CIA Probe Reignites a Partisan Battle Over Spy Agency's Activities

Republicans are accusing Democrats of waging "war" on America's spies.

The declaration follows Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to investigate CIA interrogators for possible abuses against high-level terror detainees and House Democratic leaders' charge that the CIA misled them on Bush-era anti-terror policies.

Now Republicans are coming to the defense of the spy agency.

"They've kept us safe for eight years," said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "And now to have an attorney general of the United States opening up a criminal investigation against them -- it's disgraceful and I think it's going to have a demoralizing effect on the CIA."

Holder on Monday appointed federal prosecutor John Durham to look into abuse allegations after the release of an internal CIA inspector general's report that revealed agency interrogators once threatened to kill a Sept. 11 suspect's children and suggested another would be forced to watch his mother be sexually assaulted.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has pushed for an investigation into the CIA's secret interrogation program despite being forced to fend off withering criticism for accusing the CIA in May of lying to her in 2002 about its use of waterboarding. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers has said the current investigation doesn't go far enough.

This isn't the first time that the CIA has come under fire. The Watergate scandal ushered in the first great wave of attacks on the intelligence community. Two decades of CIA abuses were detailed in an exclusive 1974 New York Times article by Seymour Hersh, including domestic break-ins, wiretaps, drug experiments, and other violations of the agency's charter.

The ensuing furor led to explosive Senate hearings, led by the late Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat. The House and Senate formed permanent oversight panels and further restrictions were placed on CIA assets at home and abroad.

"The Church hearings and the investigations and all of the media attacks in the 1970s certainly hurt the CIA, hurt them, I think, for two decades," King said.

But former Sen. Walter Huddleston, a Kentucky Democrat who served on the Church committee defends its role in exposing and curbing intelligence abuses.

"And I believe in the long run we probably saved the intelligence operations because had they continued as they were..[there] might well have been a major move to just eliminate them," he s aid.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks produced a surge in public backing for more aggressive intelligence tactics. They also produced in late 2005 another New York Times expose about the national security agency conducting warrantless wiretaps.

But no real furor followed.

"This is a very different moment, I think, than the Church committee," said Kathy Olmsted, a history professor at UC Davis. "After 30 years of revelations, people are a little more hardened to this, and are no longer as surprised to find out that the CIA or the NSA is spying on them."

With Americans still embroiled in two wars abroad, it remains to be seen whether the current controversies mark another watershed moment or simply another skirmish in the eternal tension between spies -- compelled by training and statute to operate in secrecy -- and those charged with their oversight.

FOX News' James Rosen contributed to this report.