Be afraid, be very afraid, of spying by U.S. Army
By CHRISTOPHER H. PYLE
The
Hartford Courant
The
Pentagon is planning to use computers to investigate hundreds of thousands of
law-abiding Americans. Why? On the odd chance one might be a terrorist.
The person
in charge of this new dragnet? John M. Poindexter, the former national security
adviser who secretly sold weapons to Middle Eastern terrorists in the 1980s and,
as a result, was convicted of defrauding the U.S. government, lying to Congress
and destroying evidence.
That law
enforcement agencies would search for terrorists makes sense. Terrorists are
criminals. But why the Army? It is a criminal offense for Army personnel to
become directly involved in civilian law enforcement. Are they seeking to
identify anti-war demonstrators, whom they harassed in the 1960s? Are they
getting ready to round up more civilians for detention without trial, as they
did to Japanese Americans during World War II? Is counterterrorism becoming the
sort of investigative obsession that anti-Communism was in the 1950s and 1960s,
with all the bureaucratic excesses and abuses that entailed?
This isn’t
the first time that the military has slipped the bounds of law to spy on
civilians. In the late 1960s, it secretly collected personal information on
more than a million law-abiding Americans in a misguided effort to quell
anti-war demonstrations, predict riots and discredit protesters. I know because
in 1970, as a former captain in Army intelligence, I disclosed the existence of
that program.
Back then,
the Army employed more than 1,500 plainclothes agents, coast to coast, to watch
every demonstration of 20 people or more.
The chances
that any one of those protests would grow into a riot so large that regular
Army troops would be needed to restore order were remote in the extreme, but
Army intelligence wasn’t taking any chances. Its plainclothes agents
infiltrated civil rights protests, misdirected busloads of anti-war
demonstrators, set up phony news organizations and engaged in a paranoid effort
to prove that communists were stirring up opposition to racial segregation and
the war in Vietnam.
After I
testified against the surveillance in 1971, Sen. Sam J. Ervin’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights
hired me to write two book-length reports on the Army’s spying. To do this, I
had to read the contents of six Army computers containing spy reports. What struck
me most was not the harm that any one of those (often inaccurate) reports could
do by itself, but the harm that could be done if the government ever gained
untraceable access to the financial records and private communications of its
critics.
In 1975,
while working for Sen. Frank Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence, I
became exquisitely aware of just how nasty domestic intelligence agencies can
become. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was the worst. It not only engaged in thousands
of illegal wiretaps, mail openings and burglaries, it also blackmailed members
of Congress, defamed government critics and even tried to drive the Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr. to suicide by threatening to disclose embarrassing tape
recordings of his extramarital affairs.
Army
intelligence was nowhere near as bad as the FBI, but it responded to my
criticisms by putting me on Nixon’s “enemies list,” which meant a punitive tax
audit. It also tried to monitor my mail and prevent me from testifying before
Congress by spreading false stories that I had fathered illegitimate children.
I often wondered what the intelligence community could do to people like me if
it really became efficient.
We may be
about to find out. Under Poindexter’s plan, the Army’s Intelligence and Security
Command, headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Va., will use high-powered computers to
secretly search the e-mail messages, credit-card purchases, phone records and
bank statements of hundreds of thousands of people on the chance that they
might be associated with, or sympathetic to, terrorists.
Much of
INSCOM’S information will be sent to the Army’s new Northern Command, which is
supposed to provide perimeter security, crowd control and technical assistance
to civilian agencies in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. Nothing in the
Northern Command’s mission requires it to keep dossiers on anti-war
demonstrators or Muslim Americans, but the Northern Command expects to receive
so many reports on individual terrorists and their sympathizers that it is
planning to employ 150 people just to read them.
The scale
of this operation suggests that the Army is not just preparing to clear
streets, defuse bombs and provide emergency services. It’s too early to tell
how far the Army will actually go with its plans, but it is not too early to
start asking questions.
Christopher
H. Pyle teaches constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College
in South Hadley, Mass.