Naomi Wolf’s ‘Shocking Truth’ About the ‘Occupy Crackdowns’ Offers Anything but the Truth

[salvorhardin]

There has been a flurry of speculation surrounding various reports suggesting that a “coordinated,” nationwide crack-down on the Occupy Movement is underway. The problem with these stories lies in the fact that the word “coordinated” is too vague to offer any analytic value.

The difference between local officials talking to each other — or federal law enforcement agencies advising them on what they see as “best practices” for evicting local occupations — and some unseen hand directing, incentivizing or coercing municipalities to do so when they would not otherwise be so inclined is not a minor one. It’s not a matter of semantics or a distinction without difference. As I wrote recently, “if federal authorities were ordering cities to crack down on their local occupations in a concerted effort to wipe out a movement that has spread like wildfire across the country, that would indeed be a huge, and hugely troubling story. In the United States, policing protests is a local matter, and law enforcement agencies must remain accountable for their actions to local officials. Local government’s autonomy in this regard is an important principle.”

But there has not been a single report offered by any media outlet suggesting that anyone – federal officials or police organizations – is directing or in any way exerting pressure on cities to crack down on their occupations. Instead, there have been a lot of dark ruminations that such an effort is underway – notably by Naomi Wolf in an error-filled blog-post and a somewhat bizarre column for The Guardian in which Wolf takes an enormous leap away from any known facts to suggest that Congress is ordering cities to smash the Occupy Movement in order to preserve their own economic privilege.

...

Here’s how she opens her blog-post:

Now is the time to get cops on board with the OWS movement — especially now that Alternet has broken the story that municipal police are being pushed around by a shadowy private policing consultancy affiliated with DHS. If you study any closing society decent people get handed monstrous orders and are forced to comply, and right now municipal police are being forced to comply with brutal orders from this corporate police consultancy, by economic pressure.

AlterNet has “broken” no such story – nobody has. We have asked Wolf to retract this claim, but as of this writing, it still remains on her site several days later.

Complete article: http://www.alternet.org/occupywallst/153222/naomi_wolf%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%98shocking_truth%E2%80%99_about_the_%E2%80%98occupy_crackdowns%E2%80%99_offers_anything_but_the_truth/?page=entire

It does seem like Naomi Wolf is grasping at straws on this one.

[tabatha]

1. That is too bad.

There are two Naomis, Wolf and Klein and people may confuse them, and give Naomi Klein (Shock Doctrine) a bad name.
That is a bad thing.

[salvorhardin]

2. Excellent point!

I used to make the same mistake myself.

[limpyhobbler]

3. Josh Holland makes a good point but...

In response to
http://www.alternet.org/occupywallst/153222/naomi_wolf%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%98shocking_truth%E2%80%99_about_the_%E2%80%98occupy_crackdowns%E2%80%99_offers_anything_but_the_truth/?page=entire

Josh Holland makes a good point in his article. Naomi Wolf went overboard and connected a lot of dots that shouldn't have been connected.

But still there are some important questions that need to be raised.

When DHS was established, most people thought it was to protect us against terrorists.

What is DHS's expertise in crowd control? What representatives from the federal government were on these conference calls? What is the role of the federal government in crowd control and suppression of these assemblies?

Wolf tried to give an explanation for why the federal government has a direct incentive to silence the Occupy protests, and how they would be able to act on that, based partly on Rep. King's committee chairmanship. Like Holland pointed out, Wolf wasn't really able to demonstrate it and she came off looking nutty as a result.

But asking the question is not nutty at all and I hope that other journalists and elected officials are going to observe and report on the federal role in crowd control and suppression of peoples rights to speech and assembly.

Mayor Quan did us a favor actually when she reported that she had participated in the conference call. Otherwise we might not have know about it at all.

I think Josh Holland may be not paranoid enough when he says:

"I don’t find it in the least bit surprising that law enforcement officials communicate with each other, and such communication is in no way an assault on local communities’ autonomy. Every day professionals dealing with similar issues get on conference calls, send messages to list-servs or otherwise talk shop – it’s just part of our “interconnected world."

That's fine. But if all the police chiefs and/or mayors are on the call, they all get the same advice, all hear the same talking points, it is bound to influence their actions, and sometimes in negative, dangerous ways.

I got the impression, around the time of some of the big sweeps and evictions, around the time of the Oakland general strike, that the police and governments in these cities were all sort of spouting the same talking points. They claimed the protests had changed, a new group of people had taken over the protests, scary people, anarchists, anti-semites, foreigners, illegal immigrants, drug addicts, dirty homeless people.

Of course they did that because they knew from opinion polling that the Occupy movement was fairly popular with the American people. So in order to justify the impending brutal crackdowns, they had to claim the the movement had been hijacked. They would be evicting the occupiers to save them from themselves, because the movement had been hijacked.

We can probably never know exactly what is said on those coordinating phone calls. But I don't want the Federal Government coordinating the actions of local police to help them suppress political speech.

Furthermore, Holland says

"Mayors in a handful of cities, responding to local political pressures, decided to break up their local occupations — decisions that were announced to the press well in advance — and were advised as to how best to do so.."

I really don't think mayors were simply responding to local political pressures in deciding to break up the occupations. If they get on a conference call, the subject of which is how to break up occupations, they are going to hear a bunch of BS propaganda on there.

Also on these phone calls, the chiefs and mayors would have been advised which physical crowd control tactics to use. Thus pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets.

Clearly they did not get on the conference call and hear "We should go easy on the protesters, they make a lot of good points. Let's loosen the laws up a little bit to help them out."

If the mayors and police chiefs just want to communicate with each other to share information, then why is "Police Executive Research Forum, PERF" coordinating the call, and what is their role in it? What federal agencies were represented on the calls? Were the tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullet manufacturers and suppliers on the call as well, to ensure that extra supplies could be shipped out right away if needed? We will never know the answers to any of these questions of course. After all it is a matter of national security and you don't need to know. There is no transparency in this at all. Why shouldn't all these calls be recorded and made public? If they are as innocuous as what PERF and others claim, go ahead and publish the transcripts on the internet. I'm betting they can't, "for security reasons".

So yes Naomi Wolf did not succeed it showing a connection between federal involvement and the brutal actions of local police. On the other hand a healthy dose of paranoia is appropriate when considering this issue. Federal agencies should not have a role in coordinating crowd control and evicting political protesters from public parks.

Of course there is a much needed role for the federal government to help coordinate local law enforcement for counter-terrorism. That's very real. But it's wholly inappropriate to use those channels of communication to discuss what is the best way to crack down on non-violent domestic political dissent.

DHS was pretty much created in a moment of panic when we were all scared of another big terrorist attack. Some people warned that we were opening a door for a domestic security police state. Let's all pay attention to these trends.