Disclosure of ‘Secrets’ in the ’70s Didn’t Destroy the Nation (Goodman / Truthdig)

[struggle4progress]

Posted on Apr 29, 2009
By Amy Goodman

... A similar crisis confronted the U.S. public in the mid-1970s. While the Watergate scandal was unfolding, widespread evidence was mounting of illegal government activity, including domestic spying and the infiltration and disruption of legal political groups, mostly anti-war groups, in a broad-based, secret government crackdown on dissent. In response, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities was formed. It came to be known as the Church Committee, named after its chairman, Idaho Democratic Sen. Frank Church. The Church Committee documented and exposed extraordinary activities on the CIA and FBI, such as CIA efforts to assassinate foreign leaders, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO (counterintelligence) program, which extensively spied on prominent leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

It is not only the practices that are similar, but the people. Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., general counsel to the Church Committee, noted two people who were active in the Ford White House and attempted to block the committee’s work: “Rumsfeld and then .. Cheney were people who felt that nothing should be known about these secret operations, and there should be as much disruption as possible.”

Church’s widow, Bethine Church, now 86, continues to be very politically active in Idaho. She was so active in Washington in the 1970s that she was known as “Idaho’s third senator.” She said there needs to be a similar investigation today: “When you think of all the things that the Church Committee tried to straighten out and when you think of the terrific secrecy that Cheney and all of these people dealt with, they were always secretive about everything, and they didn’t want anything known. I think people have to know what went on. And that’s why I think an independent committee <is needed>, outside of the Congress, that just looked at the whole problem and everything that happened.”

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090428_heed_the_churches_on_torture/

[Psychic Consortium]

1. If the truth destroys us, what kind of people are we?

Have we no strength, courage or moral center?

[glitch]

4. I think it is very easy to determine who has and who hasn't by who wants to expose the truth

and who wants to hide it.

One of the clearest political decisions we've had lately. And the idea that we have to keep all this secret so that the terrorists won't know how "far we'll go" is absolute bullshit, but what else can we expect from someone of Porter Goss' character?

[HereSince1628]

2. I wonder...those were Cheney's formative years around the Whitehouse

How much of what he saw as Chief of Staff turned him into the evil man his is?

[Demeter]

3. He Is a Naturally Evil Man

The Mitchells, Kissingers, etc. of Nixon's cabal merely honed his skills.

[RufusTFirefly]

5. Yup. More evil than Nixon, that's for sure.

Nixon was bigoted and paranoid (with some reason) and wallowed in a major inferiority complex because he wasn't rich, handsome, or from old East Coast money. Cheney and Rumsfeld, on the other hand, were and are both the cool, calculating technocrat types, with all the warmth and morals of paid assassins.

[katty]

7. Cheney was an active participant where he could be even

in "those days".

[bobthedrummer]

6. There are extrajudicial politicized death squads operating in The United States of America

they really got a boost from the Nixon era (Operation CHAOS, COINTELPRO's, Operation GARDEN MARKET, The Huston Plan...) which led to the employment of assassins (and other professionals with similar skill sets) to silence and supress political opposition right here at home while making a killing financially.