The Unfinished Work of the Church Committee
Updated 5/5/2023
According to Merriam-Webster, a “secret police” is “a police organization that is run by a government and that operates in a secret way to control the actions of people who oppose the government.” Of course, in this day and age, it’s not easy to define “the government”. We live in an oligarchical society. There are elected officials, including the President, who stay in office for a fixed amount of time and have a certain amount of power to change the way that things are done. But on the other hand, there are permanent institutions, both within the government itself and within society at large, that also wield significant power and are responsible for safeguarding the interests of the oligarchy, should they be threatened by the policies of the temporary, elected government.
There are various ways to describe this superstructure of oligarchic rule. One term which has become popular of late is “Deep State.” Because the term has been used by Donald Trump, it has been ridiculed in the press as a “conspiracy theory,” an expression which is often used to identify an “unauthorized narrative”. A more technical term, favored by the British and the neocons, is “Continuity of Government” (COG.) There has been plenty of analysis of this concept, some well-founded, some highly speculative.
But a few things are self-evident here. One is that there is a huge number of career civil servants working in all branches of government who don’t leave their jobs at the end of a 4- or 8-year presidential term. They remain, offering their professional experience, as well as their established political allegiances and ideological habits, to the incoming administration. Secondly, these career professionals are connected in multiple ways to non-governmental institutions with which they have formed closed working relationships, such as the media and the financial community, or the arms industry (the famed “Military Industrial Complex.”)
Agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) devote much of their efforts to covert activity, and these agencies have at times clashed with elected officials. There have been allegations that these agencies are more loyal to permanent oligarchic power centers than to any temporary occupant of the White House. There are even compelling reasons to believe that these secretive agencies have been deployed against U.S. elected officials and even presidents.
In the early 1970s there were troubling revelations about covert operations. A daring burglary in Philadelphia by anti-war activists exposed the FBI’s campaign to suppress dissent, including the despicable persecution of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Over time, more dirty deeds by the FBI would come to light, including illegal spying on American citizens, and assassinations of dissident leaders such as Fred Hampton and Malcolm X (we now know that the FBI also withheld documents during the trial of the ostensible assassins of Malcolm X, sending innocent persons to jail to hide the identities of the real killers). Growing public concern about these abuses led to the formation of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee after its chairman, Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho. Creation of the Committee was approved on January 27, 1975 by the U.S. Senate. It published an extensive final report in April of 1976.
The Committee investigated the activities of the CIA and FBI, as well as the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). It investigated assassinations of foreign leaders, unauthorized surveillance of U.S. citizens, and other covert operations. Efforts were made by political leaders, including President Gerald Ford, to keep these findings secret. These efforts were only partially successful.
Some of the projects which were exposed by the Church Committee included:
- COINTELPRO, the FBI program to infiltrate and disrupt dissident organizations, including the movement of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as well as many other civil rights or anti-war organizations
- MK-ULTRA, the CIA program to develop mind control techniques including the use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD
- Operation Mockingbird, the CIA program to manipulate the news media for propaganda purposes
Typically, the agencies under investigation would issue a mea culpa and assure the public that these naughty activities had all been discontinued. However, new revelations over the past decades have demonstrated that nothing could be further from the truth. During the 1980s, all the relevant agencies joined forces for a new round of COINTELPRO against the organizations associated with Lyndon LaRouche, as well as other boat-rockers.
Of particular interest, more recently, is the case of Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who revealed the truly staggering extent of the unlawful surveillance being carried out on American citizens.
Some things which were once done with utmost discretion, such as the infiltration of the news media by the CIA under Operation Mockingbird, are now done completely out in the open without the public batting an eye. For example, former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who both lied under oath to the US Congress about illegal activity by the CIA and NSA, now hold high-profile positions at MSNBC and CNN respectively. Asha Rangappa, a former FBI special agent specializing in counterintelligence investigations, is now a commentator at CNN.
It was Russiagate that brought into sharp relief the depth and breadth of CIA/NSA/FBI involvement in the manipulation of domestic politics. It originated in London, the great mecca of the neocons, with the preparation of the “Steele Dossier” by a “former” operative of MI6. For four years in the U.S., Russiagate was propagated through regular leaks of anonymous “assessments” from members of the “intel community” to their assets in the media, some of whom were themselves ostensibly retirees from the “intel community.”
These leakers were dutifully characterized in the media as courageous, patriotic whistleblowers, unlike those individuals such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange who revealed material that was embarrassing to the neocons. The condemnation of those latter persons by intel community appendage Congressman Adam Schiff, who had his own personal whistleblower on tap for his impeachment effort, is also illuminating.
One organization which has earned the gratitude of the American public for shedding light on the malignant activities of the “intel community” is group of genuine, high-profile whistleblowers that calls itself Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). They have played an important role in debunking the story that Russia “hacked” the DNC servers and furnished information on DNC misconduct to Wikileaks.
A particularly insightful voice is that of Ray McGovern, who was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, and in the 1980s chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President’s Daily Brief. Recently, Mr. McGovern authored a blockbuster exposé of the FBI’s role, not in investigating the theft of data from the DNC servers, but in covering up the identities of the real perpetrators, and using the media to misdirect the public to a ludicrous conspiracy theory.
What has come out of the shadows and into full view during the past four years is a new sort of complex, where the covert agencies, the media, and the corporations which now monopolize social media, join forces to create an unprecedented, “total immersion” propaganda environment. Initially, the internet and social media appeared to be a “wild west” sort of venue where anyone could say anything. Much of the population soon began to prefer this as a source for news over the corporate media, and the neocons cried foul. Facebook hastened to accomodate them, bringing in the vociferously neocon Atlantic Council and the mother of all Regime Change organizations, the National Endowment for Democracy, as consultants in 2018 to help decide which voices should be silenced.
Not to be outdone, Twitter hired a part-time officer in the British Army’s psychological warfare unit as senior executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East in 2019. The following year Facebook upped the ante by hiring the former Director-General of Israel’s Justice Ministry, a specialist in censorship, as a member of its new “oversight board.”
The FBI joined the fun, seizing over 100 internet domains in late 2020 and claiming that they were operated by Iran. This included the site for the American Herald Tribune, an alternative press organ with a substantial following. The FBI Special Agent in charge issued a statement, saying that “Thanks to our ongoing collaboration with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, the FBI was able to disrupt this Iranian propaganda campaign and we will continue to pursue any attempts by foreign actors to spread disinformation in our country.”
However, it doesn’t stop with propaganda and censorship. During the presidential election of 2020, there was an escalated intervention by the secret police agencies into the electoral process. A few courageous individuals spoke out against this.
On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk took over Twitter after purchasing it for $44 billion. Musk, like Donald Trump, is a political novice, mercurial and unorthodox. He began to examine some of the management policies of his predecessors, and made the decision to reveal some of what he found. He entrusted renegade journalist Matt Taibbi with the job of presenting some of the findings to the public at large.
Taibbi revealed, on Twitter itself, that throughout 2020 the FBI was essentially supervising Twitter censorship policy, with particular emphases on trying to legitimize evidence-free allegations of foreign interference in U.S. affairs, and on controlling the way that the presidential race was allowed to be discussed. There was additional participation by the Department of Homeland Security and state governments.
Much of this censorship had the effect of shoring up presidential candidate Joe Biden in his race against Trump. The most celebrated case was the suppression of the New York Post story about the material in Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was denounced as “Russian disinformation” by a substantial number of “intel community” operatives as well as leading neocons such as Congressman Adam Schiff. This “narrative” continued to be circulated until the New York Times ruefully conceded in March of 2022 that the laptop story was legitimate (and many of the most corrupt personalities continued to circulate it regardless.) In April of 2023, evidence surfaced that the “intel community” letter had been prepared at the initiative of neocon capo and current Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken.
Why would the covert agencies attack Trump, who supposedly is a hardline right-winger? Well, apparently he is not regarded as such in establishment circles. One of the preeminent establishment megaphones, The Atlantic, published a very revealing article in which they compared Trump to Henry Wallace, who served as Vice President under FDR and went on to found the Progressive Party. Wallace opposed the Cold War, and Trump’s reluctance to embrace the Cold War 2.0 that began with the neocon-sponsored 2014 coup in Ukraine appears to be what put him on the enemies list.
The many allegations of fraud in the 2020 election may be the subject of controversy, litigation, and even civil unrest for possibly years to come. The capitol riots on January 6 may well have been another COINTEL-style operation by the FBI, intended to create a climate of fear which would be used in turn to justify more authoritarian powers for the secret police agencies.
Then on August 8, 2022, the folks in the “intel community” who brought you “Russiagate” decided to make an attempt to prevent Trump from running again in 2024, by launching a high-profile FBI raid on his home in Florida. This was clearly a fishing expedition combined with a media spectacular, and an echo of the much larger DOJ extravaganza that was aimed at Lyndon LaRouche in 1986, which set the precedent for combined secret police/media operations against political undesirables.
The raid generated the expected tsunami of press coverage, but as Trump shrewdly learned in 2016, any coverage is potentially good coverage. His opponents, being slower to draw this conclusion, followed up with an indictment on April 4 of 2023. President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador tweeted, “Sadly, it’ll be very hard for US Foreign Policy to use arguments such as ‘democracy’ and ‘free and fair elections’, or try to condemn ‘political persecution’ in other countries, from now on.”
The increasing anxious “Deep State” representatives followed this up with yet another indictment on June 8, alleging that Trump had mishandled classified documents. Predictably, Trump’s polling numbers promptly went up. The more heavy-handed the attempts are to suppress his campaign, the more the electorate seems to relish an opportunity to give a big middle finger to the establishment.
But, the establishment seems to have no inclination to ease up on the abuses of the secret police agencies. At this point, can anyone argue that it is not urgent for the Congress to resume an investigation of misconduct, and that this time they not be satisfied with polite assurances that the bad behavior will cease?
Thanks for reading. If you find this material interesting, perhaps you might contact Twitter and ask them why my account was suspended on June 30, 2020. I would very much like to find out the reason.
