Waging War On Dissent

WAGING WAR ON DISSENT A Report by the Seattle National Lawyers Guild WTO Legal Group and the Center for Study of Domestic Militarization ANNIVERSARY EDITION • NOVEMBER 30, 2001

By Jim Redden The sound of breaking glass signaled a dramatic change in the focus of the government’s political surveillance programs in late 1999. After spending most of the decade spying on the right wing neo-Patriot movement, law enforcement agencies abruptly shifted gears and declared brick-throwing anarchists to be the newest threat to the American way of life. By the dawn of the new Millennium, the government was running COINTELPRO-style operations against a coalition of radical labor, environmental, and human rights organizations opposed to corporate control of the global economy. Police were photographing suspected activists and entering license plate numbers in their computer databanks. Undercover operatives were infiltrating meetings and disrupting protests. Even the Pentagon was involved, dispatching its Delta Force anti-terrorism commandos to identify and secretly videotape suspected leaders. By early August, calls were underway for a full-blown federal investigation into the movement, raising the specter of a government-orchestrated Green Scare along the lines of anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. The shift was the direct result of the massive protests, which disrupted the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle. Over 50,000 demonstrators jammed the streets, snarling traffic and preventing WTO delegates from reaching their meetings. When the authorities tried to break up the protests, a small group of the most militant activists struck back, vandalizing businesses in the downtown core and clashing with police throughout the city. Much like the urban riots of the early 1960s, the intensity of the confrontations caught political leaders and law enforcement officials off guard, prompting the most significant change in the direction of the government’s domestic surveillance operations in the past 20 years. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the FBI and other domestic law enforcement agencies focused their political intelligence-gathering programs on militias and other Far Right organizations. But, by the summer of 1999,federal authorities were beginning to look at the emerging anti-globalization movement. Tipped off that large numbers of protesters were preparing to travel to Seattle for the December WTO meeting, the FBI began spying on environmental, labor and anti-corporate activists. As the Seattle Weekly reported on December 23, 1999, “Sources say ... that police and 30 other local, state, and federal agencies have been aggressively gathering intelligence on violent and nonviolent protest groups since early summer (FBI agents even paid personal visits to some activists’ homes to inquire about their plans).” Even the military got involved. According to the Seattle Weekly, the Pentagon sent members of the top-secret Delta Force to Seattle to prepare for President Bill Clinton’s arrival. As the paper put it, 3the elite Army special force, operating under its cover name of Combat Applications Group (CAG), was in Seattle a week (see POLICE STATE, p. 3)

GEORGE HICKEY

Police State Targets the Left

Police use chemical agents on demonstrators. Not only were protesters and bystanders injured, so were police. At least one officer exposed to these chemicals experienced heart problems, according to SPD reports.

A New Type of Domestic Warfare Paul Richmond, NW Regional Vice President, National Lawyers Guild “We are up against the strongest, welltrained militant revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America...They’re worse than the brownshirts and the Communist element and the night riders and the vigilantes.” – Ohio Governor James Rhodes, speaking in Kent Ohio, May 3 1970, the day before the shootings Corporations Calling Protest War The “War on Terrorism,” “War on Crime” and “War on Drugs” have one main thing in common. All of these are becoming code words for waging war on civilian populations. What happened during the Seattle WTO Ministerial, when the police exposed tens of thousands of people to potentially lethal agents and invaded the densest population center on the West Coast north of San Francisco, is that the Third World got a lot bigger. In Yugoslavia, almost a year after the WTO held its historic meeting in Seattle, thousands of people gathered in the streets. They were outraged by a few petty despots who thumbed their noses at democratic process. Tens of thousands strong, these outraged citizens stormed a heavily defended meeting place, braved tear gas and rubber bullets and shut down an undemocratic process. The voices of the establishment in politics (both major parties and their shared

lists of corporate donors) and the media (all six outlets) decided this was a cause for exalting the power of democracy. The people had taken to the streets. The people had challenged the tyrants. The people had won. Bill Clinton and Al Gore found it a cause for celebration. So did George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Two years ago, something similar happened in streets of Seattle. Tens of thousands of citizens, concerned about an undemocratic institution managed by a few individuals who thumbed their noses at democratic process, blocked the streets and shut the despots down. They too braved tear gas, rubber bullets, and paramilitary troops with military rifles and no identification. Ironically, many of the same voices that trumpeted what took place in Yugoslavia as a triumph, have expressed a “Never

Again” attitude about Seattle style demonstrations here in the United States. Demonstrations subsequent to Seattle have been met universally with intense preemptive harassment, chilling levels of surveillance, and an equation of basic First Amendment rights with acts of terrorism. The reason for these escalating tactics, more reminiscent of a fascist dictatorship than a democracy, has to do with the fact that we’re living in a system run not for the benefit of freedom, but the benefit of profit. The rules of the WTO, the FTAA, NAFTA and GATT openly allow human rights, environmental protections, restrictions against child labor to all be challenged as “barriers to free trade.” This is nothing really new. The U.S. government has overthrown foreign democracies and (see NEW TYPE OF WAR, p. 3)

INSIDE False Police Reports, by Tim Ream, p. 2 New Tanks and Planes, p. 3 Columbine Triggers New Police Tactics, p. 6 Coup d’etat, p. 10 Historical Background of Corporations, p. 13 Signs from the Times, p. 13 The Role of WTO in Corporate World Government, p. 15 Goons Around the Globe, p. 16 Organizing in the Face of Increased Repression, by Starhawk, p. 20 Recommendations, by Paul Richmond, p. 20

False Police Reports Are Part of Police Strategy by Tim Ream

A disturbing trend is developing regarding police pre-emptive response to mass protest. In numerous situations since the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in late 1999, police have issued misinformation claiming unsubstantiated evidence of violent plans by protesters gathering for mass actions. The false information is then used as a pretext for unwarranted police actions. The misinformation concerning protester plans have ranged from chemical weapons to bomb-making. None of the numerous claims of violent plans have been substantiated. Nonetheless, many media outlets appear to have been predisposed to repeat information provided by police without fact-checking or seeking responses from the organizations accused. The damage to free speech and the mass protest movement has been extensive. Introduction Mass protest of government policies on this continent is at least as old as the property destruction that characterized the Boston Tea Party, involving hundreds of activists in 1773. Since the anti-war protest of the 1960s and anti-nuclear protests of the 1970s, few instances of mass protest have garnered national media attention. That situation changed radically on November 30, 1999 when activists from around the globe shut down Seattle meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO). This story garnered widespread international attention, fueled further by the violent police response to peaceful protesters and the declaration of a no-protest zone. The Seattle Police Department reputation was damaged severely by officers’ lack of control and brutal response in the streets. In the wake of the protests, Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper quickly resigned. Police departments charged with preventing similar disruptions in their cities since the Seattle actions have scrambled to find ways to prevent mass protest. A disturbing pattern of response has appeared over the next months. It is loosely characterized by three steps. First, police departments, often in conjunction with city government, begin a multi-faceted media campaign designed to make protest organizers appear to be involved in preparations for violence. Police departments have assembled and distributed collections of flyers claiming violence, released videos of protest from other cities, held meetings with individual media organizations and created a mythic notion of an organization dedicated to violence and central to the protest usually identified as “the anarchists” or “the Eugene Anarchists.” Once the public is predisposed to expect violence from activists, the second step in the process involves a specific claim of evidence suggesting an imminent act of violence. These claims will later be retracted, corrected or will simply remain unsubstantiated. They have included claims of stolen bomb-making materials, a bus load of poisonous animals, a factory to produce pepper spray, acid filled balloons, a cyanide poisoning or the simple fact that known terrorists have evaded police surveillance and now may be prepared to act without restraint. The third step in this tactic follows the second closely or simultaneously. It involves a police action publicly justified in the climate of imminent terrorism. It has the effect however, of a prior restraint on free speech and intimidation of those who would speak their mind against their government. Examples have included seizing training and puppet making facilities; seizing training, art and medical supplies; and seizing hard drives and political literature. Potential protesters have been arrested, beaten and had bail set at ridiculously high amounts to hold them past the event around which the protest was scheduled.

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Recent Examples Philadelphia Republican National Convention - August 2000 The Philadelphia Police Department raided a warehouse where activists were engaged in creating puppets to protest at the Republican National Convention (RNC). Seventy activists were arrested, materials were seized and the warehouse was shut down. The police claimed prior to the raid that they believed that activists were storing C4 explosives. Also, activists were allegedly preparing weapons in the form of acid-filled balloons presumably to throw at the police. The warehouse was claimed to be a staging ground for both producing weapons and preparing a riot. Police also claim to have arrested people associated with a bus containing small animals, some of which were poisonous. Police claim that these animals were to be used to attack delegates of the RNC. No C4 explosive was found. Nor were any other weapons or acid found. The bus driver transporting the animals claims to be a pet shop owner. Bail was set at amounts that preclude easy release generally ranging around $15,000. One activist was held on misdemeanor charges and $1,000,000 bail subsequently reduced to $100,000. This effectively prevented activists from speaking out against the RNC and the subsequent Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Los Angeles. Washington, DC IMF/World Bank Meetings - April 2000 The day before the mass protest of World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington, DC police raided a training and art supply warehouse popularly referred to as a “convergence” space. Police reports claimed that they found materials for making Molotov cocktails, a laboratory for mass production of pepper spray and bomb-making materials. This, in part, justified arrests that ran to near 1200 people for the week. In a later retraction, police admitted that the Molotov cocktail supplies were plastic containers and rags that smelled of solvents. The pepper spray factory was nothing more than a kitchen, and bombmaking materials were limited to simple plastic water pipe. All of these materials are consistent with activities related to the convergence and art projects. As a result of police action the infrastructure and political messages in the form of signs and puppets were taken by police and did not appear on the streets or in media coverage. Undoubtedly numerous people stayed home for fear of associating with violent terrorists utilizing bomb-making factories. Minneapolis International Society of Animal Geneticists July 2000 Several days before the protest was to begin, police claimed that large quantities of ammonium nitrate had been stolen from a nearby storage area and that unidentified protestors were suspected of involvement. On the day of the major march, police claimed that a cyanide bomb had been detonated in a McDonalds restaurant. The FBI called this an act of terrorism and the local anti-protest law enforcement action was placed under federal control. The next day the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, including hooded officers raided a house where some protest organizing had taken place. Residents were beaten, arrested and taken to a hospital. Computer hard drives and political literature were seized along with less than an ounce of marijuana and a small amount of psychedelics. Police at the raid claimed that an undercover agent had warned that residents at the house wore hunting knives to attack police in the event of an arrest. Charges on all but one resident have since been dropped. Police announced that they now have no reason to believe that activists were involved in the ammonium nitrate theft. A health department inspector said that there was no cyanide threat, the poison being more concentrated in apple seeds than in the

smoke bomb that fogged the McDonalds. Needless to say, the retractions did not receive the level of press coverage of the original actions. Discussion of the ethics of animal genetics received little discussion. Tacoma Kaiser Aluminum Lock-out of Steelworkers March 2000 In the wake of the successful alliance built between labor and environmentalists in Seattle, action was planned in Tacoma to support the locked-out United Steel Workers of America. The Direct Action Network, Steelworkers and more than a dozen other groups allied to call for a weekend of actions. As that weekend approached, police warned the press and community leaders of the violence that was likely. They claimed that “anarchists from Eugene were missing” and actions at the Kaiser plant could start a chain reaction and “blow up the whole port of Tacoma.” In this case, initial scare tactics were sufficient. Steelworker leadership backed out of the alliance one week before the actions and the protest fell apart. No mass labor-environment action coalition has happened since. Eugene, Oregon Eugene Active Existence - June 2000 A six-week anarchist conference was the subject of numerous police press releases concerning alleged threats of violence and the precautions the Eugene Police Department employed to avert trouble. Police distributed to the media a portfolio of dozens of flyers spanning five years that they claimed revealed protesters’ violent threats. They created a video simulation of a dummy police officer burned by a policeconstructed firebomb that anarchists might use. Two days before the final planned march, police arrested two young men for allegedly burning a truck. They are currently being held on $900,000 bail and face 15 to 86 years in prison if convicted. Conclusions Mass media and public perceptions are being systematically manipulated by police departments and other government agencies faced with upcoming mass protests in their cities. These manipulations are designed to squelch protest and thereby the message of dissent. A common thread in the current series of nation-wide protests is a sense that control of government is no longer in the hands of common people. Governments are effectively squashing the challenge inherent in this message. Editorial pages and conversations on the street are full of critiques that protesters are not clear about what they stand for and seem more interested in violence than meaningful change. This is as clear a sign as any that protester voices have been effectively silenced and police positioning of protesters is carrying the day. In addition, activists are scared. Anyone who has been involved in the mass protest movement through a major event of the last six months has friends who have been brutalized at the hands of the system. Of the nearly 2500 protest arrests that have happened since November 30, 1999, more than three-quarters have had all charges dropped and only a small percentage of arrests have resulted in convictions. These facts notwithstanding, there is little national debate on police strong-arm tactics. The reason seems clear. Despite the injustice activists face for speaking their beliefs, the public allows these police tactics because they have been made to fear activists. Unfortunately, the evidence for their fear is the result of misinformation by these same police agencies. The costs to police agencies since Seattle are minimal. No chief has been pressured to resign, no officer has been charged with misbehavior and requests for special appropriations in the millions of dollars for gear and overtime have been granted. When the full range of political dialogue is no longer tolerated by the government, it will not simply disappear. With debate stifled, energy for change will instead transform and move underground. Evidence of a growing movement of covert acts of sabotage indicate that the movement underground is picking up steam.

POLICE STATE (cont.) in advance of the Clinton visit to scope out possible terrorist acts. Under the control of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the contingent took up residence in a Regrade motel and fanned out downtown dressed as demonstrators, some wearing their jungle greens. The preparations didn’t work. Thousands of protesters overwhelmed the police on the opening day of the conference, shutting down the center where the main meetings were scheduled to be held. The police overreacted and began pepper spraying and tear-gassing the protesters who were preventing the WTO delegates from entering the center. When a few hours later, a small group of the most militant protesters retaliated by attacking such corporate icons as McDonalds, Nike Town, the Gap and Starbucks, smashing windows, toppling shelves, spraying graffiti they provided the justification for a massive police crackdown. The mayor of Seattle declared a state of civil emergency, essentially a local version of martial law. Washington’s governor called out 300 state troopers and two divisions of the National Guard to secure the blocks around the downtown convention site. A “ProtestFree Zone” was declared around the conference headquarters, allowing the police to exclude anyone merely wishing to express their First Amendment rights. Police dressed up in military-style riot gear chased protesters through the streets for the next few days. Thousands of people were sprayed with pepper gas, clubbed with ballistic batons, and shot with rubber-coated bullets and steel pellet-filled “beanbag” shotgun rounds. Many of the victims were innocent bystanders and business owners who simply didn’t get out of the way fast enough. The chaos was broadcast around the world. TV viewers saw police firing at protesters at point blank range. One cop went out of his way to kick an empty-handed protester in the groin. Another cop ripped a gas mask off a pregnant foreign reporter and struck her. Delta Force troops were in the middle of the confrontations, working to identify protest leaders. Some Deltas wore lapel cameras, continuously transmitting pictures of rioters and other demonstrators to a master video unit in the motel command center, which could be used by law enforcement agencies to identify and track suspects, the Weekly reported. The WTO conference ended in disarray, a victory for the protesters and a major embarrassment for the Clinton Administration. Four days later, Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper resigned in disgrace. The corporate media immediately fell into line behind the government, portraying all anti-corporate protesters as violent thugs to justify the coming crackdown. Although the police shot demonstrators with tear gas canisters at point blank range, images of blackclad anarchists smashing windows dominated the post-riot news reports. The December 13 issue of Newsweek linked the anarchists to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. 60 Minutes traveled Eugene for a story on the new domestic terrorists. They came to Seattle with violence in their hearts and destruction on their minds, the CBS News show warned viewers sternly. The government’s abrupt shift from right to left wing activists was accompanied by a wave of false alarms and bogus reports. A rumor spread that the Eugene anarchists were planning to drive up the freeway to Portland and disrupt that city’s downtown New Year’s Eve party. The local police went on high alert, fencing off the site and installing security gates to detain and search party-goers. The U.S. Marshals Office opened a number of temporary holding cells in an old downtown federal building. The FBI set up a command center in the basement of the nearby Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse. Heavily-armed federal agents gathered in the basement on

"...(W)e know the direction we must begin to travel. On land our heavy forces will be lighter, our light forces will be more lethal. All will beeasier to deploy and to sustain..." President George W. Bush NEW TYPE OF WAR (cont.) even opened fire on domestic strikers, before anyone reading this article was born. It’s merely making what has been last-ditch standard operating procedure into an official policy. Here’s what’s really frightening: if you examine the plans of those in power, as we do in this article, you see that they’re aware that our ecological base is collapsing around us, and will of course take the economy with it. But their plans aren’t to stop this, only to keep themselves in power as the planet goes down the tubes Recently, there has been an escalation of the tools and tactics used to wage war on the U.S. domestic population. It’s resulted in more than half the adult black male population under 27 being in some form of detention or parole. If you look at the more rural populations, the war on drugs has allowed the police to work with National Guard units, with helicopters and automatic weapons. There’s been the “war on crime” which has turned the prison industry into our leading growth industry. The “threat of terrorists” has prompted unrestricted information access by the law enforcement, particularly the federal agencies. Not only are these increased powers being used against the poor, but they are being used against any who practice political dissent. If you believe the “experts,” what took place in Seattle during the WTO Ministerial, and during the other large demonstrations that have followed, are prototypical examples of what is being called “asymmetrical warfare.” According to these “experts,” “asymmetrical warfare” is the war of the future. Their reports say the scope has shifted from wars between nations to warfare between gangs and political factions. Under asymmetrical warfare, “wars” on crime, drugs, and political dissent are all lumped together. Political dissent and revolution are looked at as criminal acts based on opportunism. The primary field of conflict is “urban terrain,” or in plain English, cities. Seattle is being held up as the prototype of this type of “war.” Incredible tactical, and even militaristic characteristics are being attributed to the protesters. This has led to justifications of sophisticated weaponry against these protesters as the new norm. Remember when you could go to a demonstration and not expect chemical agents or rubber bullets? Law enforcement have become ever more ready to use heavy-handed tactics and potentially lethal force. This is true of large demonstrations and it is true of their daily response when dealing with unpopular people. During the WTO Ministerial in Seattle something changed in the U.S., something fundamental to the way that the government of the United States conducted itself with its citizens. During the WTO Ministerial literally tens of thousands of people many of them bystanders, many of them elderly, many of them people with asthma and AIDs, were exposed to potentially lethal chemical agents. Heavily armed and anonymous police invaded Capital Hill, the most densely populated area on the West Coast of the United States north of San Francisco. People were gassed and shot

at in restaurants, in their cars and in their homes. What was going on? The World as Third World – Fortified Limousines Riding Through the Global Village One of the best explanations of the dynamic which is creating institutions such as the World Trade Organization, and the paramilitary presence they inevitably bring with them is The Coming Anarchy published in the February 1994 edition of The Atlantic and recently expanded into a book. Author Robert Kaplan describes the plundering of the

world’s resources that are taking place, from the loss of half the world’s topsoil, to our ever-diminishing supply of drinkable water. With the collapse of the world’s ecology, Kaplan acknowledges, will eventually come the collapse of most of the world’s economy. As this occurs, the poor will continue to grow in raw numbers and percentage of the human population. The “global village” will become divided. Most of it will be ghettos. The privileged few who own most of everything that can be owned will try to find ways to hold onto what they’ve got. They will ride around in armored limousines as they drive from one fortified suburban enclave to the next. Author Kaplan writes this report from the vantage point of “those of us inside the stretch limo,” (p. 44). He analyzes the changing state of warfare, relying on prominent military historian Martin Van Creveld, and his book The Transformation of War. Van Creveld describes a new type of warfare, “Asymmetric Warfare” that has already taken the place of war between nations. These are the highlights of their analysis: • War will be more likely to take place

Tanks. Planes and Big Guns for Asymmetrical War Fun “Today, wars are small regional conflicts that increasingly start and end fast. A weapon that can’t arrive in time for the battle isn’t really a weapon at all.” “Army’s New Ride,” Scott Gourley, Popular Mechanics, February 2001. Indications that the military is retooling in a major way to fight the “asymmetrical” wars described by Kaplan, Van Creveld, ERI, et al are found in the seemingly innocuous publications Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. Popular Mechanics examines new, light-weight alternatives to the 70 ton Abrams Battle Tank that can be used in urban terrain and are transportable quickly to any city in the world. Popular Science looks at new types of experimental jet fighters that are easily transportable and can land and take off in very limited areas, like city streets. Replacing the tank will be an eight wheeled, treadless armored vehicle, much like a very buffed up version of the “Peacekeepers” seen by our local SWAT teams. The new weapons, according to author Scott Gourley will travel 60 mph and have the “off road agility of light armored vehicles.” This doesn’t mean they’ll be lacking in destructive power. Gourley informs us they will carry 105mm cannons, the original weapon of the Abrams M1 main battle tank. But where the M1 is too heavy to be used effectively in urban terrain, the new LAVs (Light Armored Vehicles) can make deliver this firepower to the crumbling streets of Lebanon, Mogadishu or even Anytown USA. And not only can these new vehicles move quickly, they can be relocated quickly too. The department of Defense’s plan is to have combat brigades that can be anywhere in the world, Kosovo or the LA Riots, in 96 hours, and a combat brigade – about 15,000 soldiers, could be there in 120 hours. “We will begin to immediately transform the entire Army into a more dominant and strategically responsive force,” the article quotes General Eric K. Shinseki, Chief of Staff of the Army as saying. While Popular Mechanics looks at fun with tanks, Popular Science has fun with jets. Playing off the recent X-Men movie, author Bill Sweetman calls his article “The New Generation –X.” Both Lockheed Martin and Seattle’s favorite child, Boeing are testing a fun new concept called STOVL – Short Take Off and Vertical Landing (get it?). It appears our armed forces need a fast flying combat aircraft with lots of kill power that can land and take off from a small area like “a 400 yard stretch of road.” The development of these Asymmetrical “X” planes are on the fast track. The Pentagon is planning to buy 3,000 of these starting in 2008, and to export another 2,000 to our economic vassals. Sweetman continues, “the winner (between Boeing and Lockheed Martin) could gain as a trillion dollars including lifetime support costs.” Put another way, it’s a contract that dwarfs Microsoft. Clearly both jets and LAVs are designed for the sort of “asymmetrical” combat – a war against civilian populations - that Van Creveld, Kaplan and ERI describe. That these systems appear so prominently in popular publications and with so little attempt to hide their intent, is indicative of the thoroughness and velocity with which these plans are rocketing forward. Paul Richmond Sources: “Army’s New Ride,” Scott Gourley, Popular Mechanics, February 2001 “The New Generation X,” Bill Sweetman, Popular Science, February 2001

(see POLICE STATE, p. 4)

WAGING WAR ON DISSENT • 3

among groups of people formally considered civilians. Hence the military must prepare to wage war upon what are presently considered civilian populations. • Future wars will be based on community survival and environmental scarcity. • State armies will shrink, gradually being replaced by private security. • Existing distinctions between war and crime will break down as they have in Lebanon, El Salvador, Peru or Columbia. The model put forward by Van Creveld and supported by Kaplan is also that being put forward by the Chicago based Emergency Response Institute (ERI). The ERI has recently put out several reports describing what took place in the streets of Seattle during the WTO Ministerial and more recently during the World Bank/ IMF protests as examples of “Asymmetric Warfare.” According to their analysis, what took place in recent U.S. protests is little dif-

Waco, Texas, 1993 ferent from Somalia, Lebanon, Bosnia or Panama. Kaplan’s prescription is to unify intelligence agencies such as the CIA with the military. This is a dynamic mirrored in law enforcement circles through programs such as “community policing” where an intimate knowledge of the community by law enforcement, is being paired with increased tactical capabilities The other factor in Kaplan’s prescription is acknowledging that as we move to a global society, it is the corporations that have the true power. The natural extension of this is that it is the rights of corporations, not nations, much less their populations, that must be protected. Understanding this social dynamic helps explain why during the Seattle WTO Ministerial, law enforcement protected delegates and exposed thousands of Seattle residents to CS, CN, OC and other potentially lethal agents. Another factor that puts this in perspective is that the military itself is an industry and a source of pecuniary income for the wealthy few. Despite the fact that it’s been more than fifty years since the U.S. military engaged in all out battle with anything resembling an evenly matched opponent, we are still living in a wartime economy. What saved the U.S. economy from the Great Depression was World War II. What kept it going afterwards was the Cold War. With the end of the Cold War, the military industrial complex has had to focus on new targets. Part of this focus has been “terrorists.” Part of this has been “the war on crime.” Part of this has been “the war on drugs.” Part of this has been the war on “political extremists.” And as the police and military become more interchangeable

4 • WAGING WAR ON DISSENT

this industry spreads into things like the building of prisons where major military contractors including Bechtel, the largest privately held company in the U.S. become builders of prisons. Militarizing Main Street USA – The Third World’s Getting a Lot Bigger Another dynamic that must be examined to understand what took place during the Seattle WTO Ministerial is the creation of an ever-larger paramilitary force to control the domestic population. The use of a paramilitary force to keep political dissidents and even the general population in line is something puppet dictators in Third World nations have used for years. It’s allowed them to loot their own countries, put a little bit of money in their pocket, and help the world’s wealthiest corporations, the true beneficiaries of WTO type policies (and incidentally, many of the players that brought Hitler into power,) accomplish whatever they feel is needed. In practice this has meant such things as the murder of outspoken religious leaders in places like El Salvador, the murder of labor leaders in Chile and the wholesale massacre of populations as in Indonesia and East Timor. Its also been applied domestically from time to time, its just not as widely reported. Some Earlier Domestic Paramilitary Police Actions The use of the U.S. military against U.S. citizens is a long-standing tradition. The following just serve as a few of the betterdocumented examples: • In 1914, National Guardsmen broke a strike at a Standard Oil owned Mining facility in the town of Ludlow. They did so by firing machine guns into the tents occupied by the striking miners and their families. Thirteen people, mostly women and children died, scores more were injured. (For point of reference, Standard Oil and its satellites were key players in the discussions that created GATT, the IMF and the World Bank in the 1940’s. City Bank, now Citicorp, was created as one of Standard Oil’s banks.) • In 1932, at the height of the depression, a group of starving World War I veterans came to Washington D.C. with their wives and children in tow. They numbered more than twenty thousand. They had no work, no food, and no place to live. They hoped that they could collect a bonus promised them by the government when they’d served their country as soldiers in what had been history’s bloodiest war. The U.S. government responded by sending out four troops of cavalry, four troops of infantry, a machine gun squadron and six tanks. Soon the streets of Washington D.C. were filled with tear gas. Casualties followed. This domestic force was led by several who would go on to become top military commanders including George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas Macarthur. • In the 1940’s the entire Japanese population was forced to abandon all their worldly possessions and relocate to camps. Barbed wire and armed guards surrounded the camps. It was similar to Rex 84 Bravo, the scenario envisioned in the 1980’s by Oliver North for locking up political dissidents in the event the U.S. again found itself experiencing dissent during a military conflict. It is also similar to the militaristic dynamic that currently exists on the U.S. Mexican border. • In the 1960’s and early 1970’s many of the most repressed minority groups began to acquire a sense of pride in their cultures and history. Many of them had been sent to fight in a pointless war in Vietnam. They came back realizing that they were a group of victims being used to fight more victims. Groups like the Black Panthers developed programs that

PHOTO COURTESY OF IMC-SEATTLE/PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN

NEW TYPE OF WAR (cont.)

fed and educated their impoverished communities. The response of the government was predictably brutal. Simultaneous military attacks were staged on the different headquarters of the Black Panther organization. In the case of at least one chapter in Chicago, the chapter’s members were surreptitiously drugged before the forces of the law broke in and machine-gunned them as they slept. In South Dakota, members of the American Indian Movement armed with antiquated rifles designed to hunt small game, faced a well-armed military force that included helicopters and armored personnel carriers. • On May 13, 1985 the Philadelphia Police ended a long, politically uncomfortable standoff with the African American back to the land group MOVE. MOVE occupied a small row house. Police used tear gas, water canons, shot guns, Uzis, M-16’s, M-60 machine guns, a 20mm anti tank gun and a 50-caliber machine gun. Police filled the home with tear gas and fired over 10,000 rounds. When this was insufficient to force out the people inside, a helicopter dropped an incendiary device. The blaze was allowed to spread consuming not only the MOVE house, but also all 60 homes on the block. Eleven people, including five children died in the inferno. There were two survivors, one of them an infant who was carried out. • Under the guise of the “War on Drugs” the National Guard was given increased powers. These powers enable the Guard to be used routinely against the domestic population. Among the areas hardest hit were the parts of Northern California and Southern Oregon called the “Emerald Triangle.” Routinely now, people in these areas find their homes invaded. Troops in camouflage uniforms, carrying M-16 combat rifles and supported by helicopters hold families at gunpoint. Furniture and other property are destroyed. Dogs and livestock are shot. Some of these people do grow marijuana. The majority of them are loggers with nothing left to cut or farmers with nothing profitable left to grow. This has been going on since the mid 1980’s. • An avowed “White Separatist,” Randy Weaver, found himself and his family laid siege by hundreds of paramilitary agents in his remote, plywood shack. Facing questionable charges from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, Weaver had refused to plea bargain his charges by infiltrating a “White Separatist” organization.Camouflaged snipers who hid in the woods killed his dog and fourteen-year old son. His wife was killed when a sniper’s50 caliber bullet exploded her head as they prepared the son’s body for burial. For those unfamiliar with weapons, this is the same caliber bullet as that used by the Macaw Indians to kill a whale. Vicky Weaver’s head exploded with such force that Randy Weaver was injured by the flying fragments of her skull. • In Waco Texas, hundreds of armorclad federal agents laid siege to a half-constructed combination church and community center. During the initial siege federal agents broke through doors and windows, and helicopters passed overhead firing machine guns. Records available later show that the agents only withdrew when they ran out of ammunition and negotiated a cease-fire and retreat. For long weeks, the members of the religious community were subjected to loudspeakers that blasted sounds of rabbits dying in slaughterhouses as they watched the corpses of community members killed in the earlier shoot-out decompose. Tanks circled their property, driving over their vehicles. After some six weeks the facility, seventeen children inside, was filled with tear gas – a highly incendiary substance outlawed by the Geneva Convention, and a favorite tool of law enforcement. The plywood structure burned

POLICE STATE (cont.) New Year’s Eve. Police in full riot gear patrolled the perimeter. None of the anarchists showed up. The informant was wrong. Another bogus tip sparked a similar panic in Tacoma, Washington a few months later. The local steelworkers union had called for a March 25 rally at the Kaiser aluminum plant. Labor and environmental activists from throughout the Pacific Northwest were planning to attend. Then Eugene authorities contacted the Tacoma police and reported that some of the anarchists were allegedly heading their way with a bomb. The police contacted union organizer Jon Youngdahl, who called off the protest. No bomb-carrying anarchist was ever found. Anarchy fever gripped the Portland police again in late April. A few hundred local activists were planning a May Day march and demonstration. An unnamed informant told the police that the Eugene anarchists were coming up to cause trouble. According to one police report, they have little regard for the laws of society and were expected to engage in civil disobedience. Police Chief Mark Kroeker, a former deputy chief from the Los Angeles Police Department who had only been on the job a few months, dispatched over 150 officers in full riot gear, including black body armor and helmets with plastic face shields. Police spent hours chasing demonstrators through the streets, spraying them with OC, clubbing them with ballistic batons and shooting them with “beanbag” rounds. Nineteen people were arrested, mostly on minor charges. None were anarchists from Eugene. Kroeker later apologized to the city council for the actions of his officers. These incidents occurred as federal authorities were bracing for the next major antiglobalization protests, set for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings scheduled to begin on April 16 in Washington DC. As the activists began planning their demonstrations, federal, state and local law enforcement officials targeted them. Their meetings were infiltrated, their public gatherings disrupted, their phones tapped, and police were posted outside their homes and offices. Even the corporate media took note of the harassment. “Some protesters think they are being watched. They are correct,” the Washington Post reported on April 1O, quoting Executive Assistant Washington Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer as saying, If it’s an open meeting and it says, ‘Come on over,’ then anybody’s welcome.” Three days later, USA Today reported government agents were going undercover online to thwart the protesters. “[T]hey have been monitoring 73 internet sites where the groups have been exchanging messages to learn more about their plans. Sometimes, officers have even gone online posing as protesters,” the paper said, adding that police were physically following suspected anarchists throughout the capitol city. “They have been monitoring the movements of nearly two dozen self-proclaimed anarchists who have arrived in Washington.” As a result of this surveillance, all 3,500 DC police officers were put on alert, along with unknown number of law enforcement agents from at least 12 federal and state agencies, including the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The authorities spent over $1 million on new body armor and bullet-proof shields. They set up three mass detention centers where arrested protesters would be taken. They removed 69 mailboxes where bombs could be hidden. “They ain’t burning our city like they did in Seattle,” Police Chief Charles Ramsey told USA Today. “I’m not going to let it happen. I guarantee it.” The authorities started cracking down on the activists the week before the IMF/World Bank meetings were scheduled to begin. On April 13, seven activists driving to a planning meeting were pulled over and arrested. Police seized 256 PCV pipes, 45 smaller pipes, 2 rolls of chicken wire, 50 rolls of duct tape, gas masks, bolt cutters, chains, an electrical

saw, and lock boxes. According to a Washington Post account of the incident, a Secret Service agent frisked one passenger, showing him a photo that had been taken of him earlier. The police justified the arrests by saying the materials and tools found in the van were “implements of crime.” The accusation struck National Lawyers Guild President Karen Jo Koonan as absurd. “These activists construct signs, puppets, sound stages, and other tools for expressing their political views,” she wrote in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. “They were in fact arrested for possession of implements of First Amendment activity. We have been told by an MPD officer that the FBI directed them to make this arrest.” But the police claim was made a specific purpose – a purpose that would soon become clear. It is illegal for the police to spy on anyone simply because of their political beliefs. But political activists can be monitored if the police believe they are planning to commit crimes, no matter how petty. The police claimed the items seized from the van were “instruments of crime” to justify their surveillance. It was a claim that would be heard repeatedly in the days, weeks and months to come. On the morning of April 15, law enforcement authorities unexpectedly raided a warehouse that served as the demonstrators’ headquarters. According to eyewitness accounts, the agencies involved in the raid included the BATF, the Washington Metropolitan Police Department and the Washington Fire Department. Saying the warehouse violated fire codes, the authorities threw all the activists out and closed the building. Then the authorities claimed they found weapons in the warehouse, physical proof that violent crimes were being planned. According to the police, the evidence included a Molotov cocktail, balloons filled with acid, and a lab for producing explosives and pepper spray. In a later retraction, the police admitted they’d only found oily rags and a kitchen, but not until after the warehouse was shut down. Police also kept all the signs, banners and giant satiric posters under construction inside, depriving the demonstrators of their most effective means of communicating their causes. The first mass arrests happened that afternoon when a few thousand protesters took part in a march against the prison industrial complex. The police blocked their way, then isolated and arrested approximately 635 activists — far more than the 525 protesters arrested during a full week of demonstrations in Seattle — declaring their march illegal. By the morning of Saturday the 16th, the police had cordoned off 50 blocks around the headquarters of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. “What makes the situation all the more maddening is that such actions are apparently being taken based on the ridiculous view that every protester or activist is an anarchist time bomb waiting to go off – a view apparently buttressed by unspecified police intelligence that may or may not be true,” reporter Jason Vest wrote in the online SpeakOut.com website. The authorities quickly revealed that they were obsessed with identifying the protesters. Those who provided identification were fined $50. Those who didn’t were fined $300. Demonstrators clashed with police during the next few days. The federal government gave all non-essential employees in Washington DC the day off on Monday, resulting in a partial government shut-down, which is far more than the neo-Patriot movement was able to achieve at any point in the 1990s. By the time it was over, even the IMF had released a communiqué that acknowledged the protesters had made its policies a matter “of growing public debate.” As the ABC Evening News reported on Monday, “The demonstrators outside the building did their best to be heard. The delegates inside the building said they got the message.” The full extent of the government’s surveillance operation was not revealed until May 4, when the Paris-based Intelligence News-

quickly. Survivors recall that many who tried to exit the burning structure were fired upon. Thermal imaging of film taken during this time, seems to confirm this. What distinguishes these from what took place in Seattle is that all these actions took place against populations that were marginalized socially, geographically or economically. During the Seattle WTO Ministerial this use of military force was openly applied to a vast middle-class population in the most densely populated urban area north of San Francisco. It was not only an effective way of telling the people that the rules had changed. It was setting a precedent about the use of potentially lethal military force against any population, in effect telling the U.S. middle class that they too had joined the Third World. Say Goodbye to Posse Comitatus The United States has a protection against the use of federal troops for civilian law enforcement. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 makes it a crime to do so. The intent behind this is that the military is there to deal with foreign enemies, usually with a lethal response. Police, by contrast are members of the community and there above all to protect life. The two are hence incompatible. Recent legislation enacted as a result of the “War on Drugs” has changed this. The lines between police and the military have become increasingly blurred. For example 10 USC 375 only limits the use of military to actual engagement of troops in the field. This means that that the most elite “Special Forces” military units including the Navy Seals Team 6, Delta Force and the Special Service (SAS) routinely train both federal and police SWAT Teams. These “Special Forces” not only are allowed to conduct trainings, they can also appear on site and act as “consultants” at every stage of the action, even writing action plans that supercede those of their law enforcement counterparts. Under 10 USC 372, the military forces can also provide any piece of military equipment deemed necessary. The only restriction is that military personnel cannot operate this military equipment. Under 10 USC 373, the military are authorized to train the law enforcement on any piece of their equipment, such as the tanks that were used at Waco. Also under recent exceptions created under the “War on Drugs” members of the National Guard may be brought in directly. FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) founder Danny Coulson seems to have grasped some of the implications of this blurring of the lines between military and law enforcement. Then FBI Director William Webster and Coulson had observed an early training session of Delta Force. Coulson who describes the FBI’s involvement in the 1973 Wounded Knee siege as “disastrous” (Coulson, No Heroes, pp. 136-37) describes the following exchange: “Webster nodded sagely and took a closer look at the array of guns and gizmos. There seemed to be something missing. He turned a puzzled face to Major General Richard Scholtes, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, who oversaw Delta, SEAL Team Six and other DOD counter terror activities. ‘I don’t see any handcuffs,’ Webster said. ‘We don’t have handcuffs,’ Scholtes responded crisply. ‘It’s not my job to arrest people.’ Oh? Oh! Webster’s eyebrows curved like the St. Louis arch as the realization dawned that once the military was called in, the situation would most assuredly be resolved with bullets, and there might be no one left to be taken to jail. It conjured up a nightmare sce-

nario that could make Kent State look like a picnic.”(Coulson p. 139) In point of fact, these military units may be overruling their civilian counterparts once called in. Evidence of this is shown by examination of the testimony by Attorney General Janet concerning the disaster that occurred at Waco. Reno first described the role of the President as being limited like a World War II general who was not expected to exercise constant oversight. Reno also acknowledged that though the FBI had conceived the April 19 th assault of the Branch Davidian’s plywood structure with military tanks, the actual implementation which began a few minutes after the tanks were first deployed, was the work of Delta Force. “In effect Delta Force’s recommendation was carried out.” (Kopel and Blackmun, No More Wacos, pp. 84-87) There is certainly evidence that a similar dynamic was taking place in Se-

ence of members of the Seattle chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild. NLG attorneys received a short letter from Captain Linda Pierce a few days before the WTO Ministerial. Captain Pierce’s letter included the following acknowledgment: “While we appreciate your interest in ensuring individual First Amendment expression, it is important to note that security issues are paramount and are often dictated by federal agencies responsible for event security.” In essence, the letter is saying, what we locals think or want doesn’t matter. The Feds are in charge. What this Portends What took place in Seattle is part of a larger trend. Over the last decade is the capability to wage war on the domestic population has increased several fold. Much of the money that went to the military now goes to National Guard Units. These units are functionally the same as the military. They have been

Philadelphia, 1985 attle. Evidence of Federal involvement in the Seattle Ministerial is there as early as July 16th article in The Wall Street Journal. This article quotes SPD spokesperson Carmen Best as saying, “The police department has set up a WTO planning commission, which is coordinating with the U.S. Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the State Department, Federal Emergency Management Agency, The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and numerous other law enforcement types.” (Emphasis added.) An article in The Seattle Weekly published two weeks after the ministerial, states that Delta Force members were on the street in civilian garb mingling with demonstrators. The Delta Force members may not have only been in charge of much of what was going on in the streets, but according to two sources, were those who pushed the hardest for the crackdown that occurred on the streets. (SW, “Delta’s Down with it.” Rick Anderson, 12/23/1999, p. 16.) Certainly the response that occurred on November 30 where thousands were exposed to chemical agents and almost no one arrested mirrors Coulson’s and Webster’s impressions of Delta’s operating style. Community leader Harriet Walden, one of the founders of the group Mothers for Police Accountability made remarks to this effect at a community dialogue with Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper: After the crackdown began, every press briefing was held in the federal building. The local authorities were not in control. This conclusion is mirrored by experi-

called to serve in Panama and the Persian Gulf. Arguably the training, level of equipment and level of recruits they receive is superior to that of their counterparts in the regular military. Indeed many of these National Guard Units routinely best their military counterparts in staged competitions. The difference is that the National Guard may be used against the domestic population. The police too have become militarized. The euphemisms for this are the “War on Crime” and the “War on Drugs.” Their result has been a vastly enlarged police force. This force many more and newer officers. These officers use weapons with higher capacities, but having less training and street experience behind them. There has been an increase in the number of paramilitary SWAT and SERT units. In large part because this is where the federal funds are, small town police forces apply for and receive grants for SWAT teams, not basic items such as police cars. One recent academic study found that nearly 70% of the cities with populations under 50,000 had paramilitary units. For cities with populations over 50,000 the number jumped to 90%. And much of the tactics and mindset of SWAT has become integral to police training and culture. Much of this rise in the militarization of the police has occurred alongside the growth of something called “Community Policing.” Discussions of community policing are usually dominated by touchyfeely terms of “community involvement.” Neighbors are encouraged to be the eyes and ears of the police in the community. They are encouraged to report any “suspicious” persons and events and to work with the police in eliminating these ele-

(see POLICE STATE, p. 6)

WAGING WAR ON DISSENT • 5

POLICE STATE (cont.) ments. What in fact “Community Policing” accomplishes is that the police, particularly the paramilitary police described above, are given eyes, informants and unchecked entry into the community. Portland, Oregon is one of the national models of “Community Policing.” It has hosted several national conferences on the subject and two of its chiefs were among the three finalists for position of administering the allocation of the 100,000 new police created by the federal crime bill. A closer look at this program reveals how closely it is intertwined in the community. Figures in a study conducted by the Portland City Auditor’s office revealed that under community policing, the number of patrol cops actually went slightly down, while the number of those involved in Tactical Operations went from two to fiftysix officers in the space of a little over three years, an increase of some 2800%. Also the person who was “Lieutenant in charge of Community Policing” inevitably became the “Captain in Charge of Tactical Operations.” Just to clarify, “Tactical Operations” is the division that runs the paramilitary team that knocks down doors, dresses in camouflage, drives armored cars, and carries military type AR-15 combat rifles and H&K MP-5 submachine guns. This is also the division of the police that can confiscate property. This is part of the “asset forfeiture” fund mentioned in the 1993 Federal Crime Bill that created 100,000 new police on the streets. “Asset forfeiture” refers to property taken through drug and other crime related seizures by law enforcement. In effect, the police are expected to become self-funding through the confiscation of private property. One obscure ordinance passed by Portland City Council enabled this branch of the police to work with the National Guard to compile a database of property owned in Portland under the guise of a “War on Drugs.”

One can find why “Community Policing” is most relevant to what is now occurring in the U.S. in remarks by one of the program’s founders. Lee Brown a former Multnomah County Sheriff, New York City Police Commissioner and Clinton Drug Czar wrote this in a history of “Community Policing” intended for members of the law enforcement community. Brown begins by looking at “shortcomings” to the police response that occurred during the protests of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s: “ (These shortcomings) came into sharp focus by the middle 1960’s and early 1970’s when riots and protests ex-

Columbine Triggers New Police Tactics “His ears ringing from gunfire, his uniform damp with sweat, his breath labored and acrid-tasting from the gunpowder in the air, Officer Larry Layman ran heavily down a hallway toward an insistent pop-pop-pop. A gunman was running through school shooting children, and Layman was chasing him. Layman rounded a corner, holding his gun in front of him two stiff arms and stopped dead. The gunman stood facing him, with an arm around a hostage’s neck and a gun held to the hostage’s head. “Drop your gun or I’ll blow your head off!” the gunman screamed. Layman, a police officer for more than half his fifty years, had been trained always to drop his gun at a moment like this. Now he fired. “This was only a training exercise. But the point of this training is something radically new and different, and it is unsettling for Larry Layman, and his fellow officers in Peoria, Illinois and thousands of other law enforcement officers across the country. Historically, the police in the United States have employed a standard response when confronted with armed suspects in schools, malls, banks, post offices, and other heavily populated buildings. The first officers to arrive never rushed in. Instead they set up perimeters and controlled the scene. They tried to contain the suspects and called in a rigorously trained Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team. The SWAT team arrived, assumed positions to keep the suspects pinned down, and negotiated with them until they surrendered. SWAT teams stormed buildings only when necessary to save lives, such as when hostages were being executed one by one. “Today, however, police officers are setting aside traditional tactics. They are being taught to enter a building if they are the first to arrive at the scene, to chase the gunman, and to kill or disable him as quickly as possible. This sweeping change in police tactics – variously called rapid response, emergency-response, or first responder – is a direct result of the shootings that occurred at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20 of last year…. “Larry Glick, the executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, says that Columbine almost immediately became a seminal event in the history of police training and tactics. Most of the nation’s 17,000 police agencies, he says, especially the roughly 2,000 agencies with fifty or more officers, have instituted new rapid-response training programs in the past year. These programs are intended to train all police officers not just SWAT teams – to respond swiftly and aggressively if they are among the first officers on the scene. Glick’s association, with 37,000 members from 3,500 participating agencies, teaches SWAT specialists to retrain their fellow officers, including everyday patrolmen, like Larry Layman….” “Shoot to Kill” Timothy Harper, The Atlantic Monthly, October 2,000.

6 • WAGING WAR ON DISSENT

ploded with rampant regularity across America…questions were raised about the apparent inability of police to prevent or at least control such outbreaks.” (Perspectives on Policing, U.S. Department of Justice, September 1989.) In other words, “Community Policing” was put into place to answer the question: how can the police more effectively eliminate dissent, or if that is not possible, control it. To place this trend in perspective, imagine the political furor in the U.S. if Lee Brown’s remarks on “controlling” dissent, which are not disputed, could be attributed to the domestic policies of say Fidel Castro or Saddam Hussein. More Cops, Less Training “Community Policing” also brought with it a mass of new hires. There is no objective evidence anywhere that supports that bringing more cops on the street limits crime. FBI Statistics prove that there is no correlation with having more police and a lowered crime rate. That information is being ignored and more and more police are being hired. In most police departments, new recruits have swelled the ranks, and sometimes even form a majority of the police on the street. In Seattle, as the WTO Ministerial approached, one third of the SPD had been on the force for less than two years. This flood of new hires has brought a concern noted by many police commanders and police union leaders, that with the increasing numbers of new recruits, police cannot be and are not being adequately trained. Robert Vernon, Retired Assistant Chief of the LAPD writes the following in his book LA Justice: “I also called the (Christopher) Commission’s attention to our training problem in the LAPD. Our hiring schedule was (and is) controlled completely by the politicians and the city administrative officer…. (T)hese leaders mandated our hiring to go from zero growth to adding several hundred in one year. To make political points with the people, they actually began seeing who could add the most officers to our authorized strength. The result was that in recent years of heavy hiring, we hired too many too quickly. When I joined the department and graduated from the academy, I was assigned to work with an 8-year veteran. I soon learned that it took several years of experience to become an effective officer.

letter carried a story titled “Watching the AntiWTO Crowd” which reported that U.S. Army intelligence units were monitoring the anticorporate protesters. Among other things, the newsletter discovered that “reserve units from the US Army Intelligence and Security Command helped Washington police keep an eye on demonstrations staged at the World Bank/ IMF meetings ... [T]he Pentagon sent around 700 men from the Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir to assist the Washington police on April 17, including specialists in human and signals intelligence. One unit was even strategically located on the fourth floor balcony in a building at 1919 Pennsylvania Avenue with a birds-eye view of most demonstrators.” The newsletter also charged that much information being collected about the protesters was being fed into the Regional Information Sharing System computers used by law enforcement agencies across the country. According to the report, the government is rationalizing this surveillance by claiming the protesters are terrorists. As the report put it, “to justify their interest in anti-globalization groups from a legal standpoint, the authorities lump them into a category of terrorist organizations. Among those considered as such at present are Global Justice (the group that organized the April 17 demonstration), Earth First, Greenpeace, American Indian Movement, Zapatista National Liberation Front and Act-Up.” In early May, In These Times confirmed the government spy operation. The progressive newspaper quoted Robert Scully, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, as saying that federal, state and local law enforcement agencies were “successful in infiltrating some of the groups ... and had firsthand, inside information of who, when, why, and where things were going to happen.” Even before the Washington DC protests began, organizers began planning to bring their message to the Republican and Democratic Presidential conventions, scheduled for July and August in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Police representatives from both cities traveled to the nation’s capitol for the April demonstrations, consulting with federal authorities on how to identify and handle the demonstrators. Federal officials also traveled to the convention cities, setting up surveillance operations in advance of the arriving demonstrators. By late May, the corporate media was openly writing about the intelligence-gathering operations. Previewing the Republican convention, the Philadelphia Inquirer said, “The Secret Service is checking rooftops. The FBI is monitoring the Internet. And city police are getting ready to play cat and mouse with protesters ... ‘Virtually every resource that the FBI has available will be put into play,’ said Thomas J. Harrington, the assistant special agent-in-charge in the FBI’s Philadelphia office.” The Reuters news agency confirmed the FBI’s role in June 2, saying, “The U.S. Secret Service is running security inside the convention and at main hotels, the FBI is handling intelligence and state police are providing escorts for dignitaries. That leaves Philadelphia’s 6,800-strong police department to keep the streets of the 5th-largest U.S. city safe for delegates and clear of unruly crowds.” Throughout June, activists from several groups reported at least five instances in which unidentified men were seen photographing people entering and leaving protest planning meetings. On June 29, a reporter with the Philadelphia Inquirer observed two men dressed in casual clothes watching activists arrive for a meeting at the offices of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. The pair sat on the hood of a maroon Plymouth, taking pictures of the activists as they came and went. Both men refused to answer any questions from the reporter. Police spokeswoman Lt. Susan Slawson flatly denied her agency was doing

anything that would violate its policy against political intelligence-gathering, saying, “[W]e are in no way violating it. But then the reporter traced the license plates on the Plymouth to the police department. Confronted with proof of his agency’s role in the surveillance operation, department spokesman David Yarnell reluctantly admitted the activists were right. “We were watching. We were making surveillance efforts. It’s just prudent preparations for anything,” he confessed. “This is just outrageous,” responded organizer Michael Morrill “If this is in fact going on, and city officials are lying about it, I wonder what else they’re doing.” Philadelphia police officials openly talked about having the protesters under surveillance when the Republican National Convention began on July 31, with Police Commissioner John Timoney specifically saying his troops were watching “the anarchists.” The first serious confrontation occurred on August 1, after police unexpectedly raided a warehouse where activists were painting posters and building puppets. Before the raid, police claimed the activists were storing weapons in the building, in this case C4 explosives and acid-filled balloon. No explosives, acid or other weapons were found. But 70 activists were arrested, and all their signs and puppets were seized. The raid set off street protests, during which 15 police officers were injured in scuffles, and more than 25 police cruisers and other city vehicles were vandalized by protesters who also overturned dumpsters, smashed windows, and sprayed graffiti on downtown buildings. Before the end of the day, more than 350 people were arrested, including 19 who were charged with such felony offenses as assaults. Most were jailed and kept imprisoned on high bails. Hundreds were still behind bars days after the convention ended, complaining of deplorable conditions and brutal treatment. The day after the delegates went home, Timoney called a press conference and announced that he and his intelligence officers had uncovered a vast left wing conspiracy. In language reflecting the anti-Communist hysteria of the Red Scare, the Philadelphia police commissioner claimed outside agitators had conspired to cause violence and property damage at the convention. He called on the federal government to investigate this subversive plot, saying, “There is a cadre, if you will, of criminal conspirators who are about the business of planning conspiracies to go in and cause mayhem and cause property damage in major cities in America that have large conventions or large numbers of people coming in for one reason or another.” One of the alleged conspirators was John Sellers, director of Ruckus Society, a Berkeley-based organization that trains political protesters in civil disobedience tactics. He was arrested while walking down the street and talking into a cell phone outside the Police Administration building. Although all of the charges filed against Sellers were misdemeanors, one of them was carrying an “instrument of a crime,” the police excuse for spying on him. His bail was set at $1 million, far more than all but the most dangerous felons are required to post. In seeking the high bail, District Attorney, Cindy Mertelli produced a 27 page “dossier” on Sellers. She called him “a real risk of danger to the community,” noting he had been “involved in Seattle, a situation with almost dead bodies.” Although none of the charges levied at Sellers involved violence or even vandalism, Mertelli said he “sets the stage to facilitate the more radical elements and intends to do the same in L.A.,” where the Democrats were set to meet in early August. Shortly after bail was set, CBS News was reporting that Philadelphia police had pinpointed the “ringleaders” of the most violent protests against the Republicans and had been stalking them throughout the day. Sellers was identified as one of the ringleaders that were stalked. “We know they had a list of things they

NEW TYPE OF WAR (cont.) When we shifted into heavy hiring mode that wise practice all but disappeared. Today it’s not unusual to have a rookie working with a training officer who has all of 18 months’ experience. The sharper recruits often find themselves working a 1-person car – on their own – near the end of their probationary period. This is another reason we’re not adequately passing on the principles of police professionalism.” (Vernon, LA Justice p. 120) A similar dynamic pervades the dynamics of training special units such as SWAT teams. FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) founder, Danny Coulson describes a situation in which he was assigned to handle a prison disturbance with members of several local police SWAT Teams. Coulson writes: “We were asking a lot of the SWAT agents. We’d had years to practice these skills. These men had days – maybe hours.” (No Heroes, Coulson, p. 357) An even worse dynamic seems to have occurred in Seattle during the WTO Ministerial. Many of the police from outside the Seattle area seem to all available evidence, to have been called in at the last minute and received no training whatsoever on the less lethal weaponry. What often becomes a substitute for that training is the preconception that the officers have when they begin the job. Usually these preconceptions come from television and movies. These works of corporate produced popular fiction feature continuous images of the police actively engaging in direct physical acts such as gun fights and car chases on an abnormally regular basis, sometimes several times a week. Actual officers may go 20 years without a single shoot out, and are far less likely than convenience store clerks or tax drivers to have a firearm pointed at them. These factors go a long way to describing the enthusiasm and irregularities displayed by numerous officers deployed during WTO Ministerial. Scenes such as occurred after the December 1 st labor march where demonstrators were inexplicably driven from one barrage of tear gas to another, or in Seattle’s Capital Hill neighborhood, where less lethal weaponry was fired into empty streets, make a lot more sense in light of these factors. Consider also that as the training levels are going down, the capacity and lethality of the weaponry by these officers are increasing. Where they once had very accurate six shot revolvers whose barrels formed a natural extension of their hands, the standard issue weapon is now a semiautomatic 9mm Glock that carries anything from 17 to 30 rounds in a clip. To accommodate the extra bullets, the Glock is built with a diagonal handle, so that the barrel does not form a natural extension of the forefinger when it is clasped in a person’s hand, as it would with the standard issue service revolvers. The result is that the Glock does not lend itself to being aimed as quickly and accurately as the older weapons. Police Being Trained to View the Public as a Threat Also consider that a dominant factor in police training is to have officers assume the worst about a person. Police are trained to view nearly every movement that a suspected person makes as a threat. They are also taught to respond to that threat with a necessary amount of force. One of the greatest illustrations of this is found in Sgt. Stacey Koon’s book Presumed Guilty; The Tragedy of the Rodney King Affair. Sgt. Koon was the LAPD officer in charge of the pursuit and arrest of Rodney King on March 3 of 1991. In the opening chapter Sergeant Koon gives a step-by-step analysis of the

pursuit and stop of Rodney King. Every moment on the famous videotape is explained as examples of the police doing exactly what they were trained to do. The following are some of the more illustrative examples from Sgt. Koon’s detailed narration: “After the second TASER King continued to right himself. In an instant he was on his feet. His arms outstretched, King rushed Officer Powell. If he had wanted to escape, there were plenty of avenues available. He could have fled across the street into the crowd of bystanders, or to his right into the park. But King didn’t do that. He chose to collide into Officer Powell, and the two grappled for a split second. That’s why all of the officers present interpreted it as an assault on a policeman instead of a chance to escape. Powell was terrified; police officers get

effort to avoid getting hit. But he wasn’t being hit at the time. King wasn’t avoiding blows. He was rolling toward Officer Wind – he was doing the “Folsom Roll.” Any LAPD cop who’s dealt with ex-cons is familiar with the “Folsom Roll.” Prisoners at California’s Folsom Prison and correction units in other states have been photographed teaching it to one another in the prison yard. It’s a technique for disarming an officer while proned out on the ground. The idea is to roll into an officer and tangle up his legs, then reach up and grab a gun belt and holster while the officer is off-balance. Then the officer is downed and the suspect has the weapon.” (pp. 42-43) This provides insight into why the officers were acquitted the first time – they were conducting the entire operation by the book. A similar dynamic took place in one of

Detainees, Port Isabel, Texas, 1990s

Internment camp, California, 1940s scared, too. He defended himself with his metal PR 24 baton…” (p.40) “Then the officers stepped back to evaluate the effect the blows were having on the suspect. That’s strictly procedure, because it gives the officers an opportunity to determine whether the suspect intends to comply. More importantly, the pause gives the suspect an outlet to avoid any further blows by obeying the command to prone out, hands behind the back. These pauses are known as “pulsations” in police language. Yet they are interpreted by many viewers of the videotape as policemen simply taking turns beating an innocent suspect. That wasn’t the case. They were following my orders and strict procedure; deliver the baton blows, then back off to see what effect they’re having on the suspect…” (p.42) “…in one of the more tense moments that is captured in stark clarity on the Holliday videotape, King began rolling toward Officer Wind. Wind backed quickly away. He knew what was happening. Rodney King was doing the “Folsom Roll.” To the casual viewer of the videotape, it appeared as though King were rolling away from the officers in an

the models of “Community Policing.” A Portland Police officer pursuing a suspect fired twenty-seven shots. Gerald Gratton had been observed carrying a gun, which he immediately dropped. The officer, Douglas Erickson, pursued Gratton through a residential neighborhood, shooting wildly. Since his Glock only carried 17 rounds, he even reloaded his clip, firing more than twenty bullets. Though initially dismissed Erickson was reinstated. The official decision to reinstate, described the pursuit in detail and how every move by Mr. Gratton, was a potential threat to the life of the officer. When Gratton crouched, when he held up his hands, every move mirrored something that the officer had been trained to respond to as a potentially lethal attack. A more recent example of this sort of shooting is the Diallo shooting in New York. A similar dynamic seems to have applied during the WTO. One of the few of the approximately 600 arrestees to make it to trial was Eric Larsen, manager of a local cafe, a photographer and a poet. The videotape of the King County Sheriff’s Office used in the trial, shows that Larsen was subjected to several distinct blasts of

(see POLICE STATE, p. 8)

WAGING WAR ON DISSENT • 7

PHOTO COURTESY OF IMC-SEATTLE/PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN

pepper spray. King County Sheriffs dutifully explained the whys of this. When Larsen wiped at his eyes, or held out his hands to block a stream of the spray, or bent over slightly with his arms at his side, every one of these was a potential chance for Larsen to attack the few dozen armored officers he faced. Larsen was acquitted of all charges including resisting arrest. Other police videos support this view of a police force being trained to expect the worst from the demonstrators. For example video of the police training on 11/ 19 shows the police divided into two groups one being the protesters. The “protesters” do things such as hurling large chunks of debris at the other officers. There is also a tape provided by one of the police agencies where they receive a morning briefing. “They will try to provoke you,” warns their commander. Most ominous is an assessment hinted

is to protect my partner. That’s my main be a wake up call.” (Oregonian 7/21/97, job.’ This kept coming across – every PDXS Vol. 7, No. 11) More recently, cop. ‘My main job is to protect my part- Mack has come under fire for his critiner and make sure I go home every cism of the Portland Police Bureau’s use night.’ And we had to say: ‘That’s not of “less lethal” beanbag rounds, on May why we hired you! Implicit in all this is 1st. Mack stated the policies were unthat it is a dangerous business. You may sound and being forced on the street ofget shot. You may be called upon to ficers from their commanders. He’d also make the ultimate sacrifice. But I didn’t made these statements about a “Gang hire you to protect your partner. I hired Enforcement Program” to a panel of you to protect the public.’ And the more leaders assembled by his police chief: “When you talk about a popular I thought about it, the more I realized: Something’s switched. Something’s thing, gangs are becoming bigger bechanged. I didn’t think I would have given that answer as a young cop.” The Last Cop in What distinguishes these from what Camelot, Tom Junod, took place in Seattle is that all these Esquire June 2,000, p116. This sort of insularity actions took place against populations is something that can that were marginalized socially, and does pervade to the geographically or economically. During highest levels of police

the Seattle WTO Ministerial this use of military force was openly applied to a vast middle-class population in the most densely populated urban area north of San Francisco. It was not only an effective way of telling the people that the rules had changed. It was setting a precedent about the use of potentially lethal military force against any population, in effect telling the U.S. middle class that they too had joined the Third World.

Seattle, 1999 at in some of the police reports, that a certain number of police casualties would have been acceptable. Even if this was only a rumor circulating among the police officers, the fact that it had credence, as all evidence suggests, is indicative of the officers’ mindset. Police Viewing Themselves as Outsiders in a Hostile Community What has changed is that police who were once taught to protect life, are now focused on making it home from the hostile environments they patrol. It is part of a larger rubric similar to the changed training methods in the military that brought increased killing rates from American Troops in Vietnam. Once the enemy is dehumanized it becomes a lot easier to kill if deemed necessary. Police come to view themselves as being in a position analogous to “the lost patrol.” Trapped behind enemy lines with no one but each other for support. The dynamic of police as outsiders, is revealed in an interview with Philadelphia Police Chief Ed Timoney, some short months before the recent Republican National Convention. Chief Timoney describes a 1994 gunfight he had investigated while a chief in the New York Police Department. The gunfight had lasted ten minutes, the police had shot 258 rounds of ammunition. Four people were killed including an innocent bystander who was shot by a police bullet. The casualties also included a pregnant woman who was left alone to bleed to death in a nearby restaurant. Timoney states that he conducted his investigation to determine how these officers defined their jobs as members of the police department. What he found disturbed him deeply: “She was dying, she was pregnant, and the cops went out – they ran away. And the more we spoke to cops the more we heard, ‘Hey, listen, my main function

8 • WAGING WAR ON DISSENT

organizations. New York’s Mollen Commission, one of the most in depth analysis of police misbehavior conducted in recent years observed that the NYPD had become so concerned with protecting its image that it avoided investigating known instances of corruption because of the demoralizing effect such investigations would have. The commission wrote: “…the Department allowed its own systems for fighting corruption virtually to collapse. It had become more concerned about the bad publicity that corruption disclosures generate than the devastating consequences of corruption itself. As a result, its corruption controls minimized, ignored and at times concealed corruption rather than the devastating consequences of corruption itself….This reluctance manifested itself in every component of the Department’s corruption controls from command accountability and supervision, to investigations, police culture, training and recruitment.” (Mollen Commission Report 7/7/1994, pp2-3) Smart Cops Realize This Puts Them in Danger The more experienced cops realize that these dynamics ultimately make their own job more dangerous and create unnecessary friction in the community. Moreover, these policies may themselves create the very criminals that they are nominally there to protect the community from. Portland Police Officer Thomas Mack, a representative of the Police Officers Union, has been one of the more candid critics of the effect community policing has had on officers ability to perform their jobs. When Portland experienced its first fatal shooting of an officer in nearly two decades Mack made remarks to a reporter attributing the officer’s death to the lack of training officers were receiving. He said “it should

cause they are popular. I want you to understand part of the approach we’re taking may be a reason for that. When you put a special unit together and special uniforms and special cars and call it “gang enforcement unit,” the little kids who are wannabes and are not quite sure look at it and go these “G’s” these “little G’d” and “OG’s,” these big guys they must be important because the police are putting together a special unit to fight them. I want you to think twice about making the gang unit bigger and bigger and bigger, because what you seem to be doing, looking at the stats here is making the problem bigger and bigger.” (Statement of Officer Tom Mack to PPB Chief’s Forum, 10/24/94, Portlandian Vol. I, No.3) It takes little imagination to apply this same dynamic to the relationship between the authorities and the Anarchists. By drawing so much attention to these groups, members of law enforcement have become these groups’ best recruiters. By describing disruptive tactics that the demonstrators might use, certain members of law enforcement make their appearance on the street inevitable. Part of Mack’s reticence may stem from the increased fatalities that Community Policing brings with it. For example in 1993, annual statistics released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation show that Portland had the third highest per capita shooting rate of citizens by its own police. In 1997, for the first time in almost two decades, police officers wee fatally shot. The case of the first officer, Thomas Jeffries is especially instructive. Jeffries pursued an armed suspect, who had shot at a child earlier that night. It was late at night, the area was a residential neighborhood. This was a situation where containment would have been ideal. Instead, Jeffries, separated from his partner, losing whatever advantage he had. During his last moments, he crashed through ten-foot hedges pinning his arms, and alerting the suspect through the rustling of leaves. This might work nicely on television but it was horrible in life. Jeffries was not the only PPB Officer to die that year. A few

POLICE STATE (cont.) were going to do, and they set about doing it,” Timoney said at an August 2 news conference, signaling that at least some of his information came from infiltrators. “I intend on raising this issue with federal authorities. Somebody’s got to look into these groups.” Although a judge soon lowered the bail, the local news media immediately embraced the police version of events. The day after Timoney’s press conference, the Philadelphia Inquirer congratulated the police for their restraint, crediting their excellent intelligencegathering work. The paper also said that what appeared to be a spontaneous melee on August 1 was in fact a carefully choreographed assault, the result of a conspiracy. Timoney’s conspiracy theory got a boost when it was embraced by Bruce Chapman, president of the Discovery Institute and a former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Organizations in Vienna. Writing in the Washington Times, Chapman claimed several left wing political organizations had conspired to cause violence in Seattle, Washington DC, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, including the Direct Action Network, Global Exchange, the Rainforest Action Network, the Foundation for Deep Ecology, and The International Forum on Globalization, which he described as “an umbrella group for 55 organizations opposed to globalization and high technology.” Chapman said several of the most prominent organizations were funded by Douglas Tompkins, who he described as “a businessman who nurses an intense anger at modern technology and international trade.” Chapman ended his piece by calling for a federal investigation of Tompkins, the organizations, and “the rioters.” Although the most serious charges against Sellers were eventually dropped, protesters faced a similar surveillance and harassment campaign in Los Angeles. On July 13, the Los Angeles Times printed a guest editorial by Mayor Richard Riordan, which warned of violence by “international anarchists.” In the piece titled “A Fair Warning to All: Don’t Disrupt Our City, Riordan said the protesters coming to town had attended “training camps where they have learned strategies of destruction and guerrilla tactics.” Before too long, the authorities and media were talking about the protesters in terms, which had previously been reserved for domestic terrorists. On July 23, the Los Angeles Times reported the Secret Service and other government agencies were warning that a biological agent might be released in or around the Staples Center, where the convention was scheduled to be held. “We have purchased a lot of equipment, specialized masks and gowns,” said Dr. Robert Splawn, medical director of the California Hospital Medical Center, the closest hospital to the center. The police also began visiting businesses near the center, showing them videos from the Seattle protests and advising them to consider boarding up glass walls and windows, hiring additional security guards, and stocking up on emergency provisions like flashlights, food and water. “It’s almost like a tornado,” said LAPD Detective Darryl. “You can see it coming, but you don’t know where it’s going to go.” On August 7, the Southern California chapter of the ACLU wrote a letter to Police Chief Bernard Parks and Deputy City Attorney Debra Gonzales on behalf of several groups coordinating the upcoming demonstrations, including the D2K Convention Planning Coalition, the Rise Up/Direct Action Network, and the Community Action Network. In the letter, ACLU attorney Dan Tokaji complained that police were watching the fourstory protest headquarters building around the clock, constantly videotaped the building and recorded license plate numbers of cars used by protesters. The letter also alleged police were selectively enforcing traffic laws near the building, and had repeatedly entered it with producing search warrants. “They’ve crossed the line separating legitimate security preparations from unlawful harassment

that violates protesters” First and Fourth amendment rights. The mere potential for a disturbance does not justify the suspension of our constitutional rights,” the letter said. When the city didn’t respond, the ACLU went to federal court on August 11 and obtained a temporary restraining order prevent the police from raiding the building without a warrant. In its complaint, ACLU lawyers cited 22 separate incidents of surveillance and harassment, including random police visits without warrants, low helicopter overflights, and people being followed and searched after leaving the building. Although U.S. District Court Judge Dean Pregerson granted the injunction, he did not bar police from keeping the protest headquarters under surveillance if they had “probable cause.” But the injunction didn’t stop the police from infiltrating the protest organizations. On August 12, a group called The Youth Are the Future! We Demand a Better World! held a meeting Luna Sol Cafe. They were planning to participate in the next day’s Mumia AbuJamal protest march. Shortly after the meeting broke up, uniformed police officers rushed through the café’s door and through three of the main speakers up against a wall. Several of the meeting’s participates also jumped up and helped with the arrests, revealing themselves to be undercover officers. After checking the identifies of the three activists, the officers let two go and hauled the third one away in handcuffs. By the time the Democratic National Convention began on August 18, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies were running an untold number of undercover officers and other infiltrators among the protesters. The infiltrators included members of the LAPD’s Anti-Terrorism Division who were already spying on political dissidents in the Los Angeles area. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, “[S]ome of these undercover officers met before going out on the streets in their work clothes: T-shirts and shorts, bandannas, thong shoes and sneakers. They even are allowed to break department policy by wearing beards and keeping their hair long. One wore a ‘Free Mumia’ bandanna, a reference to a Pennsylvania inmate on death row for killing a police officer. His face was unshaven, his hair tousled.” Among other things, these “scouts” mingled with protesters at the various demonstrations, using cell phones to file continuous reports and allowing commanders to make “real time” decisions on deploying riotgear equipped squads around town. Intelligence officers working in several downtown command posts took information from the undercover officers, then immediately shared it with commanders and lieutenants. Police used tip provided by these infiltrators to justify arresting 42 animal rights protesters on August 15. Authorities claimed the protesters had materials that could be used in “homemade flamethrowers,” a charge strongly denied by the activists. A Superior Court judge released 40 of them after a hearing two days later. “It’s standard operating procedure: infiltrate and disrupt,” protest organizer Lisa Fithian told the Times. “They are potentially trying to incite problems in the midst of our demonstrations. We’re not doing anything illegal; we’re not doing anything wrong.” The undercover agents helped police arrest hundreds of demonstrators during the convention. By the time the Democrats went home, even the protesters were beginning to concede the snitch-fueled tactics were beginning to hurt the anti-globalization. “Anyone who has been involved in the mass protest movement through a major event of the last six months has friends who have been brutalized at the hands of the system,” activist/ journalist Tim Ream wrote in an August 10 dispatch from Los Angeles, noting that nearly 2,500 protesters had been arrested since November 30, 1999. But the repression wasn’t merely happening in America. In recent years, the FBI has opened more than 40 satellite offices around (see POLICE STATE, p. 10)

NEW TYPE OF WAR (cont.) months later several officers conducting a “no-knock” drug bust failed to pay attention to a video camera mounted conspicuously outside the door. All three were shot. For one, a recently married female officer on her first drug assignment, the shooting was fatal. Another officer who was her trainer remained in critical condition for months. MAKING THE USE OF LETHAL FORCE MORE PALLATABLE The Human Aversion to Killing and Lie of “Non-Lethal” Weapons “Blank cartridges should never be fired against a mob, nor should a volley be fired over the heads of the mob even if there is little danger of hurting persons in the rear. Such things will be regarded as an admission of weakness, or an attempt to bluff, and may do much more harm than good.” General Douglas Macarthur, Military Aid in Civil Disturbances One of the major things to come out of the WTO Ministerial Demonstrations in Seattle was a grudging acceptance of what are being referred to by some members of law enforcement as “non-lethal” weaponry. In demonstrations that have followed the WTO Ministerial in Seattle, police seem more prone to using these weapons, then they were even a short while ago. • In Mardi Gras in Seattle, hundreds of revelers in Pioneer Square received doses of pepper spray for reasons that remain unclear at best. • In Washington D.C, during the meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, these weapons were employed on multiple occasions. The acceptance these weapons have gained is illustrated by the fact that many in the progressive community refer to these uses with terms such as “sparing” and “minimal.” • Two hundred miles to the south of Seattle, the Portland Police fire “non-lethal” bean bag rounds from shotguns, during a small May 1st street demonstration. This was a first for the city George Bush Senior once dubbed “Little Beirut.” No Normal Person Likes to Kill To understand the attraction of what are now being popularly referred to as “nonlethal weapons,” it is helpful to understand the basic aversion to killing that is biologically hard-wired into most of the advanced life forms on this planet. Most of us who have been around a television set sometime in our lives have seen the nature documentaries where two members of the same species engage in very ritualized combat over territory, food, sex, etc. Even the most vilified species on the planet have adopted these sorts of rituals to settle disputes. Piranhas establish dominance by swatting each other with their tails. Rattlesnakes wrestle with each other. In the human realm these same habits are reflected in the anthropological documentaries most of us have also seen, where the warriors of two primitive hunter gatherer societies stand in opposing lines, posture at each other, make loud noises and the like. When actual weapons such as spears and bows and arrows are employed, weapons these people use to hunt with and are indisputably competent with, the weapons inevitably miss their targets. The point is not to kill a member of one’s own species but to vanquish the opposition through a show of force. These same habits and aversion have directed the way most war has been fought in most of Western Civilization including the United States. While the popular image of warfare is of soldiers on both sides valiantly fighting slaying and triumphing over phenomenal odds, these are usually just tall tales of another primitive society. In nearly every case, the vast majority of soldiers who behaved compe-

tently in training were unable to kill their opponents. Firearms and lines of soldiers seem to have been more often used as means of intimidation. Most soldiers would do things such as load and reload their weapons or fire over their enemies’ heads. A relatively small portion of the soldiers did the actual killing. These results are confirmed by numerous examples in history: • In studies of the Napoleonic and U.S. Civil Wars it has been shown that lines of two hundred to a thousand men standing thirty yards apart and firing their muskets at an exposed enemy regiment produced kill rates of one to two per minute. For point of reference, these were weapons that could fire between one and five rounds per minute and would have an accuracy rate of 50%. This should have resulted in a killing rate of hundreds per minute. • In World War Two, Army Brigadier

shaped targets that pop out at them. Some of these targets are even filled with jugs of red liquid to more effectively simulate a person being killed by a bullet. The point was to make the killing of what looked like a human being instinctual and reflexive. There are also distancing techniques through mechanization. It’s easier to kill another human being if you’re looking through a simulator, scope, or any sort of device that makes them look less like a human being and more like a figure on the screen. This is why soldiers ranging from bombers to snipers have never been plagued with the low kill rates of infantry. Another factor utilized is the use of pressure from leaders and members of a group. Two of the most famous experiments in the field of psychology help illustrate the methods used in the training of soldiers and more recently, police. In

Grant Park, Chicago, 1968 General S.L.A. Marshall worked with a team of Historians both during and after the war. They conducted interviews with literally thousands of soldiers in more than four hundred infantry companies. The results they found were consistently the same: only 15 to 20 percent of American riflemen in combat in World War would fire at the enemy. Interestingly it was found that those who were further removed from their enemy had far less difficulty killing. Bombers, and even snipers had a much higher kill rate then their counterparts in the infantry who faced their opponents at close range. (see Lt. Col Dave Grossman On Killing, 1995; also Marshall’s studies of World War II and Paddy Griffith’s studies of infantry killing rates in the Civil War.) Making Soldiers into More Efficient Killers As members of the U.S. military have become more aware of these natural tendencies to avoid killing, the training of soldiers has been modified to result in higher killing rates. During Korea, figures gathered by Marshall indicate that about 55% of U.S. troops were firing accurately upon the opposition. In Vietnam it is estimated that 95% of the soldiers fired at their enemies. The methods used to accomplish these higher kill rates were based on desensitization, conditioning and denial. The training camps of World War II and these later wars differed dramatically. Studies of the methods used in these camps show that use of the term “killing” was far more a part of the trainer’s vernacular in the later wars. Also the targets more accurately resembled human beings. Where once soldiers practiced shooting bulls-eyes, they now practice on human

one experiment a person was told that they would be helping to administer an experiment. Their job, at the direction of a person in a lab coat, was to deliver shocks to a third party. In reality the person administering the shocks was the unwitting subject. The person in the lab coat and the person receiving the shocks were working together. As the experiment proceeded, the person in the lab coat would direct the true subject to keep increasing the level of shocks administered. The simple mechanism of having an authority figure there, ordering the person on was enough to make the vast majority of the subjects continue to administer shocks long after they were aware that what they were doing would kill the person. In practical matters, this resulted in the “improvement” of having more commanders in the field to urge on the troops; an “improvement” that has recently been added to many police departments as a component of “community policing,” even as we enter a an error of “streamlining” government through massive cuts. Another experiment involved group psychology. Two groups of people were selected at random. One was told that they were guards, the others, prisoners. With no other stimulus, the two groups evolved distinct behavior patterns. The guards became successively more brutal enforcing each other’s behavior. This of course mirrors the sort of closed group psychology that allowed U.S. troops to participate in acts that would have been individually repugnant and unthinkable to the vast majority as individuals, events such as the massacre at Mai Lai. Stories abound of troops shooting children, raping women, and executing entire villages. The ugly truth is that (see NEW TYPE OF WAR, p. 12)

WAGING WAR ON DISSENT • 9

It’s Government by and for U.S. Corporations and Their Values William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune Thursday, January 18, 2001 The inauguration of George W. Bush as 43d president of the United States confirms a fundamental change in the nature of U.S. government. Government has become the instrument of a segment of American society: corporate business. It has become, as others than myself have already recognized, “America Inc.” This change has taken place in full sight and with general consent of the U.S. electorate. A minority has expressed concern; a small minority has anxiously protested that this is not the way it was meant to be; but the overwhelming majority has been content to see this happen. One might argue from history — the 19th century Populist movement, the 20th century progressives and the New Deal – that the government’s takeover by business interests is normal and cyclical, with a “progressive” or liberal reform counteraction foreseeable in 2004 or 2008. After all, Al Gore won the popular vote, and in the opinion of many he should have won the Electoral College vote as well. However, Mr. Gore was a corporate candidate, too. That is what is new. There is no alternative. A Gore administration would have been different from a Bush administration in its handling of the so-called cultural issues — race, gays, feminism, abortion. It would have been friendlier to labor, but not so friendly as to alienate business. It probably would have been more enthusiastic about globalization and free trade than Mr. Bush may actually prove to be. Its foreign and economic policies would have been those of the business interests that supported the Clinton administration and profited from having done so, and which largely financed the Gore campaign.

Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader said the two main candidates were Tweedledum and Tweedledee (who “agreed to have a battle,” to continue the quotation). We know what happened to candidates Buchanan and Nader. If a candidate today is not acceptable to the corporate mainstream, he is unelectable. Corporate money determines national policy, and even foreign policy. Under Mr. Clinton, industry successfully promoted the U.S. intervention with helicopters and arms into the struggle in Colombia. A national missile defense system, to which the Bush administration is committed, is an aerospace industry program, not a national security program. Most foreign policy specialists and independent systems analysts regard it as a technologically misconceived response to a vastly exaggerated threat. Mr. Bush’s supporters are already promoting a new threat, which promises to be as costly to counter as building a shield against rogue missiles. A congressionally appointed commission led by Mr. Bush’s pick for secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, calls for measures against the hostile-nation menace to U.S. satellites. It calls for “doctrine, concepts of operations and capabilities for space, including weapons systems that operate in space and that can defend assets in orbit and augment air, land and sea forces.” This would put American industry in profitable competition with itself, since the countermeasures to be developed deal with a threat that no other hightech country has any interest in posing. In the past, weapons development has tended to be driven by military definitions of threat. Today the tendency is for industry to promote advanced weapons systems by marketing novel threats. Corporate lobbyists drove trade policy during the Clinton administration. The banana

war with Europe concerns bananas neither produced in nor shipped from the United States. The disabused citizen may ask what is new about all this. From the 1920s on the U.S. Marine Corps enforced the Central American interests of the United Fruit Company. The sober Calvin Coolidge’s observation that “the chief business of the American people is business” is incontrovertible. What is new about the situation today is that a seemingly irreversible mutation in the American system has occurred. At some point, quantitative change does becomes qualitative change. The point when that change took place was probably 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that money spent in support of a political candidate is a form of constitutionally protected free speech. Moneyed interests now finance not only the winners of national elections but also most of the losers. This is part of the enlarging domination of American life by business corporations and their values, which are those of material aggrandizement, a phenomenon accompanied and promoted by the circuses and gladiatorial contests provided by the most important U.S. Industry of all, entertainment, which now showcases elections and even wars as entertainments. This is a curious outcome for the United States, whose most powerful hated display and luxury, practiced severe and unremitting discipline and considered man wholly sinful, able to be saved only by arbitrary grace. How far America has come from its origins! How distant its formative beliefs are from the values that politicians celebrate on such occasions as presidential inaugurations. The country no longer knows what it is.

What’s Hiding In GW’s Cabinet? by Robert Lederman “I’m very good at delegating authority...I’ll surround myself with the best minds in America”. Exactly who are these, best minds in America, and where is GW Bush getting them from? There is a common thread connecting all of Bush’s appointees -pharmaceuticals, oil, Wall Street and the historical connection between the CIA, major US corporations and Nazi Germany. If you’ve studied the Bush family history in any depth you won’t find many surprises among his nominations. Paul O’Neill, the Bush nominee for Treasury Secretary, is the chairman of Alcoa Aluminum, one of the nation’s largest toxic polluters. O’Neill owns 1.6 million shares of Alcoa, worth more than $50 million. During WWII Alcoa negotiated a deal with the Nazis and IG Farben to supply Germany’s war machine rather than the US military with aluminum. “If America loses this war,” said then Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes on June 26, 1941, “it can thank the Aluminum Corporation of America [ALCOA].” Alcoa is the producer of hundreds of millions of tons of fluoride. This highly toxic byproduct of aluminum has been scientifically linked in thousands of medical studies conducted since the 19th century to cancer and other degenerative diseases. In the 1950’s Alcoa arranged to have it profitably added to our nation’s drinking water rather than disposed of as toxic waste. During WWII the Nazis discovered that by adding fluoride to the drinking

water in concentration camps they could make prisoners far more submissive to authority. Melquiades R. Martinez, designated Secretary for Housing and Urban Development, is a Cuban refugee who established his political reputation by preventing new housing from being built in conservative Orange Co. Florida-claiming it was a quality of life violation. As chair of Orange County, Martinez eliminated the department of community affairs, a civil rights agency that was set up to give poor people a voice in local government. It is probable that Martinez received CIA indoctrination after he arrived in the US at age 15 as part of a government airlift program of children whose parents did not want them to grow up under the Castro regime. NJ Governor Christie Whitman is the Bush designee for the Environmental Protection Agency. Her massively polluted state hosts some of the world’s largest oil refineries and chemical manufacturing plants. Environmental non-expert Whitman has said she doubts that the giant ozone hole over the North Pole or global warming are actually serious problems. Donald L. Evans, the nominee for Commerce Secretary, is an insider in the Texas “oil mafia” and is GW’s closest friend and confidant. He’s also a close friend, confidant and contributor to one of America’s biggest recipients of government contacts, Halliburton’s Dick Cheney.

Rev. Floyd Flake, Dubya’s nominee for Secretary of Education, was the only prominent African American leader in NYC to endorse Bush pal Rudy Giuliani, the racist NYC Mayor who has executed a seven year long campaign of violence, harassment and false arrest aimed at African Americans. Giuliani’s most memorable quote on education was a proposal to blow up the entire NYC Board of Education. Last year, to his everlasting credit, Flake publicly denounced Giuliani as a mental case. Like numerous GW Bush aides and advisors, Rev. Flake is part of the CIA’s Manhattan Institute which masterminded Giuliani’s entire social eugenics agenda. Among the areas Flake is likely to focus on for Bush is turning public education over to religious institutions and corporations. Ann M. Veneman, Bush’s appointee for secretary of agriculture, was deputy secretary for agriculture under President George Bush. She is known as an advocate for letting corporations exploit public land and for widespread distribution of foods containing genetically-altered animal genes, viruses, self-contained insecticides and bacteria. Bush has said he wants to open up Federal reserves, national forests and other pristine areas of public land to oil drilling, mining and road construction. Under Bush stewardship, we could see corporations running frankenfood farms (see WHAT’S HIDING, p. 18)

10 • WAGING WAR ON DISSENT

Coup d’etat Dear Mr. Secretary General: Help us! Massive election fraud is taking place in an area that looks like a banana republic — but is actually part of the United States of America! We are sitting here helpless as our leaders appear unable to do anything about this stolen election. On behalf of freedom-loving people everywhere, I appeal to the world community and the United Nations for immediate intervention. There is ample evidence to indicate that the votes of thousands of our citizens were not counted or, worse, were given to a man who has a sister named “Bay.” Further evidence also shows that hundreds of African American voters were simply not allowed to vote. I ask that you appoint humanitarian ambassador/carpenter Jimmy Carter to head up an official United Nations team of election observers from Rwanda, Brunei, Bosnia and South Africa and send them to this state we call “Florida.” They are desperately needed to oversee the re-count, the hand-count and any other forms of counting being conducted by people who apparently can count. Remember that guy Milosevic in Yugoslavia trying to claim victory when he got the least number of votes? He would love Florida! Next to watching greyhound dogs run in circles, election fraud is South Florida’s favorite pastime (I am enclosing, for your observer team, copies of the Miami Herald series on voter fraud which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize). It appears on the surface that lame graphic design is at the root of this ballot problem, especially in Palm Beach County where Jewish votes were given to a man who always has a nice word to say about Third Reich. But even more telling is the situation in the Daytona Beach area. In that county, the Socialist Workers Party candidate, James Harris, received a whopping 9,888 votes. When your observers arrive, they will discover that the socialist revolution in Daytona Beach is running a distant third to drunken college spring breaks and NASCAR racing. In fact, you will be hard-pressed to find a single Bolshevik in Daytona Beach, let alone a decent cappuccino. What CBS News discovered is that these 9,888 votes in Daytona Beach for

Coup that shames America

samplings from the press the socialist Mr. Harris represented more than HALF of his ENTIRE 19,310 votes nationwide! Some might see this a communist plot; election officials in Florida have tried to pass it off as a “computer glitch.” I call it fuzzy math. You should know that the ruler of this disputed region of our country is the brother of the presidential candidate who is benefiting from these shenanigans, George W. Bush. He is already beginning to function as the “PresidentElect,” even though he got fewer votes in the country than his opponent, Al Gore! The networks had reported that Gore won the state of Florida, but after the one Bush (the candidate) made a call to the other Bush (the governor of Florida), suddenly the Bush running for president was ahead. This must sound very familiar to you. I know you have had to deal with “the relatives” before in places like Indonesia and The Congo, and, hey, who can blame them? Everyone wants to see family members do well. But in this case, the self-declared “President-Elect” is also the son of the former President who was dethroned by Gore and his running mate 8 years ago. Does any of this make sense? Would it help to know that the father of the “President-Elect” was also the head of the CIA? Just so you know what you are getting into. Mr. Secretary General, you are already at the U.N. in New York! Flights from NYC to Miami leave every 15 minutes! Mr. Carter is in the state right next to Florida! Stop by, pick him up, and tell him he may need at least his hammer, if not his nails. If the state of Florida refuses to admit your international team of election observers, I implore the Security Council to impose economic sanctions against this place which calls itself “the Sunshine State.” The rest of us in America can no longer tolerate their rogue operations. Please remember this is the same state which earlier this year turned kidnapping into a legal sport when they refused to return a little Cuban boy to his father. We had to put up with that circus for nearly eight months. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. If this kind of thievery were happening in any other part of the world, we would have bombed the crap out of it by now. I am hoping for a peaceful resolution to this crisis and for the self-declared “President-Elect” to be returned to his box seat in Arlington, Texas. Michael Moore [email protected] www.michaelmoore.com

Continuing unofficial counts reveal the full extent of Al Gore’s lead and the massive abuses that have put George W. Bush into power I never thought I would live to see it. vertible abuse is that Bush has won power goes on, offering the US and the world a There has been a right-wing coup in the despite losing, and critically he only pulled policy and perspective not wanted by the United States. It is now clear beyond any off this feat because the Republicans con- majority of Americans. The consensus doubt that the winner of the Presidential trol the Supreme Court. The Right has view is that within months the whole election was Al Gore. In Florida the votes subverted pivotal US institutions to win Florida affair will be forgotten, and Bush are being counted unofficially in a way the power - a campaign of which the discred- will be installed as a legitimate US PresiSupreme Court would not permit: he was iting and attempted impeachment of dent. I don’t agree. The value of democalready 140 votes ahead when counting Clinton was part - and in the process dis- racies is they produce administrations stopped for Christmas and his final lead graced the legitimacy of US democracy at broadly in tune with the times and will of promises to be in the thousands. Nation- home and abroad, and undermined con- the people, and thus able to marshal both ally he leads by over half a million votes. ceptions of the rule of law. It is a poor au- consent and the correct policy responses What has happened is beyond outrage. It gury for the twenty-first century… for the varying crises that hit them. is the cynical misuse of power by a con…For all the talk of reconciliation Bush Not so in America. Whether the need servative élite nakedly to serve its inter- is building a tribal conservative adminis- to respect international treaties abroad or ests - and all of us should be frightened tration bent on supporting business at the desire to universalise medical protecfor the consequences. home and asserting US unilateralism tion at home, the US has the man in power The issue is not George W. Bush’s con- abroad. His next Treasury Secretary has it did not want and whose instincts are servatism, opponent though I am of what been picked not for his capacity to nego- opposite to those of the majority. This will Bush plans to do; a democracy only has tiate the US and the world through the prove a disastrous administration for vitality and political tension if its philoso- minefield of a fragile international finan- America and the world….” phy and stream of thinking is articulated cial system, but his interest in feathering and pitches to win elections. The incontro- the nests of corporate America. And so it Will Hutton, The Guardian

Ebert on the election: Thumbs Down Now that the adventure is over, it might be instructive to consider some of the ideas that seeped into the general consciousness. How and why, for example, did it become established in so many minds that Bush was the presumptive winner and Gore the apparent loser? What the Republicans did, cleverly, was to establish effective “memes” in the minds of the public and the pundits. A meme, so named by the British evolutionist Richard Dawkins, is like a gene, except that instead of advancing through organisms, it moves through minds. Memes are simply ideas that demonstrate a high rate of survival and transmission. Bush became the “winner” of a dead heat, in the midst of an incomplete recount, when a premature victory was declared on her own unnecessary deadline by his Florida campaign co-chairwoman, who also held the crucial post of secretary of state. Once this bogus “certification” was final (Ms. Harris signing several cop-

ies on TV, including a valuable souvenir for herself), the Republicans referred to it endlessly as a valid event, even though it was clearly a shameless ploy to slam the door before the election escaped. A meme was born. The other effective GOP meme was the mantra, “we counted, and counted again, and then a third time.” These words were chanted by Baker and the other Bush spokesmen until many Americans accepted them as a form of truth, even though it is clear that thousands of ballots were never counted at all. The GOP had no hesitation in making the dangerous charge that Democrats were “stealing” the election. This in the face of plausible evidence that Gore got more votes in Florida, as he did nationally. Right-wing pundits were stirred to a frenzy. Ann Coulter accused the Democrats of being “delusional nutcases,” called the Florida Supreme Court “powermad lunatics,” and found that the Demo-

crats had crossed the “fine line” between “typical Democrat lies and demonstrably psychotic behavior.” The Democrats were just plain outshouted. And Lady Luck rolled the dice and gave them the butterfly ballot, the Jews for Buchanan, the election boards that took days off, the hired mob to stop the Dade recount, the disenfranchised black voters, the illegally franchised military and absentee voters, the Bush cousin to call the election on TV, the Bush cochairwoman to rush it through certification, and the Bush brother to mastermind operation fail-safe by the Florida legislature to certify Bush electors no matter who won. Even in Vegas they’d be amazed by luck this rotten; the Miami Herald’s statisticiansestimated that Gore probably outpolled Bush by about 23,000 votes. That’s why it was so important for the Republicans to stop the count. Roger Ebert Chicago Sun Times

Down The “Memory Hole” By Daniesha L. George Orwell wrote of journalists who would destroy articles which contradicted the prevailing orthodoxy. Officials working for the “Ministry of Truth” would throw them down a “memory hole,” where they would be burned. This erasure of history is happening now — not in government ministries,but in the corporate controlled newsrooms. What was ignored by the mainstream outlets is the FACT that the manual recounts throughout the whole of Florida have shown that G.W. Bush actually lost. One paper in Florida, the Orlando Sentinel, reported that Gore gained 130 votes in Lake County and in Broward County alone: An inspection of more than 6,000 discarded presidential ballots in Lake County on Monday revealed that Vice President Al Gore lost a net 130 votes that were clearly his even in a conservative GOP bastion that President-elect Bush dominated as a whole. The tally of uncounted ballots by the Orlando Sentinel was the first outside review to be completed in any Florida county since the U.S. Supreme Court halted a statewide recount on December 9. Why was this not reported in any major newspaper, or by any major televi-

sion news outlet? Periodic checks of the major outlets (including all those involved in the recount, namely the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the Miami Herald, the Wall Street Journal) show no interest in the story. What is even more troubling is the fact that the Orlando Sentinel has ERASED THE STORY FROM ITS ARCHIVES. The story has fallen into the “memory hole”. It no longer exists. A search of the archives will find plenty of articles about the recount, which go back further than the above mentioned story. The report on manual counts in Lake and Broward County,which showed Gore pulling ahead, appeared just before Christmas. A search on the Orlando Sentinel Web site shows the existence of older stories about certain foods and drinks named after the “chads” and after other irregularities. Stories about the “recounts” and about “undervotes” are easy to retrieve, if they are mere “human interest” stories, or entertaining anecdotes. But the real story has disappeared down the memory hole. It cannot be retrieved, and the above quoted paragraphs were copied before the Sentinel web site erased them. This is not uncommon. When CNN published and broadcast a story on the use of poison gas by the US military to kill US deserters in Indochina, the station man-

agers canceled the story, and erased all record of it on their web site. To this day, there is no web site which contains the original CNN story. The truth about Bush’s election loss in Florida is “secret knowledge”, unknown to the vast majority of the American public. Excerpts from various letters are circulating the net, which tell the story as follows: Media recounts now show Al Gore would have won a statewide recount of Florida. Even in conservative Lake, Hernando and Hillsborough counties, examination of the ballots by independent auditors has shown that clear and legal votes for Gore were not counted. In addition, tens of thousands of predominantly Democratic voters were prevented from having their vote recorded. But still the major newspapers, networks, and cable news stations refuse to tell the story. Abroad, the story has been reported in the Guardian and Observer of London. The facts cannot be hidden, and are widely known, especially amongst members of the African American community, who feel aggrieved by their disenfranchisement. Even though many people do not have direct access to the internet, the news has traveled by word of mouth, and has been conveyed by channels other than those controlled by the major media corporations.

WAGING WAR ON DISSENT • 11

these acts mirror the tactics that Organizations such as the school of the Americas and CIA often encourage their trainees to take part in, because it demoralizes and controls the domestic population.

cannot help wondering if policing economically depressed communities has become an example of what Van Creveld and Stratton call “Asymmetrical Warfare” if these patterns of abuses are in some way deliberate as they are in many third world regions outside the U.S.?

Transferring Military Training to the Police The reason this report examines the training methods of the military in such detail is that the training methods of the police have begun to resemble those of the military, especially as many of these police units train with and go into action with those of the military. Police shooting simulators, enormous video games, train police to reflexively shoot at human targets. Police sniper ranges also feature human figures with exploding heads filled with red liquid. Police gear including night vision goggles, gas masks, all serve to add another layer of distancing to what the police are doing. The police have also utilized what has been learned from the field of psychology’s most famous experiments. Where government has been cutting middle level management in nearly every field, the opposite is true of the police. Instead the trend has been to increase the number of field commanders. This of course makes it more likely that police will be more likely to perform tasks that they consider repugnant such as tear-gassing members of their community. Consider also the analogy of gangs. Philadelphia Chief Timoney’s remarks not withstanding, there are numerous instances of police forming into gangs and performing acts as despicable as those of the worst of the troops in Vietnam. The recent Ramparts scandal is hardly something new. In New York the Mollen Commission reported officers in the NYPD forming gangs, taking property from murder victims, selling drugs and even going into a brothel, chasing out the johns and raping the prostitutes. In New Orleans one officer was convicted of murdering someone informing on a drug dealer she worked for. In Portland, a survey by the city’s Metropolitan Human Rights Commission found the thing that members of the city’s minority population most feared was the police. There are of course no end to the number of citizens who have attended forums in the past year to speak about police abuse, not only in relation to the WTO but also among the poor and minorities as well. In a military campaign these sorts of tactics can have a demoralizing effect on the native population. U.S. funded Institutions such as the School of the Americas even train “police” in foreign countries to inflict these harms upon the domestic population. CIA distributed manuals give step-by-step instructions on how “freedom fighters” can do the same. One

The Correct Term is “Less Lethal” One of the most efficient ways to get people to be able to inflict pain or harm is to build up denial mechanisms. Most of the police in Seattle seemed to have believed that the weapons they had weren’t capable of killing anybody. This is seen by the repeated referral to them as “non-lethal” rather than “less-lethal” weapons. The term “non-lethal” was used in some of the SPD training materials and in many of the officers’ afteraction reports. It was even used by SPD Chief Norm Stamper during WTO related Press Conferences when he first acknowledged these weapons existence after their use. Moreover the police officers are even forced to expose themselves to the effects of some these weapons. The author of this report has been giving training videos that show the police pepper spraying each other. For most the atmosphere is jubilant, almost like a watching a frat party. The officers make jokes, and go through macho posturing routines. Using these weapons themselves is probably a huge adrenaline rush. Like taking part in a furious snowball fight as a kid, the adrenaline is pumping, the other side says “ow,” but it’s all in good fun. The author of this report had the opportunity of joking with a police officer inside the WTO Ministerial doing security. The officer was asked questions about how quickly he’d be able to disperse the delegates with the same weapons he’d used on the demonstrators. The officer’s face lit up as he joked about a smoke bomb here and a concussion grenade there. The point in relating this is not to condemn this officer but to realize that these weapons have a powerful intoxicating effect, especially if one’s been raised on corporate TV and video games, as so many have. The problem is that the term “non-lethal” is a misnomer. These products’ manufacturers refer to them as “less lethal.” In essence, these are weapons that can and have produced many fatal injuries. These have been documented in their use during war time, their use as weapons of “civil control” in other parts of the world including South Africa, Israel and Ireland and studies of their use domestically as part of law enforcement. (An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control, European Parliament, January 6, 1998.) Indications are that a large part of the reason Seattle Police did not consider these weapons lethal had to do with their

NEW TYPE OF WAR (cont.)

This “Multi-Launcher” can fire as many as eight projectiles without reloading. It can shoot rubber bullets, batons, chemical agents, or combinations of these.

training. This is indicated by their placement in the “use of force continuum.” A use of force continuum is a guideline that tells an officer how much force is appropriate for a given situation, or put another way, how much force should be used to counter a specific type of threat. The rankings for these weapons provided by the manufacturer and the SPD in their training academy are quite different. The manufacturer rates these weapons in the same range as use of a gun or other potentially lethal force. The SPD rates them slightly above a verbal command. Projectile Weapons “… Plastic and rubber bullets were products of British colonial experience in Hong Kong where the flying teak baton round became the template for future kinetic weapons. The concept was one of a flying truncheon which could disperse a crowd without using small arms. They were however regarded as too dangerous for use on white people, so in 1969, Porton Down came up with a ‘safer’ version for use in Northern Ireland in 1970. Just as plastic bullets were considered too dangerous for use in mainland Britain until 1985 when they proliferated throughout the UK’s police forces, so were baton rounds regarded as too dangerous for the residents of Northern Ireland but not Hong Kong. Now plastic bullets have been deployed in virtually every continent from the USA to Argentina, to South Africa…” – An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control, page 22. – European Parliament, January 6, 1998. There were several type of projectile weapons, used by the police during the Seattle Ministerial. These projectile weapons included: • 12 gage pump action shot guns • 37mm and 40 mm weapons that fired large versions of what were in the shot gun shells Both of these fired a variety of projectiles including: • 32 caliber rubber bullets • 60 caliber rubber bullets • wooden dowels • leaded weights called “bean bags” • a variety of chemical agents There were also CO2 powered launchers that fired individual .69 rubber spherical projectiles, or “rubber bullets,” at 350+ feet per second. Additionally, exploding, “less lethal” grenades released some of these projectiles. There are two factors that make these weapons less likely to produce lethal injuries. One is that the ammunition that is propelled is physically lighter than that of the traditional firearms. The other is that the explosive charge that propels these projectiles is not as powerful as that used for traditional firearms. In theory, the smaller explosive charge delivers the projectiles at a slower speed. This less powerful charge is crucial to these weapons not producing fatalities. If a lightweight plastic munition is given a large enough charge it can easily be lethal. In fact some of the more popular “cop killer” bullets are made out of similar materials to some of the “less lethal” rounds. They are simply propelled with enough velocity to penetrate a “bulletproof” Kevlar vest – it is similar to the way that a straw can penetrate a tree or a concrete block in a hurricane. The smaller explosive charge is why none of these projectiles are dispensed from semi-automatic type weapons that rely on the charge’s backfire to cycle the next round into the chamber. The 37mm and 40mm mechanically load the next round in the manner of a revolver. The pump action shotguns require the user to manually cycle the next round in to the (see NEW TYPE OF WAR, p. 14)

12 • WAGING WAR ON DISSENT

POLICE STATE (cont.) the world. In August 2000, the Central and Eastern European Review reported that FBI Director Louis Freeh and Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross met to discuss launching a joint operation in advance of the annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, set for September 26 in Prague. At the time, thousands of anarchist, socialists, communists and other left wing European activists were planning to protest the gathering, and Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman had declared, “Largest threat to stability in the country is the extreme left.” As Freezerbox political writer Ezekial Ford put it, “The Battle of Seattle, followed by Mayday demonstrations around the world and the IMF protests in Washington, was a wake up call to those interested in seeing popular struggle against the reign of capital stunted or reversed. We must remember that the 1960s were viewed by elites not as a flowering of consciousness or a period of liberation for subjected groups, but constituted a ‘crisis of democracy,’ according to the Trilateral Commission, the collective voice for elites in the US, Europe and Japan. Networks of activists involved in the struggle against the investor-centric model of globalization may become future targets of state repression, just as they were in the 60s and 70s. And the FBI is apparently doing the preparatory fieldwork.” The New Millennium is suddenly looking a lot like the 1960s. (The preceding article is a condensed version of a chapter from SNITCH CULTURE(ISBN: 0-922915-63-6), a new book by reporter Jim Redden. It is now available at local bookstores, from Amazon.com, and from Feral House, 2554 Lincoln Blvd., Suite 739, Venice CALIF 90291. SNITCH CULTURE retails for $14.95.

Snitch Culture: How Citizens are Turned into the Eyes and Ears of the State, by Jim Redden In this alarming expose, investigative journalist Jim Redden examines how snooping has become so much a part of American culture that it is practically a family value, encouraged on billboards, television, and even in classrooms. From employees hired to spy on their coworkers to doctors forced to disclose medical information, the U.S. has developed a chilling network for monitoring its citizens. Worst of all, the information gathered—and widely disseminated—is often unreliable, solicited from paid and anonymous informants. Chapters and case studies cover such topics as the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO operations, the NSA’s super-secret ECHELON surveillance system, private intelligence networks, and the government’s current efforts to infiltrate and disrupt the growing anti-corporate globalization movement.

“No one is safe in the Snitch Culture. Jim Redden has written a scary, fascinating, and important examination of the pervasive use and abuse of informants and snitches in the United States.” —Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love List Price: $14.95, Paperback — 320 pages Feral House; ISBN: 0922915636; December 2000

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Signs from the Times On page 17 of the Seattle Times, four soldiers pose. The assault rifles they carry are those carried by the King County Sheriff and nearly acquired by the University of Washington Police mere months ago. There is a slight difference. The soldiers' weapons have a second barrel capable of firing tear gas, flash bang grenades, or full out explosives. Caption: "Training as part of a more mobile army, infantry soldiers at Fort Lewis prepare to enter a mock house inhabited by "civilians" and "the enemy." On the bottom of the page a soldier rides a vehicle of similar configuration to the peacekeeper, but much larger and with the weaponry of a tank. Highlights of text:

Army Prepares for New Type of Battle Alex Fryer, Seattle Times 2/25/2001 “Ten years after the Persian Gulf War, a new army takes shape in the shadow of Mount Ranier. Soldiers at Fort Lewis are the first in the nation to form a combat unit with the agility of an infantry force and the training of a SWAT team. When operational, the unit will fill a gap in the traditional U.S. Army, say top generals. Soon after the liberation of Kuwait on February 28, 1991, military planners recognized that victory depended on the ability to deploy troops quickly. The war in Kosvo proved that big tanks couldn't cross crumbling old bridges or narrow streets. So two years ago, the top brass ordered Fort Lewis to lead an operation known as "transformation." Tanks and heavy vehicles are giving way to light armored brigades of 7,000 men and women, able to be anywhere in the world in 96 hours. Troops in transformation learn police tactics; how to kick down a door and the best way to use plastic handcuffs. Explosive grenades on the firing range are sometimes replaced with flashbang grenades, intended to startle instead of kill. "The initial training has attracted worldwide attention. Military observers from France, Thailand and Japan have visited Fort Lewis to tour exercises. German television has twice sent camera crews.

Summary: FLEISCHER SAYS GUARD WILL BE DEALING WITH DOMESTIC TERRORISM OR PREVENTING IT Article: 14 February 2001 White House Report on National Guard/Domestic Terrorism, Feb. 14 En route back to Andrews Air Force Base from Charleston, West Virginia February 14, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was asked by reporters to flesh out President Bush's comments at Yaeger Field on potential changes in the National Guard. Fleischer offered these remarks: "The mission of the guard, under his vision, will increasingly be homeland defense, which means dealing with the consequences of domestic terrorism or preventing domestic terrorism. "As you know," said the White House Press Secretary, "in recent years at Olympic events, major events, it's become an increasingly unfortunate concern of our government about preventing incidents at home and protecting American people from any incidents at home. And the Guard plays an increasing role in homeland defense. "It's a change," Fleischer said. "When he was in the Guard, it had a different mission. Homeland defense was patrolling off the coastline. Homeland defense now unfortunately has taken on a whole new meaning as a result of terrorism that can threaten our government." The Press Secretary declined to comment on a proposal before the Congress to establish a homeland defense agency that would incorporate several agencies now involved in such duty. (Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http:// usinfo.state.gov)

Historical Background of Corporate Hegemony Conflict between democratic ideals and corporate desires is nothing new. Consider the role price gauging policies of the East India Tea company played in fomenting the American revolution and it’s obvious that much of this revolution was about keeping monopoly power, whether by king or corporation, from going unchecked. The corporations behind the WTO are the same ones that have built the most corrupt monopolies on the planet. Well over a hundred years ago, the owners of the same fortunes that still dominate our economy fortunes, called “robber barons” by the critics of their time, took part in power grabs centered on the building of the railroads. During these times there were huge financial scandals that involved funneling enormous sums of money into non-existent projects. There were also huge give-aways of land and the resources on that land as part of the railroad construction. This enabled the few families who profited from the railroads’ construction to build many more industries. These new franchises included mining operations, timber companies, residential land developments and banks to finance these operations. Look at the names of a few of the timber companies created during this time such as GeorgiaPacific and Louisiana-Pacific and the connection becomes obvious. Families to profit from this included Morgans, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and Mellons. The power of these corporations was enormous, and because of the increasing power of technology, unprecedented. Before the turn of the century, these corporations were even granted legal status as human beings. (See Robber Barons, Josephson; America’s Fifty Families, The Rich and the Super Rich, Lundberg; Railroads and Clearcuts, Draffan) The familes themselves, like ancient medieval royalty, made political alliance and arranged marriages. After World War I, many of them began to gather into institutions called “think tanks.” Representatives of the different fortunes would meet with the leading politicians and academics they funded. They would discuss ideas for moving forward, and they would come to consensus on ways they could move forward. Working through their members that consensus would be exported. Politicians would implement it as policy. Academics, journalists and even some “community leaders” would act as the politicians’ cheerleaders, creating the appearance of a spontaneous popular groundswell. The most influential of these think tanks was the Council on Foreign Relations. Initially it was born out of the circle of JP Morgan and his banking empire. As Morgan declined somewhat, that power shifted to a circled dominated by the Rockefeller family whose circle included Citibank, Chase Manhattan, and every gas station with a red white and blue logo. Prior to and during World War II, institutions that were conceived by the Council on Foreign Relations included NATO, the National Security Council, The Central Intelligence Agency, The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs. The leaders of these institutions were predominantly officers, board members and major shareholders of the same few corporations run by the same few families. Since many of these individuals dominated the cabinets of Presidential Administrations and both houses of Congress, it was pretty easy to turn these corporate desires into U.S. government policy. (Korten, When Corporations Rule the World Ch. 9; Minter and Shoup, Imperial Brain Trust.) —Paul Richmond

Send in the Goons By Robert Rees Honolulu Weekly, Feb. 7, 2001

Correa did reveal that certain city parks will be shut down. Ostensibly this is to provide staging areas for the HPD in its new role, as an occupying army, but it will have the effect of choking off any opportunity for protesters to legally congregate in our public forums. This, in turn, will force the protesters to the streets. Getting into this spirit of Dr. Strangelove, Transportation director Cheryl Soon noted solemnly that bus routes might have to be altered. Further, intoned Soon, "We will give out [revised bus schedules and routes] only on a need to know basis." Of special concern was Fishman's promise, "We will not tolerate excessive inconvenience?" As a policy, this is an excuse for stifling free speech based on content. In fact, if we applied Fishman's conve-

nience rule to the Martin Luther King Jr. parade financed by the city, or to the Convention Center itself, neither would exist. It's enough to make you want to protest. In fact, with President Bush possibly on hand, the international forum provides a grand opportunity for a highly visible demonstration on behalf of freedom for diversity and dissent.

JOHN AMBROSAVAGE

The Honolulu City Council committees on Transportation and Planning and Public Safety met jointly on Jan. 31 to discuss a single agenda item, the plans to curtail free speech when the Asia Development Bank meets in Hawaii at the Hawaii Convention Center. Attending the May 7-11 ADB meeting will be representatives of 60 owning countries, 1200 investment bankers and as many as 400 journalists. The Hawaii Tourism Authority considers hosting the event a coup, and the HTA's executive director, Bob Fishman, was on hand to tell the Council how important it is that Hawaii "makes a good impression" on these cashladen and opinion-leading visitors. Fishman warned that the opponents of globalization have learned to utilize international conferences as venues for expressing concerns. Hawaii, hungry for business, was chosen for the ADB conference because it promised an oasis of security. To hold up its end of the deal, Honolulu plans to spend an extra $7 million

on crowd control. Rationalized Fishman, "We are training and developing a police force for a higher level of proficiency that makes Hawaii a more attractive place." Assistant Chief of Police Boisse Correa assured the Council that "We're on top of this," but added, "We need more riot equipment." Correa noted also that "the National Guard is working with us," and "all leaves will be canceled." Correa didn't disclose that the HPD has asked the state judiciary to cancel all scheduled court appearances by HPD officers during the conference, and has arranged for alternative sites for arraignment and detention of protesters. Further, as first reported by the Hawaii Chapter of Refuse & Resist, the City Council is rushing to pass new ordinances to make the job of the HPD easier. Says Council Chair Jon Yoshimura, "We are giving the HPD additional tools to deal with protesters. These tools are patterned after what Los Angeles has done."(Among other things, it will be illegal to wear a mask "with the intent to commit a crime," police dogs will be allowed in our parks and campers will be arrested.)

WAGING WAR ON DISSENT • 13

NEW TYPE OF WAR (cont.)

Shots to the head can result in: • “ Concussion – Mild injury to the brain resulting in short term loss of consciousness and memory, headache and possibly vomiting. • “Contusion – Bruising of the brain tissue or spinal cord, resulting in a loss of

There has been an increase in the number of paramilitary SWAT and SERT units. In large part because this is where the federal funds are, small town police forces apply for and receive grants for SWAT teams, not basic items such as police cars. One recent academic study found that nearly 70% of the cities with populations under 50,000 had paramilitary units. For cities with populations over 50,000 the number jumped to 90%. And much of the tactics and mindset of SWAT has become integral to police training and culture.

PHOTO COURTESY OF IMC-SEATTLE/PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN

chamber. The problem here is that these weapons still must have a sufficient charge to propel the projectiles as far as they are intended to travel. In practice what this means is that they are traveling at much faster speeds when they leave the muzzle, then when they arrive at the distance they are designed to hit their targets at. So if they strike someone at close range, before they’ve lost velocity, most of these weapons become potentially lethal. Though there is some variation with the many types of cartridges and projectiles used, as a general rule they shouldn’t be striking anything closer than fifteen feet, or you’re risking serious injury, trauma and possible death. Even at “safe” distances, the manufacturer’s guidelines stress that there are limited areas of the human body that these projectiles are designed to hit with a minimum expectation of loss of life. These areas where these weapons can be shot are limited to the areas of large muscle mass mostly limited to the buttocks and thighs. Some of the munitions, such as the cartridges with multiple rubber bullets, are not even intended to be fired directly at the target. Instead they should be fired at the pavement in front of a large crowd so that they will lose velocity as they ricochet up and hit their intended targets. This method is called “skip firing.” The literature provided by the Armor Holdings Company, a manufacturer and distributor of these weapons gives a very lengthy list of the possible injuries that can result from these weapons misuse, or even by chance if used correctly.

Seattle, 1999 normal brain function to the affected area; may cause swelling hemorrhage, unconsciousness, and possibly death. • “Fractures - may result in abrasions, contusions, lacerations or, (sic) avulsions to brain and spinal tissue requiring neurological and orthopedic remedies. a) “Fractures to trachea and/or phar-

This is one method of dispersing rubber bullets. They can also be dispersed from 12-gauge shotguns, grenades, and CO2 guns. If they strike the wrong part of the body or are fired from the wrong distance, they can kill.

14 • WAGING WAR ON DISSENT

ynx that could obstruct the airway. b) “Fractures may effect the teeth, jaw, facial bones, nose, sinus cavities and auditory organs. Shots to the chest can result in: • “Mydrocordial Contusion – Bruising of the heart and surrounding tissue (thepericarium) resulting in tachycardia, arrhythmia, or weakening of the aorta or pulmonary artery that could result in tearing. • Fractures to the sternum or rib cage that may cause hemothorax, pneumothorax, hemmoraghic shock, or diagrammatic rupture; all of which are potentially fatal. Shots to the abdomen: • Depending on the force of the blow, the trauma can lacerate the liver spleen, rupture the stomach and bruise or damage the kidneys and intestines. These are the instructions provided with the munitions by Armor Holdings Inc. It is hard to imagine how they could be more explicit. Yet it seems from an overwhelming body of evidence, that these warnings were routinely ignored. Witness statements given to organizations including NLG, DAN Legal and others report police firing both from distances that are potentially lethal or trauma inducing, and shooting into parts of the body that are potentially lethal or trauma inducing. This is confirmed in photos and video taken by the press, members of the Independent Media Center and hundreds of independent citizens. One witness states that an officer pointed a large barreled weapon in their direction and shot them. At least one of the projectiles seems to have struck them in the eye. Either from the force of the projectile, or as a reaction to the pain, they fell back into a large metal box. This person suffered partial blindness, continued bleeding in the eye, and the possibility of a detached retina. Another person states that they were struck in the face by the rubber projectiles and that they made holes as they passed through the area around their mouth. Neither of these individuals or any of the others shot with these rounds was, ac-

cording to available evidence, ever offered medical treatment by the police. In fact this is something that is mandated by the manufacturers, the trainers and the SPD’s own guidelines. All of these require filling out a medical report each time a suspect is struck with one of these potentially lethal rounds. No completed forms of this type have ever been presented to this group or to all available evidence to the Seattle City Council’s WTO Accountability Review Committee during their halfyear long investigation. Training officers from other departments were appalled at this casual misuse of the weaponry. One Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Deputy wrote in a chat line for members of law enforcement, during a discussion on Seattle: “As a less lethal weapons tactics instructor, I was somewhat concerned with what I saw. “Why were officers with less-lethal weapons engaging suspects while their partners watched? These personnel should have been behind skirmish lines. “I also hope that 37mm Stinger rounds were not being fired into the faces of demonstrators as some still photographs suggest. Shooting these rounds above a suspect’s waist is only an option at our agency in deadly force situations. Firing Stinger ordinance point-blank into someone’s face escalates the chance of inflicting a lethal injury. “I noticed officers were firing full-auto pepperball guns in addition to tossing CS grenades. It was not clear what they were hoping to gain—crowd dispersal or shepherding suspects toward an arrest area? In either case, it seemed like too much of a good thing. Col. Ijames of the Springfield Missouri PD, a leading trainer and expert on the subject of less lethal weaponry notes that at least six fatalities have occurred as a result of the use of these weapons in the United States, and an unknown number in Europe. Speaking in a recent training session, Ijames told the story of someone in Canada who was struck in the chest with a leaded weight known as a “bean bag” round. The lead projectile traveled through the suspect’s chest cavity into their heart. “The subject was DRT – dead right there.” Ijames also stressed the need for prompt medical attention with anyone who is shot with any of these rounds: “You can’t see what’s going on inside the subject. He may have internal bleeding. If he goes into the drunk tank and dies, you are going to be in trouble.” Only the minutest fraction of the thousands of people exposed to these less lethal weapons during the WTO Ministerial, seem to have been given any medical follow-up by the police. Additional complications in the deployment of these weapons have to do with the very nature of the situations in which they are deployed. In essence, the very nature of crowd control situations makes their deployment as practiced in a training situation, impractical. Simply put, with hundreds, or even dozens of people moving around in a close area, it is impossible to factor in the distance and trajectory for each of the people so that the weapon may be fired in a “safe” manner. This is of course exacerbated with the grenades. This inability to actually use the weapons in their intended manner is born out by studies completed after the extensive use of rubber bullets in Ireland. One report compiled by physicians in the early 1970’s includes documentation of the following as some of the injuries sustained from 90 patients who sought hospital treatment after being hit with rubber bullets: • 32 fractures of facial bones • 8 ruptured eye globes, all resulting in blindness

• 3 cases of severe brain damage • 7 cases of lung injury • 4 cases of facial disfigurement This and similar studies have found that the majority of these injuries were caused not only by their being pointed at the wrong parts of the body, but being fired at far too close a distance. In another study done of 12 fatalities caused by these bullets, inquests found that six out of the twelve killed were not in any way involved in any civil disturbance, and seven of the twelve were children fifteen years or younger. It was also found, that each time these

Further empirical work suggested…the resistance they bred led to a successive deployment of each subsequent and more violent phase of the low intensity conflict programme. In effect they bred the dissent they were designed to ‘fix.’” (Emphasis added.) It was based on facts such as these that their use was banned by the European Parliament in 1982, and upheld as a recommendation in 1998. (An Appraisal of Technologies of Political Control, European Parliament, Luxembourg, January 6, 1998.)

Wounded Knee, 1973 weapons were used, they required a stronger response. As was found in a 1987 study conducted by the Richardson Institute at the University of Lancaster: “The initial use of water canon thus gave way to the use of CS gas. This was augmented by rubber bullets which were then replaced by the harder hitting PVC variety, and in greater quantities.

Chemical Irritant Weapons “On November 30 I observed police throw tear gas canisters at non-violent protesters…downtown. They were not…(warning) the crowds and people were taken by surprise. I had to assist an elderly man momentarily blinded by gas.” “Around 8’O Clock PM, at my friend’s apartment on (Capitol Hill) I was inside

The Role of the WTO in a Corporate World Government The WTO was officially established as part of the Uruguay Round Agreement of GATT in January 1995. It now has more than 130 nations. The WTO was nominally chartered as a dispute resolution organization. The problem is it is an organization with no real oversight or accountability, and a process that favors the most powerful corporations. Each country that signs on to the Marrakesh Agreement (which brought the WTO into existence) gives up its ability to preserve and enforce its own laws. The WTO is governed by “dispute resolution panels. Typically, a panel consists of three “trade experts” selected by the WTO Secretariat from a list created and maintained by the WTO. The qualifications to be on the list relate solely to having experience in international trade relations as an academic or a government official. A panel member need have no understanding of why a country might heavily regulate or ban particular products, of the environmental or social concerns underlying a particular law Panel members’ inherent bias for trade over governmental interests serves merely as the background for a system of rules and procedures that sacrifice the most basic elements of democracy and human rights to a primacy of trade in commodified goods. At the outset, all submissions to the panel, and the proceedings themselves, are secret. No one is allowed to participate except representatives from the participating countries. The WTO denies even the citizens of a participant country the right to review their own government’s submissions. The only public result of a WTO panel decision is the opinion of the panel itself, written by the panel. In health and safety, a product may be developed and immediately introduced, and may only later be banned or restricted if a country can prove the existence of health or environmental risks. By then, of course, the worst damage may already have been done. Second, products must be treated “equally” by a country’s trade laws, without regard for how or where the product was made or harvested. A tee-shirt made in a sweatshop or by child labor is the same as one made by union workers. Tuna caught in purse seine nets that kill thousands of dolphins are the same as those caught by methods that do not endanger dolphins. Economic sanctions against an inhumane government, such as the sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa, are not acceptable under the WTO regime. Finally, even if a country is able to prove that a product is unsafe, even if a product is shown to be somehow physically different due to its method of production, the WTO Agreement requires that a country use the “least trade-restrictive” means to accomplish its non-trade-related (environmental, human rights, health and safety) purpose. Again money, not safety or effectiveness, is the bottom line. Once a panel makes its decision, there are only two ways it may be changed. The losing country can appeal—which means a three-member panel is formed to review the legal issues addressed by the original panel. Or, the decision can be overturned by the unanimous vote of every member country of the WTO— including the country that won the dispute. It is not difficult to understand why no decision has ever been overturned by that unanimous vote. Once the decision has been made to subjugate human rights to trade, all that remains is enforcement. The losing country in a WTO dispute has only three choices: change its laws in accordance with the dictates of the panel pay monetary sanctions to the winning country, or allow the winning country to impose retaliatory trade sanctions. What this means in practice is that any international corporation that was prohibited from doing what might be reasonably considered a hazardous practice anywhere on the planet, need only find the government of one country to come forward and present a complaint on their behalf. A business that produces a food prepared with dangerous, carcinogenic, or poisonous chemicals can bring a challenge. So can a corporation that employs eight-year old children who work 20-hour days who lived in cardboard boxes. So can the manufacturer of flimsy houses that tended to collapse or cars that tended to explode. Under the regulations of the WTO any protections against these or other practices could be viewed as barriers to “Free Trade.” In practice this has meant successful challenges to: • The U.S. Clean Air Act • Protections on Dolphins and Sea Turtles, • Guaranteeing 30 day shelf life for meat • Banning hormone tested beef • Labeling of genetically modified food • Bans on asbestos. These are the issues that brought tens of thousands of people to Seattle to protest the WTO Ministerial Meeting. This is why environmentalists, indigenous peoples, anarchists, labor unions, social justice activists, and church groups all find common cause against the WTO: because it threatens by the very structure of its existence every aspect of the values that make human beings and their relationship with the earth something more than the dull collision of objects in a dead universe: the inherent value of the ecosystems of the Earth, and the worth of human beings for their qualities that cannot be bought and sold.

—Paul Richmond and Eric Nelson An inaccurate weapon, this grenade combines chemical agents and rubber bullets. It is of course impossible to predict how it will affect people when thrown into a large crowd.

WAGING WAR ON DISSENT • 15

NYPD Seeks to Tighten Rules for PublicProtest, ActivistsCryFoul A little-noticed proposal to amend the city rules governing parades and rallies could serve to restrict political dissenters, critics of the proposal say. Community activists and first amendment advocates complain that the new requirements would make it harder to hold a protest than a sports celebration . . . . “These are direct political attempts to restrict speech,” testified anti-police-brutality activist Steve Yip. He was one of several who argued that a recent rise in political protest, particularly around the Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond police shootings, has triggered a backlash on the part of an already intolerant administration and police department. Fueling activists’ distrust is a proposed change that would allow police to deny a permit based on the belief that an event would involve disorderly conduct as defined under the city’s penal law. In a letter to the NYPD’s legal department, the NYCLU contends that any rule allowing police to presuppose illegal acts is unconstitutional. It is also an excuse for discrimination, activists argue, questioning whether any event other than a political protest would so trigger police suspicions. “The target is people of color, people with AIDS, poor people,” says Puerto Rican human rights activist Gabriel Torres. The pending rule would impact such communities the most, he argues, because “we are the ones who need to demonstrate.” Other, less obviously controversial proposals have sparked concern, including a new restriction that would recognize only titled “officers” of a “corporation, organization, or association” as legitimate permit applicants. Since grassroots groups usually rely on volunteers and keep informal structures, they would have a tough time meeting that requirement,says Brody. What makes seemingly innocuous regulations questionable is context, argues Richie Perez, a lead organizer with the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights and a coordinator of the multiracial grassroots coalition People’s Justice 2000. The proposals, he says, cannot be viewed apart from recent NYPD practices such as the videotaping and other surveillance of protesters in violation of a longtime legal prohibition. The aggregate result is “a chilling effect on participation,” according to Perez. By minimally advertising the hearing and holding it on World AIDS Day, fellow critics complain, the city continues to discourage participation of dissenters. Chisun Lee, Village Voice

Corporations target activist groups In response to the anti-globalization movement’s numbers and vigilance, multinational companies and right-wing think tanks are beginning to take aim at the protesters. According to a document obtained by the newsletter Inside EPA, the Sony Corporation has been preparing an “action plan for counteracting the efforts of several domestic and international environmental groups—including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition” that are involved in a campaign to hold electronics manufacturers responsible for their toxic waste. Last summer in Brussels, Belgium, Sony representatives presented a paper called “NGO Strategy” to the European 16 • WAGING WAR ON DISSENT

Goons Around the Globe Activists charge police with infiltration Activists have accused police of infiltrating their groups before most of the major protests in the District in April and during the political conventions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles this summer. It happened again Wednesday, when activists with the Justice Action Movement, the umbrella group for Inauguration Day protests, said they recognized a man at their meeting as a police officer. “We outed one undercover cop,” Mr. Holstein said. “We booted up a picture of him from the protests in April in a police parka. He said, ‘That’s not me.’ “ . . . Activists have made more serious accusations about “agents provocateur” at previous protests and upcoming demonstrations during Inauguration Day. Mr. Holstein said a new member at an activist meeting about two months ago said, “Let’s take a bunch of explosives and block the bridge.” He said the man’s comment was ridiculous among a group with many members who view eating hamburger or wearing leather as violence. Fred Smith, Washington Times

Davos: Credibility of meeting threatened by policing, say NGOs Letter of Concern from NGOs at Davos Unfortunately, the actions of the Swiss authorities have transformed Davos into a “fortress”. In the process, the right of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression guaranteed both by the Swiss Constitution and international standards - has been severely restricted. Even people seeking to attend or participate in an NGO seminar hosted by “Public Eye on Davos” were arrested. For instance, NGOs present in Davos report that several people handing out brochures about this seminar to passersby on Davos streets were detained. A researcher who was travelling to Davos to speak at the NGO seminar was taken off the train by police during a car-by-car check of all trains travelling towards Davos. Adam Ma’anit was stopped by police on the morning of Friday 26 January while on his way to a forum, organized by nongovernmental organizations taking place in Davos parallel to the World Economic Forum. He was stopped at a train station in Landquart by security forces where he was searched, questioned and photographed before being taken back to the border at Basel. The Swiss authorities, by simply banning demonstrations in Davos during the World Economic Forum, have set an ominous precedent for future world gatherings. Given Switzerland’s reputation for democracy and inclusive, participatory governance, certainly the Swiss authorities would not seek to play such a role.

Quebec City to pull up drawbridge to protect heads of state at summit By Tom Cohen, Associated Press January 8, 2001 QUEBEC CITY – The towers and walls built to repel invaders of centuries past are no longer suffice for protecting 34 heads of state coming for the Summit of the Americas in April. So another wall will be built, this one of metal fencing around several square miles of old Quebec City, says Houle, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Riot police will stand guard along the fence in an old-fashioned show of force intended to prevent a protest movement from disrupting the three-day summit that likely will be the first foreign trip for President Bush. It will be one of the largest security operations in Canadian history, with a perimeter security fence similar to the 10-foot wall of metal wire that surrounded June’s Organization of American States gathering in Windsor, Ontario. . . . Preventing street clashes like the ones that derailed World Trade Organization talks in Seattle in December 1999 is the main goal, say police officials at the federal, provincial and local level.

Organizing Against the FTAA : A Report from Quebec City By Chris Dixon

. . . A new task force on domestic terrorism that includes Portland police officers and FBI agents follows a national trend to combat terrorism on U.S. soil. But some think the wording of an agreement between the city and the FBI is merely window dressing for a newly formed “Red Squad” to infiltrate lawful political protests and their organizers. The FBI’s budget and number of counter-terrorism agents have jumped significantly each year since 1993, when a bomb blast rocked New York’s World Trade Center and the nation’s psyche. (Editors Note – The “terrorists” were later found to be trained, encouraged and supplied with explosives by the FBI.) Portland’s task force was formed specifically to investigate crimes by extremist groups. An agreement between the FBI and the city names the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, militant environmental groups that have claimed responsibility for crimes. “It’s Big Brother keeping his spying eyes on people,” said Spencer Neal, a Portland civil rights lawyer who has filed numerous lawsuits against the city and police. “I think they’re going to have a problem.” Some activists are calling on the City Council to reconsider its approval of the agreement, or at a minimum, hold a hearing in which their opinions can be fully aired. Several have signed up to be heard

at today’s City Council meeting More than 30 cities across the country have formed antiterrorism task forces that include federal agents and local police. Seattle formed one in September to thwart such things as white supremacist violence. The FBI also has teamed with police departments to battle cyber terrorists who could hack into computer systems to do such things as shut down the nation’s power grid or collide two airliners . . . . Other federal agencies are also preparing. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a $155 million annual bio-terrorism research program with 100 full-time employees, according to a September report by Newhouse News Service. The CDC is stockpiling drugs in case of large-scale exposures to such things as anthrax and smallpox. Some say having the police gathering intelligence on extremist groups presents difficult choices for a nation that values civil liberties. They caution that the potential to cross the line is far too easy. “The FBI has a long history of spying on political groups,” said Portland attorney Alan Graf of the National Lawyers Guild. “They’re identifying people based on political ideology and association with certain groups.” Mark Larabee, The Oregonian

What is the FTAA? The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) would effectively integrate the nations of North and South America into a single free trade bloc. It is being negotiated under the auspices of the Organization of American States (OAS), which includes trade representatives from all 34 countries of the Americas (excluding Cuba). With the aim of being fully operative by 2005, the FTAA would encompass 800 million people in a potential market of $19 trillion. Mimicking the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and reputedly copying key features of the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), the FTAA promises more deregulation and privatization while affording global capital ever-greater power and profitmaking potential. This means further consolidation of corporate power, erosion of popular gains, exploitation of resources and labor in the global South, and dismantlement of already insufficient environmental protections—all in the name of “free trade.” In other words, it’s the same old story of colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism. What will Quebec City look like in April? Snowy and scenic, Quebec City is relatively small (pop. 500,000), 98% francophone (French-speaking), and overwhelmingly white. Protestors arriving in April will be greeted by the largest security operation in the history of Canada. Police are promising a 3.8-kilometer security perimeter around meeting facilities and downtown hotels. (Local activists suggest it will probably be half as large in reality.) The perimeter will be fortified with a 3-meter fence fixed in concrete barriers and tipped with barbed wire. In preparation, authorities are also emptying out the local prison in order to “make room” for protestors.

Information and Communications Technology Industry Association’s conference on environmental policy. Sony’s strategic suggestions included “pre-funding intervention” to reduce the financial support that liberal foundations give to environmental organizations; a recommendation that companies ratchet up their capability to quickly respond to environmental critics and pre-empt future legislation; and the development of a “detailed moni-

toring and contact network” to keep tabs on these organizations. Inside EPA suggests that this monitoring might be carried out by “one of the dozens of new Internet ‘intelligence’ agencies— such as the London-based Infonics PLC— that monitor chat rooms, e-mail lists, electronic bulletin boards, online news services,newsgroups and other sources of public information for specific data re-

quested by a company or industry group.” Sony executives have acknowledged that the company is monitoring environmental groups. “We are obviously concerned about our image,” Mark Small, Sony’s vice president of environmental and health and safety issues, told the InterPress news service. “If Greenpeace is pushing something, we want to be on top if it.” Bill Berkowitz, In These Times

Police role in terror task force criticized

the apartment – not even participating in the events. Watching TV coverage on Channel 5. Eyes started burning inside the apartment building. Realized it was tear gas. I went outside. Police outside. I complained to police about gas. Police said, ‘I don’t give a fuck. If you don’t want something more severe, go back inside your apartment.’…Gas continued inside for 2-3 hours. “ “Skin irritation, chest pain…(I) am asthmatic have heart problem. Was involved in good dose of pepper spray…could not rest could not breathe. Used (respirator) machine (to breathe).” – From Declarations collected by the Seattle National Lawyer’s Guild Data Collection Group. Speaking before a recent panel at the Environmental Law Conference in Eugene, Dr. Kirk Murphy, a UCLA physician told those assembled that they were part of the largest experiment in chemical warfare in recent history. The reason Dr. Murphy was able to make this statement was that CN and CS gas fall into a sort of limbo where they are not subject to testing for their effects. They are not classified as weapons of war, though they have been used in warfare extensively. Chemical Irritant Weapons were first introduced by Allied forces during World War I. They were intended to clear out German trenches so that the Allies could then machine-gun them. It was a weapon that remained popular with the Allies in the subsequent struggles they had with their colonies. The RAF dropped it on the Afghan trenches in the 1920’s. The French and Spanish used it in Morocco. The book A Higher Form of Killing provides this summary of the use and development of tear gas: “The Geneva Protocol had laid down firm controls over the use of gas in war. But the use of chemical weapons, like tear gas, by domestic police forces was a matter purely for national governments. Both the United States and Britain had established factories to manufacture CN gas after the First World War, and the British were soon using the gas against rioters in the colonies. The weapon which replaced it, and was used in Vietnam, CS gas, (named after the two American scientists, Carson and Staughton who discovered it in 1928,) provides a near-perfect example of the way in which British chemical warfare research, despite its commitment to purely defensive purposes came to be applied to war.” Britain realized the shortcomings of CN gas in the 1950’s in Korea and Cyprus. In particular, it was ineffective in controlling “rioters” who had only to close or cover their eyes to protect themselves from its effects. CS gas had the “advantage” of producing a far wider range of effects. These effects included making the victims’ eyes burn and water, their skin itch, their noses run, and inducing coughing and vomiting. All of the above are complaints, not coincidentally, made by members of the Seattle Police Department in their afteraction reports. The British first tested CS in Cyprus in 1958. Buoyed by the success of this, the British continued to use CS ‘in support of civil power’ as in when it was deployed in Ireland a few years later. The U.S., under General Westmoreland, Commander in Chief of Operations in Vietnam, began to use CS Gas as early as 1965. Because of the deservedly horrendous reputation chemical and gas warfare had acquired, the term “tear gas” was first coined as spin control. U.S. Troops were specifically trained to refer to CS by that term and that term alone. Literally thousands of tons of CS gas were dumped by the U.S. forces on the Vietnamese. Its purpose was to drive out

PHOTO COURTESY OF IMC-SEATTLE/MATT A. EMRICH

NEW TYPE OF WAR (cont.)

Seattle, 1999

those in hiding so that machine guns and carpet bombs could kill them. The CS gas doubtless mixed with defoliants such as Agent Orange and added to the literally millions of persons who’s long term injuries may never be understood. (A Higher Form of Killing, Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, esp. pp. 9, 44, 194-5, 233.) The effects these substances have on humans and other living creatures are still not understood. A major portion of the notion of their safety comes from the belief that they will naturally disperse, so that persons will not be exposed to concentrated doses. This of course does not happen if the agents are used in a confined space, or are altered by such factors as weather. All information provided on the safety of these agents to law enforcement comes form the manufacturers themselves. In many ways it is the ultimate WTO dynamic, as if the manufacturer of DDT or Thalidomide or Malathion were in charge of determining its products safety. The police rely on the manufacturers of these products for assurances of their safety, and the public in turn relies on police. Compositions of these products all contain carriers and agents. As with the other weaponry examined, the lethality of each can vary depending upon the strength with which it is mixed. Often it is the carrier agent the chemical is mixed with that is the most lethal part of these weapons. The tests done on these carrier agents are limited and sometimes nonexistent. Frequently the manufacturers guard the most basic information about carrier agents as “trade secrets.”

CS CS is also a solid that is mixed with pyrotechnic carrier agent and propelled through a pressurized aerosol. The basic instructions manuals supplied by the manufacturers and the Seattle Police Department require that any person or group of persons being sprayed with CS gas be given an exit path. In Seattle, where demonstrators were, on multiple occasions, trapped between lines of armor clad police spraying chemical weapons and shouting dispersal orders through Jack in the Box style PA systems, these instructions were violated on repeated occasions. There is no doubt that these are potentially lethal substances. In an investigation of the Israeli Army, the United Nations determined that there were dozens of deaths resulting from application of CS on Palestinians in closed spaces. The substance also killed a large number of children in South Africa under apartheid. CS has been determined among other things to raise blood pres-

sure, sometimes cause heart failure, so could be potentially be the cause of the heart problems experienced by an SPD officer mentioned in one of their afteraction reports. “Of particular concern,” writes Harvard epidemiologist Howard Hu, “are allegations that exposure to tear gas has been associated with increases in miscarriages and stillbirths.” Hu has also linked CS to chromosomal mutation – changes to the very structure of a person’s DNA. CS also particularly puts people with asthma, diabetes and heart conditions at greater risks. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found that one exposure to respiratory irritants similar to CS have led to the development of ‘reactive airways disease syndrome’ – in layperson’s terms this has meant a prolonged cough and shortness of breath. The British medical Journal The Lancet called for CS Gas to be withdrawn from police until more research has been carried into health implications.

CN CN is more commonly known by the brand name of its most popular brand, “mace.” During instructions in its use, trainees are told that it is not a gas, but really small metal barbs contained in a carrier agent. According to one manufacturer the propellant in the Def-Tec formula used in Seattle added a methylene chloride a toxic substance used in paint removers as a propellant. OSHA classifies methylene chloride as a “potential occupational carcinogen.” Both methylene chloride and CN are classified as hazardous materials that require notification of release. U.S. Army research shows that methylene chloride is, “reasonably expected to be a carcinogen.” Both the U.S. Army and NATO have removed it from their arsenals.

WAGING WAR ON DISSENT • 17

NEW TYPE OF WAR (cont.)

In violation of basic protocol for safe use of these weapons, chemical agents were used repeatedly without allowing for escape routes.

OC OC (oleoresin capsicum, cap-stun or pepper spray) is made from extract of cayenne pepper. The substance gained popularity, because unlike CN gas, it did not merely incapacitate the person by causing great discomfort, it caused involuntary physical reactions. The fact that it caused involuntary physical reactions made more effective on persons on drugs, persons suffering from psychotic episodes, and animals such as dogs and

bears, whose nasal systems are different from humans. Pepper spray was first endorsed by the FBI in 1987 and trickled down to most of the other law enforcement agencies in the country. Thomas Ward the director of the FBI’s Quantico Firearms Training Unit, brought the weapon into the FBI’s arsenal and wrote the main study cited by law enforcement to defend its use. In February of 1996 Ward pled guilty to accepting a $57,500 kickback from the

pepper-spray manufacturer who was the leading supplier to the FBI making the entire certification of the substance suspect. Some of the harshest criticisms of OC have come form Prison Guards and Police Officers, most of who are required to have it sprayed in their eyes as part of their training. OC may have some genuine utility for law enforcement, for example it does provide an intermediary use of force that might not otherwise be available. LA Chief Willie Williams, for example, states that had it been available at the time, it would have been used to contain Rodney King. But all objective criteria seem to prove that its use is becoming all too prevalent. It is used routinely in prisons not only to extract troublesome prisoners, but also simply to quiet them. In Northern California, it was applied by swabs to protesters’ eyes. The Court found that a reasonable person could conclude this was excessive use of force. In Seattle, Philadelphia and other locations it was used repeatedly at close range on demonstrators on the street. It was also used in jail situations that from some witnesses’ statements, seem to resemble third world torture scenes, more than traditional images of U.S. Justice Like the other agents, OC has been linked to numerous fatalities. A 1995 article by the Los Angeles Times noted a minimum of 61 deaths linked with the use of OC by police in the U.S.A. A study by the ACLU in the same year documented 27 deaths in custody over a two-year period because of the use of OC in California alone. (For a further

discussion of these substances see the articles by Terry Allen in In These Times.) Methods of Dispersal – Varied and Inaccurate There are several methods of dispersal for all of these agents. There were cartridges fired from the 37mm launchers, and shotguns. These seem to have been filled mostly with CS gas, some CN Gas. The police seem to have used these to fire into the middle of crowds from a distance. Some of these cartridges contained combinations of these and other “less lethal technologies.” For example, the “barricade rounds” were designed to penetrate a heavy barrier, then release the chemical agent on the other

WHAT’S HIDING (cont. from p. 10) in Yosemite or drilling for oil in the Grand Canyon. John Ashcroft, GW’s choice for Attorney General, is a self-styled moral crusader as strongly against abortion as he is enthusiastic about the death penalty. He lost his Senate seat in the 2000 election to an opponent who died during the campaign. Last year, Ashcroft received an honorary degree from Bob Jones University and is closely aligned with the Christian Coalition and Pat Robertson. Ashcroft is also an outspoken fan of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He is known among lobbyists as an advocate for drug companies and the automotive industry and for preventing consumers from suing HMO’s. Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., nominated as director of the Office of Management and Budget was senior executive of the Eli Lilly drug company-which Bush’s father headed from 1977-79. Daniels was also previously the president of the arch conservative think tank Hudson Institute. Daniels, who advocates strict enforcement of laws against casual drug users, was arrested for marijuana possession in 1970. Secretary of State designee Colin Powell is a lifelong operative of the CIA/militaryindustrial complex. While working for the Pentagon he helped cover up the Mai Lai massacre, the contra/arms deal and Gulf War Syndrome. Powell’s fame derives from presiding over a war in which US troops were used as guinea pigs for experimental vaccines so that they could “safely” fight George Bush’s friend Sadamn Husseinwho had been given the go ahead to attack Kuwait after being supplied with chemical and biological weapons by the Bush administration. Like many of GW’s appointees of color, Powell proudly admits he owes his career in large part to affirmative action while joining an administration that considers ending affirmative action one of its topmost priorities. Condolezza Rice, Bush’s National Security advisor was formerly a security advisor under President George Bush and

18 • WAGING WAR ON DISSENT

an aide to Colin Powell. She has the job of explaining the basic elements of foreign policy to GW, about which Bush admits to knowing almost nothing. A large part of her career was involved in administering the CIA’s foreign policy objectives. She serves on the board of Chevron Oilknown as one of the African continents most violent human rights abusers. A grateful Chevron recently named an oil tanker after her. The emerging profile of the Bush administration-moderately conservative and multi-racial-is a facade. To see their real agenda one has to examine the administration’s ideological source-the Manhattan Institute. GW may cultivate the image of a plain-talkin’ good ole boy who prefers barbecuing to making policy, but virtually every idea presented as central to his agenda comes from this elite east coast institution. A little background MI (The Manhattan Institute) was started in 1978 by William Casey, one of the top intelligence operatives in US history. During WWII Casey worked with OSS chief William Donavan and Allen Dulles to bring top level Nazi officials to the US where they were recruited into the newly-formed CIA, the military, government-connected medical research institutions and the media. The stated rational for importing Hitler’s top intelligence operatives, social scientists and propagandists to the US was that they would be employed in fighting Communism-exactly what Hitler claimed he used them for. In reality they were brought here to help establish fascism in America-a goal which they are increasingly succeeding at. Before WWII started Dulles was involved with GW’s grandfather Prescott Bush on Wall Street where, along with George Herbert Walker (Prescott Bush’s father-in-law) they operated banks and shipping companies that were later declared by the US Congress to be fronts for the Nazis. In 1942 shortly after the US

entered WWII the assets of these Wall Street companies were seized by the US government under the Trading With The Enemy Act. Dulles was the legal counsel for both Standard Oil and for Nazi Germany’s I.G. Farben-one of the world’s largest industrial powerhouses-which was co-owned by the Rockefeller family-the main funders of the Manhattan Institute. The US ambassador to Germany at the time had this to say about The Rockefellers, the Bush’s, the Mellons (owners of Alcoa) and the other wealthy Americans who were backing Hitler and promoting Eugenics, or scientific racism: “A clique of U.S. industrialists is hellbent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany. I have had plenty of opportunity in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime. . .They extended aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there.” - William Dodd, U.S. Ambassador to Germany, 1937.-Facts and Fascism, G Seldes, p. 122 Also, Trading with the Enemy, Charles Higham, p.167 When IG Farben was broken up after Germany lost the war its parts became the top pharmaceutical companies in the world- BASF, Hoechst, Bayer AG, AgfaGevaert and Cassella AG. Today these companies, along with Pfizer and Eli Lilly-which former President George Bush headed from 1977-1979-are the largest manufacturers of prescription and over the counter drugs sold in the U.S. Both the Pfizer and Eli Lilly drug companies are sponsors of MI. These oil, pharmaceutical and Wall Street investment banking elites are the foundations of the Rockefeller and Bush dynasties and are the real constituents of the new Bush administration. Being a business partner with the Third

Reich posed no problem for Dulles who became the first CIA director in 1947. In fact, their relationship with the Nazis and Wall Street was exactly how Dulles, former Pres. Bush and William Casey all became CIA directors. GW’s father was made CIA director in 1976. Shortly after creating the Manhattan Institute, William Casey was made CIA director by Ronald Reagan. In 1954 Casey put together a consortium of investors including top US intelligence experts who had made fortunes on Wall Street to form Capital Cities. In the interim, Casey served as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1969 to 1977. By 1985 Casey’s Capital Cities had so much cash it was able to buy ABC (an act that took place shortly after ABC ran a documentary considered critical by the CIA) and operate it as a propaganda arm of the US government-which it continues to be today. Casey was the top stockholder in ABC while he was director of the CIA under the Reagan and Bush administrations. ABC, CNN and Rupert Murdoch’s rabidly right wing network FOX were instrumental in fabricating GW Bush’s illegitimate presidency, the myth that Colin Powell is a hero and the idea that the Gulf War was a military victory-rather than a human and ecological disaster fought solely to benefit the oil industry. Many Americans didn’t seem to mind seeing the CIA ruthlessly manipulate the political and social fabric of other nations for the second half of the 20th century. How they will feel about America being openly run by the CIA and this circle of racist corporate gangsters may well determine the history of the next century. Robert Lederman 12/23/2000 Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists’ Response To Illegal State Tactics) [email protected] (718) 743-3722 for much more detailed info on all of the above see http://Baltech.org/lederman/spray/

Though there is some variation with the many types of cartridges and projectiles used, as a general rule they shouldn’t be striking anything closer than fifteen feet, or you’re risking serious injury, trauma and possible death.

PHOTO COURTESY OF IMC-SEATTLE/PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN

side. Other cartridges combined the release of the chemical agents with that of rubber projectiles. Yet others released multiple containers that dispersed the agents to minimize the chance that they could be thrown back at the police. There were grenades that could be thrown. These contained similar components to the cartridges. Many would scatter “rubber” bullets and chemical agents simultaneously. There were paint-ball guns. These shot rubber containers filled with OC powder. There were canisters the size of small fire extinguishers that were carried by officers. These seem to have been carrying OC, and sometimes a combination of OC and CN. The OC was dispersed in both the form of a mist and in the form of foam that according to training officers was far more potent. There were portable fogger units. All of these methods of disposal encountered problems during the WTO Ministerial.. Police officers fired at themselves, dropped canisters at their feet, had gas blow back at them on the street and in buses of prisoners, and had at least one grenade explode in an officer’s hands. The problems in dispersing these agents among large crowds were even worse. There was no way the police could separate who was being hit with these agents with any accuracy. They could not separate the old, the invalids, and the infants. They could not separate out those with heart conditions, diabetes, asthma or AIDs. They could not separate the bystanders from the demonstrators. And they could not offer the medical aid they were required to once the gas was launched in large quantities.

Lethal Agents + Inaccurate Dispersal Techniques = Bad News In the months leading up to the WTO Ministerial, Seattle officials explicitly played down the use of their weaponry. Mayor Paul Schell had even encouraged people to come do their holiday shopping downtown on November 30th. Speaking weeks before the WTO Ministerial, he had stated that downtown would be the safest place in Washington to be that day. In considering the effects these weapons had, look also at who some of the most vulnerable people subjected to these weapons were: There were children and pregnant women. Capital Hill arguably the community most affected by these weapons of war, is home to several retirement homes. Perhaps most vulnerable, were the people with AIDs, there to protest the policies of the WTO – an organization that prevented the manufacture of less expensive treatments and vaccines. These may have been the people who suffered the worst effects from these agents. Many with this stigmatizing disease were forced not only to take time off of work because of the effects the gas had on them, but also to offer explanations to their employers and acquaintances. There seems to be at least one fatality as a result of deployment of these “lesslethal” technologies during the WTO Ministerial. Key Martin was a long time activist and video producer. He suffered from asthma and AIDS. This put him in a more vulnerable position during the Seattle WTO Ministerial. Martin was shot with rubber bullets and exposed to nu-

“Spin Control”: From Armor Holdings, Inc., training manual for law enforcement personnel.

From Armor Holdings, Inc., on the prospects for injuries or death from their “Specialty Impact Munitions.”

merous chemical agents. Some months after the WTO he developed swelling in the areas where he was struck. He died shortly after this. Some of those who were close to him attributed his recent death to complications resulting from the injuries he suffered from these weapons. That Key Martin had these pre-existing conditions does not make his death reasonable or even legally justified. Under the most basic precepts of tort liability, a defendant takes a victim as they are. The implications of Martin’s death are far reaching. It is well known that those with AIDs are already in a weakened and vulnerable state. Consider that among the leaders of those activist groups the police had met with were leaders of AIDs groups including ACT-UP. Perhaps Martin’s death can be excused as a case of cognitive dissonance. Future deaths cannot be excused this way. Knowingly using these chemical agents and other weapons on an infected population has to be recognized for what it is, a lethal use of force. It must also be acknowledged that if these chemical agents can be expected to be deployed with minimal warning those suffering from AIDs have effectively lost their right to free speech. So too have many of the elderly and the physically disabled. Given the numbers of children, old people and disabled present at this event the numbers could also have been far higher and indeed they may be. What has kept many of these people from coming out with their stories is that they themselves are undergoing feelings of posttraumatic-stress-disorder usually assigned to survivors of wars. The legal system itself also presents massive hurdles, hurdles few people have the resources to overcome. Some state frankly, that they fear retribution. In the aftermath of the exposure to these weapons, questions are being raised about the origin and toxicity of agents that were employed. Some of these are questions that may yield quicker answers such as where did the tear gas used after the SPD exhausted their initial supply come from and what was in it? The other thing to consider is that many of the effects of these weapons are simply not known, especially since they have not been widely studied. Matters concerning the lethality of these materials may emerge over time as happened with symptoms associated Agent Orange and is happening now with the Gulf War syndrome. Ironically, should this occur, police officers that were affected may find themselves in a position similar to that of the veterans of these wars, relying on the protesters for information and support. Ultimately, those in both the military

and in law enforcement must look hard and honestly at the dynamic that is taking place in the streets after the Seattle WTO Ministerial. They must look at the ever more militarized force they are creating, the effect it has on the citizens right to free speech, the effect it has on the safety of those who enforce the policies and the effect it is having on the very fabric of democracy. There is a moral and legal obligation to set up long term monitoring facilities for those who were exposed to these lethal substances. This includes protesters, bystanders and members of law enforcement. If these modest recommendations cannot be implemented then it is perhaps time to openly acknowledge that we have a government that is there to protect the rights of its largest corporations and to further acknowledge that the citizenry has become a disposable commodity that may be swept aside with lethal force when it infringes on that corporate interest.

Paul Richmond is the main author of the Seattle NLG’s Report on the WTO Ministerial. He served as co-coordinator for the NLG’s legal observer program during the Ministerial in 1999 and its anniversary in November 2000. He was also a founding member of the first Independent Media Center established to cover the WTO Ministerial. He has worked for over a decade on the issues of police accountability and the militarization of law enforcement as both an activist and a reporter. He returned to school to get a law degree when he was unable to find an attorney to take these matters on. He was elected NW Regional Vice President of the National Lawyers Guild in November of 2,000. He plans to establish a center for the study of the militarization of law enforcement. For other information contact PO Box 1773, Everett, WA, 98206, or nopolicestate@yahoo. com or (206) 9892673; website: www.nlgseattle.org

Thanks to the hundreds of legal observers, people who filled out declarations, and otherwise contributed information that was used in this report. Excerpts from The Washington Post, The Oregonian, In These Times, Village Voice, The Guardian, Chicago Sun Times, The Atlantic, Seattle Times, Honolulu Weekly, Herald Tribune, Michael Moore and others are used in conjunction with applicable fair use laws.

WAGING WAR ON DISSENT • 19

Recommendations This report details the unfortunate trend of militarization in law enforcement. The problem is obvious. Police are being trained as if they were soldiers. Soldiers are being utilized as if they were police. Without another superpower to fight, the military industrial complex, still a cornerstone of the U.S. economy is reaching into law enforcement every chance it gets. Major military contractors such as Bechtel are making enormous profits from the out of control prison building industry. Major military research facilities such as Los Alamos lab are designing many of the new generation of “less lethal” weapons. Police aren’t Soldiers and Soldiers aren’t Police. George Bush Senior, former C.I.A. director, destroyer of many democracies and father of our current, semi-elected President, described the United States as “the policemen of the free world.” What this declaration represented was a series of military actions and invasions toting democracy, while overthrowing legitimate leaders and killing literally millions of civilians. George Bush Sr. created more corpses than Pol Pot’s Cambodian Killing Fields. The goals and purposes of soldiers and police are incompatible. Police are there to preserve life. Soldiers are trained to take it. Yet as we see happening in Fort Lewis Washington, soldiers are being trained for “policing” functions. Their armament is more mobile. Their weapons and training specifically targeted for use in heavily populated urban areas. Police are being trained in a military style. Small towns, college campuses, now routinely have their own military style units equipped with their own military style weapons. What is being built is not a force to protect the rights of people, but an occupying army. Though these forces have largely been limited in their use to marginalized communities, the definition of a marginalized community is a moving target. History has shown that when the use of these tools and tactics get to a certain level they can no longer be controlled, even by those who put them in place. The CIA, IMF, the businesses who work with them, think nothing of overthrowing governments and putting in their own dictatorial puppets – inevitably these dictatorial puppets get out of control and have to be externally crushed. Yet what happens when the forces used to crush these puppets gets out of control? The answer is nothing. It’s too late. Hitler, Mussolini were put in power by big business, yet they themselves devoured many of the businesses that created them. Outfitting and training police as if they were members of the military needs to end. There is no reason for police on college campuses and small towns to be outfitted like SWAT units. There is little reason for all but the most highly trained specialist to have these weapons. The incidence that genuinely requires the response of these units is minimal. The police end up causing more property destruction and death than the forces they are nominally supposed to contain. The arms currently possessed by law enforcement need to be evaluated. Esp-ecially with the influx of new hires and the drop in training that creates. The move to handguns with more rounds needs to be looked at more closely. This report has discussed the way these higher capacity weapons, particularly in the hands of inexperienced officers have led to increased numbers of shootings with many more bullets being fired. Part of the reason these guns gained prominence was fear of drugs such as PCP, and part of it was talk that police are being outgunned. For the first, PCP has largely disappeared form the streets. For the second, FBI statistics show you have four times as many officers killed by their own weapon as anything resembling an assault weapon.

Cops aren’t getting killed because they’re outgunned; they’re getting killed because they’re getting put out on the street without adequate training. This report was titled the war on dissent. In closing it’s important to note what dissent is. Most political struggle is based on survival. As a bottom line, dissent is often just trying to survive. The black person who can’t drive a car without being pulled over, or even walk down certain streets, as happens routinely in Seattle, is forced to dissent. So is the logger who’s got nothing left to cut and finds the only way they can keep their home is to grow certain herbs in the backwoods, inviting the wrath of the local sheriff and the national guard. So is the person who crawls into a sleeping bag in some out of the way place downtown. The corporate and colonial powers have always responded more brutally the further they were operating away from their home base. The sort of actions routinely performed by the Central Intelligence Agency, the rigging of elections and the open assassination of opposition leaders, would be almost unthinkable domestically (recent developments in Florida and Cointelpro notwithstanding.) The sort of bombing perpetrated by the U.S. military on Viet Nam or Iraq, would also in most cases be unthinkable (MOVE and Waco not withstanding.) The World Trade Organization policies signaled a change in the way business was conducted. Prior to the birth of the Ministerial, accusations of labor laws, human rights, environmental protections all being trashed in the name trade would have been dismissed as wild-eyed conspiracy theory. This wouldn’t have meant that they weren’t happening, simply that there was a concerted effort to make them appear untrue. As is the way with these things, when they go on long enough, there’s an eventual effort to formalize them as policy. The birth of the World Trade Organization was a way of the most powerful corporations on the planet saying, sovereignty doesn’t matter, and we’re going to do what we want. The Seattle WTO Ministerial signaled a change in the way domestic law enforcement operated. Previously the targets of corporate directed law enforcement were isolated geographically, or socially. The scale of paramilitary police action in a Capitol Hill, a large, middle class neighborhood, during the evenings of the WTO Ministerial, was a signal that with the shrinking of the middle class, the middle class is now a legitimate target. In other words, as the middle class shrinks, then to simply survive as a member of the middle class is to practice dissent. So as a final recommendation what is needed is people who will stand up not only for their own rights, but also for the rights of others, even those they may not entirely agree with. There is a tendency when someone has been labeled a criminal to allow law enforcement to either figuratively or literally shoot, and have it sorted out later. Unfortunately, the laws are so stringently written, that better than 98% have probably broken a federal law. At least that was the number I heard quoted by a DOJ spokesperson, before the enactment of either the crime bill or the terrorist bill. Doubtless the number’s gone up. In the 19th century, the French divided their government into two warring factions. One was the “left” side or “wing” of the chamber, and one was the “right.” Perhaps as we move to the 21st Century we can realize the dichotomy is not as much “left” and “right” as much as it is an ever narrowing top and an ever-expanding bottom. Paul Richmond Seattle, Washington

Organizing in the Face of Increased Repression By Starhawk Since the very first morning of the Seattle blockade a year ago, the police forces of the world have greeted the antiglobalization movement with a high level of violence and repression. As the international movement has continued on, the repression has fallen into a pattern discernible from DC to Prague and beyond. This pattern involves: 1. A concerted media campaign by the police and government forces that begins long before the demonstration, painting the activists as violent terrorists. All previous demos are equally characterized as violent, regardless of the actual facts. 2. Surveillance of meetings, email lists, phones, listserves, etc. 3. Attempts at pre-emptive control, which range from mass illegal arrests in DC the night before the action, shut downs of convergence centers and IndyMedia centers, and border closures, to declaring a 5kilometer no-protest zone five months before the planned action in Quebec. 4. Less obvious violence on the street. Seattle taught them that tear gassing whole sections of the city was a bad idea. However, tear gas, pepper spray, beatings, projectile weapons, water cannon and concussion grenades, etc. are routinely used now from Prague to Cincinnati. 5. Random arrests and targeting of peaceful protestors, while those throwing rocks are often let go. Maybe nonviolent protestors are easier to catch? Or maybe this is a concerted effort to discourage wider participation in these actions? 6. Use of provocateurs. I am not say-

20 • WAGING WAR ON DISSENT

ing that all who throw rocks are provocateurs. However, there is a growing body of eyewitnesses and stories of “protestors” seen one moment throwing a rock at a window and the next, being sheltered behind a police line to indicate that provocateurs are being used. Along with them, we can suspect the whole range of fun cointelpro tactics. 7. Intimidation and brutality in jail, which reached levels of outright torture in Prague. 8. Some sporadic attempts to identify and neutralize “leaders,” i.e. holding John Sellers of Ruckus on a million dollars bail for charges that were all later dropped. What fun! It’s enough to make you think we’re being effective, especially when, as in Prague, the protestors still managed to disrupt the meeting and send the banksters home a day early. What can we do about it? Are we doomed to have these actions become more and more dangerous, and smaller and smaller? Or can we succeed in building a mass movement in spite of repression? 1. The greatest restraint to police violence during an action is the organizing and alliance building we’ve done before the action ever happens. We need to counter their disinformation campaigns with our own community outreach, to leaflet, to talk to people, to go door to door, to explain to the community what we’re doing and why long before we do it. 2. We need to build alliances with labor, churches, NGOs, all the groups who

are fighting the same vested interests. We don’t have to do the same work they do, we don’t have to change our hairstyles or analysis to accommodate them, but we do need to build bridges so that we can call on them to defend our and their civil rights, at the border, on the streets or in jail. 3. We need to train and prepare as many people as possible. The more people have had a chance to play out a dangerous situation, to think out possible responses and try out different tactics, the calmer and more resilient they’ll be on the streets. Even a few centered people in a crowd can be enough to prevent panic and spark an effective moment of resistance. Trainings need to stress flexibility and developing a range of possible responses to widely varied situations, so activists are prepared in the moment to make choices about what to do. 4. We also need ever more flexible and creative tactics. The more we can plan for orchestrated spontaneity, the harder we’ll be to stop. For example, in Prague part of the plan was for smaller marches led by flags of different colors to break away from the main march and go in different directions. While this tactic had been discussed at open meetings for at least a month before the action, it still seemed to confuse the authorities. 5. We may need to focus more on preparation for surviving jail, for resisting intimidation and being prepared for interrogation, than on the classic jail solidarity tactics we’ve used in the U.S. Those tactics focus on attempting to stay in jail where our strength of numbers allows us to pres-

sure the system to drop or lower charges, and helps to protect individuals at risk. These tactics were developed, however, in a very different time, when the authorities often were interested in releasing most and when jail experiences were often hard and uncomfortable but relatively decent. At times those conditions still prevail and that kind of jail solidarity has been effective in Seattle and DC. However, if people are being chained to the wall and beaten, the focus needs to shift to getting them out of jail. Solidarity then becomes what people outside jail do to put political pressure on the system, from calling on allies, phoning, faxing and emailing the authorities, to blockading the jail itself. 6. Organizing an action needs to include planning post-action and post-jail support, debriefing, trauma counseling, etc. 7. We need to continue building a broader, larger movement, to find ways to encourage participation at varied levels of risk, to support a wide variety of forms of protest that can mobilize different groups of people, to confront the racism, sexism, classism etc. in our own groups and reach out to more diversity. Most of all, we need to clarify our vision of the world we want to create, so we can mobilize peoples’ hopes and desires as well as their outrage. And we need to be creative, visionary, wild, sexy, colorful, humorous, and fun in the face of the violence directed against us. ■ Starhawk is an author and trainer in nonviolent direct action.