GOP claims it's creating a new Church Committee — this is what's really going on
Raw StoryDuring the George W. Bush years, as the nation waged the "global war on terror," there was massive concern among civil libertarians about the government's indifference, if not hostility, to human rights and civil liberties. From the beginning there were calls for a "new Church Committee" to investigate the vast overreach of the intelligence community. Although it was associated with Richard Nixon's scandals, the Church Committee was truly bipartisan — conservative hero Barry Goldwater was among its five Republican members — and examined the excesses and illegal activity of the FBI, CIA and NSA during the entire postwar period, much of which had been revealed in the press during that era of aggressive investigative journalism. So when civil libertarians called for a "new Church Committee" a decade or more ago, that made sense. Jim Jordan's jury-rigged "investigation of the investigators" bears no resemblance to the bipartisan Church Committee.
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GOP claims it's creating a new Church Committee: The real historical parallel is Joe McCarthy
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