Church Committee

Senator Frank Church concluded in the final report of the committee of inquiry he chaired that "the growing abuse of the secret services reflects a larger, fundamental problem in our central institutions."

As a "Church Committee" is special committee of the US Senate to examine the governance related to activities of the intelligence services ( United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities ) in 1975 respectively. The name comes from the chairman of the committee Frank Church , a Democratic senator from Idaho .

The development

Against the background of the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, several individual publications about secret activities of the US government aroused increasing interest from the public and the US Congress from the early 1970s .

January 1970: Ex-soldier Christopher Pyle reveals that the US Army is monitoring anti-war protests and activists in his own country. In the middle of the year, the Senate begins its first investigation under Sam Ervin .
Late March 1971: The Washington Post and New York Times report on illegal FBI programs , surveillance, and corruption against civil rights groups . It later became known that the programs had been running under the name COINTELPRO since 1956. The reporting was based on documents that were stolen by the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI and forwarded to the press.
June 1971: Despite massive pressure from the government, the New York Times publishes the so-called “ Pentagon Papers ” on the longstanding and secret political and military engagement of the USA in Vietnam before and during the outbreak of the Vietnam War.
1972: A series of initially small articles by journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Washington Post reveals the background to a break-in into the headquarters of the Democratic Party in the "Watergate Hotel". Only the trial of the burglars in January 1973 revealed the background to the Watergate affair and triggered massive Senate investigations, again led by Sam Ervin. In August 1974, under the weight of the allegations , US President Richard Nixon resigned after impeachment proceedings were initiated against him.
December 1974: The journalist Seymour Hersh reveals in a series of the NYT the " family jewels " of the CIA , secret operations to assassinate foreign heads of state and coups. He also mentions massive surveillance operations by the CIA against political opponents of the Vietnam War in the USA under the code name Operation CHAOS .

The intelligence services

At that time, the USA did not have sufficient experience with the control of its intelligence services, which were only established in World War II and have only been structured ad hoc since then . The military intelligence service Defense Intelligence Agency was not developed from the services of the armed forces until the 1960s, the responsibilities of the FBI as a domestic intelligence service were poorly defined and the Central Intelligence Agency was torn between its dual function as a foreign intelligence service and coordinating all US services.

The committee

In 1975 and 1976 the committee published a total of 14 volumes of investigation results. Particular attention was paid to the revelations of successful or attempted assassinations on behalf of the USA on Fidel Castro , Cuba ; Patrice Lumumba , Zaire ; Rafael Trujillo , Dominican Republic ; General René Schneider , Chile and Ngô Đình Diệm from South Vietnam . The committee also investigated human experimentation with drugs and torture as part of the MKULTRA project . Another topic was the illegal COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence PROgram), in which, beginning in the McCarthy era , the FBI discredited , manipulated and monitored left-wing political organizations within the USA between 1956 and 1971 .

The investigation also revealed that various MPs from the two chambers had been informed of individual operations. However, there was a lack of coordination and clear responsibilities, so that the individual MPs preferred to look in a different direction.

Under pressure from the Publications president issued Gerald Ford , the Executive Order 11905 , a mandatory ban on all US government agencies and their executive organs, foreign heads of state to kill targeted or to plan such operations.

Continue

From the Church Committee , the standing committees to control the intelligence services in the US Senate ( Select Committee on Intelligence ) and in the House of Representatives ( United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence ) emerged. In addition, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 stipulated the rules according to which the CIA may operate abroad and that the services for the surveillance of American citizens require the approval of the newly established FISC court.

The rules were tightened in the 1980s under the influence of the Iran-Contra affair . After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and revelations about operations by US intelligence services in the " war on terror ", an extensive discussion developed from 2005 onwards about the rights of the US president to allow intelligence activities outside of legal restrictions.

2014: Call for a new Church Committee

In March 2014, 16 former members of the original Church Committee called for a fundamental overhaul of intelligence oversight in the USA on the occasion of the 40th anniversary and under the influence of the global surveillance and espionage affair that had been revealed by Edward Snowden since 2013 . They call for a committee of inquiry to publicly examine and evaluate the practices of the intelligence services and the underlying laws.

Web links

Commons : Church Committee - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Complete documentation of the Church Committee reports (14 volumes) as well as around 1000 pages of approved original files

Russel Miller: How the NSA became what it is , Verfassungsblog - on matters constitutional, September 16, 2013

Individual evidence

^ "Final report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: together with additional, supplemental, and separate views." April 26, 1976, original quote: "the growth of intelligence abuses reflects a more general failure of our basic institutions."
^ Alfred W. McCoy : Torture and let torture. 50 years of torture research and practice by the CIA and the US military. Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt 2005, ISBN 3-86150-729-3 , p. 36 f.
^ Electronic Frontier Foundation: Call on Congress to Create Modern Day Church Committee , March 17, 2014

[1] "Final report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: together with additional, supplemental, and separate views." April 26, 1976, original quote: "the growth of intelligence abuses reflects a more general failure of our basic institutions."

[2] Alfred W. McCoy : Torture and let torture. 50 years of torture research and practice by the CIA and the US military. Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt 2005, ISBN 3-86150-729-3 , p. 36 f.

[3] Electronic Frontier Foundation: Call on Congress to Create Modern Day Church Committee , March 17, 2014