I've seen several bloggers recommend this article in The Nation by Chris Hayes and I'm going to join them. It's partly a brief history of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities which was created in 1975 and is more colloquially known as the Church Committee. Led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, the committee conducted a wide-ranging investigation of abuses committed by the American intelligence apparatus, from the CIA's attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro (among other international figures) to the FBI's spying on American citizens, including attempts to blackmail Martin Luther King into committing suicide. The work of the committee is widely credited with inspiring reforms to improve oversight on those agencies and one of the hallmarks of the Bush administration was its attempts to either roll back or circumvent that oversight.
Hayes also tries to build a case for a modern day Church Committee:
Public debates over intelligence are qualitatively different from other policy discussions. In a debate over whether, say, the economic stimulus has been effective, there is a presumption that all participants are working from a common set of data--GDP growth, unemployment, government spending, etc.--but with different interpretations and emphases. Such is not the case when the issue is the effectiveness of intelligence programs or the scope of covert activities. Those debates are conducted on fundamentally unequal footing. Critics may charge that torture is counterproductive and produces bad intelligence, but defenders of the secret government can wave away such concerns by saying, more or less, You don't know what we know.
What the Church Committee did was to eliminate this inequality by wrenching an entire segment of the state into the light of day. It created a universally accepted set of facts, a canonical public record that turned the secret conversations of the powerful and initiated into the material for a broad debate. It brought the world of intelligence into the public sphere, the place where self-governance ought to take place.
The first paragraph of that quote put me in mind of statements by CSIS that tell us all about the terrible things they've prevented without telling us anything at all about the terrible things they've prevented. National security, you know.
The title of this post, by the way, is a quote from Richard Clarke who is best known for serving as a counter-terrorism advisor to both the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations. On his retirement in 2003 he became a vocal critic of Bush's War on Terror™. He agrees with Hayes on the merits of a thorough investigation.
If any of this is of interest, read the whole thing.
Good links, interesting and important data contained therein.
RE: the mantra that so our intelligence organizations use to rationalize their activities -"You don't know what we know."- ah, so true. But I know what is right. Intentional deception, lies, unlawful support for rendition, and tacit approval of third party torture techniques is, and will be (in a word) WRONG!
That's a good portrait of the committee, the way it worked, and its main accomplishments -- I didn't know any of the backroom stuff, and I lived through those hearings.
The article bothers me a little because of its tilt towards validating the bipartisan and respectable, those familiar Villager standards. I got the feeling that Hayes agrees with the assessment of the more confrontational Pike Committee as "flaky and partisan," eg, and included those and other details partly as a warning to left progressives to back off from aggressive demands for investigation and possible prosecutions.
It's true that the right wing cast the Church Committee, like the opposition to the Viet Nam war, as a stab in the back (the Dolchstosslegende), but then they're going to do that anyway. The people who disagree with them are traitors as far as they're concerned, and you're not going to talk them out of that by taking smaller steps.
As Fat Arse says, the first answer to those who say "You don't know what we know" is that they don't know and are undermining the law, both domestically and internationally, and then the second answer is "Why don't I know? Why have you not been informing me?" Because otherwise this is just a con game they could go on playing forever.
I'm not opposed to the creation of a commission somewhere down the line that could get the full story out -- it could help to remind people to ask that second question.
But horrific crimes have been committed. Hayes wants a commission to take responsibility for addressing those crimes away from Obama and Holder so they won't be distracted. But what does that mean, that a president who has shown too many signs already of wanting to continue some of the abuses of his predecessor's regime should be off the hook when his nation is asked to confront those abuses?
We do know a good deal of what the spooks know. We also know a good deal of what they or others did, and what they were authorized and ordered to do. If those crimes are not investigated and prosecuted, they remain authorized; the goalposts of law will have been moved, and the crimes will be committed again.
And a PS: A warning about getting all bipartisan: Michael Scheuer is a good example of what happens when you listen to a self-important spook. I'm sure he was critical of Bush's management of programs he felt proprietorial towards, but he isn't a guy any progressive would want to climb into bed with. Asked by Jerry Nadler (R-NY) at a House subcommittee meeting what he would think if he learned that a person who'd been subject to "rendition" (ie, kidnapping) was entirely innocent, Scheuer replied, "He's not an American, so why should I care?"