Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 13. januar 2014 / Time Line January 13, 2014
Version 3.512. Januar 2014, 14. Januar 2014
01/13/2014
Church Committee Investigator, Legal Scholar to Testify in Case
of Military Spying on Antiwar Protesters
Tacoma, WA -- Former Army intelligence officer, Church Committee
investigator, and professor of constitutional law Christopher Pyle
has provided an expert witness report in a widely-watched federal
lawsuit brought by antiwar activists who were infiltrated and spied
on by the military.
Pyle's report, which was filed last month in the
case Panagacos v. Towery, comes as new information is revealed
about the Federal Bureau of Investigation's counterintelligence
program (COINTELPRO) used to spy on, "disrupt" and "neutralize"
political dissidents from 1956 until 1971, when the program was
finally exposed. Pyle's report rests largely on his research and
scholastic efforts over the years to analyze government
counterintelligence programs with particular emphasis on
investigating FBI operations for the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, or Church Committee, in the mid-1970s. The Church
Committee was responsible for a variety of Congressional reforms,
such as establishing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,
which were supposed to have protected Americans from the type of
spying disclosed by former National Security Agency contractor
Edward Snowden.
The Panagacos case has helped expose not only COINTELPRO-type
tactics still in use by federal and local law enforcement, but also
the military's direct and unlawful involvement. It was discovered
through public records released in 2009 that over a 2-year period
beginning in 2006, Army intelligence analyst John J. Towery (under
the alias "John Jacob") infiltrated and spied on the Olympia
antiwar group Port Militarization Resistance (PMR) as well as
several other organizations, including Students for a Democratic
Society, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Iraq Veterans
Against the War. Towery's "intelligence" was passed on to the
Washington State Fusion Center, a communications hub of local,
state and federal law enforcement, and then used by local police to
target activists for repeated harassment, preemptive and false
arrest, excessive use of force, and malicious prosecution. Records
also revealed that the fusion center disseminated "domestic
terrorist" dossiers on some of the plaintiffs in advance of a 2007
Domestic Terrorism Conference held in Spokane.
In his report, Pyle pointed to "a long and well-documented pattern
of military surveillance of anti-war groups like the Plaintiffs who
were then subjected to arrest by civilian police in connection with
their political, not criminal, activity." Pyle called Towery's
infiltration "precisely the sort of work that Army intelligence did
at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 and which it
promised Congress it would never do again." Pyle accused Towery and
his superiors of "exceed[ing] their legal authority, which they
should have known from Army regulations adopted during the
Watergate era, when disclosures of similar spying on civilians
forced the Army to abolish the U.S. Army Intelligence Command and
to destroy all its records on civilian politics."
Citing a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which
forbids the military to enforce civilian law on U.S. soil, Pyle
argued that, "So long as Army intelligence can operate in secret,
it has no reason to minimize privacy invasions...Nor does the
intelligence bureaucracy punish excessive collection." Based on his
35 years of research, Pyle concluded that, "[T]he Army targeted PMR
and the other organizations because of bureaucratic overreach and
perhaps because they were becoming persuasive with civilian port
authorities." The ports of Olympia and Grays Harbor have not
accepted a military shipment since the protests ended at those
locations in 2007.
Towery, who worked at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, not only
coordinated his action with local, state and federal law
enforcement agencies, many of whom are named defendants in the
Panagacos case, he also admitted to eavesdropping on a
confidential, privileged attorney-client email listserv of criminal
defendants and their legal counsel. Such conduct is considered a
constitutional violation, but Towery also took sensitive
information from the listserv vital to a pending criminal trial in
2007 and passed it on to fusion center officials who then
transmitted it to prosecutors, forcing a mistrial in a case the
defense was winning handily. The case was later dismissed for
prosecutorial misconduct.
"The breadth and intensity of the spying by U.S. Army officials and
other law enforcement agents is staggering," said Larry Hildes, a
National Lawyers Guild attorney who filed the lawsuit in 2009.
"Profiling nonviolent antiwar activists as domestic terrorists and
breaching confidential attorney-client communication should be
alarming to most Americans," Hildes continued. "Now, with these and
other recent revelations, we can be certain that the political
spying reforms established in the 1970s are impotent in the face of
the sprawling security apparatus we've developed in the U.S."
Public records recently obtained by activists indicate that the
Army continued to spy on and target protesters until at least 2010,
long after Towery's identity was exposed.
The Obama Administration tried to dismiss the Panagacos lawsuit,
but in a Ninth Circuit decision from December 2012 the court
rejected the government's arguments, ruling that allegations of
First and Fourth Amendment violations were "plausible," and ordered
the case to proceed to trial. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of
seven PMR members who sought to oppose the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan through nonviolent civil disobedience and is being
heard by U.S. District Court Judge Ronald B. Leighton. In addition
to Towery, named defendants in Panagacos include Thomas Rudd, one
of Towery's superiors at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the U.S. Army,
Navy, and Coast Guard, as well as certain officials within its
ranks, the City of Olympia and its police department, the City of
Tacoma and its police department, Pierce County, and various
personnel from those jurisdictions.
Panagacos v. Towery is currently in the discovery stage and is
scheduled to go to trial in June 2014.
Further information:
Expert testimony of Christopher Pyle
Panagacos lawsuit complaint
Domestic terrorism dossiers on plaintiffs
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