Due to actions by the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI along with the efforts of other individuals during the early 1970’s, evidence was uncovered on the illegal actions that the FBI and other government organizations were participating in. This illegal action included the COINTELPRO program and the incidents of spying by the Nixon administration including the Watergate scandal. In early 1975, Senator John Pastore proposed to create a group of individuals in order to investigate and resolve the issues that have been prevalent for the past twenty years.
This group was called the United States Senate Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities or the “Church Committee”. A senator from Idaho named Frank Church headed the committee. A newspaper took out a bio on Frank Church when it was decided that he would take over the committee. The committee was comprised of 11 members, six democrats including Church and five republicans. The members of the committee are pictured above with Church at the head of the table to the far right. This picture was taken during one of the few public addresses that the committee made .It was the goals of the committee to not have this investigation go public too soon, so most of the meetings during the beginning stages were held behind closed doors. As the investigation went on though, public hearings took place in which the committee took questions from reporters and discussed certain cases of unlawful intelligence that the government participated in.
The actual investigation took over a year of painstaking work. Over 150 individuals worked under the committee collecting documents, interviewing individuals and writing reports. The individuals working within the committee were allowed access to documents from the White House, FBI and other national security organizations that had not been made possible before. The investigation uncovered illegal activity and intelligence dating back to the Eisenhower administration all the way through the Nixon administration.
The report was officially published on April 29th, 1976 that covered the government’s history of illegal activity during the Cold War and through the Vietnam War era. One of the most important conclusions that the committee came to was that “Intelligence agencies have undermined the constitutional rights of citizens” (US Senate). The committee showed that numerous government agencies had shown a lack of checks and balances along with negligence in cases such as J Edgar Hoover creating the COINTELPRO program behind the backs of his superiors. Not only did the committee point out the years of illegal activity, but it also gave 96 recommendations to different sectors of the government in order for there to be better control over the governments power.
This led to two different bills being put in place in order for intelligence agencies to be better monitored. The first was the created of the Senate Select Committee, which would oversee the intelligence actions by the FBI, NSA and other organizations within the government. The second was pushed through by President Jimmy Carter’s administration in 1978 that made it so wire-tapping’s and surveillance requests the branches of the government had to go through a request format so that illegal activity would not continue. The work of the Church committee helped to expose and make public the illegal suppression activities that had gone unnoticed. This committee helped to create transparency between the public and the government, but this does not mean that its citizens would forget the years of illegal activity.
Anti-War Suppression 
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