(lightly edited by Charley – hyperlinked and excerpted)
Reported in Daily Kos as well. Here’s the link to the Guardian.
Apparently the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund got a response to a FOI request after others tried and failed. The response documents they received are really chilling. The article has a link to the response documents if you want to check it out.
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.
Call me naive but I thought we were past this stuff.
This should shock all freedom loving Americans whatever their political beliefs.
As in why is the FBI at all motivated to work so closely with the corporations? Why are the banks so thin-skinned that they could not possibly suffer the slightest critique?
I’ve read the documents and the threads about this topic over at Daily Kos. I tend to agree with those who think that there ought to be a Senate hearing on the topic. Some one went as far to suggest that Elizabeth Warren do so.
The redacted documents can be read so many ways. Finding out what really happened is important. A committee with subpoena power could do that. One question, for instance, is what was the role of the Domestic Security Alliance Council? for that matter what the hell is the DSAC?
There is the component of this story involving threats of assassination of OWS “leaders” by sniper fire. I find it pretty much impossible that anyone in the FBI is involved in attempts to kill nonexistent OWS leaders. But they did fail to warn people in OWS encampments that they had received threats. That is a deviation from SOP.
Then there is the fact that the FBI denied that the documents they released
to Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) existed when they were previously requested by Truthout [http://truth-out.org/news/item/5120:fbi-claims-it-does-not-have-any-documents-on-occupy-wall-street].
I would like to think that Tom Menino exercised independent judgment in how OWS was handled in Boston, because I thought the city did a pretty good job. Now not so much.
And I’d argue OWS would have been just as ineffective if none of this pressure was born on it. What a huge waste of time and resources and it actually makes the OWS arguments far more potent now that it is revealed. It’d have been smarter for the powers that be to let the drum circles roll into obscurity.
It’s right up there with COINTELPRO, but with a corporate partnership. Please excuse my language, but this is pretty fucking disturbing. Before the corporate world worked with police and the government surreptitiously, now they brag about it.
Over the course of the 20th century, the Left was intentionally destroyed by the the power elite and a compliant liberal class that joined them. The Red Scares weren’t all about Soviet spies; they were about destroying the Left. The FBI began in earnest with the Palmer Raids in 1919 and 1920; from 1956 to 1971 it ran COINTELPRO; by the 1960s, the Old Left, the socialists, anarchists, and communists that were crucial to unionism were pretty much past; the New Left had fractured by the 1970 and, unlike the roots of the Old Left, its roots never reached very deep into the working class. In 1971, the future Justice Lewis Powell, then a corporate attorney, issued an infamous memo in which he proposed using the Chamber of Commerce for a propaganda campaign. The 20th century is the story of America becoming a corporatocracy.
The relative lack of experience of OWS, the lack of an enduring Left wing, and a lack of history makes all of this come as somewhat of surprise to us. Unfortunately, this is the real America.