counterpunch | A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil
Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the
National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and
is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy
Movement.
The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara
Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive
materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only
“scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion
Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes
thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and
monitor the social justice movement.”
Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they
offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on
the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with
last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.
The latest documents, reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s
so-called National Operations Center (NOC). In its own literature, the
DHS describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic
situational awareness,
common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing,
communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of
terrorist attacks and domestic incident management.”
The DHS says that the NOC is “the primary conduit for the White House
Situation Room” and that it also “facilitates information sharing and
operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal,
non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.”
Remember, this vast yet centralized operation — what
Verheyden-Hilliard describes as “a vast, tentacled, national
intelligence and domestic spying network that the U.S. government
operates against its own people” — was in this case deployed not against
some terrorist organization or even mob or drug cartel, but rather
against a loose-knit band of protesters, all conscientiously and
publicly committed to nonviolence, who were exercising their
Constitutionally-protected right to gather in public places and to speak
out against the crimes and abuses of the corporate elite and the
politicians who are bought and paid by that elite.
