Even though it isn’t enough it’s still important
by digby
I cannot urge you strongly enough to read Rick Perlstein’s latest two pieces outlining exactly what happened during the 70s — the last time the congress tried to rein in the intelligence services. Let’s just say that the results we’ve all been taught they brought are largely a myth.
In Part One he discusses the environment in which the Church Committee along with the various other investigations finally raised the issue of our intelligence programs running wild to the national forefront. Today, he talks about how they were defanged:
Yesterday we learned how in 1975 the media, CIA apostate Philip Agee, the Church Committee in the Senate, and the Pike Committee in the House revealed the American intelligence community to be a violent, thuggish, and ineffectual embarrassment to the Constitution of the United States—and not very intelligent to boot. And what happened next, in 1976?
Pretty much nothing. The establishment’s distraction campaigns proved too powerful.
Begin the melodrama around Christmastime 1975, with Agee, author of the devastating expose Inside the Company: A CIA Diary. He had by then from his hideout in Communist Cuba joined a movement to actively sabotage American intelligence, centered in the organization the Fifth Estate and its magazine Counterspy (whose founders and funders included the novelist Norman Mailer). “The most effective and important systematic effort to counter the CIA that can be undertaken right now,” Agee wrote in the winter 1975 issue, was “the identification, exposure, and neutralization of its people working abroad.” One of the people Agee’s article thus named was named Richard Welch, whom he identified as the station chief in Lima, Peru.
By then, however, Welch was not in Lima. He was the station chief in Athens—where, two days before Christmas, he was ambushed and assassinated by masked men outside his home.
Agee’s article was merely coincidental to the attack—and in Athens, his cover had already, independently, been blown (as, in fact, it had been in Lima), not least because he lived in a house whose CIA identity was a matter of wide public knowledge. The work being done by the House and Senate select committees on intelligence had even less to do with it. No matter: here was the perfect fodder for a perfect disinformation campaign. Presidential press secretary Ron Nessen insinuated that the intelligence committees’ carelessness was responsible for the tragedy. The plane bearing Welch’s coffin was timed to touch down at Andrews Air Force Base for live coverage on the morning news, greeted by an Air Force honor guard. (It circled for fifteen minutes to get the timing just right.)
Time had already eulogized Welch as a “scholar, wit, athlete, spy”—a gentleman James Bond. “Never before,” Daniel Schorr announced on the CBS News on December 30, “had a fallen secret agent come home as such a public hero,” and the lionization was only beginning: over the protests of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Welch’s burial broke military protocol by taking place at Arlington Secretary, starring more honor guards, dozens of flags, the flower of the American defense establishment, and the very same horse-drawn caisson from the interment of President Kennedy bearing the coffin, President Ford escorted the veiled widow.
Soon, hundreds of telegrams and letters, some just the single word “Murderer!” flooded the Church Committee’s transom from angry citizens alert to administration’s insinuations that it all must have been congressional investigators’ fault. A supposedly adversarial press piled on, especially the Washington Post. In 1974 they brought down a president; now, they ran thirteen stories in the week after Welch’s death following the administration line, an editorial labeling it the “entirely predictable result of the disclosure tactics chosen by certain American critics of the agency.” Wrote the Post’s admirably independent ombudsmen Charles Seib, “The press was used to publicize what in its broad effect was an attack on itself.” That is, when the press bothered to cover intelligence reform at all, now that a weary press public’s attentions had turned elsewhere—to the hydra-headed 1976 Democratic presidential field to the showdown between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination, to the impending Bicentennial celebrations.
And it all happened just as the two select committees on intelligence were drawing up their final reports and investigations for intelligence reform—terrified, now, that any more disclosure of any secret would discredit the entirety of their work.
Read on to see just how successful this was.
Those of you who follow politics closely must see just how easy this sort of thing is to pull off. (One might even call it a patented hissy fit.) The ability of the permanent political etablishment to pull on the emotional/patriotic heartstrings of the American people in service of both misdirection and distraction is obvious. They do it all the time. And among their most servile accomplices is the mainstream media.
I’m all for empowering the congress to investigate and I hope they do. It’s vitally important that these programs and the inevitable abuses are fully exposed. But don’t get your hopes up that it will change anything. Until this country comes off its war footing, they are going to protect this stuff with everything they have. And we’ve been on a war footing since 1941. (Also too: Big $$$$)
So I think we have to see this as an ongoing battle that will not be solved through some “oversight” or with a few investigations. It requires constant vigilance and a commitment to challenge the government’s powerful incentives to keep pushing the envelope.
The good news is that these revelations, when they happen, do set the establishment back on its heels, at least temporarily. They are forced to reckon with their own sloppiness and maybe even sometimes reevaluate the necessity of some of the crazy stuff they have been getting away with in the dark. It doesn’t solve the problem, but it’s an important function of our democracy that we always put pressure on them when this sort of thing comes to light.
Long term, maybe some day we’ll decide that it’s time for us to declare our post WWII imperial adventure a grand victory and start rolling it back. But in the meantime we citizens just have to keep up our end of the bargain and try to ensure that the government doesn’t too badly abuse its wartime powers. Like so much else in American civic life it’s a tension. And things are likely to go badly awry if one side doesn’t fulfill its obligation to hold up its end.
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