by Dan Kennedy

An antiwar activist has been accused of spying for the US army, raising legal questions the Obama administration must answer

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.”

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 andDick 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.

The Bush-Cheney administration’s obsession with running roughshod over constitutional and legal principles is by now well-established, with torture being just the most infamous example. Only a week ago, the New York Times revealed that Cheney had pushed hard in 2002 to send troops to suburban Buffalo in order to arrest several al-Qaida suspects. It’s difficult to imagine why Cheney would want to do such a thing other than to set a precedent. In any event, Bush said no.

And as we know, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and their fellow neoconservatives weren’t above casting institutions such as the military and even the CIA as weak and unpatriotic when it suited their purposes.

General Eric Shinseki, after all, was cashiered from his position as army chief of staff after he dared to tell the truth about how many troops would be needed to carry out a successful invasion and occupation of Iraq. (Shinseki is now Obama’s secretary of veterans affairs.)

And when former diplomat Joseph Wilson, on a mission for the CIA, revealed he had found no evidence that Saddam Hussein sought to purchase uranium in Niger, Team Cheney retaliated by exposing his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, as an agency operative.

The Towery allegations are not the first time it’s been reported that the goverment has infiltrated the rather impotent antiwar movement. A little more than a year ago, for instance, it was revealed that the Maryland state police had spied on peace activistsin that state. But the alleged misuse of the army places this on a different level, both ethically and legally.

Not to get ahead of the story, but if the Towery story bears out, then it’s difficult to imagine he was alone. In that sense this could prove to be reminiscent of Cointelpro, the FBI’s secret, illegal programme, which kept tabs on dissidents from 1956 to1971. We need to know the truth about what happened during the Bush-Cheney years, and what may still be happening, with or without Obama’s knowledge.

Since his inauguration more than six months ago, Obama has been half-hearted, at best, about exposing his predecessor’s wrongdoing. Maybe he’s right – maybe he can’t investigate the Bush White House and govern the country at the same time.

But if that is the case, then Obama should quietly encourage officials like Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, who has made it clear that he’d like to conduct a no-holds-barred investigation.

Much as Obama would like to put it all behind us, he can’t. And he shouldn’t.

by Shelley Dubois

The Air Force’s geek squad wants the technology to monitor government employees’ deviant online behavior. And they want you to build it.

Today, the Air Force issued a call for proposals from small businesses, with this objective: “Define, develop, and demonstrate innovative approaches for determining ‘good’ (approved) versus ‘bad’ (disallowed/subversive) activities, including insiders and/or malware.”

But taboo activity could span everything from leaking top secret information to spamming contacts with a chain letter to visiting any site that government officials deem dubious. Previously, they’ve said some interesting things about social networking, which may or may not influence what they’d do with new tools.

Now, those tools are a ways away. Current methods to detect insider breaches of cyber security “only address the most blatant violations of policy or the grossest deviations from accepted behavior,” according to the Air Force request. The cyber security system works mostly by rejecting certain predefined digital signatures at the borders of the network. But, as the Air Force request pointed out, people with inside access are more familiar with the security system and best know how to thwart it.

Not everyone who jeopardizes security does it intentionally. The Air Force also wants the algorithm to flag unwitting security breaches like opening an infected site during research.

Get cracking if you want to help root out the deviants. The technology needs to be ready to test nine months from now, and you’ll be compensated up to $100,000 for your troubles.

by Sebastian Smith, AFP

A top US domestic security chief announced Wednesday a strategy to make ordinary citizens the first line of defense against an increasingly multi-faceted terrorist threat.

“For too long, we’ve treated the public as a liability to be protected rather than an asset in our nation’s collective security,” Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a speech in New York.

“This approach, unfortunately, has allowed confusion, anxiety and fear to linger.”

Napolitano, who also announced an extra 78 million dollars in anti-terrorism funding for 15 mass transit systems nationwide, said modern communications had increased the sophistication of threats since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

“The tools for creating violence and chaos are as easy to find as the tools to buy music online or restocking inventory,” she said. “If 9/11 happened in a web 1.0 world, terrorists are certainly in a web 2.0 world now.”

Napolitano urged a “much broader society response” in which the public helps curb a growing phenomenon of so-called home-grown terrorism.

Referring to a spate of arrests around the country of US citizens and residents charged with jihad-type militancy, Napolitano said that ordinary people were often the best eyes and ears.

“You are the ones who know when something is not right in your communities,” she said in her speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Indeed if you look at the last couple of weeks, arrests have been made in places like Minneapolis and North Carolina,” she said.

“So I think better education, about the breadth of the threat and how it can be carried out, is important.”

In the latest case, seven people were arrested Monday, including an American-born Muslim convert and his two sons living in a quiet North Carolina suburb.

Napolitano even called on children to join an effort previously shouldered by police and other security services.

“There’s actually an important role we can play in educating even our very young about watching for, and knowing what to do, if you’re in an airport and you see a package left with no one around,” she said.

However, she stressed she was not advocating “a culture of spying on one another.”

She insisted that President Barack Obama’s administration was committed to repairing the erosion of civil liberties that took place under his predecessor, George W. Bush.

“We have to be careful,” she said. “That’s a balance to be struck.”

An example, she said, was the need to respect mosques and other Islamic institutions.

“We have to be very careful about profiling a religious institution just as we have to be careful about profiling individuals,” she said. “We have to be very, very careful about interfering with the free exercise of religion.”

Even as US troops become increasingly focused on fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, more attention is being paid to violent plots hatched within US borders — often led by US citizens or residents.

The Washington Post on Wednesday described the chief suspect in the North Carolina arrests, Daniel Boyd, as the son of a US marine who had a “typical American childhood” in the suburbs of the US capital, Washington.

This week, a New York court unsealed a confession made in January by a Long Island man, Bryant Vinas, who says he joined Al-Qaeda to attack US forces in Afghanistan and had plotted to attack a New York commuter train.

In May, five Miami men were found guilty of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, which just this month was renamed the Willis Tower.

Also in May, four New York men — three of them US citizens — were arrested on charges of trying to blow up synagogues and destroy a US military plane.