UPDATE 1.1: While it's not immediately apparent [to ME because I associated the month with the time of YEAR it is right NOW and really didn't see 2012] from the Guardian article, this article was from 2012; the Democracy Now interview with the Executive Director of the PCJF was done either in late 2012 or early 2013. Because neither of the links referred to in this diary had the actual date of the articles at the beginning of the piece, it's not immediately clear unless you carefully read through the articles. The link was on my twitter timeline this morning and that's how I came to put it up here. Okay Bob Johnson, you can stop posting in this diary now.
UPDATE 2: Now that I have read some of the comments here, let me say a few things. One, I so GET that this is dated information, thank you very much. Update #1 should have taken care of that one. Two, there are some who question the credibility of Naomi Wolf, the author of the Guardian piece. Her piece referred to a group called the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund who was the recipient of the FOIA documents from the FBI. Now the link no longer works, so I could not verify the documents with my own eyes, so I sought out a second source on this story. You know, the thing that most journalists are trained to do and supposed to do? And I'm not a journalist by any stretch of the imagination. That took me to the Democracy Now website where there is a transcript purporting the same information from the Guardian; Amy Goodman interviewed Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the PCJF for the story.
Now. Clearly there are some who take issue with other Kossers with respect to discussing this and other similar topics. Do me a favor. Don't bring that pie fight in here. I posted this because one, I did think it was new news, and two, regardless of my issues with the OWS movement, the bigger point here is that OWS should be afforded the same rights under the Constitution as anyone else and if that is being subverted in anyway, that is a grave concern for me and it should be for you. The Cointellpro program is not conspiracy theory. It happened and as logic would suggest, those things that work will keep on being used.
In whatever form, shape or fashion. Carry on.
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I have had my fair share of criticism of the Occupy Movement mainly due to its lack of diversity, but the principles expressed regarding economic disparity was spot on.
Also their Constitutional right to freely assemble and express their concerns over such inequalities, as well as the lack of criminal accountability held to the financial institutions responsible for the 2007 nuclear economic meltdown should always be held in high regard.
So it is with this that I regret to report an explosive story published by the Guardian and reported on by Democracy Now involving a coordinated effort between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), local police jurisdictions and major financial institutions' (Big Banks) coordinated efforts to break up the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
If this has been posted previously, my regrets, but I didn't see any such diary. Follow me over the curvy for more...
The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) is the organization who filed a request for documents and those documents newly received reveal a network of efforts between the federal government and private financial institutions to nullify the efforts of the Occupy Movement:
"The document ... 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 link to the documents obtained by the PCJF appear to be broken, but if someone can find the link, I will be happy to update this diary with it. It should be noted that back in 2011,
Truthout sought to obtain documents under the Freedom of Information Act from the FBI to prove that there was a crackdown being coordinated at the Federal level but was told there were no such documents.
The Guardian report goes on to say how the FBI characterized the Occupy Movement as 'while peaceful' a domestic terrorist organization and that several Universities fed intelligence to the FBI on Occupy activities and that even events planned up to a month in advance were being orchestrated by the FBI, through intelligence received from banks and at least one branch of the Federal Reserve to infiltrate and control the actions and movements of Occupy. There was also information to suggest that some OWS organizers were being targeted for hits via sniper fire.
Here is the bottom line, again from the Guardian. I will leave you with this. In light of the protest now taking place regarding police actions in this country, we should be fully aware of what we are now dealing with in this country.
Anyone one wanting to say 'I told you so', feel free.
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.