November 7
, 2003
For
Professor Christopher Pyle,
the Patriot Act is Déjà-Vu
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Photo: Nancy Palmieri
Christopher Pyle
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For
Christopher Pyle, professor of politics, talking to the press
about constitutional rights is his “night job.” He
gets several calls a week from publications such as the Washington
Post and Congressional Quarterly to share his views on controversial
legal issues. Questions about the Patriot Act, adopted in the
wake of the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, have recalled
the Watergate era, when he investigated government spying on
civilian politics for congressional committees.
In the late 1960s, Pyle was an army captain teaching constitutional law at the
U.S. Army Intelligence School in Fort Holabird, Maryland. In that capacity, he
learned about the army’s domestic spying operation, which involved 1,500
plainclothes military personnel spying on antiwar and civil rights protesters
across the country. Pyle disclosed that surveillance in 1970 in two award-winning
articles and went on to recruit 125 former intelligence agents who testified
about the surveillance in Con-gress and in court, provided information for hundreds
of news articles, and appeared in several television documentaries. Their disclosures
eventually forced the army to destroy its files on political protesters and disband
the U.S. Army Intel-ligence Command.
In 1971 Pyle told the New York Times that he decided to reveal
the domestic surveillance program “because [the army] had created the apparatus of a police state.
These were well-intentioned men who were obeying orders and trying to please
their superior officers, but I was worried about what other, and evil, men might
do with it.” As a consultant to Senator Sam J. Ervin’s Subcommittee
on Constitutional Rights, he learned of the FBI’s program of anonymous “dirty
tricks,” including an effort to drive the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to
commit suicide.
Pyle’s whistle-blowing did not sit well with the military, which put him
on President Nixon’s “enemies list.” His taxes were audited,
and efforts were made to defame his reputation and monitor his mail. But Pyle
continued his investigations for Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee
on Intelligence, which forced an end to most of the spying by 1976.
That was then. Now, Pyle said, “the walls we built between military intelligence
and civilian law enforcement, and between the FBI and the CIA, are being destroyed.
The Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures
lies in a coma, while dozens of government agencies are laboring to develop a
police state apparatus that is more extensive, intrusive, and unrestrained than
anything we exposed in the 1970s.”
Pyle spends much of his time these days writing and lecturing against the Patriot
Act, the detention of aliens and citizens without trial, and government plans
to replace constitutional courts with ad hoc military tribunals. He is pleased
to see students speaking out against the Patriot Act and helping to found a
Five College chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
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