The Church Committee did not hamstring America's Intelligence Agencies. That is a myth promoted by the right-side of the political bipolarity as a method enabling them to shirk personal responsibility for the plethoric intelligence failures of contemporary conservatism. Time and time again, many of the very same governmental appointee failures from the past, have risen up like spectres from the grave to haunt the American Psyche.

This past cycle: The Tyranny of GW Bush; has traversed far beyond amusing; from my vantage point without the idiocy of the two-party system. This Administration has with willfullness, waged an immoral War Upon Iraq, the evidence notwithstanding, whilst the Nation's true enemies and perpetrators of 911 were allowed to escape at Tora Bora, when the military had them dead in their sights, and were close to taking them to ground as hunted mongrels. Al Qaida has metastasised in the Pak/Afghan Frontier, and reemerged as a threat to our tranquility. The Bush Administration has stolen Natural Liberty from its rightful possessors: ALL humans, who are endowed with this at birth, by that which they perceive to be the force of creation. They have stripped away life, liberty and property from humans who had never been convicted of any crime in a trial that afforded due process of law. They have consciously entered into a conspiracy to engage in, and committed serial acts of, human torture. The blame need be properly laid at their bloody boots, and there should be an accounting for their repeated bestial rapine of The Dreamtime America. Contemporary Conservatism is a giant slug which need be mortally wounded, then salted, to assure its manifest evil can never arise again.

When the Church Committee first supeonaed then CIA Director William Colby; Philip W. Buchen, Henry Kissinger, John Otho Marsh, Jr., and Donald Rumsfeld drafted a recommendation that Colby should not testify, and instead only "brief" the Committee.

Rumsfeld had been a Nixon director of Economic Opportunity, even though as a Congressman, he'd opposed it. He was subsequently promoted to a cabinet position by Nixon as a Counselor, and then appointed as US Ambassador to NATO. Ford made him Chief of Staff, and then Sec. of Defense. At this same time, GHW Bush was CIA head. Rumsfeld had pressed for Nixon to end the Vietnam War. Kissinger was a Nixon and Ford Sec. of State, as well as a Ford NSA. He also colluded with Nixon, and sold out S. Vietnam on his "Particularly Loquacious Day", June 20, 1972, in a secret meeting with Chou En-lai. NSC Staff member, John D. Negroponte, was a witness to that meeting.

In 1973, hawk Democratic politicians led by Senators 'Scoop' Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan created the Coalition for a Democratic Majority. Elliott Abrams, Stephen Bryen, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Norman Podhoretz were all members. Elliot Abrams, Doug Feith, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz were all at various times, Sen. Jackson staff members.  

Jeanne Kirkpatrick's husband, Dr. Evron M. Kirkpatrick, held many appointed spook positions in the 50's, and went on to become the Executive Director of the American Political Science Association (APSA). Some members of the APSA were a part of the academics who travelled to S. Vietnam, then published deceitful propaganda about conditions there in the 50s.  Dr. Kirkpatrick was also a long-term  President of the Operations and Policy Research, Inc. (OPR), a think-tank front, funded by the USIA to facilitate covert publishing of their sponsored treatises. The OCR received covert CIA cultural cold-war funding through at least two of its fronts. Irving Kristol, Bill's father, and early proponent of Neo-Conservatism, was one of "The New York Intellectuals", which also included Daniel Bell, James Burnham, and Sidney Hook.  Kristol received covert CIA money through their Farfeild Foundation, which funded Enquiry and Commentary magazines, while Kristol was associated with them. Farfield Foundation paid the freight for several other unprofitable journals that were written and published by former Trotskyists. Kristol was a principle of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, whose anti-communist leftist intellectual members spied upon Americans both domestically, and abroad. Sydney Hook went on to become a founding fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Near the end of Ford's Presidency, GHW Bush set-up "Team B" at the CIA, and hand-picked the analysts who were part of it. Team B produced studies about The USSR's military capabilities which were greatly exaggerated, and ran counter to the estimates that career CIA analysts were producing. Through disingenuous dissemination of Team B's findings, using a tactic I call "The Neocon Circle-Jerk" (associated individuals, who carry multiple credentials through various think-tanks and publications, cross-referencing one another, whilst hiding their intimate connectedness, and pointing to the same underlying citation/meme over an extended period of time-thus giving power to their fabrications); the career CIA analysts were denigrated, and the exaggerated Soviet estimates ended up being the ones the public was led to believe were the true ones, at the unjustifiable expense of US Intelligence Agencies' Domestic prestige. Team B's patrons and members included, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Daniel O. Graham, Thomas Wolf, Seymour Weiss, Paul Nitze and Richard Pipes, father of Richard. Team B also traded information with "Scoop" Jackson's team, which at that time included Richard Perle.

At the beginning of the Carter Presidency, many of the aforementioned individuals formed a new incestuous alliance: The Committee for the Present Danger, which played a significant role in Ronald Reagan's 1980 election win. During the Reagan Administration, many of them were rewarded with glossied-over shiny new revisionary conservative labels, and powerful positions within his administration. These included :  Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle, Stephen Bryen, Ken Adelman and Elliott Abrams. Bryen at one time, aided and abetted by Richard Perle,  attempted to circumvent military export restrictions on new radar technology, and hand it over to Israel. When Richard Armitage discovered the scheme, he put an end to it. Michael Ledeen earned his weasel-walking papers in the Iran/Contra affair, and still to this day defends Manucher Ghorbanifar, claiming that he isn't the habitual liar that the CIA has shown Ghotbanifar to be. The Reagan Administration, educated Arab Afghan-Freedom fighters in the dark arts of insurgency, put stingers at their shoulders, built cement bunkers for their operational centres at Tora Bora, and then pushed them down through the Khyber Pass, cheering mightily. This did nothing to hurry along the End of the Soviet, which was in reality, a collapsing bear made of substandard cardboard manufactured in state-run factories, unable to sustain its own weight. The Soviet/Afghan War instead lengthened the iron-fisted control of the Kremlin over the USSR. After the Soviet's fall, during the GHW Bush  Presidency (much to the startled surprise of that administration's intelligence failures); America just packed up and walked away from Afghanistan, leaving it to descend into a stone-aged barbarity. A short time later, The Administration of Papa Bush again proved its absence of intelligence gathering capabilities, when they got blind-sided by a 2nd World tin-horn dictator, Saddam, who perceived the Administration's message to him, which was transmitted through State Department official, April Glaspie, as a sign of hesitancy, and an opportunity to wage offensive war. Glaspie took the hit, and the guilty policy wonks walked away unscathed.

The Church Committee did not tie the hands of America's Intelligence Agencies. They have instead for over 30 years now, been made the patsies who end up taking the fall for contemporary conservatives' preponderant incompetence, hiding their own culpability in the fog of their wafting mendacity. The New-Right and former Trotskyists have since the Nixon presidency worked tirelessly to pollute American Conservatism, and navigated it over the event horizon into the dark fetid well of moral relativism, where it still spins in a decaying orbit. In the past 30 odd years, it is difficult to perceive more than a scant handful of valid insights, promulgated by Contemporary Conservatives. They have offered an abundance of anecdotal evidence, that The Peter Principle is naught but a myth, perpetrated by the liberal media. Self-evidently, they have proven time and time again with personal examples, that people can and do get promoted past their level of incompetence. They also brought into the American consciousness a new oxymoron on September 11, 2001: National Security.

The Rumsfield-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.

Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war Zone, our national Economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon's "war strategy" has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend, and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by Mutinies in Iraq and even Fort Bragg.

The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world.

The Stock Market will never come back, our Armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives.

The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it.

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, "Welcome to the Big Darkness", ESPN Page 2 -July .22,  2003.