Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have called for a special committee to investigate the Benghazi attack, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) rejected the request, saying he would refuse to allow the Senate to be used for “baseless partisan attacks.”
The question is what this committee would do that does not already fall under the jurisdiction of Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The difference between McCain’s committee and the current one is not clear, except that McCain’s committee has publicity.
McCain and Graham want the committee to investigate the Benghazi attack and the government’s response to it. Several other senators, including frequent McCain ally Joe Lieberman (and fellow republican Saxby Chambliss, have said an umbrella committee for the investigations is unnecessary. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) has joined McCain and Graham in the call for a special committee.
The special committee would be a Senate Investigative Committee, designed to disband after submitting its final report to the Senate. The most recent Senate Investigative Committee was the Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran, created in 1987 and disbanded in 1989, which conducted the Iran-Contra hearings.
The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities was also a committee that looked into the relationship of the intelligence community and politicians. It investigated abuse of power in intelligence gathering by CIA and the FBI in the aftermath of Watergate.
Known as the Church Committee, it published reports on the formation and operations of US intelligence agencies, as well as their alleged abuses of power. The recommendations of the investigation inspired the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
As McCain’s Benghazi committee plan would have the committee looking into the relationship of the White House and the intelligence community, the success of the Church Committee suggests it might be reasonable. The committee’s reports mention the difficulty of looking into the different intelligence agencies. The National Security Agency hearings provide one example of the difficulties legislators have with looking into intelligence communities.
“No statute establishes the NSA or defines the permissible scope of its responsibilities,” Church said at the National Security Agency hearing, “Rather, Executive directives make up the sole “charter” for the Agency. Furthermore, these directives fail to define precisely what constitutes the “technical and intelligence information” which the NSA is authorized to collect.”
The final report of this committee suggests that the intelligence committee, due to its power and nature of secrecy, is a uniquely dangerous entity to the country.
The committee wrote, “Endowed with its special privilege of operational secrecy, the Federal intelligence organization, in any violation of its pledge of service to the citizenry, can expect to elicit a prohibitive punishment from the polity, for it has,
of course, a unique potential to execute the ultimate breach of trust,
the demise of the demos itself.”
This suggests that government should be particularly active in policing the intelligence community and seems to be in line with McCain’s proposed Benghazi committee. There is one issue, which is that the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was created one year after the Church Committee and still exists.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was specifically created to oversee the intelligence community and its relationship to the executive branch. The Church Committee was created as a temporary committee that was very similar to what McCain wants now. However, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was created as part of the result of the Church Committee to make such temporary committees unnecessary.
An investigative committee on the Benghazi attack would be doing the exact work an existing committee was created to do.
