Chris Hayes discusses the audacity of Cheney’s continued defense of torture with Rachel. Hayes calls for the Obama administration to prosecute rather than ignore acts of torture and the defense of torture and provides some history in his recent article in The Nation.
…thanks to the work of the Church Committee. Chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church in 1975-76, the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities labored for sixteen months to produce a 5,000-page report that is a canonical history of the secret government. Over the past three decades the Church Committee has faded into relative obscurity. (I was somewhat surprised to discover how few people my age had heard of it.) But in the wake of further disclosures of crimes and abuses committed by the Bush administration and the escalating war of words between the CIA and Congress over just how much Congress knew about (and approved) these activities, the specter of the committee has begun to haunt Capitol Hill.
Mostly, the Church Committee is invoked by conservatives as a cautionary tale, a case of liberal overreach that handicapped the nation’s intelligence operations for decades. Dick Cheney bemoaned the fact that his time as President Ford’s chief of staff was “the low point” of presidential authority, thanks to a feckless Congress “all too often swayed by the public opinion of the moment.”
