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<font size=2>May 14, 2012 <br>
<br>
Documents Show How White House and Democrats Worked to Protect the Banks
Against Protests<br><br>
</font><h1><font size=4><b>Did the White House Direct the Police
Crackdown on Occupy?</b></font></h1><font size=2>by DAVE LINDORFF<br>
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/14/did-the-white-house-direct-the-police-crackdown-on-occupy/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/14/did-the-white-house-direct-the-police-crackdown-on-occupy/<br>
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</a>A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice
Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers
Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally
coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.<br><br>
The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard
insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the
possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface
of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with
‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal
officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice
movement.”<br><br>
Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer
clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the
wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last
September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.<br><br>
The latest documents, reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called
National Operations Center (NOC). In its own literature, the DHS
describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic
situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion,
information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the
prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident
management.”<br><br>
The DHS says that the NOC is “the primary conduit for the White House
Situation Room” and that it also “facilitates information sharing and
operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal,
non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.”<br><br>
A better description for a fascist police state network could not be
written.<br><br>
Remember, this vast yet centralized operation what Verheyden-Hilliard
describes as “a vast, tentacled, national intelligence and domestic
spying network that the U.S. government operates against its own people”
was in this case deployed not against some terrorist organization or
even mob or drug cartel, but rather against a loose-knit band of
protesters, all conscientiously and publicly committed to nonviolence,
who were exercising their Constitutionally-protected right to gather in
public places and to speak out against the crimes and abuses of the
corporate elite and the politicians who are bought and paid by that
elite.<br><br>
Among the documents obtained by the PCJF in this second batch of
responses to its FOIA filing is one from the NOC Fusion Center Desk dated
Nov. 5, 2011, which collects at the federal level and then distributes
the names and contact information of a group of Occupy protesters who
were arrested during a demonstration in Dallas, TX against Bank of
America, one of the nation’s biggest predatory lenders. Although
none of the seven arrested were charged with any serious crime (six were
charged with “using the sidewalk!”), their names and contact information
were widely disseminated by the DHS.<br><br>
Fusion Centers, a post-9-11 creation, are a federally-funded joint
project of the DHS and the US Justice Department which are designed to
share intelligence information among such federal agencies as the DHS,
the FBI, the CIA and the US Military, as well as state and local police
agencies. By their nature they are designed to circumvent legal
constraints on various agencies, for example the ban on CIA domestic
spying, or the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars active military activity
within the borders of the US. There are currently 72 Fusion Centers
around the US.<br><br>
Another group of documents shows that on November 9, two days after a
demonstration by 1000 Occupy activists in Chicago protesting social
service cuts in that city, the NOC Fusion Desk relayed a request from
Chicago Police asking other local police agencies what kind of tactics
they were using against Occupy activists. They specifically requested
that information be sought from police departments in New York, Oakland,
Atlanta, Washington, D.C. Denver, Boston, Portland OR, and Seattle all
the scene of major Occupation actions and of violent police
repression.<br><br>
Realizing that it would look bad if it assisted in such coordination
overtly, higher officials in the DHS ordered the recall of the request
but then simply rerouted it through “law enforcement channels,” where
presumably it would be harder for anyone to spot a federal role in the
coordination of local police responses. In response to that order, the
documents show that the duty director of the NOC wrote that he would
“reach out” to “LEO LNOs (liaison officer) on the floor” to assist.
Verheyden-Hilliard explains that LEO is FBI’s nationally integrated law
enforcement, intelligence and military network.<br><br>
On December 12, when Occupy planned anti-war protests at various US
ports, Verheyden-Hilliard says the new documents show that the NOC “went
into high gear” seeking information from local field offices of the
Department of Homeland Security about what actions police in Houston,
Portland, Oakland, Seattle, San Diego, and Los Angeles planned to deal
with Occupy movement actions.<br><br>
Another document shows that earlier, in advance of a planned Occupy
action at the Oakland, CA port facility on Nov. 2, DHS “went so far as to
keep the Pentagon’s Northcom (Northern Command) in the intelligence
loop.”<br><br>
Given the subterfuge revealed in these documents that went into trying to
create the illusion that the DHS was and is not coordinating a national
campaign of spying, disruption and repression against Occupy activists,
it is almost comical to find documents that show the DHS was in “direct
communication with the White House” to obtain advance approval of public
statements by DHS officials denying any DHS involvement in anti-Occupy
actions.<br><br>
These documents show that both DHS and one of that department’s police
arms, the Federal Protective Service (FPS) were in direct contact with
Portland, Oregon’s police chief and mayor, discussing how to deal with
protesters who were in part on federal property. The coordination between
the feds and the local police and political authorities were intense. Yet
the approved statement sent to DHS from the White House read:<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>Any decisions on how to handle specifics (sic) situations are dealt
with by local authorities in that location. If a protest area is located
on Federal property and has been deemed unsanitary or unsafe by the
General Services Administration (GSA) or city officials, and they make a
decision to evacuate participants the Federal Protective Service (FPS)
will work with those officials to develop a plan to ensure the security
and safety of everyone involved.<br><br>
</dl><font size=3>There was, comically, also a White House-approved DHS
“background” statement, too! (Typically background statements by federal
officials are supposed to be used when they want to tell a journalist the
true situation but don’t want to have that statement attributed to them
or their department. Having it pre-approved by the White House defeats
that purpose and is simply a manipulation of the media.)<br><br>
The faux “background” information included the following–a flat-out
lie:<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>DHS is not actively coordinating with local law enforcement agencies
and/or city governments concerning the evictions of Occupy encampments
writ large.<br><br>
</dl>Tellingly, the documents also include a Dec. 5 copy of the “Weekly
Informant, ” an intelligence report published by the DHS’s Office for
State and Local Law Enforcement. The issue includes an update from the
Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) concerning the activities of the
Occupy Movement. PERF, Verheyden-Hilliard notes, is the group that the
federal government claims organized a series of multi-city law
enforcement calls to coordinate the police response to Occupy, which led
immediately to the wave of violent crackdowns. It was at those meetings
that police were advised among other things to act at night, to use
aggressive tactics and weapons like tasers and pepper spray, and to take
steps to remove journalists and cameras from the scene of
crackdowns.<br><br>
The overall sense from these latest documents is that Washington and the
DHS, along with the FBI, was the nexus of the crackdown, orchestrating
it, encouraging it, and attempting to cover its tracks.<br><br>
The documents among other things expose the massive hypocrisy of the
Obama administration and the Democratic Party, which this election year
have tried to co-opt and claim as their own the anti-fat-cat theme of the
“We are the 99%”-chanting Occupiers, while actually acting in the
interest of Bank of America and its fellow financial sector mega-firms in
trying to crush the movement itself.<br><br>
To see all the new FOIA documents, go to the PJIF website.<br><br>
Dave Lindorff</b> is a founder of This Can’t Be Happening and a
contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion,
published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle
edition.</i> He lives in Philadelphia. <br><br>
<br><br>
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