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church committee
How the CIA Destabilizes the World
If only the CIA’s rogue operations had been consigned to history as a result of the crimes exposed by the Church Committee, or at the least had brought the CIA under the rule of law and public accountability. But that was not to be.
Feb 12, 2024
There are three basic problems with the CIA: its objectives, methods, and unaccountability. Its operational objectives are whatever the CIA or the President of the United States defines to be in the U.S. interest at a given time, irrespective of international law or U.S. law. Its methods are secretive and duplicitous. Its unaccountability means that the CIA and president run foreign policy without any public scrutiny. Congress is a doormat, a sideshow.
As a recent CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, said of his time at the CIA: "I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment."
The CIA was established in 1947 as the successor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OSS had performed two distinct roles in World War II, intelligence and subversion. The CIA took over both roles. On the one hand, the CIA was to provide intelligence to the US Government. On the other, the CIA was to subvert the “enemy,” that is, whomever the president or CIA defined as the enemy, using a wide range of measures: assassinations, coups, staged unrest, arming of insurgents, and other means.
It is the latter role that has proved devastating to global stability and the U.S. rule of law. It is a role that the CIA continues to pursue today. In effect, the CIA is a secret army of the U.S., capable of creating mayhem across the world with no accountability whatsoever.
When President Dwight Eisenhower decided that Africa’s rising political star, democratically elected Patrice Lumumba of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), was the “enemy,” the CIA conspired in his 1961 assassination, thus undermining the democratic hopes for Africa. He would hardly be the last African president brought down by the CIA.
The extent of the continuing mayhem resulting from CIA operations gone awry is astounding.
In its 77-year history, the CIA has been held to serious public account just once, in 1975. In that year, Idaho Senator Frank Church led a Senate investigation that exposed the CIA’s shocking rampage of assassinations, coups, destabilization, surveillance, and Mengele-style torture and medical “experiments.”
The expose by the Church Committee of the CIA’s shocking malfeasance has recently been chronicled in a superb book by the investigative reporter James Risen, The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys―and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy.
That single episode of oversight occurred because of a rare confluence of events.
In the year before the Church Committee, the Watergate scandal had toppled Richard Nixon and weakened the White House. As successor to Nixon, Gerald Ford was unelected, a former Congressman, and reluctant to oppose the oversight prerogatives of the Congress. The Watergate scandal, investigated by the Senate Ervin Committee, had also empowered the Senate and demonstrated the value of Senate oversight of Executive Branch abuses of power. Crucially, the CIA was newly led by Director William Colby, who wanted to clean up the CIA operations. Also, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, author of pervasive illegalities also exposed by the Church committee, had died in 1972.
In December 1974, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, then as now a great reporter with sources inside the CIA, published an account of illegal CIA intelligence operations against the U.S. antiwar movement. The Senate Majority Leader at the time, Mike Mansfield, a leader of character, then appointed Church to investigate the CIA. Church himself was a brave, honest, intelligent, independent-minded, and intrepid Senator, characteristics chronically in short supply in U.S. politics.
If only the CIA’s rogue operations had been consigned to history as a result of the crimes exposed by the Church Committee, or at the least had brought the CIA under the rule of law and public accountability. But that was not to be. The CIA has had the last laugh —or better said, has brought the world to tears—by maintaining its preeminent role in U.S. foreign policy, including overseas subversion.
Since 1975, the CIA has run secretive operations backing Islamic jihadists in Afghanistan that utterly wrecked Afghanistan while giving rise to al-Qaeda. The CIA has likely run secretive operations in the Balkans against Serbia, in the Caucuses against Russia, and in Central Asia targeting China, all deploying CIA-backed jihadists. In the 2010s, the CIA ran deadly operations to topple Syria’s Bashir al-Assad, again with Islamic jihadists. For at least 20 years, the CIA has been deeply involved in fomenting the growing catastrophe in Ukraine, including the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 that triggered the devastating war now engulfing Ukraine.
What do we know of these operations? Only the parts that whistleblowers, a few intrepid investigative reporters, a handful of brave scholars, and some foreign governments have been willing or able to tell us, with all of these potential witnesses knowing that they might face severe retribution from the U.S. government. There has been little to no accountability by the U.S. government itself, or meaningful oversight or restraint imposed by Congress. On the contrary, the government has become ever-more obsessively secretive, pursuing aggressive legal actions against disclosures of classified information, even when, or especially when, that information describes the illegal actions by the government itself.
Once in a while, a former U.S. official spills the beans, such as when Zbigniew Brzezinski revealed that he had induced Jimmy Carter to assign the CIA to train Islamic jihadists to destabilize the government of Afghanistan, with the aim of inducing the Soviet Union to invade that country.
In the case of Syria, we learned from a few stories in the New York Times in 2016 and 2017 of the CIA’s subversive operations to destabilize Syria and overthrow Assad, as ordered by President Barack Obama. Here is the case of a dreadfully misguided CIA operation, blatantly in violation of international law, that has led to a decade of mayhem, an escalating regional war, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and millions of displaced people, and yet there has not been a single honest acknowledgment of this CIA-led disaster by the White House or Congress.
In the case of Ukraine, we know that the U.S. played a major covert role in the violent coup that brought down Yanukovych and that swept Ukraine into a decade of bloodshed but to this day, we don’t know the details. Russia offered the world a window into the coup by intercepting and then posting a call between Victoria Nuland, then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State (now Under-Secretary of State) and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt (now Assistant Secretary of State), in which they plot the post-coup government. Following the coup, the CIA covertly trained special operations forces of the post-coup regime the U.S. had helped bring to power. The U.S. government has been mum about the CIA’s covert operations in Ukraine.
We have good reason to believe that CIA operatives carried out the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, as per Seymour Hersh, who is now an independent reporter. Unlike in 1975, when Hersh was with the New York Times at a time when the paper still tried to hold the government to account, the Times does not even deign to look into Hersh’s account.
Holding the CIA to public account is of course a steep uphill struggle. Presidents and the Congress don’t even try. The mainstream media don’t investigate the CIA, preferring instead to quote “senior unnamed officials” and the official cover-up. Are the mainstream media outlets lazy, suborned, afraid of advertising revenues from the military-industrial complex, threatened,
ignorant, or all of the above? Who knows.
There is a tiny glimmer of hope. Back in 1975, the CIA was led by a reformer. Today, the CIA is led by William Burns, one of America’s long-standing leading diplomats. Burns knows the truth about Ukraine, since he served as Ambassador to Russia in 2008 and cabled Washington about the grave error of pushing NATO enlargement to Ukraine. Given Burns’ stature and diplomatic accomplishments, perhaps he would support the urgently needed accountability.
The extent of the continuing mayhem resulting from CIA operations gone awry is astounding. In Afghanistan, Haiti, Syria, Venezuela, Kosovo, Ukraine, and far beyond, the needless deaths, instability, and destruction unleashed by CIA subversion continues to this day. The mainstream media, academic institutions, and Congress should be investigating these operations to the best of their ability and demanding the release of documents to enable democratic accountability.
Next year is the 50th anniversary of the Church Committee hearings. Fifty years on, with the precedent, inspiration, and guidance of the Church Committee itself, it’s urgently time to open the blinds, expose the truth about the U.S.-led mayhem, and begin a new era in which U.S. foreign policy becomes transparent, accountable, subject to the rule of law both domestic and international, and directed towards global peace rather than subversion of supposed enemies.
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House GOP 'Insurrection Protection Committee Is a Sham,' Says Pressley
Progressives within and beyond Congress rejected Republicans' comparisons of the new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to the historic Church Committee.
Jan 10, 2023
Progressives in the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday blasted Republicans for using their narrow majority to establish a panel headed by a far-right congressman to "expose the abuses committed by the unelected, unaccountable federal bureaucracy."
In a 221-211 vote along party lines, the GOP approved a resolution creating a Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, under the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
"The goal is not justice, but to delegitimize credible investigations into people who attempted to overthrow our government."
Jordan—who infamously defied a congressional subpoena to testify about the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump—took aim at the U.S. Homeland Security and Justice departments as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and key House Democrats in a Tuesday floor speech advocating for the subcommittee.
"Mr. Jordan, who was deeply involved in Mr. Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, has for months been investigating what he says is a bias in federal law enforcement against conservatives," The New York Timesreported. "Now that Republicans have the majority, he plans to use his gavel and his subpoena power to escalate and expand that inquiry, including searching for evidence that federal workers have become politicized and demanding documents about ongoing criminal investigations."
While Republicans in Congress have compared their now-official panel to the historic Church Committee—which, in the 1970s, "labored for 16 months to produce a 5,000-page report that is a canonical history of the secret government," as journalist Chris Hayes wrote for The Nation in 2009—progressives, including Hayes last week, have challenged that comparison.
"In 1975, the Senate created a bipartisan Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities," Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said after the vote. "Dubbed the Church Committee, the panel uncovered the surveillance and abuses against civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as illegal programs to assassinate foreign leaders. Minnesota legend Walter Mondale served on the committee and his questions helped uncover abuses of power."
Explaining her "no" vote, Omar continued:
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.
Additionally, agency oversight belongs in the House Committee on Oversight and Reform or on an independent committee. The fact that this is being formed under the Judiciary Committee suggests that the goal isn't accountability but rather to obstruct justice and undercut legal investigations they don't agree with.
Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), a fellow "Squad" member, was similarly critical on Tuesday.
"The federal government has already been weaponized by Republicans against Black, brown, and other marginalized groups," she said. "So unless they're investigating themselves, this Insurrection Protection Committee is a sham."
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) called the committee "a fascist power grab to evade accountability" for the January 6 attack.
\u201cFWIW: The @GOP's Weaponization Select Subcommittee is a fascist power grab to evade accountability for 1/6.\n\nThey don't care about government weaponization against Black & brown communities, for example. They just want access to investigations into them & their cult leader Trump.\u201d— Congresswoman Cori Bush (@Congresswoman Cori Bush) 1673394611
Congressman Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) tied the creation of the new panel to the 15 votes and backroom deals it took last week for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to get far-right members of his party to stop blocking his path to the leadership position.
"House Republicans just created a committee with unprecedented power to review criminal investigations and access high-level intelligence for political purposes," Pocan said. "This is what Speaker McCarthy was willing to compromise to be speaker. It's wild."
There were also critics beyond Congress—including Noah Bookbinder, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
"This new House subcommittee, specifically set up to investigate ongoing investigations by the Justice Department and FBI into Donald Trump and others, is dangerous and threatens accountability and the rule of law," he said. "We can't accept this as normal."
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New Docs Raise Questions About CIA Spying Here at Home
The current debate about government surveillance has largely overlooked the CIA, possibly because we know little about the agency's activities within the United States. While the relevant legal authorities governing the CIA, including Executive Order 12333, set out the CIA's mandate, they do so in broad terms. Beyond the generalities in EO 12333 and other laws, the public has had few opportunities to examine the rules governing the CIA's activities.
Jun 16, 2015
The current debate about government surveillance has largely overlooked the CIA, possibly because we know little about the agency's activities within the United States. While the relevant legal authorities governing the CIA, including Executive Order 12333, set out the CIA's mandate, they do so in broad terms. Beyond the generalities in EO 12333 and other laws, the public has had few opportunities to examine the rules governing the CIA's activities.
But we know more today than we did a few weeks ago. In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU and Yale Law School's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, the CIA has released a slew of documents concerning CIA surveillance under EO 12333. (The Justice Department has also recently released a set of documents related to the executive order.)
The national debate in the 1970s about the proper limits of U.S. government spying on its own citizens was, to a large extent, about the CIA. In the wake of the Watergate scandal and news stories about other illegal CIA activity, President Gerald Ford and Congress launched investigations into the full range of CIA misdeeds -- from domestic spying programs and infiltration of leftist organizations to experimentation on non-consenting human subjects and attempts to assassinate foreign leaders.
Although the CIA's legal authority to spy on Americans was very narrow, these investigative committees -- chaired by Sen. Frank Church, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and Rep. Otis Pike -- discovered that the CIA had engaged in a massive domestic spying project, "Operation CHAOS," which targeted anti-war activists and political dissenters. The committee reports also revealed that, for more than 20 years, the CIA had indiscriminately intercepted and opened hundreds of thousands of Americans' letters. In addition to documenting the intelligence agencies' extensive violations of the law, the Church Committee concluded that the constitutional system of checks and balances "has not adequately controlled intelligence activities."
The Church Committee's conclusion -- at core, an admonition -- still resonates today. While the documents that the CIA has released are heavily redacted, raising more questions than they answer, they strongly suggest that the agency's domestic activities are extensive.
Some highlights from the documents:
- A key CIA regulation -- titled "AR 2-2" -- governs the conduct of the CIA's activities, which include domestic intelligence collection.
AR 2-2, which has never been publicly released before, includes rules governing a wide range of activities, including surveillance of U.S. persons, human experimentation, contracts with academic institutions, relations with journalists and staff of U.S. news media, and relations with clergy and missionaries.
Several annexes to AR 2-2 contain the agency's EO 12333 implementing procedures. For example, Annex A, "Guidance for CIA Activities Outside the United States," sets forth the procedures that apply to CIA activity directed toward U.S. citizens and permanent residents who are abroad. Much of the relevant information is redacted. Annex F, "Procedures Governing Conduct and Coordination by CIA and DEA of Narcotics Activities Abroad," is similarly redacted in key sections, including the section discussing the agencies' "Specific Agreement Concerning Electronic Surveillance."
- The documents indicate that the CIA engages in a wide array of domestic activity, often in conjunction with the FBI.
Domestically, the CIA's spying is governed by Annex B to AR 2-2, "Guidance for CIA Activities Within the United States." This document explains:
Although EO 12333, AR 2-2, and Annex B prohibit the agency from engaging in electronic surveillance within the United States, the CIA can nevertheless ask the FBI to do its bidding:
Annex B and the CIA-FBI memorandum of understanding comport with past reporting that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorized the FBI to work with the CIA to collect Americans' financial records in bulk under Patriot Act Section 215.
In addition, Annex B explains that the CIA may "use a monitoring device within the United States under circumstances in which a warrant would not be required for law enforcement purposes if the CIA General Counsel concurs."
But what qualifies as a "monitoring device"? And how exactly does monitoring differ from "electronic surveillance," which the CIA is prohibited from doing domestically? We don't know. In the newly released documents, the definition of "monitoring" (as distinct from "electronic surveillance") is redacted.
The CIA also turned over several years' worth of annual reports to Congress about the agency's activities under EO 12333. These reports begin by discussing "Intelligence Activities Conducted by CIA Within the United States." This header is followed by dozens of entirely redacted pages -- once again suggesting that the agency is engaged in a significant amount of intelligence activity here at home.
- The rules for the handling of Americans' information are so complex that the CIA struggled to apply them properly.
A 2002 report by the CIA inspector general, "Intelligence Activity Assessment: Compliance with Executive Order 12333: The Use of [redacted] Collection [redacted] from 1995-2000," observed "a general and widespread lack of understanding" within the CIA of the rules governing the retention and sharing of U.S. citizens' and permanent residents' information. In particular, the OIG found that few managers or other officers "could accurately state the appropriate procedures for retaining or disseminating U.S. person information," and it concluded that these rules were "not being applied consistently" by the agency.
* * *
The independent and bi-partisan Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is currently examining the intelligence community's counterterrorism-related activities under EO 12333. Notably, one of the topics the board plans to focus on is the CIA's collection of information within the United States. We hope that, when the board eventually issues its public report about the agencies' activities under EO 12333, it sheds a little more light on what exactly the CIA is doing here at home.
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