The Most Important Congressional Investigation in U.S. History

by Valtin of DailyKos
MON MAR 12, 2007 AT 05:08 PM PDT

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.

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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.

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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/03/12/311068/-The-Most-Important-Congressional-Investigation-in-U-S-History#

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. [font color="red"]If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.[/font color]

I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.” -- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho)

CIA moonlights in corporate world

By EAMON JAVERS
Politico, 2/1/10

In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.

In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.

The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.

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But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.

The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.

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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eIFPhHBh