Chicago Arrests: Government Entrapment Threatens Right to Dissent

A dangerous legal development which threatens the right of protest has materialized in the course of demonstrations against the Chicago NATO summit over the weekend. Five protesters allegedly connected with the black bloc were arrested and charged with “conspiracy to commit terrorism, providing material support for terrorism and possession of an explosive or incendiary device.” The arrested protesters’ lawyers claim entrapment by undercover police.

According to the Chicago Tribune, police informants recorded three of the defendants in conversations about making Molotov cocktails and using them to attack police stations, mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house, and Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago. They were arrested on Friday after they allegedly bought gasoline and started making the devices. Two other men were arrested on similar charges on Sunday, on information supplied by the same undercover police.

The Guardian report noted: “The men’s defence attorney, Michael Deutsch, has said the three were victims of a ‘a Chicago police set-up, entrapment to the highest degree.’ … Deutsch said the undercover police officers – reportedly nicknamed ‘Nadia,’ ‘Mo’ and ‘Gloves’ – had ‘egged on’ the protesters.” He told Democracy Now that “from our information, these so-called incendiary devices and the plans to attack police stations, attack the mayor’s office, is all coming from the mind of the police informants and are not coming from our clients, who are nonviolent protesters. They are not anarchists. They don’t belong to a Black Bloc organization. They’re involved with nonviolent protest.”

AJC News commented: “Longtime observers of police tactics said the operation seemed similar to those conducted by authorities in other cities before similarly high-profile events. For instance, prior to the Republican National Convention in 2008 in St. Paul, Minn., prosecutors charged eight activists who were organizing mass protests with terrorism-related crimes after investigators said they recovered equipment for Molotov cocktails, slingshots with marbles and other items. … Molotov cocktails are dangerous weapons, but it ‘kind of stretches the bounds to define that as terrorism,’ said Michael Scott, director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.”

The boundaries of definition are being stretched as part of a broader strategy to make an ideological connection between Occupy protests and terrorism. What is new is the systematic use of police entrapment, similar to the methods used to obtain convictions of alleged sympathizers of al-Quaeda. Even without a conviction, these charges now carry the possibility of indefinite detention and even assassination by presidential order.

Occupy Wall Street pointed out on their website: “This is now the second time authorities have timed high-profile arrests of alleged ‘domestic terrorists’ to coincide with major days of action for the Occupy movement – the other was earlier this month when five Occupiers in Cleveland were arrested on charges of conspiring to blow up a bridge on May Day. In both cases, authorities surveilled and infiltrated activist circles to instigate and supply support for alleged conspiracies to commit domestic terrorism.”

An analysis of the Cleveland charges by RT reveals that “although the suspects are believed to have expressed anti-government sentiments and disdain for major financial corporations, the impetus in the would-be bombing was the urging of undercover agents that had infiltrated a group of friends and encouraged them to consider acts of terrorism.” The FBI despatched an informant to infiltrate an Occupy protest in Cleveland in October, who then forged a relationship with a number of men who “acted differently” from the others, made them financially and emotionally dependent on him, and browbeat them into planning criminal acts.

Richard Schulte, a veteran activist, told Jake Olzen that two of the men had been part of the full-time occupation over the winter in Cleveland’s Public Square. “After having grown frustrated with what they perceived as the Occupiers’ timidity — Schulte called it ‘passive gradualism’ — the Five were encouraged by [the informant] Azir to break off from Occupy Cleveland and form their own, much smaller group, ‘The People’s Liberation Army.’ … Azir would give them a case of beer in the morning, according to Schulte, have them work outside on houses all day, and then give them a case of beer at night. He gave them marijuana and would wear them down by keeping them up late into the night with drinking and conversation — all the while urging them to break away from other groups, keep their arrangement secret and not to trust other activists. Looking back, Schulte said Azir and the FBI used ‘security culture against activists’ and ‘developed patterns of trust to seem legit.’ The Cleveland Five, he explains, ‘were coached by the federal government’.”

There is no way these operations could have been organized without the complicity of the Obama administration. The highly-disciplined character of police behavior during the demonstrations, refusing to respond to open provocations – which frustrated some protesters – was due to extensive training from the Department of Homeland Security. Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy told Chicago Tonight: “Only about a third of the department is going to be used for this event. Those officers are being trained to levels that have been called exceeding the national standards by the people who do this across the country.”

Demonstrators were allowed to roam the streets, but McCarthy said ”police would be ready with quick but targeted arrests of any demonstrators who turn violent Sunday. ‘If anything else happens, the plan is to go in and get the people who create the violent acts, take them out of the crowd and arrest them,’ warned McCarthy, at the scene of protests after dark. ‘We’re not going to charge the crowd wholesale – that’s the bottom line’.”

These “snatch squad” counter-insurgency techniques were employed at the end of Sunday’s mass demonstration: “At the end of the march, police appeared to be using precisely the tactics Superintendent Garry McCarthy said they would — extracting individuals from the crowd and quickly getting them away from the rest of the demonstrators. Several times they could be seen pulling protesters into a line of officers, which parted briefly before quickly closing ranks again,” reported SeattlePi.

Although some praised the restraint of the police during the weekend, the iron fist within was revealed when demonstrators overstepped, even by a little, the bounds imposed by the authorities. According to In These Times writer Rebecca Burns, “Though [Sunday’s] march proceeded from Grant Park without incident, police began to move in as soon as the permit expired at 5 P.M. This followed similar police behavior at Friday’s National Nurses United-organized rally, where police gave a dispersal order immediately following the permitted rally’s end. … as the veterans and other demonstrators began exiting, one group of protesters advanced towards the line of police … Within ten minutes, at least two demonstrators emerged from the cluster bleeding from the head as a result of blows from police batons.”

Independent journalists and live streamers were targeted by police in an attempt to intimidate and suppress press coverage. According to the Guardian: “Late Saturday night Tim Pool, Luke Rudkowski, Geoff Shively and two friends were driving to an apartment where they had been staying in Chicago. The group had spent the day live streaming and documenting anti-Nato protests. As they approached a stop sign, roughly a dozen police vehicles – marked and unmarked – reportedly surrounded their car with lights flashing. … Police bent Shively over the vehicle and handcuffed the remaining four. Officers rifled through the vehicle and reportedly smashed batteries and external hard drives belonging to the journalists. Rudkowksi’s phone was taken from him and much of his footage from the incident was deleted. …

“Pool and Rudkowski are among the most well-known live stream journalists covering the Occupy movement. Pool’s work has been profiled in Time magazine and number of other publications. Shivley recently returned from a live streaming trip to Syria. Rudkowski – who was granted NATO press credentials – has a history of confronting political figures and executives with his camera. A day before his detention, Rudkowski questioned Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy and asked if the department intended to use agent provocateurs in responding to the NATO demonstrations. Hours before the live streamers were detained, Mike Paczesny, who works with Rudkowski’s media outlet, We Are Change, claims he was held for over seven hours at a Chicago police precinct in connection with a separate incident and was questioned about Rudkowski.”

There seems little doubt that the government is mounting a two-pronged attack on the right to dissent. Protests are being contained using politically-sophisticated crowd control techniques, avoiding mass arrests which have been shown to increase support for the protesters, and public opinion is being manipulated by connecting demonstrations with the threat of violence and domestic terrorism. To maintain this narrative, independent press coverage of confrontations is being suppressed. More ominously, this strategy lays the legal foundation for detention without trial.

NOTE: This post was updated to make it clear that only the prosecution was claiming any connection of the arrested protesters with the black bloc.

The Black Bloc Cyclops: Enabling, not fighting, Government Psyops Against Occupy

An article by Chris Hedges in Alternet criticizing the black bloc as “the cancer in Occupy” has created a stir among anarchist sympathizers.

Susie Cagle replies that anarchists are inspired by struggles in places like Greece. Their critics, she says, portray property destruction “by perceived black bloc ‘hooligans’ as a discrediting force in the movement, even while they understand the role of focused property destruction at, say, the Boston Tea Party, or in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s struggle against EGT in Longview, Washington.”

To conflate property destruction by individuals with a mass movement of protest in Greece or anywhere else is a remarkable piece of historical confusion. Anarchists believe that by recreating the image of other struggles across the world, they can create a movement in America. However, this only satisfies their own egos and alienates potential supporters of the Occupy Movement.

Ms. Cagle writes approvingly that “On November 2, an autonomously organized anti-capitalist black bloc marched through Oakland, destroying windows and other property at banks and, allegedly, strike-busting businesses such as Whole Foods. … That march resulted in the Oakland police calling in mutual aid, but it did not result in a discrediting of the national movement; tens of thousands still marched on the Port of Oakland hours later.”

What she omits from this story is that the black bloc members were a small minority of the marchers on that day, and that after the success of the thousands who marched on the Port of Oakland – despite the black bloc, not because of it – the occupation of an abandoned building by a small group led to a violent confrontation which overshadowed the day’s action. At the time, Colonel Despard quoted a critical letter from a non-black bloc anarchist, “Thousands of citizens took to the streets and shut down the 5th largest port in America. You burned some garbage and broke some glass. Thousands of people took to the streets and marched on banks to shut them down. You painted some walls. Thousands of people made headlines by organizing successfully a massive general strike that drew attention from the entire world. You made headlines by throwing rocks at the police, who incidentally didn’t show any use of force, who were in fact not even a significant presence, until your actions.”

Ms. Cagle herself makes the best argument against individualistic black bloc tactics: “A full plastic water bottle lobbed at police in full riot gear, whether it hits one of them or not, is enough to legally warrant the shooting of less lethal, rubber-coated steel bullets at a crowd. Occupiers, of course, threw more than just water bottles on January 28 – glass bottles, bricks, lawn chairs – but police, according to their own statements, sustained no injuries beyond two small cuts and one bruise. …”

In other words, throwing objects at the police is completely ineffectual and only serves to give them legal justification for firing their rubber bullets. But anarchists turn up their noses at legality; they don’t want to fight a political battle, using the provisions of the First Amendment, to win over millions of Americans to their cause. Chris Hedges is right to point out the absolutist arrogance of anarchists on this point. “The Black Bloc movement bears the rigidity and dogmatism of all absolutism sects. Its adherents alone possess the truth. They alone understand. They alone arrogate the right, because they are enlightened and we are not, to dismiss and ignore competing points of view as infantile and irrelevant.”

They are motivated by ideological purity, not by any kind of concrete evaluation of the situation the Occupy movement is in. Another anarchist supporter, Kevin Carson writes in self-justification: “The state is simply a group of human beings cooperating for common purposes — purposes frequently at odds with those of other groups of people, like the majority of people in the same society. … The state is nothing but an association for armed violence on the part of those who make money at the expense of other people. … The state is by far the greatest concentration of organized violence, and it almost always employs such violence for evil purposes — whether at Tahrir Square, Hama, or Oakland.”

Are not Social Security and Medicare also functions of the state? Shouldn’t we fight to defend Social Security and Medicare? Carson’s simplistic nineteenth-century definition of the state excludes organs of mass persuasion like TV and the press, or the creators of ideology in universities and think tanks, and assumes the impossibility of political pressure placing limits on state intervention. If the state were such a monolithic entity in support of capitalism, why is it that the super-rich have spent literally billions of dollars to push for legislation in their favor at the federal and state level? It’s clearly important for them to reverse state-imposed limits by agencies like the EPA and the IRS.

Carson quotes Andy Robinson, a professor at Cambridge University, who critiques news coverage of the Occupy movement. “There’s no mention of the fact that police have repeatedly, violently attacked Occupy protests which consisted simply of sit-downs and camp-outs. … The fact that police use violence routinely and with impunity is not mentioned.  In fact, police violence as such (as opposed to excessive brutality) is treated as uncontroversial.” Official lies by politicians and cops, Robinson argues, are a “psyop designed to conceal their own repeated use of violence.”

There is a psyops war going on, but the anarchists don’t want to fight this war. Otherwise they would recognize that black bloc activities assist the state’s psyop campaign to isolate and destroy the Occupy movement. We do have democracy in America, not a police state, and governments claim legitimacy for their actions by reference to the popular vote. Treating the state as always and everywhere engaged in violence against the people is an ideological justification for abstaining from using legal methods of struggle aimed at winning over the American people, who are the basis of popular sovereignty.

The Secrecy of Direct Action: A Trojan Horse in Occupy Wall Street

Nothing could assist the state more in its aim of denigrating the Occupy movement than black bloc tactics, which encourage anonymous provocateurs to create havoc and tarnish the rest of the movement. The debate over “diversity of tactics” taking place among occupiers confuses the issue. What needs to be clarified is whether the aim of direct action is to build a mass movement, or allow a small group of activists to substitute themselves for the people they claim to represent.

Looking at the state itself, it’s clear that the police have refined their tactics in order to control their media representation, following the political consequences of earlier attacks on occupations. Online videos of police pepper-spraying women in New York and firing rubber bullets at protesters in Oakland evoked a huge public reaction and gave the Occupy movement a national following.

In Washington DC last Saturday, in contrast, police were careful to avoid violent confrontations, saying they were not evicting protesters but were merely enforcing an existing ban on camping. The occupiers, however, were in no doubt what was happening. “This is a slow, media-friendly eviction,” Melissa Byrne told the Guardian. “We’re on federal property, so they have to make it look good.”

The Washington eviction followed a carefully planned protocol where police claimed to be merely enforcing regulations, held bad-faith negotiations with protesters, then declared the area “closed” and used metal fences and shields to physically force occupiers out of the park. The police were well prepared for the eviction: the Washington Post noted “dozens of officers, a patrol wagon, an arrest-processing tent and a cherry-picker truck used to remove the Guy Fawkes mask that had been placed over the face of Civil War general James B. McPherson’s statue.”

According to the same article: “Protesters and police at first interacted in good humor Saturday as they negotiated taking down the big, blue ‘Tent of Dreams,’ which protesters had unfurled over a Civil War statue Monday. But relations grew tense as the day wore on and police began clearing the park of several truckloads of bedding and trash. At one point, dozens of officers pushed back the crowd with riot shields so they could erect more barricades.”

Much was made of the presence of rats and unsanitary conditions, reinforced by the image of park workers in yellow or white hazmat suits dumping bedding. In other words, part of the operation was to depict the protesters as unclean, lazy scroungers, as a rabble without purpose or constitutional rights of assembly.

The police are now ultra-careful because control of images by the mainstream media has been undercut by activists livestreaming police actions and posting YouTube videos. So it’s disturbing that a livestreamer was attached by a masked individual on the Occupy Oakland support march held in Manhattan the previous week.

The Gothamist reported: “From the march’s beginning at Washington Square Park, an unusual amount of masked protesters along with the heavy scent of booze contributed to a heightened state of volatility. The instances of projectiles being thrown were met with scorn, outrage and chants of ‘This is a peaceful protest’ by a majority of the protesters. When a can and a bottle were thrown on 14th Street, the crowd was stunned into silence, as New York’s Occupy Wall Street protesters have largely shied away from the more aggressive tactics used by their mask-donning West Coast counterparts. When a masked man began punching the camera of a livestreamer, other protesters urged the police to arrest him.”

And it’s more disturbing that spokespeople for OWS wouldn’t defend the livestreaming journalist.  According to the Gothamist, “That man is Tim Pool, a well-known if extremely divisive documenter of Occupy Wall Street. Pool records everything he sees—including protesters releasing the air out of the tires of NYPD squad cars during the eviction of Zuccotti Park. … Patrick Bruner, Occupy Wall Street’s former ‘official’ press spokesman, told the Voice that he was ‘very uncomfortable’ with Pool’s actions, and shines his light into Pool’s lens whenever he trains it on him.”

The Guardian reported Bruner as claiming: “It wasn’t a random individual attacking Tim Pool. It was an individual attempting to make it so that he could no longer film someone who didn’t want to be filmed. [Occupy] never filed for a permit. Nearly every action that we do, on some level, is illegal and when you have someone documenting it in a way that doesn’t respect an individual’s privacy or their right to choose whether or not they want to be filmed, that puts people in danger.”

Bruner’s remarks are specious: there is a big difference between the illegality of asserting the right to protest, where permits are an arbitrary police restriction, and attacking property, which is a clear violation of laws most people accept. Pool vigorously defended himself in the Gothamist: “… it does offend me when people say I’m putting them at risk. If you throw a bottle at the police, you’re putting people at risk. When two innocent people who were doing nothing get arrested because you threw the bottle, that’s putting people at risk. I’m going to hold those people accountable.”

The Indypendent commented: “Those who had been at the afternoon’s Occupy Town Square beforehand might have seen this coming. Members of OWS’s Direct Action Working Group—which oversees the planning of most marches and other actions—gave an impromptu teach-in about the idea of ‘diversity of tactics,’ which was in many respects insightful, but ultimately became an apologia for undertaking, or at least tolerating, what might be construed as violent actions. The villains of the presentation, perhaps even more so than police, were those within the movement who denounce or try to stop others who want to do such things. They were described as likely to be sexist and racist for trying to insist on nonviolent discipline.”

It seems that the eviction at Zuccotti Park has changed the dynamic within the activists of Occupy Wall Street, and that protesters’ frustration with continuous police harassment has encouraged some of them to adopt the tactics of the black bloc.

Michael Greenberg observed in a recent essay: “The [police] crackdowns scare away less hard-core supporters. Actions now routinely involve a diminishing group of three hundred to five hundred demonstrators or less. Some activists I spoke with preferred the smaller, more concentrated quality of the actions, partly, I suspect, because it gave them the elevated feeling of being the street fighters, the incorruptible ones, the keepers of what is pure. Skirmishes with police could be seen as proof that they were a bona fide threat to the system.”

The Village Voice also noted: “Last night’s episode speaks to an ongoing tension within Occupy Wall Street, as many protesters and organizers embrace radical transparency, while others — especially those involved in planning direct actions — see a need for secrecy and strict security culture to protect the movement from the government infiltrators almost everyone agrees must be within the movement. Bruner warned that the ongoing police crackdowns against occupations from Oakland to New York only serve to encourage protesters to protect themselves with increasing secrecy and Black Bloc tactics.”

Patrick Bruner may only be speaking for one group of activists. Other occupiers would differ, like Ted Hall who told the Guardian he believes Pool is helping Occupy face facts: “We have people within our movement who are doing things that the vast majority of people in this movement would not agree with. The vast majority of us are not going to agree that releasing the air out of the tires of the cops is going to do anything but agitate them, and they have guns.” Occupy should focus its energy on playful, creative actions planned and executed with transparency, Hall contends. … “Our strengths are not in secrecy. Our strengths are in transparency,” he adds. “Anything that’s secretive is going to attract instigators and undercovers like a moth to a flame.”