For the week of  Sept. 26 - Oct. 2, 2001

Scapegoating a dead senator

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Cheap shots are routine in politics. But two finger pointers looking for fall guys for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on Washington and New York have raised the level of political malice.

They’re blaming the late Sen. Frank Church, who died 17 years ago, as the culprit who made it easy for the kamikaze doomsday flights.

Church — the Idaho Democrat who served 24 years in the Senate, helped father the Wilderness Act of 1964, and is a godfather of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area — is in the cross hairs of a former colleague, former Republican Sen. James McClure, also of Idaho, and James Baker, chief of staff and secretary of State under President George Bush the Elder.

McClure and Baker (conservatives to the core) have combined to blame Church (an unabashed liberal) for weakening the Central Intelligence Agency 25 years ago, and thus hobbling the agency’s ability to detect terrorists in 2001.

McClure and Baker have not even bothered to beautify this odorous rubbish with logic.

Sen. Church’s special investigating committee in 1975 probed CIA activities that at the time disturbed members of Congress and the public. Incidentally, McClure and the late Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater were members of the committee.

Thereafter, among other things, then-President Gerald Ford signed an executive order banning assassinations by the CIA, and Congress enacted other CIA reforms. No one in responsible positions in our memory bellyached at the time about the reforms.

But now McClure and Baker stand over the grave of Frank Church and vilify him (and not the committee) as an unscrupulous villain, responsible 25 years ago for CIA failures to foil today’s terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 suicide air attacks.

The crucial question McClure and Baker have avoided — because it would expose their spiteful thinking — is this: If the Church committee’s findings that led to restrictions on the CIA were so destructive to national interests, why didn’t five subsequent U.S. presidents (including one that Baker served, President George the First) and subsequent Congresses reverse or modify the restrictions?

McClure’s answer on Boise Channel 7 television spoke volumes about the inanity of his attack on Church: Five presidents and Congresses didn’t seek changes because the media — "liberal," as it were — wouldn’t stand for it. So, in McClure’s estimation, two Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and Bush the Elder, lacked the courage to stand up to media liberals.

Obviously, blaming a dead man who cannot set the record straight is a more convenient scapegoat for McClure and Baker.

It’s a wonder Baker and McClure also haven’t blamed Church for the CIA’s miserable failure to detect a Soviet spy, Aldrich Ames, in its midst.

Can the day be too far off when critics blame President Lincoln more than a century later for Affirmative Action programs for minorities because he ended slavery?

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