With the recent call for investigation of the activities of the CIA by Attorney General Holder; I thought it might be important to hearken back to another crippling attack on the intelligence gathering activities of the United States, namely the Church Committee.
Some may remember Frank Church, a Democrat Senator from Idaho who after Watergate and during the presidency of Jimmy Carter conducted a series of congressional investigations into the activities of the CIA. The results of these investigations and reports ended up in a Democrat controlled Congress severely limiting the ability of the agency to conduct operations gathering intelligence through agents rather than electronic or other means.
This so-called human intelligence component was seriously damaged by Senator Church's take on how the United States should operate in interactions with other countries and Carter's seriously naïve and damaging worldview.
The highly restricted ability of the CIA to interact with nefarious individuals who might be able to obtain information of use to the United States probably has contributed to a number of intelligence failures over the years.
There's little doubt that covert intelligence needs principled oversight but that is a rare commodity to find in a politically motivated congressional panel, some of which had constituencies that believed the CIA was responsible for overthrowing the government of Chile and propping up despots all over the world in some unknowable way.
In the meantime, the Carter ministration was busily putting situations in motion that would result in the deposing of the Shah of Iran, who is a pretty good example of someone that was not so hot but it least nominally supportive, with Ayatollah Khomeini who was really not supportive and immediately took over our embassy and held the occupants hostage.
Click anywhere on this posting to go to a good retrospective on the Church Committee
