September 25, 2011, 12th St between University and 5th Ave, NYC. A journalist (Louis Jargow) is violently arrested for documenting police brutality against OWS protesters and a young woman is attacked by a police officer and dragged into the street by her hair. Moments later the young women from the opening shot of the video are pepper sprayed, point blank without warning or provocation.
Naomi Wolf gives an excellent in-depth analysis of those newly released documents that reveal the FBI's counterterrorism monitoring of Occupy Wall Street, and points out the assassination by sniper fire threats against OWS leaders that the FBI never bothered to inform anyone in the movement about.
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF points out the close partnering of banks, the New York Stock Exchange and at least one local Federal Reserve with the FBI and DHS, and calls it "police-statism," and believes these documents are only the "tip of the iceberg."
The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document – reproduced here in an easily searchable format – shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.
The documents, released after long delay in the week between Christmas and New Year, show a nationwide meta-plot unfolding in city after city in an Orwellian world: six American universities are sites where campus police funneled information about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the administrations' knowledge (p51); banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI – and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire – by whom? Where? – now remain redacted and undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat against a political leader (p61).
Wolf mentions that Jason Leopold, at Truthout.org, has sought similar documents for more than a year, and reported that the FBI falsely asserted in response to his own FOIA requests that no documents related to its infiltration of Occupy Wall Street existed at all. So indeed, is the release strategic? Having your personal information harvested and sent to terrorism task forces and fusion centers, and the threat of an unknown entity's "longterm" plans to shoot you could easily frighten off even the most hard-core activists among us.
Are we all Wikileaks?
Wolf writes,"There is a new twist: the merger of the private sector, DHS and the FBI means that any of us can become WikiLeaks, a point that Julian Assange was trying to make in explaining the argument behind his recent book. The fusion of the tracking of money and the suppression of dissent means that a huge area of vulnerability in civil society – people's income streams and financial records – is now firmly in the hands of the banks, which are, in turn, now in the business of tracking your dissent."
And of the push for counterterrorism fusion centers and the Department of Homeland Security militarization of police departments, she adds, "It was never really about "the terrorists". It was not even about civil unrest. It was always about this moment, when vast crimes might be uncovered by citizens – it was always, that is to say, meant to be about you."
