Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
The following link was sent to me by Otteray Scribe, who is among the most erudite and respected people among those who frequently comment on this blog. He is an extremely well educated man, with masterful writing ability and a creatively active mind. The title of his E mail to me and the other guest bloggers was WTF? and this is what he wrote:
“This is beyond strange. Horace Boothroyd III is disabled and apparently has nothing to do but sit at his computer. He monitors everything going on regarding OWS and police misconduct. I won’t try to describe this, but it is more than passing strange. Might be worth following up.”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/03/1088516/-Occupy-Minnesota-WTF-Cops-picking-up-sober-Occupiers-and-Drugging-them-for-Training-
When someone who I like and respect as much as I do Otteray Scribe, is at a loss for words to describe something, I take notice. When I clicked the link and read this story from Daily Kos, my own reaction mirrored his: WTF? It took me more than twelve hours to respond to his E mail because I needed to let it gestate in my own mind and figure out just what to write about.
Rather than me regurgitating the story I think it is an important one for the readers to view for themselves and present their own take on the why, wherefore and implications inherent in the story.
While allowing you make your own judgments, let me give my bottom line opinion on all of the issues and questions the story raises and let’s see what you the reader makes of it on your own. I believe that the actions detailed in this story are indicative of our beloved America fast moving towards becoming a police state, in the same manner that the USSR, its successor Russia and China are police states. That is that all protest against the status quo is to be repressed. The police/security/intelligence/military forces are not only to act as agents of this repression, in many instances on their own volition without sanction, but also are taking part in the use of counter-insurgency techniques towards those elements within the society deemed dangerous to the status quo. In the minds of those in power openly and behind the scenes the question of what is threatening to the country is in most instances a self-serving rationale for what is politically/economically threatening to them. We must ask ourselves are we to be mere observers meekly silent for fear of our own security, or will we act openly to oppose the destruction of the Constitution of the United States and with it our rights and freedoms?
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/05/29
Published on Tuesday, May 29, 2012 by The Guardian/UK
Cleveland Occupy Arrests are the Latest in FBI’s Pattern of Manipulation
The FBI says the five arrested before May Day are terrorists, but friends in Cleveland say they were goaded on by informant
by Arun Gupta
Excerpt:
Lea Tolls calls the five “boys playing cowboys and Indians with fireworks and spray paint. They were trying to empower themselves and passionately wanted to change their world. Instead of helping them, the FBI targets them for something nefarious and violent. It’s just disgusting that the government uses them towards this end.”
It wouldn’t be the first time. The FBI’s rap sheet is a history of political repression: the Red Scare after the first world war, the anti-Communist purges following the second world war, the disruption of the anti-Vietnam protests, student and black liberation movements in the 1960s, spying on Central American solidarity activists in the 1980s. In addition to targeting Muslims during the last decade the FBI has termed “animal rights and environmental extremists” and anarchists as domestic terrorist threats. It has used infiltrators, most infamously one code-named Anna, to entrap leftist activists.
It would be easy to conclude the FBI and the government is out of control. It’s not. It is fully in control. It’s in control of a media that rarely questions the war on terror. It’s in control of a public that willingly sheds rights for the never-ending war. And it’s in control of an apparatus that turns children into terrorists. (end of excerpt)
Otteray,
These are the same videos I posted 24 hours earlier with comments by Shano. There is also a link in to another, more in-depth, report in the second link.
This just makes me…sad.
Here is another WTF? moment, courtesy of the NYPD. This stuff is not going to stop until there is change at the top. As the old saying goes, a fish rots from the head down.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/07/1089457/-New-Video-Emerges-Shows-NYPD-Abused-Power-against-Black-Teen
Did you know that when cops “look the other way” they are breaking the law? That makes them accessories of the “10%” -HBIII
Yes. (Thanks for your good work and efforts, HBIII.)
I’m kinda surprised that you are surprised by this or the video-arrest story that was posted an comments. The War on Drugs illustrated that the police benefit strongly from the criminalization of citizens, just look at the growing budgets, powers and range of “toys” the War on Drugs has given cops. How much more directly do the police benefit from the criminalization of citizens that act to check the abuses of power? One of the most common disagreements I saw at Zuccotti Park was the “Cops are part of the 99% too!” vs “Cops are the thugs for the 1% !” From my own casual observation, about 90% of cops are just hard working 99%ers trying, mostly, to do something good. But they still look the other way when the thuggish 10% decide to practice fascism. In that “look the other way” the 90% of cops are tacitly supporting the erosion of citizen rights and the freedom of our country.
But it’s been going on for a long time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QwcxaQCO1Q Those protesters were awarded $1 each after a years long court battle. The cops who did this all kept their jobs.
Did you know that when cops “look the other way” they are breaking the law? That makes them accessories of the “10%”
HBIII:
Horace, thank you for all you are doing to get the word out on stories most of us would never hear about, were it not for your efforts. Keep up the good work. I will continue to cross post those of your stories I think this legal community might find interesting.
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by Emmanuel Goldstein
Chapter III: War is Peace
“… The war, …, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. … But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. … In our own day … war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. … This — although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense — is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace George Orwell, 1984
How depressing that an English journalist had to explain us to ourselves sixty years ago in a “work of fiction.” How humiliating that we have proven so utterly and dismally predictable.
Watch the lady cop at the end give this handcuffed young fellow a kick just for fun: Another stop and frisk gone wrong! http://bronx.ny1.com/content/top_stories/160622/ny1-exclusive–video-may-back-claims-bronx-teen-s-arrest-was-unfounded
oops, wasn’t finished. The Vietnam War where Blacks were a larger percentage of the draftees than their percent of the population and were expected to kill Asians against whom they had no beef.
eniobob,
Maybe if the cops hassle enough white kids, the cops will be reined in for everyone. The white kids getting killed at Kent State were a factor in the escalation of the protests against the Vietnam War.
bettykath
1, May 6, 2012 at 1:46 pm
Glad to see your eyes are wide open.
HB, Lots of videos in the links.
So now they are picking on white kids by giving them drugs. Not a nice thing to do. But consider what they are/have been doing to Black and Latino kids:
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/912616/video_shows_black_teen_brutally_beaten_by_nypd_officers_was_not_holding_drugs%2C_did_not_punch_officer/
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/154161/is_nypd_running_wild_patterns_of_brutality_raise_questions_about_mayor%27s_control_of_police
The first article shows a video of the incident from a high vantage point, the other from street level. The second article also relates other incidents from the same neighborhood.
The cops are out of control, at least from the pov of the 99%.
If you want me to get these stories out there, I need videos that will embed. Youtube will embed in most sites. Without video these stories are lost because there are just so many of them.
LOL Yes I spend alot of time online. But I also utilize search engines and social media to my advantage. The fact I have amazing reading speed probably also helps. Thanks for spreading the word. We are the media. MSM just won’t admit it yet.
Its funny how coming up I would hear stories of people being stopped and having things put in their pockets or cars or homes and going to jail.
I guess in those days if you were a minority and you complained about it no one paid you any attention.
Funny how things come full circle and this put planting things on suspects to now just getting them high is one for the record books.
” We are still in the streets. And so the police are searching for new and better ways of dealing with us that don’t entail creating public sympathy for the movement or weighing down police departments like Oakland’s with over 1000 Occupy-related police abuse claims while they have one foot in federal receivership. While we caught glimpses on May 1stof what is to come in the first warm months the Occupy movement has had in the US, we also got a clear picture of what local and federal police have been planning.”
http://www.freedominfonetwork.org/profiles/blogs/occupy-and-the-evolving-micro-techniques-of-police-repression
Mike S did this post on the anniversary of Kent State.
Some accounts indicate that a paid FBI informant fired shots from the area of the protesters prior to the National Guard Firing on the demonstrators.
Subverting protesters is a common activity by FBI and police.
—————————————————-
The Japanese protesters I mentioned in the post up-thread have very good reason to want Japan’s nuclear power plants shut down.
A U.S. Senator, Ron Wyden, who just returned from Japan because experts have said:
(If Fukushima Unit 4 Falls). The Senator echoed those claims and is urging Japan to allow help from other nations to secure Unit 4.
Protesters do good work.