Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter

It Takes a Westerner

By Joan McCarter, 2-19-08

It does sometimes seem like we’re reliving the first half of the 1970s. We’re locked in a terrible quagmire of a war with an extremely unpopular president who thinks he’s king. We’ve even got the illegal spying on Americans by our intelligence agencies. Coincidentally, we even have a Rockefeller involved in impeding investigation into this illegal activity. Then it was Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, whose Rockefeller Commission report on CIA activities was largely seen as a whitewash. This time around it’s his nephew, Jay Rockefeller, who as Chairman of the Intelligence Committee ceded to the White House’s demands that our current version of warrantless spying never be investigated by granting the telecoms amnesty for their activities.

What we don’t have in 2008 is a fourth estate, in large part, that has the principle and the gumption to fill it’s role exposing government abuses. Partly as a result, we also don’t have an electorate that is shocked and outraged at what has been done to them in the name of national security.

What we most unfortunately do not have in 2008, is Frank Church. The Idaho Democrat was a quintessential Westerner. Despite his long years of public service, the Senator maintained a healthy skepticism and even distrust of government, particularly an executive branch with a tendency to push the bounds of Constitutional checks and balances. That inherent distrust, as well as a profound sense of his responsibility as a representative of the people’s interest, led to his groundbreaking investigations of the intelligence community’s illegal activies abroad, and at home. It also led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law that protected our most basic fourth amendment protections.

In April 1976, after months of hearings and investigations, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee) released its final report (out of fourteen). The reported detailed the illegal activities of U.S. intelligence agencies and the need for Congress to reassert the Constitutional system of checks and balances to order to rein in the excesses of the executive.

Here is an extensive quote from the Senator’s final report which will hopefully provide some perspective on exactly how critical the fight we are currently waging is:

Personal privacy is protected because it is essential to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our Constitution checks the power of Government for purposes of protecting the rights of individuals, in order that all our citizens may live in a free and decent society. Unlike totalitarian states, we do not believe that any government has a monopoly on truth.

When government infringes those right instead of nurturing and protecting them, the injury spreads far beyond the particular citizens targeted to untold numbers of other Americans who may be intimidated.

Free government depends upon the ability of all its citizens to speak their minds without fear of official sanction. The ability of ordinary people to be heard by their leaders means that they must be free to join in groups in order more effectively to express their grievances. Constitutional safeguards are needed to protect the timid as well as the courageous, the weak as well as the strong. While many Americans have been willing to assert their beliefs in the face of possible governmental reprisals, no citizen should have to weigh his or her desire to express an opinion, or join a group, against the risk of having lawful speech or association used against him....

The natural tendency of government is toward abuse of power. Men entrusted with power, even those aware of its dangers, tend, particularly when pressured, to slight liberty.

Our constitutional system guards against this tendency. It establishes many different checks upon power. It is those wise restraints which keep men free. In the field of intelligence those restraints have too often been ignored....

The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are important, as ends. Crisis makes it tempting to ignore the wise restraints that make men free. But each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength which makes us free, is lessened.

And speaking directly about the NSA:

I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss,” explained Church. “That is the abyss from which there is no return.

Watching the unwinding of the latest venture into government-sponsored lawlessness, and the apparent lack of will in our Congress to fight it, I’ve wondered what Senator Church would say. How he would react to seeing his groundbreaking and difficult work--an investigation that seriously jeopardized his own political future--being undone. Senator Church died in 1984, falling victim to the cancer that he had miraculously defeated once before. So we can’t ask him.

But I did have the opportunity to ask his son, Rev. Forrest Church what he thought his father would say. I was in Idaho recently, working on research for my book, and had the chance to sit down with Forrest to talk about his father, Idaho, politics, and the state of the nation today. Forrest is so like his father in demeanor, in voice, and in the sheer power of his intellect that he is a more than adequate spokesman for his father.

I think that we don’t learn from our own history . . . we forget why we did things, why we corrected anti-American behavior in the first place when it becomes convenient for us to be anti-American again. The ends justify the means mentality is what leads us to violate our own first principles. That behavior is on a Möbius loop—it just keeps coming back and keeps returning . . . it’s remarkable. Much of what he did in 1974 is now being dismantled because of the fear of people in Congress that they’ll be perceived as insufficiently vigilant on terrorism. It will simply all have to be done again. That work will have to be restored, because it’s not good for the United States and it’s not good for the world. What appears to be self serving ultimately destroys the country’s integrity, the country’s morality, and the country’s image abroad.

One of the things that was so clear when he was investigating the CIA is that every time we did something that was un-American in order to advance American interests, we ended up setting back our own interests and undermining our ideals. So it was not even effective in terms of realpolitik.... Again, the same sorts of things are happening. He would be appalled, and he would just shake his head, I’m sure, at how quickly we are willing to cede that hard-won ground. It’s remarkable to me. But . . . that flag has been planted on a hill and it can be accosted but it can ultimately never be removed. It’s always there as a reminder.

Hopefully the spirit of Senator Church still haunts the corridors of the Senate and the Capitol. There are glimmers of it in the House of Representatives, where members last week voted to continue to do their jobs responsibly, rather than bow to the Bush administration’s blatant fear-mongering on the issue. Hopefully that act of actual responsible legislating will help our Congress members recall the criticality of the political risks Senator Church took in the name of preserving our Constitution and our freedoms, and will rally around that flag he planted.

Editor’s note: Joan McCarter’s weekly blogs are part of NewWest.Net/Politics’ “Diary of a Mad Voter” feature, a group blog, published in partnership with the Denver Post’s Politics West intended give a glimpse into the hearts and minds of several independent-minded voters and thinkers in the Rocky Mountain West in the ‘08 election cycle. For more columns check in with www.newwest.net/madvoter. And for more information on each of the bloggers, click here.

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