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in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San
Antonio and Austin, Texas. BLANK planned to gather intelligence against
the leaders of the protest group and obtain photographs, then formulate a
plan to kill the leadership by suppressed sniper rifles.”
The wording does not sound like it’s some crank Tea Party faction
they’re talking about — especially the words “deemed necessary” and the
reference to “gathering intelligence against the leaders of the protest
group.” Fortunately, in any case, no such assassination campaign
materialized in Houston or anywhere else during the wave of Occupy
actions across the country, but at the same time, there were never any
arrests of whatever organization or individuals that the FBI clearly knew
to be planning such a terrorist action against the Occupy activists.
Commenting on this peculiar lack of action by the FBI and other
national anti-terrorist organizations, Partnership for Civil Justice executive
director Maya Verheyden-Hilliard says, “The documents we’ve obtained
show that the FBI was acting as a private intelligence and protective
agency for Wall Street and the banks against people who are engaged in
First Amendment-protected free speech activities. Yet here you had
a real terrorist threat, which, if the FBI were serious about combating and
preventing terrorism it would have acted upon, and it did nothing!”
Indeed, since 9-11, there have been a number of prominent arrests
and trials and even convictions of people who were alleged to have merely
talked with FBI informants about some fanciful terror plot. These arrests
are typically prominently publicized to the media, with the perps trotted
out in front of cameras during the arrests. There was nothing like this done
in the above case, though. No arrests, no publicity. The only reason we
know about it at all was that the FBI was required to release its files on the
bureau’s monitoring of the Occupy Movement, and this particular
document surfaced among the pages that were released.
Could the FBI have been so close to the plotters, whoever they are,
that it felt confident it could simply instruct them to call off their plan —
or put it on hold? We can’t know from the heavily redacted documents that
have thus far been pried loose from the bureau. But it would not be that
surprising if it turns out there is some link between the would-be assassins