It was an odd little story, tucked well inside the front section of this past Sunday’s New York Times.
An antiwar activist in the state of Washington had been exposed as an undercover informant for the US army, stationed at massive Fort Lewis, south of Tacoma. And in one of those Kafkaesque twists for which our government is renowned, the army is now investigating itself to determine how such an arrangement came to pass.
Although the Times gave no credit, the story had been broken on 28 July by Democracy Now!, a leftwing television programme co-anchored by Amy Goodman, a longtime progressive journalist. For nearly an hour, two former associates of John Towery – a civilian employee of the army – explained how they learned their fellow activist was in fact a military spy.
“We hung out,” said Brendan Maslauskas Dunn, who filed the public-records request that inadvertently outed Towery, who had been going by the name John Jacob. “We gave workshops together on grassroots direct democracy and anarchist struggle. I mean, he was a friend.”
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Fellow activist Drew Hendricks offered a weird twist, telling Goodman that, as far back as 2007, Towery identified himself as an army employee and offered to provide Hendricks with “observations and inside knowledge of operations on Fort Lewis.”
The picture that emerges is worthy of a cheap spy novel. If Maslauskas Dunn and Hendricks are correct, then Towery truthfully told antiwar activists that he worked for the army, but lied about his name and real purpose: gathering intelligence on his new associates and what threat they might have posed. (According to the Times, antiwar groups in Washington have attempted to “disrupt military shipments.”)
Moreover, Towery’s alleged activities would almost certainly have been illegal. According to two lawyers whom Goodman interviewed, Larry Hildes of the National Lawyers Guild and Mike German of the American Civil Liberties Union, such spying would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of American military forces for domestic law-enforcement operations. The law was weakened during the Bush years, though Hildes and German told Goodman that operations such as that attributed to Towery remain illegal.
Towery’s alleged spying is yet another sign that Barack Obama‘s reluctance to come to terms with the legacy of George Bush and Dick Cheney‘s legacy is simply not tenable. By attempting to move on without accountability, Obama is becoming complicit in the very activities against which he ran.
August 10, 2009
