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and the government. It would just be Nixon’s COINTELPRO all over
again, where local police were killing activists as part of a nationally
organized campaign.
Verheyden-Hilliard says that the latest documents do show that “Well
before Zuccotti Park was occupied and before the first protest began on
Wall Street, you had the FBI meeting with leaders of the New York Stock
Exchange and with the security organizations of the Wall Street banks to
develop a coordinated strategy for dealing with the Occupy protests.”
She says,
“The other thing that is apparent from these latest documents is the
scope of the FBI’s effort against the Occupy Movement. It’s not an
anomaly at one or two FBI district offices. It’s how they’re doing business.
And all through this period, they are commenting in their communications
that the movement’s actions are peaceful. Yet the subject lines in the
memos classify them as relating to counter-terrorism or anti-crime
actions.”
She adds,
“If you look at how the US government viewed the demonstrations of
the Arab Spring, and particularly the demonstrations against Mubarak in
Tahrir Square in Cairo, they were concerned about the government using
police against the demonstrators, who were said to be exercising their
democratic right to protest. Only in America is such protest considered to
be terrorist activity.”
The contradiction between the US intelligence and law-enforcement
response to the Occupy Movement and those same agencies‘ assessment
of the actual threat posed by Occupy activists is evident in a publication
by the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), a unit of the
Department of Homeland Security. That document, published in October
2011, as the Occupy Movement was just taking off, refers to Occupy Wall
Street as “a loose coalition of ongoing peaceful protests taking place in
cities across the U.S.”
Yet it also states:
“Mass gatherings associates with public protest movements can have
disruptive effects on transportation, commercial and government services,