Details

Written by Abe DeJamminen and Madeleine Lee

Published: 26 June 2013

On Monday the New York Times took an interest in a local trial now in the discovery phase at Federal District Court in Tacoma.  --  Antiwar activists in Olympia are suing John J. Towery, a civilian employee of the Army who spied and reported on antiwar activists, Thomas R. Rudd, his former supervisor at the Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and police officials from Tacoma and Olympia.  --  On Monday, another defendant was added:  Chris Adamson of the Pierce County Sheriff's Dept., director of what has become the Washington State Fusion Center that is supposed to be involved in counterterrorism, not spying on activists.  --  "Mr. Adamson helped coordinate Mr. Towery’s spying efforts and listed at least four protesters in a 'national domestic terrorist database with pictures, and identifying personal information along with false claims alleging a propensity for violence,'" Colin Moynihan reported.[1]  --  On Wednesday, the Olympian reported on this and other developments in the case.[2]  --  Better than either of these articles in explaining the suit was an article on the Firedoglake website.[3]  --  Kevin Gostzola said that "Larry Hildes, one of the lawyers involved in arguing the case, Panagacos v. Towery, told Firedoglake in December the [Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals] ruling was the 'first time any appellate court' had 'ever said that yes you can sue the military for damages for spying on civilian activists.'"  --   On Wednesday a blogger at the website Your Inquirer Profoundly made the connection between the trial proceeding in Tacoma and the larger revelations of Edward Snowden:  "When a government can extract your thoughts and monitor your behavior through surveillance, consolidate that information through databasing to establish a data profile that defines who you are in the eyes of national security, and then disseminate information about you throughout an integrated network of authorities without you knowing, it’s only a matter of time before you think, say, or post the wrong thing warranting closer scrutiny."[4]  --  COMMENT: By promising to shed some light upon the secretive, shadowy operations of fusion centers, the Olympia PMR lawsuit has the potential to break a pattern of silence relating to fusion centers, whose existence has been systematically under-reported by corporate-owned media -- perhaps because the corporations themselves are part of the fusion center networks.  --  Clearly, a congressional investigation similar to the Church Committee of the 1970s is needed, as Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Rush Holt, D-N.J., and others have called for.  --  Secret law, assassination squads, warrantless wiretapping, misleading of Congress, and a general lack of oversight have subverted basic constitutional principles....

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