New Evidence That the US Army Hired Spies to Go Undercover Among Local Anti-War Protesters
Source: The Stranger
For the past couple of years, anti-war protesters from Olympia and Tacoma have been fighting a legal battle with the US Army, alleging in a lawsuit that a civilian named John Towery had been working as an undercover agent for the military to spy on them for political—not criminal, simply political—reasons.
... While sifting through a mountain of information they'd received from a discovery request, attorneys representing the activists recently found hard evidence that the Army was paying Towery not just to spy on peace protesters, but paid him overtime to sit in on meetings about protest plans for the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions—which had nothing to do with Fort Lewis and nothing to do with the Army, and which raise some serious questions about why military dollars are being spent to surveil and disrupt legal, peaceful, and Constitutionally protected protest activities.
"This finding is extremely significant," Larry Hildes, lead attorney in the case, said this afternoon. "Earlier, the Army came up with a fiction that Towery was working for the Pierce County Sheriff's Office on his own time as a volunteer, which was incredible to begin with. Then they said Rudd (Thomas Rudd, another civilian working in the military intelligence program) knew about it but wasn't telling them."
... "There is clearly much more of a national scope to this," Hildes said. "We already know the Army has gone after Planned Parenthood ... I think we're looking at a successor to COINTELPRO, on that scale, but with a military component."
Read more: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2013/08/20/new-evidence-that-the-us-army-paid-civilians-to-spy-on-washington-state-anti-war-protesters
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