Vol. 73/No. 31      August 17, 2009

The documents obtained by Brendan Dunn, a member of the antiwar group, revealed that John Jacob, who claimed to be an anarchist, was in fact John Towery II and employed by the military.

In an interview on “Democracy Now!” Dunn said that Jacob said he was employed as a civilian at Fort Lewis and offered to share information about base activities. He said that in addition to getting involved in PMR, Jacob was active in the group Iraq Vets Against the War. PMR activists had organized protests and blockades at Seattle-area ports to prevent Stryker military vehicles at Fort Lewis from deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fort Lewis spokesman Joseph Piek confirmed July 27 that Towery is a civilian employed at Fort Lewis. “Mr. John Towery performs sensitive work within the installation law enforcement community, and it would not be appropriate for him to discuss his duties with the media,” Piek wrote in an e-mail to the Olympian newspaper.

The next day Piek e-mailed the Olympian a definition of Fort Lewis Force Protection. “The Fort Lewis Force Protection Division, under the Directorate of Emergency Services, consists of both military and civilian employees whose focus is on supporting law enforcement and security operations to ensure the safety and security of Fort Lewis, soldiers, family members, the workforce and those personnel accessing the installation,” the e-mail reads. “In support of that focus,” Piek continued, “the Force Protection Division executes Force Protection (FP), Anti-terrorism (AT), and Criminal Intelligence collection, processing, analysis, reporting and dissemination.”

Members of the resistance group were surprised at the extent of the spying on their activities. The head of investigations and intelligence at New Jersey’s McGuire Air Force base contacted an Olympia police officer about the anarchists, saying he was looking into “leftwing anti-war groups” himself and would appreciate “any Intel.” And the U.S. Capitol Police Intelligence Investigations Section sought information from the Olympia police about an event at Evergreen State College that was planning protests at the Democratic and Republican conventions last year, according to a “Democracy Now” radio program.

Spying by the U.S. military and other government agencies has been occurring around the country over the past several years.

In 2004 at the University of Texas Law School in Austin, two Army lawyers attended, under cover, a conference entitled “Islam and the Law: A Question of Sexism.”

On Mother’s Day 2005, the National Guard in California was keeping tabs on the Raging Grannies and Code Pink.

And last year at the Republican Party convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, the U.S. Northern Command provided support.

Under the Posse Comitatus Act the government is supposedly barred from using the military against citizens for conventional law enforcement. Christopher Pyle, now a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College, was a military intelligence officer. He recalled: “In the 1960s, Army intelligence had 1,500 plainclothes agents [and some would watch] every demonstration of 20 people or more. They had a giant warehouse in Baltimore full of information on the law-abiding activities of American citizens, mainly protest politics.”
 
 
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White House builds on domestic spy program
Frame-up case against Cuban 5: A travesty of justice  
 
 
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