COINTELPRO & Occupy: The War Within

THE INFILTRATION OF THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT IN NEW ZEALAND, AND THE WORLD.

FOIA responses from the DHS have revealed exactly that which we feared in earlier days of the Occupy movement; the existence of a federally/nationally and likely internationally coordinated (probably through co-operation agreements) attempt to dismantle Occupies from the inside and otherwise infiltrate and sabotage related non-violent democraticgroups.

This counter-democratic practice extends to the use of private contracting corporationsperforming traditional police and military intelligence functions, is now undeniable and even more sophisticated than we “conspiracy theorists” had dared suspect.

It is unsurprising considering the scale of the opposition to the success of Occupy; but our nemeses are moles of superior resources and co-ordination, spreading constantdisinformation and infiltrating organisations of social change, to disrupt and subvert.

We watch in horror as the tales of the sabotage of various international occupations emerge – and in 99% of cases the events parallel precisely what occurred here in New Zealand.

Any who still doubt that the methods employed against Occupy overseas were used here, need only look at the surrounding political landscape.

Specifically;

* the timely training of our police forces by the U.S.A.
* the presence of the FBI during the Kim Dotcom raid and during the two evictions of our four Auckland occupations, where police were proved to be wearing fake badge numbers, perfect replicas of real ones;
* the May Day “visit” by Janet Napolitano, head of the Department of Homeland Security
* this week’s “visit” by, of all people, Leon Panetta;
* the recent stationing of 2,500 U.S. military troops in Northern Australia;
* a suggestion by the United States to establish a military base here in New Zealand, a Commonwealth Country; in surplus to the Waihopai Spy Base we already host;
* the latest development; further illegal conduct against Kim Dotcom by the GCSB, currently under retributive attack by Anonymous (multiple reports of gcsb.govt.nz down);

collectively set the dramatic backdrop to this monumental phase of New Zealand’s sociopolitical history.

With the benefit of hindsight & the FOIA releases a more clear picture of how methods of suppression are applied globally, and of what Occupy has endured and still is enduring, is emerging. The end result of these methods, can be analysed by their narcissistic echoes in social media; open destruction and negativity in a movement entirely based on the opposite – a new possibility; positivity. Creation. Change.

These historic internal sentiments within the movement can be mapped by repeated fixed narrative or attitude shifts at a given time. Attitudes that in retrospect, are without merit.

While initially triumphant and embracing its quick spread to nearly 2,000 cities and towns worldwide, the Occupy movement was rocked by the month-and-a-half-late emergence of the “Oakland Liberation Front” Black Bloc leaflets, shown in countless You Tube videos to be the tactics of infiltrators. This time in Occupy history represented the first major effort by the 1% to tar Occupy as a violent movement; prior to the forceful violence inflicted upon it during the evictions that occurred later.

Despite this, the founding principle of Occupy that brought people together was in fact non-violence. This was stipulated time and time again in the founding documentation of Occupies throughout the world. It was the basis for the solidarity occupations. Those who claim Black Bloc are a core component of the movement, forget the founding premises.

They similarly need to question the gap in time between the inception of the movement in September 2011, and the appearance of organised Black Bloc immediately prior to the 1st West Coast Port Shutdown/General Strike in November.

The targeting of livestreamers for suspicion was one of the many minor successes of the counter-Occupy COINTELPRO. With Black Bloc they neutralised the “peaceful protester” images from their Antony Bologna/Brooklyn Bridge P.R. disasters; which had recruited countless thousands more occupiers to the cause.

However with the attacks on livestreamers, saboteurs in several cases successfully dismantled some Occupy Media groups or sufficiently pressured key members of legitimate Occupy Media into dissipating, or turning away from the movement.

The Twitter hash-tag #WithoutLivestreamers was our community response to attacks on Occupy Live-streamers as perpetuating “surveillance” or “supplying evidence”. The anti-Live-streamer attacks came from a sector of false-Occupiers within the movement, proven the greatest of folly in light of the #TrapWire revelations, that indeed, security cameras are being actively used against democratic protesters.

Not only by civil and police authorities, but by third parties including corporates/”private” contractors and potentially their subcontractors, as revealed in the TrapWire scandal that implicated “corporate intelligence”, “market intelligence” and “asset tracking” agencies like Cubic Defense, Abraxas Corp, and potentially countless other similar military-industrial-complex interfacing companies around the globe.

We have seen proof that yes, modern surveillance cameras can zoom. Yes, they can pan. Yes, they can tilt. Yes they can target specific individuals/groups for both audio and visual reconnaissance and yes, their footage is potentially going off-shore and/or circulating around private & governmental intelligence agencies worldwide.

Yes, it is all happening on public dollars. Happening TO the public. We are the unwitting purchasers of technology that turns us into international commodities for the incestuous trading of for-profit intelligence agencies.

In this light, the idea that Joe Bloggs filming on his cellphone is going to be of any more use to law enforcement than their military-grade state-of-the-art capabilities, is ironic at best.

The truth is, Livestreams are Occupy’s single greatest recruitment tool.

Droves of new occupiers are brought into the movement by the viral nature of the live-streams, which allow us to eye-witness what the corporate media do NOT put in their made-for-TV fairy-tales dressed as news broadcasts.

Occupy Wall Street was suppressed by the global corporate media for over three weeks.

Those of us eye-witnessing the live-streams then visiting corporate news websites only to discover the blackout, were irrevocably shown that our conventional world view of the status quo is wholly malleable; and indeed is manufactured by corporations.

It appears that blackouts are created whenever events on the ground outpace the information systems that the elite 0.1% rely on, to maintain societal control.

The blackout occurred because the international media monster took time to be fed tactical instructions on how to dress and package what was unfolding in a way that would inhibit or prevent its further growth, creating an information vacuum that was filled by ordinary people.

This was a golden period of time for Occupy, one reflected in its high intake of donations and its fast growth around the globe.

However, the corporates-that-be soon got a handle on the situation and out came the Reuters and A.P. faxes to the international media who used untold thousands of outlets to saturate media markets with suitably derogatory soundbytes and vacant stereotypes, simultaneously.

The constant “24 hour news echo-chamber” post-eviction monotone drone of “Occupy is dead, Occupy is dead, Occupy is dead“, wasn’t just a voice that came from the corporate media. It was a voice which came from within the movement itself. Upon reflection, we notice the individuals who most fervently purport that the movement is over, are the same people who made and/or supported proposals to G.A.’s to deconstruct & not to construct.

To constrain and not to free. To centralise, and not to decentralise. To usurp key infrastructure. To fire media teams wholesale. To control and usurp finances.

Their malignancy flew in the face of the resources, time, care, love and attention poured in by genuine Occupiers around the world.

These subversives are people with names (albeit often fake ones), and often self-styled titles, who court an obviously corrupt corporate media for their own ends. Who stage Astroturf events, who create new media that ostracises participants, derides/degrades the movement or violates its core principles.

Sometimes even the alternative media that we love so dearly and promote with such fervour, and in all fairness have largely legitimately served us well under the most trying of circumstances, still, in some cases fail us.

Our most early experience of this was back in November of 2011, when the first photoswere emerging of DHS presence at Occupy events and evictions.

We had a tweet exchange with Alternet editor Joshua Holland who called it a “non-story”and Mother Jones contributor Gavin Aronsen thought the situation confined to PERF. The general overtone from Joshua was that the fears were unfounded, despite the tweets ofpics and videos from eye-witnesses on the ground.

Photos like this make it unlikely DHS participation was limited to an advisory role.

Joshua Holland subsequently publicly raked Naomi Wolf over the coals for suggesting as much, then after she responded over the sourcing of an article questioning DHS in an Occupy context, he did so again, through Alternet.

Witnessing the exchanges on-line, a member of Occupy Auckland Media Team made a short video questioning the vitriolic nature of Joshua’s “articles”, and noting the stark discrepancy between the 24/7 Occupy info spread by Naomi, by comparison to the relatively benign “going to walk my dog”-esque timeline of Joshua Holland.

Indeed, search @NaomiRWolf on Topsy.com then sub-search “DHS” and you’ll find a wealth of fascinating related information, whereas if you search @JoshuaHol then “DHS” you’ll see 6 total tweets, three of which are denials of stories. Search @JoshuaHol then “Dog” & there’s 6 pages.

Mysteriously, our direct Twitter exchanges with him from that time, have disappeared from Topsy entirely. So has his most recent tweet on the subject; a 180 degree turn that suggested he had been somehow vindicated by the March & May 2012 FOIA responses.

Time warp back to this Counterpunch article: “there was and is a nationally co-ordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy movement.” A far cry from Joshua’s original position; spot on Naomi’s.

Well Joshua is right that the FOIA’s cleared up the issue. Indeed they did. With the added bonus of exposing that even some members of the alternative media were involved in suppressing what was happening, as it was happening.

That even the most extreme of “tin-hat conspiracy theorists” couldn’t concoct the full extent of the reality on the ground.

Yesterday’s Vinny “GuerillaMedia MrNews” Eastwood interview of activist Penny Bright in the wake of her expulsion from several major Auckland movements, is another example of the alternative news that should represent us, being used to promote a personal agenda that is ultimately detrimental to the interests of the movement as a whole.

The interview with Penny is billed as “Exposing NZ Cointelpro”. Unfortunately it does nothing of the sort. Just harps on about her beef with one woman. Completely ignoring the larger geopolitical picture, and wasting the opportunity to inform listeners of it.

As with Holland’s Alternet pursuit of Naomi Wolf, Penny Bright’s use of an alternative media source postured as friendly to Occupy, as a tool of revenge in her personal crusade against Occupy and the uber-successful “Aotearoa Is Not For Sale” campaign, completely and utterly misses the wider plot.

Occupy does not face the work of singular saboteurs; unless they are of the unwitting variety. What it faces is the systemic application of state-sanctioned public-funded anti-terrorism networks and resources; whole “Fusion centres” co-ordinating teams of operatives infiltrating meetings and surveilling activists’ convergence points, staging events and arrest situations, and reporting back to the central government hive for resources and further instruction.

Whether Occupy is infiltrated by these teams of paid saboteurs is no longer a debatable question. Whether or not we can re-embrace our core concepts of non-violence and decentralisation sufficiently to (non)combat it; is.

Chris Hedges said that as high as it was, the ratio of Stasi informants to genuine protesters couldn’t prevent the fall of the Berlin Wall. In articles like this, Hedges defines Occupy with every fibre of his being.

Hedges, Wolf, and Occupy New Zealand share something in common. All are compelled to speak, spread and share the messages of Occupy. To awaken others as we ourselves awoke. Therefore related information bursts from us at every possible opportunity.

The infiltrators demonstrate no such compulsion.

They live by sound bytes, endlessly self-promote and betray themselves in their own speech and actions.

It takes less than 2 minutes of the Vinny Eastwood interview for Penny to give herself away. “I’ve never been treated this way by police. By local or central government. These are people who want to have a better society? I think I’d rather have what we’ve got now actually.” Penny Bright. Self-styled #1 NZ anti-corruption campaigner and ex mayoral candidate.

Sound anything like Chris Hedges? Or Naomi Wolf? Or Occupy Media? Or even, as she claims to be, “a professional protester”?

Not even slightly.

Hopefully reading this article will bring her up to speed with what Occupy has REALLY been facing, and we will include the rest of the Cointelpro links we harvested at the end of the article for reference.

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Occupy needs to leave the “anti-livestream”-type whining in the dust. To stop giving traffic and hits to corrupt corporate/MSM news sources. Even when they outrage us with their widespread and all but transparent self-hypocrisies.

We must find a way to re-engage the purity of our original mission – to find and institute a better societal framework for humankind and for the sake of the entire Earth, in order to attain lasting progress for Occupy.

We have long-since said that Occupy is a “true truth-and-reconciliation process” due to its ability to bridge massive social, racial, ideological and geographic divides.

We have also long said: “Global Solidarity – Local Governance”.

The decentralisation of power and control guarantees sovereignty at a local level & the rights of the inhabiting peoples as being above the rights of corporations. It also insulates against a “One World Government” scenario, while we break down the walls of prejudice and competition, built by our corrupt modern materialist/consumer social conditioning.

Global Solidarity is what has ultimately held the Occupy movement together. It is the super-glue that once experienced cannot be unstuck. It pushes the snowball of the awakening, and makes Occupy invincible to the types of pettiness above.

Because Occupy is not a single person; who can be pressured to quit. Permanently smeared or culled.

Occupy is an idea that never stops evolving. An idea that belongs to all of civilisation.

An idea that has spread like a virus. An idea which cannot be killed.

An idea whose time has come.

Expect us. icon_smile-2