Remembering the Church Committee, its shocking discoveries — and what it was like when Congress had backbone.
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I was a teenage politics nerd.
Well, I was actually in elementary school when I became involved in my first presidential campaign. A happy time, I remember, when a young, towering, and kindly UCLA player named Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), who doubled as a school aide, handed out our rubber balls at recess.
When I wasn’t racing around the playground, I was selling iconic “blue ribbon” buttons for the peace candidate Eugene McCarthy to fellow students and turning in my nickels and dimes to the Get Clean for Gene headquarters.
In 1976, as a high school student, my candidate was a Democratic US senator from Idaho named Frank Church. He was seeking his party’s presidential nomination, and I was thrilled to be named to his California steering committee even though I was under voting age at the time. I attended strategy meetings, recruited volunteers, even gave a few speeches. I believed fervently in the cause and can scarcely recall another candidate who inspired me quite as much.
This April 29 marks the 50th anniversary of the accomplishment most associated with Frank Church — and what electrified so many of us: the work of something known as the Church Committee. It inspired a generation of would-be government reformers and of future investigative reporters.
Officially, it was given the tongue-twisting name “Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.”
It was brought about in 1975 by the deep suspicion in the country following the Watergate scandal and revelations of domestic spying by the US Army. Chaired by Church, its purpose was to investigate abuses by US intelligence agencies. Here is a very limited sample of the committee’s findings.
The CIA had developed a massive network of assets in the press to spread propaganda and to repress attempts by any journalist to reveal the secret horrors described below.
The agency spied on American citizens, performed unethical experiments on vulnerable members of society (mental patients, prisoners), and developed techniques rendering them susceptible to mind control. This involved the use of electroshocks, secretly administered LSD, sensory isolation, forced listening to looped audio messages while under the effects of paralytic drugs, etc. (shades of the movie The Manchurian Candidate). (Go here, here, and here for more detail.)
Related: Classic Who: US Government Experiments on Americans — LSD and MK-ULTRA
Related: A Touch of Eden | Esquire | December 1999
Abroad, the CIA’s insidious interventions brought about the downfall of democratically elected foreign leaders, replacing them with US-friendly (corporate-friendly?) leaders. And, still more shocking, it plotted the assassinations of some.
Related: Why Americans Should Closely Watch Unfolding Events in Guatemala
The National Security Agency (NSA) also spied on Americans, collecting their private communications without warrants. The FBI spied on and manipulated political groups, especially antiwar and civil rights activists. They infiltrated these organizations to destabilize them, create internal division, and encourage violence.
The committee investigated the alleged role of government operatives in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but was only able to prove that federal agencies withheld crucial evidence from the Warren Commission, the official body which investigated the assassination.
These acts were done in the name of “national security” — an excuse that, to this day, is still being abused.
All this may seem like ancient history, but, in fact, many of the Church Committee’s gravest concerns are still painfully relevant today — most obviously the spying on American citizens. Only now it is with the aid of more sophisticated and dangerous methods than those of the 1970s.
Perhaps most resonant today is Church’s warning that, if a dictator ever took over, the NSA “could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.” And he said,
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.
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Imagine standing up to the most devious — most lethal — people in the country. That took guts.
Frank Church is an American hero. What Church and his committee did was extraordinary. Its accomplishments have never been matched, before or since.
And that’s the kind of thing we sure could use now: a fearless congressional committee digging deep for answers and hauling powerful officials to account.
Today, when Congress seems a shell of what it once was, as a president and his allies run roughshod over every facet of democracy, we would do well to stop and recall a time when Congress showed backbone, magnificence, even.
To learn more about the Church Committee, go here.
Will Journalism Vanish?
Plenty of news organizations are panicking because AI is starting to take over the whole show.
It seems it may not be long before people will depend largely, or even exclusively, on AI to figure out what kind of news they want, in what quantity and depth, and to spit out summaries of “all the news that fits” — according to AI’s diktat.
This could mean that most readers will no longer seek out original reporting and analysis. They also won’t be able to judge whether they should trust what AI is telling them or not. And they won’t even know that they should wonder about that.
The news organizations themselves are trying to figure out how to survive in the emerging AI-dominated landscape. Traffic from conventional channels like search engines is dropping steadily, and some big news organizations are suing or cutting deals with the AI companies that pirate the content that journalists work hard to produce.
In fact, without the reporting we journalists do — AI would be missing a key nutrient from its diet, having a dearth of critical, up-to-date news of the real world to repackage.
So it’s important to find a way for news outfits to survive. No news organizations would mean no reliable AI news briefs, no awareness of what’s happening around us.
Smaller, independent news organizations like WhoWhatWhy (where I am editor-in-chief) have a fighting chance of survival — more than many midpack legacy news organizations — because we have always appealed to a selective subset that go out of their way to self-educate.
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When I ponder the impact of people like Frank Church (and his many honorable colleagues), I struggle to think of who will lead us into the future.
If we have reason to step up and discuss what role we want AI to play in our world, we have equally good reason to worry about the humans behind its development and implementation.
Reading the internal memos, messages, and texts in the discovery materials in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman, one does not feel reassured about the kinds of people who will probably determine our future — unless other leaders emerge to challenge and restrain them. Or unless a public movement emerges to do so.
The revelations include dishing on Musk, who used the mother of four of his children to basically spy on Altman; and Mark Zuckerberg, who, while publicly feuding with Musk, privately sucked up to him by praising the chaos of Musk’s DOGE marauders, as if they were achieving some kind of efficiency breakthrough — instead of taking a wrecking ball to government agencies that many Americans depend on for necessities ranging from Social Security checks to life-saving medications dispensed by the Veterans Administration.
Church Must Be Dizzy, Spinning Nonstop in His Grave
The Church Committee could never have dreamed of the extreme chicanery that is so ubiquitous in America today.
Just as our elected “leaders” so often aren’t really capable of leading, we find that the newly ascendant class of so-called influencers turns out, in many cases, to not even be real.
Many of the internet personalities and accounts that have recently attracted huge followings are actually synthetic constructs. One example is “Emily Hart,” the bikini-clad, thin, blond MAGA babe who just loves Trump, beer, and Jesus.
Emily is the creation of a male medical student named Sam. As he told Wired (go here for free summary): “Every Reel I posted was getting 3 million views, 5 million views. I haven’t seen any easier way to make money online.” Sam went on to note:
The MAGA crowd is made up of super dumb people. And they fall for it.
People shovel money at all kinds of manipulative entrepreneurs, including the racist, homophobic, antisemitic Nick Fuentes. Plenty of financially strapped folks thought poor Nick didn’t have the funds to continue his important crusade, and decided to help out. Turns out Nick is getting rich off it all.
Equally troubling are our latter-day public servants who bear so little resemblance to Frank Church’s crowd, like the Republican congressman who suggested that Syrian billionaires wanting business help from our president should try bribing his family.
Not to be outdone by small-time hucksters, our illustrious chief justice of the Supreme Court has his own staggering self-dealing and conflicts of interest.
As compiled by Christopher Armitage, John Roberts’s issues include mischaracterizing more than $20 million in household income from law firms appearing before the Supreme Court; concealing his wife’s equity stake in her employer; failing to recuse himself from more than 500 cases argued at the Supreme Court by law firms that had paid his household millions in commissions; engineering the court’s first ethics code — and designing it to be unenforceable.
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Church’s committee came on the heels of abuses by President Richard Nixon, who had his “enemies list.” Today, with little pushback, Trump’s acts of retribution against his many enemies continue.
To be sure, he has faced some opposition. The administration has finally dropped its failed persecution of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, now that Trump’s preferred guy, Kevin Warsh, is on deck to take over. But there will always be new targets for vengeance, and an endless number of shady political hacks to keep firing out of that cannon.
Now, Trump’s former campaign lawyer and (surprise!) Fox News regular Joe diGenova has been installed in Florida to oversee parts of the retribution campaign — after a career prosecutor balked at further chasing ex-CIA Director John Brennan and was summarily fired.
Who will fix all this — Musk, Altman, and their AI brethren? A latter-day Frank Church?
Or all of us?
Finally… Trump, who on his first day in office signed an executive order to reinstate the death penalty, says he is bringing back the firing squad.
MAGA folks seem to want more guns, more maleness, more hate, more violence — and then they’re shocked when it comes round to them. So many were scurrying for cover last Saturday — makes me wonder how even the bravest of them would do facing a firing squad.
