By Nat Hentoff
Nat Hentoff
In 1975, Frank Church, a Democratic senator from Idaho, told the American people that a government intelligence agency most of them had never heard of — the National Security Agency — “had the capability to secretly monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”
Like many Americans, regardless of their political party, I was startled at this news.
At the time, Church was the chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee. He worked hard to spread this frightening news as fully as he could, which I reported in columns and my book, The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance (Seven Stories Press, 2003).
This exemplary patriot assured us that “never again will an agency of the government be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order.”
But he could not predict the coming of a Congress wholly forgetful of the Church Committee and absorbed in internal wars to gain political party ascendancy, not to mention a two-term president who largely exterminated the separation of powers.
However, as I’ve been reporting, the revelations of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and Democratic. Sen. Dianne Feinstein have partially reawakened Congress.
Meanwhile, Frederick A.O. (“Fritz”) Schwarz Jr., who was chief counsel for the Church Committee and is currently the chief counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, challenges us to rescue our fading identity as a self-governing citizenry. In his column, “Why We Need a New Church Committee to Fix Our Broken Intelligence System,” from the March 31 issue of The Nation, he writes:
“Now it is time for a new committee to examine our secret government closely again, particularly for its actions in the post-9/11 period.
“This need is underscored by what has become a full-blown crisis, with Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein accusing the CIA of spying on the committee, possibly violating the Constitution’s separation-of-powers principles, the Fourth Amendment and other laws” (Schwarz, The Nation, March 31).
In a spectacularly unexpected fusion of warring public figures, Feinstein, who had accused Edward Snowden of being a traitor, has now joined with him to expose government secrecy and make us Americans again.
And so will this Church Committee revival.
But how will this new committee actually operate to accomplish this mission? In a …read more
Source: OP-EDS
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