Was the original Church Committee effective at all in curbing the rise of the intelligence community behemoth? I don’t see that whatever new group is established will be any better.
The Church Committee forced the CIA and FBI to hide their programs with deeper and deeper compartmentalization—so their new lawyers could say “see ma, clean hands”.
They outsourced the nasty stuff:
—To private contractors
—To foreign allied intelligence agencies
—To other government agencies—easy to do with the large number of intelligence agencies (more than twenty)
In the early post Church Committee days the NSA took on a lot of the eavesdropping workload.
No, in fact the way it was supposed to gain control over the FBI was to establish the FISA court. And of course as we all know now, the FISA court is a secret court with no defense representation and it’s the playground of the FBI. As a rubberstamp, now the FBI can hold up a piece of paper from the court for any black bag operations they do and claim that it’s approved by the court. So in that sense, the church commission was a failure. It was successful with exposing the criminal activities of the intelligence community, but the remedy was a dismal failure.