Can Republicans create a new Church Committee?
We yearn for a legitimate heir to the Church Committee, but honest examination of the state of surveillance must transcend partisan score-settling.
In a party-line vote, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a resolution calling for the creation of a committee to study the “weaponization of the federal government.” Although the select committee will be housed within the Judiciary Committee, non-Judiciary Committee members can and will likely be appointed to it.
Critics of the Committee have accused it of being a partisan tool aimed at avenging Republican grievances from the January 6 Committee and other congressional oversight of the Trump Administration. Its supporters, however, have likened it to the Church Committee, the groundbreaking Senate investigation into the illegal and unethical conduct of the intelligence community at home and abroad.
Defending Rights & Dissent has long called for a new Church Committee. In the late 1970s and 1980s, we led the grassroots movement to defend and expand the post-Church Committee restrictions on domestic surveillance and covert action from attacks from the New Right and the Reagan Administration.
The resolution passed by the House unfortunately does not mirror the Church Committee’s broad mandate to oversee intelligence agency abuses, but instead talks in its own broad terms of executive branch monitoring of US citizens with no specific agencies named. As some of the most heinous abuses of civil liberties, including indefinite detention and extrajudicial executions, have been carried under the guise of the War on Terror, this means that they may fall outside the purview of the committee. Nonetheless, a review of politically motivated domestic surveillance is urgently needed. Defending Rights & Dissent has repeatedly documented political bias in the initiation of domestic terrorism investigations, including in our groundbreaking report Still Spying on Dissent: The Enduring Problem of FBI First Amendment Abuse.
Here’s where the original Church Committee led, and what the new Church Committee must do to live up to the name.
Constitutional Crises Prompt the First Church Committee
In the early 1970s, a flurry of reporting and activism dragged abuse of surveillance powers and secrecy into the limelight. In 1971, an audacious crew of peace activists calling themselves the
Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. They stole the documents from the office and discovered that many of the documents detailed an elaborate domestic spying operation focused on domestic dissenters - the draft resistors, Black Panthers, civil rights activists, and (predominantly) left-wing groups standing up to state power.
The Citizens’ Commission sent their stolen documents to members of Congress and to reporters. Only one reporter - Betty Medsger of the Washington Post - chose to bring the contents of the files public rather than quietly returning them to the FBI. In subsequent reporting, hawkeyed NBC reporter Carl Stern puzzled over the handwritten note “COINTELPRO New Left” and began filing Freedom of Information Act requests demanding information about the FBI’s war in the shadows against domestic dissent.
A few years later, in 1974, New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh uncovered the CIA’s illicit domestic intelligence operation targeting the anti-Vietnam War peace movement. In direct defiance of the agency’s foreign intelligence mandate, the CIA tailed American peace activists, cultivated networks of informants, and surveilled an anti-war member of Congress. Claiming foreign manipulation of domestic actors - a charge echoed today - foreign intelligence turned inward on Americans. This blatant abuse angered the public and members of Congress, and pressure grew for a systematic investigation into government spying, secrecy, and abuse. The post-Watergate heightened awareness of political spying added fuel to the fire.
In 1975, Congress passed a resolution establishing the Church Committee, granting the body a broad mandate to investigate abuses perpetrated by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and IRS. Peter Fenn, an aide to Senator Church described the Committee as such:
We investigated the secret actions of the FBI to spy on, and undermine, Martin Luther King, Jr. and many other civil rights leaders. We examined “watch lists” of law-abiding Americans whose communications were intercepted and put under surveillance, because they were protesting the War in Vietnam or engaged in the struggle for human rights. We focused on U.S. foreign intelligence agencies that engaged in plotting coups, undermining elections abroad and plotting assassinations of leaders. Many of these activities occurred over decades, across administrations, as intelligence agencies illegally expanded and overstepped their missions.
The Church Committee Lays Bare the National Security State
The Church Committee burrowed into the shadowy recesses of the national security state, examining around 800 witnesses and 110,000 documents. Their findings were explosive - tales of assassination plots against foreign leaders, the drugging of American citizens, protester watchlists, FBI agents stationed in mail rooms, and failure to cooperate with the Warren Commission investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Church Committee laid out how the national security state spied on domestic dissent while engaging in secret military adventurism abroad. Their findings exposed a conspiracy to deny the American people their right to know and their freedom to act. The national security state enforced silence surrounding operations abroad while waging war against dissenters at home.
Intelligence agencies and the Executive Branch didn’t easily submit to the Church Committee. President Ford proposed a presidential commission that would superficially accede to the people’s demand for information while cordoning off embarrassing information from public inquiry. Henry Kissinger cautioned that “the nature of covert operations will have a curious aspect to the average mind and out of perspective it could look inexplicable” and that “these investigations could be as damaging to the intelligence community as McCarthy was to the Foreign Service.” When it became clear that Congress intended to perform voracious oversight, intelligence agencies employed bureaucratic backstops, including denials of documents, delays, and invocation of national security to justify secrecy. A White House memo reveals a ploy to pass off “sanitized” records with conspicuous lacunae surrounding CIA misdeeds.
The national security state prefers to remain unaccountable. But through vigorous pursuit of the truth, the Church Committee substantially advanced public knowledge of the shadowy misdeeds of the national security state. New oversight over covert action was put in place, political assassinations were prohibited, and new standards were enacted for invasive surveillance techniques, such as wiretaps and infiltrators. Permanent committees were established in both chambers of Congress to conduct intelligence oversight. These reforms didn’t go far enough then, and have since eroded under siege from intelligence agencies. The FISA warrant program became a vehicle for expanded surveillance in the War on Terror era. Prohibitions against political assassinations were re-interpreted into meaninglessness. The Intelligence Committees consistently fail to pierce past the Beltway-default deference to the intelligence community.
Today’s “Church Committee”
Civil libertarians from across the political spectrum are skeptical that the Republicans’ so-called Church Committee can live up to the scope and mandate of the original Committee. We are concerned that partisan blinders will restrict honest examination of federal overreach and political spying.
Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) critiques the misguided objectives of the Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government:
I had high hopes that this would be a Church-style committee, where we could investigate surveillance of American citizens, violations of civil liberties, and the intelligence community’s overseas abuses of power. It is clear that this committee is going to be one of personal grievances and defending insurrectionists, led by members who are themselves being investigated for their role in the January 6th insurrection and who have openly defied accountability by not complying with Congressional subpoenas. The goal is not justice, but to delegitimize credible investigations into people who attempted to overthrow our government.
James Risen, author of a forthcoming book about the Church Committee, has argued the committee is no Church Committee. He criticizes the Republicans’ probable reliance on Republican conspiracy theories about a deep state aligned against conservatives:
[T]oday’s combined military, intelligence, and counterterrorism complex is a capitalistic, pro-military center of gravity in American society. It is not anti-Trump or anti-conservative, and it is definitely not a secret political organization bent on imposing “woke” views on Americans.
John Kiriakou has also argued the new committee should in no way be called a new Church Committee. As a whistleblower indicted under the Espionage Act, Kiriakou is all too familiar with government overreach. He writes:
I want to make clear that I hate the F.B.I. as much as any Republican does. The F.B.I. has raided my house twice and it has worked hard to ruin my life and to put me in prison after I blew the whistle on the C.I.A.’s illegal, immoral and unethical torture program.
Still, if we’re going to have a special subcommittee looking at government overreach and illegality, then let’s do exactly that. Go ahead and investigate the F.B.I. and its targeting of Republicans, as well as Democrats, journalists, peace groups, Julian Assange and everybody else on the chopping block.
The strength of the Church Committee lay in its clear-eyed understanding that the encroachment of the national security state is far from a partisan issue. Across administrations, our spy agencies have ratcheted up surveillance against Americans, shielded by bipartisan deference to the gods of national security and counterterrorism. Rogue agencies continue to shield their actions behind classification, willful ignorance, and enforced silence.
We need a new Church Committee. To succeed, that Committee must remain intensely skeptical of political surveillance, wherever it arises.There are representatives on both sides of the aisle who have raised legitimate concerns about surveillance. If this committee is serious, it must include the strongest civil libertarians from both parties and focus on the full range of politically abusive surveillance, including surveillance of racial justice activists, environmentalists, peace activists, Muslims and Chinese-Americans. The fact remains that left-leaning and radical activists are the chronic enemies of the national security state, and honest examination of the state of surveillance must transcend partisan score-settling.
We yearn for a legitimate heir to the Church Committee, but fear that the Republicans’ committee may merely become an echo chamber for the faux outrage of cable news pundits and online grievance mongers.