The Ford Administration Used a CIA Agent's Killing to Silence Sen. Frank Church

The assassination of Richard Welch in Athens in 1975 came as the Church Committee was beginning its final report; the White House and the CIA claimed, without proof, that the committee's investigation of CIA actions exposed Welch's identity. Welch's deputy in Athens now speaks out. 

House GOP Invokes Church Committee, but Echoes Earlier McCarthy

While they claim to be fighting abusive government agencies, promised investigations have uncomfortable parallels to McCarthy and HUAC, warns historian Beverly Gage. 

Rick Perlstein: The NSA Doppelganger

Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history, and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications.What goes around comes around.The latest news in the National Security Agency spy scandal: that the NSA has been Hoovering up your emails, documents, and connection details directly from the servers of nine US Internet companies. And that, according to NBC News, the government has been collecting records on every phone call made in the United States ever since the passage of the Patriot Act. And they have been doing so with legal immunity. Barack Obama has been helping with that, since well before he was president; and now that he is, he does what presidents do, which is to aggrandize the power of their office by whatever means at their disposal.We have been here before.