Did the White House Direct the Police Crackdown on Occupy?

From CounterPunch:

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.

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.”

And

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.

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.

More here.

And the anti-terrorist crowd assured us all the new laws and agencies that seemingly turned civil liberties into so much excrement would never be used on US citizens! Not that it matters one way or another. This is very old school, going back, way back, to at least the 1930s: you see, the US political establishment has a very long history of violating US laws in order to silence anti-capitalist movements. Occupy Wall Street, the latest version of an American anti-capitalist movement, is no different.

So I'm not surprised. I am a bit sickened, however, by the Obama administration's Republican-levels of hypocrisy on this. I mean, that shouldn't surprise me, either. After all, I've known all along that Obama is Wall Street's guy, shepherded into the White House for the express purpose of cleaning up the mess Bush made of American capitalism, stabilizing the very system that nearly brought America to its economic knees. But, as the above linked essay finally observes, our "liberal" President and his "liberal" party have been using OWS rhetoric in what may turn out to be a successful appeal to the Democratic base, all the while trying to destroy the movement and further empower the masters of finance.

No fucking way I'm voting for Obama after this.

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