Reply #39: Frank Church pulled the lid off the BFEE... [View All]

[Octafish]

The late, great Senator from Idaho knew how to use a Congressional investigation.

Behold what Frank Church and his committee discovered:

CIA powers and 1975 Church Committee

Report by Paul Wolf
Published here: 22/09/01

The cry for expanded CIA assassination powers is being supported by a lot of inaccurate references to the 1975 Church Committee investigation. “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans,” as their final report was called, was the most in-depth investigation into the American intelligence establishment ever made.

Reporters are claiming that the Church Committee tied the hands of the CIA, and now it’s time to restore their power to use whatever ruthless and inhumane means may be necessary to implement our foreign policies. In fact, although the Church Committee exposed a closet full of nightmarish operations carried out against American citizens, and some of the CIA’s activities in Chile, it was by no means an accounting of CIA atrocities around the world, and had no legal implications whatsoever. Its function was simply to inform the public of the widespread abuses that were being committed in their midst.

Among other things, the Church Committee revealed that:

* a CIA program to open mail to or from selected American citizens generated 1.5 million names stored in the Agency’s computer bank.

* intelligence units within the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) created files on over one million Americans.

*the FBI carried out five hundred thousand investigations of so-called subversives from 1960 to 1974, without a single court conviction.

* computers in the National Security Agency (NSA) monitored every cable sent overseas, or received, by Americans from 1947 to 1975.
Army intelligence units conducted investigations against one hundred thousand American citizens during the Vietnam War era.

* the CIA engaged in drug experiments (the MK/ULTRA Project) against unsuspecting subjects (two of whom died from side effects).
at least two foreign leaders were the direct targets of CIA assassination plots (none successful).

* letters written anonymously by FBI agents were designed to incite violence among blacks.

* the FBI COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) targeted civil rights activists and Vietnam War dissidents.

* the FBI attempted to blackmail civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and encouraged him to commit suicide.

* the CIA manipulated elections in democratic regimes (Chile was but one of several).

* the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) allowed tax information to be misused by intelligence agencies for political purposes.
intelligence agencies carried out burglaries in the homes and offices of suspected “subversives”.

* the CIA infiltrated religious, media, and academic organizations.
(Source: America’s Secret War: The CIA in a Democratic Society, by Loch K. Johnson, Oxford University Press,1989)

Among the worst CIA paramilitary operations was the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. According to former CIA Director William Colby, some 20,000 members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure (VCI) were murdered. “Infrastructure” referred to civilians suspected of supporting North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers.

CONTINUED...

http://www.labournet.net/world/0109/us15.html

FWIW: At the time, I was for Brown. Only now do I know enough to know what Sen. Church meant for our country.