On August 15, 1975, Senator Frank Church (D–ID), chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities—the “Church Committee” that has been much in the news these last few weeks as a possible analogue to the recently-formed House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government—appeared on Meet the Press.
I’ll have more to say at a later date about this comparison between the 1975 Church Committee and Rep. Jim Jordan’s 2023 Weaponization Subcommittee, whose membership has yet to be announced (though Massie and Bishop are likely to be appointed, and I know my own Congresswoman Harriet Hageman has put her name forward as well). If I’m not mistaken, the call for a “new Church Committee” originated with Steve Bannon, in a June 2018 interview on ABC’s This Week in which he called for “a bipartisan commission in the Senate” to go after the intelligence community and in particular the FBI; but I’d be grateful to be corrected on this.
For now, here is a clip from that Meet the Press interview with Sen. Church, followed by my transcript.
HOST: Senator, let me follow up by asking: do you think that the CIA, and military intelligence agencies, and the FBI, have used the emergency provisions both in law and by emergency agency—the Federal Preparedness Agency, it’s called now—to have contingency plans which threaten the liberty of American citizens?
SEN. CHURCH: In due course the Committee will pass judgment on those questions. I’m not going to pre-guess the Committee or prematurely attempt to pass judgment on this program. But let me tell you this. In the need to develop a capacity what potential enemies are doing, the United States Government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. These messages are between ships at sea, they could be between units, military units in the field—we have a very extensive capability of intercepting messages wherever they may be in the airwaves.
Now that is necessary, and important to the United States, as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know. At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left; such is the capability to monitor everything, telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the Intelligence Community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny. And there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
Now why is this investigation important? I’ll tell you why. Because I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there, to make tyranny total in America. And we must see to it that this agency, and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law, and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That’s the abyss from which there is no return.
I can’t help but be reminded of the prescience of Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address, and of how much the problem has metastasized in the intervening 60 years. (More thoughts on that here.) Not only have the technological aids to tyranny grown by leaps and bounds; the very agencies that Sen. Church’s Committee went on to expose are very much still with us, and then some.
The obvious question for Americans in 2023 is: Did the Church Committee succeed?
Not just in exposing what the NSA (the unnamed agency referred to by Sen. Church on Meet the Press; its very existence was not even publicly confirmed until the Committee’s report!), the CIA, the FBI, and the IRS did to the American citizenry and the American republic—which is to say, bequeathing unto endless pseuds endless material for endless threads on MK–ULTRA, etc.—but in reigning in the IC Leviathan that perpetrated these abuses and excesses?
But who can draw out Leviathan with a hook? Will he make supplications unto thee?Will he covenant with thee? Perhaps we should speak, not of reigning in the IC Leviathan, but of lopping off the heads of the IC Hydra—so long as we remember to bring the torch as well as the sword.
If the Church Committee did succeed, then what do Rep. Jordan and the other Subcommittee members need to know about its goal, its composition, its methods, and its messaging, so that they can emulate its success?
And if the Church Committee did not succeed, then why are we squabbling over whether or not it should be seen as a precedent for the Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government?
The Church Committee DID succeed, but not in the way you think.
Congress used that hearing, and many other mechanisms in the wake of Watergate, to solidify Congressional control over the administrative state.
Look at what they did, not what Church said.
As I said to Lee Smith on his podcast last week.
What Church did is the problem not the solution. What we need now is a Reformation!