief constitutional responsibility, to "take care
that the laws be faithfully executed." But presumably the thinking
goes something like this: the president has a limited amount of
political capital, and he can spend it on major, once-in-a-generation
reforms of the American social contract--universal healthcare and cap
and trade--or he can spend it pursuing justice for the perpetrators of
the previous administration's crimes. As morally worthy as the latter
might be, it won't get anyone healthcare or stop the planet from
melting; it won't provide a new foundation for progressive governance.
But as self-consciously pragmatic as this posture is, it's proving
wildly impractical to implement. The reason is that the White House
has limited control over when and what is revealed about crimes and
misdeeds of the Bush years, and every time a new revelation hits the
papers, such as the recent disclosures of Blackwater's involvement
with the CIA assassination unit and interrogators' use of "mock
executions," it dominates the news cycle. Since the White House itself
has defined such revelations as a "distraction," every time they are
in the news it is, by its own definition, distracted.
The benefit of a new Church Committee would be that it would corral
these "distractions" into a coherent undertaking, initiated in
Congress, within a fixed time period. It would also provide a
framework for systematic investigation of the policies rather than
selective prosecutions of those at the bottom of the hierarchy who
carried them out.
"Because try as Obama [may] to avoid investigations and looking
backwards, he's being dragged into it over and over again," says
Clarke. "It would be better for him if Congress just said, You know,
Barack, we're just gonna provide these wise men, give them subpoena
authority. It's not on you, Barack. There was this excess and that
excess and a pattern of excesses, and you know, it clears the air....
Now you have the impression that there's a bunch of stinking turds
under the rug."
Perhaps the greatest argument for such an undertaking is the simplest:
citizens have a right to know what crimes have been committed in their
names. Many of the relevant and damning facts have already been
conclusively established. We know we waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, a
borderline mentally ill member of the Al Qaeda entourage, 183 times in
one month. We know the NSA spied on an untold number of Americans
without warrants. We know that the CIA sent captured detainees to the
custody of regimes with abysmal human rights records, with the
explicit understanding they would be tortured.
The Church Committee came at a time when the public was in the midst
of a wrenching (and necessary) loss of innocence. But in our age,
secret government crimes and plots are almost a cliché. Polling shows
trust in government has returned roughly to its mid-'70s nadir. The
danger now isn't naïveté but cynicism--that we just come to accept
that the government will commit crimes in our name under the cover of
secrecy and that such activities are more or less business as usual,
about which nothing can be done. But something can be done. Something
must be done. And Congress should do it.
available in print in a few days). It's a look back at the legacy of
the Church Committee of the 1970's, and an argument for why we need
Congress to undertake something similar today:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090914/hayes
Here's an excerpt:
Public debates over intelligence are qualitatively different from
other policy discussions. In a debate over whether, say, the economic
stimulus has been effective, there is a presumption that all
participants are working from a common set of data--GDP growth,
unemployment, government spending, etc.--but with different
interpretations and emphases. Such is not the case when the issue is
the effectiveness of intelligence programs or the scope of covert
activities. Those debates are conducted on fundamentally unequal
footing. Critics may charge that torture is counterproductive and
produces bad intelligence, but defenders of the secret government can
wave away such concerns by saying, more or less, You don't know what
we know.
What the Church Committee did was to eliminate this inequality by
wrenching an entire segment of the state into the light of day. It
created a universally accepted set of facts, a canonical public record
that turned the secret conversations of the powerful and initiated
into the material for a broad debate. It brought the world of
intelligence into the public sphere, the place where self-governance
ought to take place.
Full text of the article follows below.
Hope everyone is enjoying summer and getting at least a little
vacation.
All best,
-c
The Secret Government
By Christopher Hayes
This article appeared in the September 14, 2009 edition of The Nation.
August 26, 2009
It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed
objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost.
There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human
conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-
standing American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered.
Though these words echo his famous endorsement of working "the dark
side" in order to triumph in the "war on terror," they were not, in
fact, written by Dick Cheney. They come from the Doolittle Report,
which was commissioned by President Eisenhower in 1954 to craft an
intelligence strategy for winning the cold war. From a strategic
perspective, the threat posed by global communism, headquartered in a
massive, nuclear-armed superpower with almost 6 million men under
arms, and Al Qaeda, a networked, globally distributed group of
thousands of nonstate actors, could not be more different. But the
national security state's understanding of each as an existential
threat was, and continues to be, nearly identical. The enemy is
ingenious, relentless and unencumbered by the procedural and moral
niceties that hamstring the bureaucrats of a liberal democracy.
Victory--indeed, survival--requires us to become more like them.
And so: the CIA contracted a Mafia boss to murder Fidel Castro, sent
biotoxins to the Republic of Congo with orders to poison Patrice
Lumumba and tested LSD on unsuspecting citizens (one of whom jumped
out of a window to his death). It fomented coups and bloodshed against
democratically elected governments, while the National Security
Agency, in coordination with the major telegram companies, read every
single telegram coming in or going out of the country for three
decades. The FBI infiltrated peaceful antiwar groups, breaking up
marriages of activists with forged evidence of infidelity, while
surveilling civil rights leaders with an assortment of bugs and break-
ins. It even attempted to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into
committing suicide, shipping him tapes of him midcoitus with a
mistress and a note that said, "There is but one way out for you. You
better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared
to the nation."
We know all this (and much more) thanks to the work of the Church
Committee. Chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church in 1975-76, the
Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to
Intelligence Activities labored for sixteen months to produce a 5,000-
page report that is a canonical history of the secret government. Over
the past three decades the Church Committee has faded into relative
obscurity. (I was somewhat surprised to discover how few people my age
had heard of it.) But in the wake of further disclosures of crimes and
abuses committed by the Bush administration and the escalating war of
words between the CIA and Congress over just how much Congress knew
about (and approved) these activities, the specter of the committee
has begun to haunt Capitol Hill.
Mostly, the Church Committee is invoked by conservatives as a
cautionary tale, a case of liberal overreach that handicapped the
nation's intelligence operations for decades. Dick Cheney bemoaned the
fact that his time as President Ford's chief of staff was "the low
point" of presidential authority, thanks to a feckless Congress "all
too often swayed by the public opinion of the moment."
But a growing chorus of voices, some of whom served on the original
committee and some of whom currently occupy oversight positions in
Congress, have begun to refer to the Church Committee as a model for
the kind of sustained inquiry needed today. Congressman Rush Holt, a
New Jersey Democrat, has served on the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence since 2003. When I met him recently, his
office had a table full of books and papers about intelligence
oversight and the Church Committee's legacy. "The intelligence
community has not undergone comprehensive examination since then," he
said, "and it needs it."
In a recent interview with the Washington Independent, former Senator
Gary Hart, who served on the Church Committee, said there are
"sufficient parallels" between the abuses of the cold war and those
revealed in the past few years to "warrant a kind of sweeping
investigation." Senators Pat Leahy and Russ Feingold have expressed
support for a commission of inquiry. Even former White House
counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, who previously criticized the
post-Church intelligence community's risk-averse ways, is on board.
"In a democracy with Congressional oversight...when you've had this
period where there appears to have been excesses, [where] there
appears to have been illegality," he told me, "you need a
comprehensive checkup."
The original Church Committee ushered in an era of reforms that we've
come to take for granted: the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts and executive orders
banning assassinations. But it's hard to survey the legal and moral
wreckage of the "war on terror" and conclude that those reforms have
stood the test of time. When the country faced another "implacable"
enemy, the reforms of the Church Committee were subverted,
circumvented, rolled back and outpaced.
To take just the most recent examples, press reports indicate that the
CIA may have been training agents to conduct assassinations of Al
Qaeda leaders during the first six months of the Obama administration,
before either CIA director Leon Panetta or Congress was notified.
What's more, according to reports in the New York Times and this
magazine, the CIA outsourced parts of an assassination program to the
private security firm Blackwater. As this article goes to press,
Attorney General Eric Holder has appointed a special prosecutor, John
Durham, to determine if a criminal investigation should go forward
against CIA agents and contractors for torturing detainees. Durham's
narrowly defined inquiry targets fewer than a dozen cases and falls
far short of the "sweeping investigation" called for by Hart, Clarke
and others.
Once again, it seems a comprehensive accounting is long overdue.
On December 22, 1974, the New York Times published an explosive front-
page story by Seymour Hersh. Drawn from leaked portions of a 704-page
internal CIA review of covert activities, known within the agency as
"the family jewels," the article detailed the activities of a massive
domestic spying program called Operation Chaos. "Huge CIA Operation
Reported Against Antiwar Forces and Other Dissidents During the Nixon
Years," read the headline.
The article created an uproar. In the wake of Watergate and the
revelations of Nixon's recklessly lawless executive branch, the public
was primed to think the worst. Church, a liberal, saw an opportunity
to ferret out abuses, rein in an out-of-control intelligence apparatus
and give himself a prime platform from which to run for president. He
advocated for a special committee to investigate the activities of the
various intelligence agencies. Senate Republicans objected, and the
White House sought to cut off momentum by establishing its own
commission of inquiry, chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.
But the press didn't let up. Hersh published more startling
revelations, and CBS's Daniel Schorr began airing reports of the CIA's
involvement in international assassinations. For a nation that had
suffered the traumatic deaths of JFK, RFK and MLK in the past dozen
years, this was the last straw. "Murder," playwright Lillian Hellman
wrote in a New York Times op-ed. "We didn't think of ourselves that
way once upon a time."
On January 27, 1975, the Senate voted to create the Select Committee
to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence
Activities. (The committee also had a House counterpart, chaired by
Otis Pike.) Each of its eleven members, six Democrats and five
Republicans, appointed a staff liaison. The committee was given broad
latitude, subpoena power and, crucially, a staff of 150. "We were in a
huge auditorium in the new Senate office building," recalls Barbara
Banoff, who joined the staff of the committee as a young attorney from
New York. "They were just little cubicles with office dividers; if
somebody was yelling at one place in the auditorium, everyone else
could hear them."
The staff was impressive. Chief counsel Frederick "Fritz" A.O. Schwarz
was a top-flight litigator at a white-shoe New York firm. Other
positions were filled by career intelligence officers, attorneys and
academics. "I thought the committee was outstanding," says Loch
Johnson, who served as Church's special assistant on the committee and
now edits the journal Intelligence and National Security. "I was kind
of amazed by that.... Usually in committees you get a hodgepodge....
Look at the résumés of the people: a lot of great attorneys and social
scientists with well-regarded credentials."
Immediately, Schwarz says, it became apparent that the magnitude of
the task before them was overwhelming. "We had to pick a few subjects
and look at the subjects in real depth because if we didn't do
that...there were so many things that were coming in as tips that we
could never get any of them well."
The committee broke its staff up into task forces, each focusing on a
discrete area, such as the CIA, assassinations and the FBI's domestic
spying. Sensing the particularly acute outrage over revelations of the
CIA's assassination plots, the committee worked hard to produce an
interim report on the matter, which it released on November 20, 1975.
It contained many of the more lurid examples of CIA high jinks--
including plans to kill Castro with poisoned cigars--that would come
to define the agency's image for an entire generation of Americans.
As the staff dug deeper, they came to realize that something was very
rotten indeed at the heart of the national security state. "I think we
were all shocked at the extent of the abuses of power by these
agencies," says Johnson. "We had, of course, read Sy Hersh's piece.
Cointelpro--that was not a part of Sy Hersh's article, and that was
simply shocking. Not only did it involve domestic surveillance but
domestic covert action. There were a number of things that were really
eye-opening."
The committee's investigations had a radicalizing effect on even the
top staffers like Schwarz and minority counsel Curtis Smothers. "As
they were reading our reports," says Banoff, "we'd hear from Fritz,
who had just read some draft report on some particularly outrageous
misdeed: 'Goddamn it!' And he'd pound the desk. And then from Curtis:
'Those bastards!' Pound the desk. It was like a counterpuntal hymn."
Contrary to right-wing caricature, the committee was not staffed with
crusading liberals. Indeed, almost every former staff member I
interviewed made a point of emphasizing that the staff was not
particularly ideological and operated without fear or favor. "The best
thing they did," says Banoff, was "they didn't have separate majority
and minority staff. I never got asked what party I belonged to, at
all. That wasn't what Fritz was looking for. The staffs were
integrated; we all worked together. We really did. We didn't have any
obstructionism from a senator or a senator's designee."
Bill Bader, a former CIA analyst and naval intelligence officer chosen
to run the committee's CIA task force, doesn't quite agree. "John
Tower and Barry Goldwater [Republican senators on the committee]
didn't think there should be anything at all," says Bader. "That was
their whole view of the whole thing, and they made Church and [fellow
committee member Walter] Mondale's life kind of miserable." That said,
at the staff level Bader says his relationships inside the CIA helped
a great deal. "But most of the analytical world was very happy for me
to have that role because they knew me, because they knew I was fair,
serious and I didn't have an ax to grind."
Particularly crucial was the reluctant compliance of CIA director
William Colby. Colby's predecessor, Richard Helms, was of the old
school: blatantly contemptuous of oversight of any kind. According to
Bader, Helms felt that "this investigation was traitorous, pure and
simple; you don't do things like that." Colby, on the other hand, was
committed to reforming the agency and, some say, privately feared that
if he fought Congress, there was a possibility it would try to get rid
of the agency altogether.
Colby's attitude proved crucial to the committee's success. Though
endowed with subpoena power, it had no enforcement capability to
compel the Ford administration to turn over relevant documents, and at
first the administration stonewalled. But the Church Committee
benefited greatly from playing good cop to the House Pike Committee's
bad cop, which quickly became embroiled in an escalating series of
showdowns over testimony and disclosure, which Henry Kissinger also
tried to stonewall. The Church Committee emerged as a kind of middle
path--the sober, responsible investigators the administration could
work with. "One of the reasons that the Senate committee got along
well [with the White House]," says staff member Richard Betts, now a
professor of political science at Columbia University, "is because
[White House officials] were really pissed off at the Pike Committee,
which they considered partisan and more flaky."
Committee investigators ultimately read through thousands of
previously unreleased files. Without this access, the Church Committee
couldn't have exposed what it did. Which prompts the question: were
Congress to undertake a similar inquiry today, would the White House
cooperate?
So far, the White House's record on disclosure has been disappointing.
With the notable and admirable exception of its decision to release
the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel's (OLC) memos
authorizing torture, the Obama administration has largely continued to
fight against disclosure of everything from photos of detainee abuse
to even the most basic facts about the US detention center at Bagram
Air Base in Afghanistan. It has invoked the state secrets privilege in
federal court to keep hidden details about the Bush administration's
wiretapping program and what exactly happened to detainees at
Guantánamo. (Full disclosure: my wife works in the White House
counsel's office.)
In these and other cases, however, the White House is fighting outside
groups like the ACLU, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
Washington, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which it can try
to stonewall in the courts with relatively little press attention. In
the case of Congressional subpoenas, it would be impossible to
replicate that strategy without provoking a serious political outcry.
Indeed, the partisan incentives in such a scenario may work in favor
of disclosure. As unlikely as it may seem, Republicans on such a
committee might find themselves zealously pursuing more disclosure.
When the White House released the notorious OLC torture memos, Dick
Cheney responded with an uncharacteristic push for more disclosure,
arguing that releasing other documents would show the effectiveness of
torture in foiling terror plots.
There was a somewhat similar dynamic in effect with the Church
Committee, one that helped create momentum for greater levels of
transparency. Since the committee began in the wake of Nixon's
resignation and revelations about his deceptions, abuses and
sociopathic pursuit of grudges, Church and many Democrats had every
reason to believe they would be chiefly unmasking the full depths of
Nixon's perfidy. Quickly, however, it became clear that Nixon was a
difference in degree rather than a difference in kind. Kennedy and
Johnson had, with J. Edgar Hoover, put in place many of the illegal
policies and programs. Secret documents obtained by the committee even
revealed that the sainted FDR had ordered IRS audits of his political
enemies. Republicans on the committee, then, had as much incentive to
dig up the truth as did their Democratic counterparts.
As historian Kathy Olmsted argues in her book Challenging the Secret
Government, Church was never quite able to part with this conception
of good Democrats/bad Republicans. Confronted with misdeeds under
Kennedy and Johnson, he chose to view the CIA as a rogue agency, as
opposed to one executing the president's wishes. This characterization
became the fulcrum of debate within the committee. At one point Church
referred to the CIA as a "rogue elephant," causing a media firestorm.
But the final committee report shows that to the degree the agency and
other parts of the secret government were operating with limited
control from the White House, it was by design. Walter Mondale came
around to the view that the problem wasn't the agencies themselves but
the accretion of secret executive power: "the grant of powers to the
CIA and to these other agencies," he said during a committee hearing,
"is, above all, a grant of power to the president."
A contemporary Church Committee would do well to follow Mondale's
approach and not Church's. It must comprehensively evaluate the secret
government, its activities and its relationship to Congress stretching
back through several decades of Democratic and Republican
administrations. Such a broad scope would insulate the committee from
charges that it was simply pursuing a partisan vendetta against a
discredited Republican administration, but it is also necessary to
understand the systemic problems and necessary reforms.
Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit and
author of several books sharply critical of Bush's management of the
"war on terror," says he would be "happy" to testify before such a
committee to explain the rendition program he designed and supervised
under Clinton. That program allowed the United States to capture
wanted terrorists and send them back to other countries to face
prosecution and, in some cases, likely torture and mistreatment. It
was this program that would come to serve as the foundation for the
Bush policy of "extraordinary rendition," which amounted to the
extralegal disappearing of suspected terrorists around the world.
We don't know much about what other secret programs Clinton and other
former presidents implemented, but it's possible that under sustained
scrutiny the sharp division between the Bush administration and its
predecessors will begin to blur.
The Church Committee's final report was released on April 26, 1976, in
six books. Its recommendations laid the groundwork for a series of
reforms that more or less constitute the current architecture of
intelligence oversight. Before the Church Committee, there was no
stand-alone intelligence committee overseeing the executive. Whatever
communication there was between the two branches of government was
decidedly one-way. "[CIA director] Allen Dulles would come up himself
to the Hill," Bill Bader told me, "not to a committee room. And he
would sit down with [lawmakers] out in the Congressional corridors and
whisper things into their ears and say, Can't tell anyone about them.
And then he would go back up to the CIA."
In 1976 the Senate created the Select Committee on Intelligence, and
the House followed suit with its own Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence a year later. Also in 1976 President Ford signed
Executive Order 11905, which flatly stated, "No employee of the United
States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political
assassination." Two years later, Congress passed and President Carter
signed FISA, which provided clear procedures for covert action,
surveillance and oversight. The law created the special FISA court,
which grants warrants for wiretapping and surveillance of anyone on
American soil as well as Americans abroad. The Church Committee's
revelations also had a profound effect on the bureaucratic culture of
the CIA, NSA and FBI. At all three agencies, internal legal controls
were put in place requiring layers of attorneys to sign off on any
possibly questionable activities.
But for all these needed reforms, it's impossible to look at the past
eight years and conclude they were sufficient. If cold war presidents
were surreptitious and/or cavalier about the lawlessness of their
actions, the Bush administration perfected a kind of perverse
legalism, using sympathetic lawyers to decree legal that which was
manifestly illegal. It was an ingeniously devious approach. By relying
on John Yoo, a loyal ideologue inside the OLC, Cheney et al. were able
to perform an end run around the extensive legal checks and restraints
created precisely as a response to the Church Committee's findings.
Indeed, the reason the infamous OLC memos are so garishly specific is
that CIA lawyers, still operating with a memory of the Church
Committee, were insistent on obtaining explicit sign-off for every
action and technique that they (quite rightly) believed to be of
dubious legality.
Similarly, Congressional oversight proved no match for a determined
executive. Many critics from across the ideological spectrum, from
Clarke to Scheuer, note that this is at least partly because Congress
often would rather not know what is going on behind the curtain. But
the controversy over just what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew about
the CIA's use of torture, and when she knew it, underscores how
dysfunctional the notification system has become. Created as part of
the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, the so-called Gang of Eight
system allows a president, under emergency circumstances, to restrict
briefings on covert activities to the leader of each party in both
houses and the top member of each party of the House and Senate
intelligence committees. What was intended as a limited briefing to be
given only temporarily during crises has emerged, instead, as the
standard.
Clarke explained its shortcomings to me this way: "Essentially what
happens, you're a member of the Gang of Eight. You get a phone call:
'We have to come and brief you.' They ask you to go to the vault. They
brief you. You can't take notes, you can't have your staff there and
you can't tell anybody." In addition, each member is briefed
separately and individually, so they can't even discuss the briefing
and ask questions in a group setting. "That's oversight?" Clarke asks.
"That's a pretense at oversight. That's a box check. The law required
us to do that, and we did this."
That "box check" allowed the Bush administration to claim that
Democrats in Congress signed off on many of the most obviously illegal
programs, from warrantless wiretapping to torture. Democrats can
counter that they were barred by law from acting on whatever they
knew. In other words, both sides can claim they fulfilled their legal
duties.
"One of the things that would be interesting for a modern version of
the Church Committee," says Robert Borosage, who worked at the Center
for National Security Studies to help publicize the original
committee's findings, "was that they'd be forced to confront the fact
that a lot of the reforms passed after the first one have failed. So
the question becomes, What do we do now?"
While many of the legal and institutional reforms ushered in by the
Church Committee have been degraded and evaded, I believe it would be
a mistake to argue that the committee failed. Its most enduring legacy
is the political and cultural understanding of the relationship
between secrecy and abuse; it narrated a moral fable about absolute
power corrupting absolutely.
Public debates over intelligence are qualitatively different from
other policy discussions. In a debate over whether, say, the economic
stimulus has been effective, there is a presumption that all
participants are working from a common set of data--GDP growth,
unemployment, government spending, etc.--but with different
interpretations and emphases. Such is not the case when the issue is
the effectiveness of intelligence programs or the scope of covert
activities. Those debates are conducted on fundamentally unequal
footing. Critics may charge that torture is counterproductive and
produces bad intelligence, but defenders of the secret government can
wave away such concerns by saying, more or less, You don't know what
we know.
What the Church Committee did was to eliminate this inequality by
wrenching an entire segment of the state into the light of day. It
created a universally accepted set of facts, a canonical public record
that turned the secret conversations of the powerful and initiated
into the material for a broad debate. It brought the world of
intelligence into the public sphere, the place where self-governance
ought to take place.
Selling a contemporary inquiry modeled on the Church Committee won't
be easy. Since the mid-1970s the right wing has crafted a deeply
distorted but potent fable about its impact and legacy. The tale goes
like this: the inquisition pursued by the Church Committee subjected
intelligence agencies to scorn and burned the agents and analysts. "In
the years that followed, it was extremely difficult to get FBI agents
to volunteer for counterterrorism assignments," argued two ex-FBI
officials in a March op-ed in the Washington Times. "The risk-
avoidance culture and excessive restrictions on gathering intelligence
that resulted from the Church hearings and other congressional attacks
on the intelligence community were major factors in our failure to
prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.... [A] new Church Committee-like public
inquiry might easily have a similar chilling effect on our ability to
recruit good people for future counterterrorism activities."
It's not hard to find lots of people within the intelligence community
who will give you more or less the same line. Richard Clarke has
little patience for it. "What bothers me," he says, "is the CIA's
tendency whenever they're criticized to say, If you do your job, if
you do oversight seriously--which Congress almost never does--then
we'll pout. Some of us, many, will not just pout; we'll retire early.
Our morale will be hurt." And if morale is hurt and the agencies are
gutted, they argue, the country will be exposed to attack. In other
words: "If you, Congress, do oversight, then we'll all die. Can you
imagine FEMA or the agricultural department saying we're all going to
retire if you conduct oversight?" Clarke asks in disbelief.
The principle of oversight aside, the right-wing story about the
committee ruining intelligence capabilities for a generation posits a
golden age of über-competent intelligence-gathering that simply never
existed. The activities described in the committee report, more often
than not, have a kind of Keystone Kops flavor to them. "From its
beginning," says Clarke, "when [the CIA] does covert action as opposed
to clandestine activity...it regularly fucks up. I remember sitting
with [Defense Secretary] Bob Gates when he was deputy national
security adviser, and he said, I don't think CIA should do covert
action; CIA ought to be an intelligence collection and analysis
[agency]."
At the peak of its cold war powers, the American security apparatus
was able to attain all kinds of information about the Russians (secret
information that KGB files have subsequently shown the Russians knew
we knew) but was unable to learn the most basic facts about "the
enemy." We failed to anticipate the invasion of Afghanistan and
routinely overestimated the strength of the Soviet economy. Indeed,
the failure to understand and foresee the internal pressures on the
Soviet Union may be the greatest failure of US cold war intelligence,
one that had absolutely nothing to do with the Church Committee and
its aftermath.
In his insightful 1998 book Secrecy, neocon patron saint Daniel
Patrick Moynihan argues that by cordoning off discrete pieces of
information, secrecy actually impedes intelligence-gathering rather
than facilitates it. "Secrecy is for losers," Moynihan concludes. "For
people who don't know how important information really is. The Soviet
Union realized this too late.... It is time to dismantle government
secrecy, this most pervasive of Cold War-era regulations."
It's hard to imagine that the White House would be enthusiastic about
such an undertaking. Obama has insisted, routinely, unwaveringly, that
he is "more interested in looking forward than...in looking
backwards." At one level this seems a shocking abrogation of the
executive branch's chief constitutional responsibility, to "take care
that the laws be faithfully executed." But presumably the thinking
goes something like this: the president has a limited amount of
political capital, and he can spend it on major, once-in-a-generation
reforms of the American social contract--universal healthcare and cap
and trade--or he can spend it pursuing justice for the perpetrators of
the previous administration's crimes. As morally worthy as the latter
might be, it won't get anyone healthcare or stop the planet from
melting; it won't provide a new foundation for progressive governance.
But as self-consciously pragmatic as this posture is, it's proving
wildly impractical to implement. The reason is that the White House
has limited control over when and what is revealed about crimes and
misdeeds of the Bush years, and every time a new revelation hits the
papers, such as the recent disclosures of Blackwater's involvement
with the CIA assassination unit and interrogators' use of "mock
executions," it dominates the news cycle. Since the White House itself
has defined such revelations as a "distraction," every time they are
in the news it is, by its own definition, distracted.
The benefit of a new Church Committee would be that it would corral
these "distractions" into a coherent undertaking, initiated in
Congress, within a fixed time period. It would also provide a
framework for systematic investigation of the policies rather than
selective prosecutions of those at the bottom of the hierarchy who
carried them out.
"Because try as Obama [may] to avoid investigations and looking
backwards, he's being dragged into it over and over again," says
Clarke. "It would be better for him if Congress just said, You know,
Barack, we're just gonna provide these wise men, give them subpoena
authority. It's not on you, Barack. There was this excess and that
excess and a pattern of excesses, and you know, it clears the air....
Now you have the impression that there's a bunch of stinking turds
under the rug."
Perhaps the greatest argument for such an undertaking is the simplest:
citizens have a right to know what crimes have been committed in their
names. Many of the relevant and damning facts have already been
conclusively established. We know we waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, a
borderline mentally ill member of the Al Qaeda entourage, 183 times in
one month. We know the NSA spied on an untold number of Americans
without warrants. We know that the CIA sent captured detainees to the
custody of regimes with abysmal human rights records, with the
explicit understanding they would be tortured.
The Church Committee came at a time when the public was in the midst
of a wrenching (and necessary) loss of innocence. But in our age,
secret government crimes and plots are almost a cliché. Polling shows
trust in government has returned roughly to its mid-'70s nadir. The
danger now isn't naïveté but cynicism--that we just come to accept
that the government will commit crimes in our name under the cover of
secrecy and that such activities are more or less business as usual,
about which nothing can be done. But something can be done. Something
must be done. And Congress should do it.
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages