Will Jordan’s Subcommittee Be Able to Achieve What the ‘Church Committee’ Couldn’t?

A sign outside the National Security Agency (NSA) campus in Fort Meade, Md., on June 6, 2013. (Patrick Semansky/AP Photo)

Commentary

Important and laudable as it was at the time (1975), we must conclude that the Senate’s vaunted “Church Committee,” under Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), ultimately failed in its mission to reform the CIA, FBI, IRS, and the National Security Agency (NSA) anywhere near permanently.

Now, 48 years later, we’re in a similar, and arguably worse, situation with the same—and more—three-letter agencies, the only serious difference being that this time Democrats are trying to cover things up while back then it was largely the Republicans.

I hesitate to use Wikipedia, given its reflexive bias, but its summary of what the Church group found seems accurate:

“The most shocking revelations of the committee include Operation MKULTRA involving the drugging and torture of unwitting US citizens as part of human experimentation on mind control; COINTELPRO involving the surveillance and infiltration of American political and civil-rights organizations; Family Jewels, a CIA program to covertly assassinate foreign leaders; Operation Mockingbird as a systematic propaganda campaign with domestic and foreign journalists operating as CIA assets and dozens of US news organizations providing cover for CIA activity.

“It also unearthed Project SHAMROCK, in which the major telecommunications companies shared their traffic with the NSA (while officially confirming the existence of this signals intelligence agency to the public for the first time).”

Does any of this sound familiar? More exactly, what part of this doesn’t sound familiar?

Operation MKULTRA lives on in all kinds of lethal scientific and medical research (see Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “The Real Anthony Fauci”).

COINTELPRO exists under other names, as we’ve seen with the FBI and almost certainly the CIA infiltrating all manner of citizens’ organizations and who knows what else?

Operation Mockingbird is all around us with the mainstream press almost entirely co-opted by the three-letter agencies. Who do we think was whispering in their ears about the bogus Trump–Russia collusion and so many similar matters?

Project SHAMROCK seems almost charmingly primitive compared to what we have today. If you’re reading this on your cellphone, your laptop, or even projected on your ceiling, they know it and their Big Tech allies with whom they’re, as we’ve seen, heavily enmeshed know it, too.

Privacy in America isn’t only dead, it’s decomposed.

At least Family Jewels seems to have been superseded—as it always should’ve been—by needing the approval of an elected official (i.e., the president) to authorize the assassination of a foreign leader.

So now—in the spirit of déjà vu—we’re going to have a new select committee, subcommittee actually, in the House on the “Weaponization of the Federal Government” chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to make the same investigations, or almost.

What’s at stake is in essence the welfare and freedom of the American citizen as defined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

This time, it’s the Republicans who are fighting for our rights. Will they succeed where the Democrat-led “Church Committee” in the end wasn’t able to?

Frankly, I’m nervous. My reasons are several, but first among them is that arguably the most important of the three-letter agencies, the one that inspired Church in the first place, is strangely MIA.

By that, I mean the CIA.

There was, curiously, no mention of Langley in Jordan’s floor remarks about the objectives of the subcommittee, although he singled out the FBI and therefore, by implication, their mentors in the Justice Department (DOJ).

The CIA also wasn’t named when he spoke about his plans at a Sean Hannity town hall, although we heard all about the intention to expose the IRS, Homeland Security, and, of course, the FBI and DOJ. Hannity, for what it’s worth, never has—to my recollection—talked about investigating the CIA, either.

And yet, the CIA, along with the NSA, may be the capo di tutti capi when it comes to regulating our lives. They stand above the other agencies, wrapped in a cloak of secrecy. To ignore them is like going after the tail of a snake while forgetting its head.

Perhaps I missed something, but this is generally what occurred. Why did this omission happen? Were they being discrete or were they afraid? If it’s the latter, unfortunately, it’s understandable, although depressing.

Worth remembering in all this is what Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, on Jan. 3, 2017, regarding then-President-elect Donald Trump’s criticism of the intelligence community:

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

Even though he’s widely thought of as a hyperpartisan, Schumer saying this was disturbing then and remains so, especially since he seemed to be accepting, or even approving, a reality that during the days of Frank Church, his party would have disdained.

But those days are long gone. And Jordan, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), and the other prospective members of this subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have their work cut out for them.

“Small fry” may be offered up as face-saving sacrifices to the subcommittee, but what’s at play here is the deepest belly of the Deep State. The members should avoid being crushed “six ways from Sunday” at all costs. This may be our last chance for individual freedom against the rapacious advances of the globalists. My suggestion is that they prepare—and then prepare again. And if that isn’t enough, prepare some more.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.