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.

The Transportation Security Administration was created as part of the response after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and the current airport scanning procedures also stem from them. Are they discouraging terrorists?

“Terrorists will always use airlines,” said Stuart Gottlieb, a terrorism expert and adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia University.

“I think aviation is certainly still an attractive venue in which certain terrorist organizations would launch an attack,” said Dr. Richard Bloom, a terrorism expert and associate vice president of academics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Gottlieb also said that pumping more money towards defending them often had the unintended consequence of making any airport penetration propaganda material.

“Because of the challenge they see it as a big publicity victory for them,” Gottlieb said.

The difficulty level of hijacking an airplane may be extremely high, but Gottlieb said that the possibilities are infinite for how a terrorist could potentially hit a plane, especially if they know someone on the inside.

Neither expert would concede that we should stop preparing for long security lines. Even if they do not have many passengers, airlines are a naturally attractive target for terrorism no matter how many security checkpoints are put in.

Bloom said that because a terrorist’s goal is to maximize psychological impact of an attack, airplanes are uniquely powerful symbolic target in addition to an economic one.

“For many people aviation to a certain degree represents freedom,” Bloom said. “People can go anywhere they want, you just get on the plane and you’re in a different location after a while. To have people worry about that really increases the probability that a terrorist can achieve whatever their objectives might be, politically, religiously or otherwise.”

The psychological motivation is just too great for terrorists to ever abandon airlines. And as long as the threat is there, neither expert thought the US should spend less money on airport security.

But how can you feel secure with infinite possibilities of attack? If knowing someone on the inside of the TSA is enough to negate most of the security measures, as Gottlieb said, then how should the US minimize the threat of terrorism using airlines without just throwing money at it?

The experts did not know.