You may have your favorites, but I believe the most important Congressional investigation in modern times (excepting any future such work as will be done by this or Congresses on the crimes of the Bush Administration) was The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, known as the "Church Committee" after its chairman Democratic Senator Frank Church.
Sen. Church, who died in 1984 of pancreatic cancer, was the fifth youngest senator elected to the U.S. Senate, and was one of the prime movers in the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
This diary looks in some detail at 1975-76 Church Committee investigation of the intelligence agencies in the post-Watergate period, taking public and private testimony from hundreds of people, collecting thousands of files from the FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, and many other federal agencies.
Extent of the Select Committee Investigation
Since the passage of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, signed into law in 1992 by President George H. W. Bush, over 50,000 pages of Church Committee records have been declassified and made available to the public. These files contain testimony and information on U.S. attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, on the Church Committee's investigation of the intelligence agencies' response to domestic assassination, MKULTRA mind control research by the CIA and other agencies, and COINTELPRO, among other topics.
No other Congressional investigation left such a damning indictment of government malfeasance and undemocratic actions as the Church reports have left us.
Sen. Church was not left untouched by backlash. The "Anybody But Church" Committee (ABC) -- the child of the conservative Washington National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). (See the many court decisions against NCPAC for their electoral shenanigans here.) Apparently, Idahoans, upset at Church's support for the Panama Canal treaty, elected GOP'er Steve Symms by less than 1% of the vote in the Reagan landslide year of 1980.
The Church Committee Reports
It's worth quoting some from the reports to give a flavor of their breadth, their political rigor, and their depth of research. The whole is way too long to quote at any length, or even give a decent sampling, but I believe those who are politically active today, and those who are currently serving in Congress, should use the Church hearings as both an inspiration and a template.
You can find the complete report at this link. Quotes below will have links to the particular section of the report quoted. Bold fonts indicate emphases I have chosen to make, and are not included in the report.
Overall, there were 7 volumes of public hearings and exhibits and 6 books which contain the Committee's writings on the various topics investigated. These 14 reports are the most extensive review of intelligence activities ever made public.
The Huston Plan
This plan called for the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence agencies to conduct far-reaching intelligence-gathering activities targeted toward domestic dissident groups and individuals. It was a massive intrusion into civil liberties by the Nixon Administration, planned and implemented (and mostly rescinded) in 1970. If you think the FBI opening mail and records is bad, how about having the CIA looking at your private communications?
... the Huston Plan, as we now know, must be viewed as but one episode, in a continuous effort by the intelligence agencies to secure the sanction of higher authority for expanded surveillance at home and abroad.
Executive Action
"Executive Action" was a CIA euphemism, defined as a project for research into developing means for overthrowing foreign
political leaders, including a "capability to perform assassinations".... The Inspector General's Report described Executive Action as a "general standby capability" to carry out assassination when required. (I.G. report, p. 37) The project was given the code name Z/R Rifle by the CIA.
We don't have any data that Z/R Rifle was ever used, however, though the Church Report quotes an Inspector General report that the attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro were part of Z/R Rifle.
The FBI
The volume on the FBI is, at 1000 pages, the longest part of the Church Committee Report. Considerable attention was given to the history of the FBI's Counterintelligence Program or COINTELPRO. This program was a counter-intelligence campaign directed at domestic dissidents during the period of civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests. According to the WIKI article on COINTELPRO, the founding document for this program directed FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of these movements and their leaders.
Part of the hearings on the FBI were held in secret executive session, so as not to impair "vital FBI operations necessary for the national defense".
Describing some of what the Committee will investigate, Frederick Schwartz, Jr., chief counsel of the committee, laid out part of the investigation:
We will tick off some of the particularly invasive techniques that have been used, and pay special attention to the subject of informants, which turns out by far to be the greatest source of information....
We will then turn, Mr. Chairman, to the dissemination and use, talk about official dissemination to agencies ranging from local law enforcement to Presidents, and then we will talk about unofficial dissemination, whereby the Bureau uses what they call friendly or cooperative news media to put out stories from their files based upon information which they regard as harmful to the individuals whom they wish to injure.
We will then turn to certain examples of particularly troublesome programs and incidents, programs to disrupt, discredit and destroy groups and individuals, examples of the use of what is called misinformation to prevent dissenters from meeting or engaging in protest activity, exammles of efforts to neutralize people by breaking up their marriages or ruining their jobs, examples of where decisions have been made to risk the death of suspect individuals by intentionally exacerbating tensions between groups known to be violence prone and known to have a desire to injure each other, where there were intentional acts taken by the Bureau, with full authority, to exacerbate that tension.
Intelligence Activities -- An Overview
There is much more that is covered in the Church reports, including investigations into the misuse of the Internal Revenue Service against political opponents, the misuse of the National Security Agency against political opponents (covering the use of illegal wiretaps), and much more.
I conclude with some of the Committee's closing observations on the impact of the intelligence apparatus on American society.
An outstanding characteristic of the contemporary intelligence structure is its pervasiveness.... One authority recently estimated that ten major intelligence agencies maintain a staff of 153,250 individuals with an annual budget of $6,228,000,000. [Note, this was 30 years ago!]....
The Constitution of the United States continues to guarantee "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searchers and seizures...." The Federal intelligence organization has the capacity to significantly enhance and support that right or to manifest itself as one of the cruelest detractors of that tenet of American government. Vigilance on the part of the citizenry as to encroachments upon its rights and liberties is an utmost necessity for the preservation of a meaningful democracy. Yet, public confidence in the state tolerates a condition of official secrecy with regard to almost every aspect of intelligence activity.... Endowed with its special privilege of operational secrecy, the Federal intelligence organization, in any violation of its pledge of service to the citizenry, can expect to elicit a prohibitive punishment from the polity, for it has, of course, a unique potential to execute the ultimate breach of trust, the demise of the demos itself.
I fervently hope that the investigations that promise to come forth from Rep. Waxman and others in the newly dominatated Democratic House of Representatives will take heed of the courage, foresight, and wisdom of those who in the deep dark days of the Nixon and Ford Administrations sought to curb the excesses of executive power, and the illegal activities of the secret police who act as that powers henchmen.