Israel's Asymmetrical Prisoner Swap

Holding political prisoners is a means of avoiding political solutions to conflict [EPA]


The Israeli-Hamas Prisoner Swap Is Not A Measure Of Life Value, But Rather An Illustration Of The Asymmetrical Conflict.

By Rachel Shabi
Last Modified: 15 Oct 2011 19:02
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"


It doesn't take long to meet a prisoner family in Palestine. With more than 6,000 Palestinians incarcerated by Israel right now and more than 700,000 in jails since Israel's 1967 occupation of the Palestinian territories, those stories soon come into the frame - mention of a father, a brother taken away; a swallowing of pain; a distant gaze determined to bring a beloved, absent face into focus. 


Now Israel has cut a deal with Hamas to release the soldier Gilad Shalit, five years after his capture, in exchange for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, these figures allude to the reality of mass Palestinian imprisonment.


With 20 per cent of the population jailed at some point, prison is a feature of Palestinian life under occupation. From the routine night raids that drag family members away, to the opaque military trials, the detention of children (7,000 since the year 2000) and the torture reported by Amnesty to take place in Israeli prisons, it all adds up to a system of control and debilitation.


Israel adheres to the script of countries that try to crush national struggle: criminalise protest; use widespread arrests to show who's in charge and categorically refuse to count any prisoners as political. Those Palestinian detention figures are shockingly high - but then, the Israeli occupation has been shockingly long, and its permeation into Palestinian life just as deep.  


Despite the duration, Hadas Ziv, of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, says the fact Israel blanket-labels all Palestinian prisoners as cold-blooded murderers shows that the country is in a phase which characterises the earliest stages of conflict.


"Once you give people the attributes of an ideology or a political struggle, there is something to talk about," she says. "When a conflict is approaching resolution, you see a move from propaganda to seeing people as human beings with political standing."


Political power is one reason why prisoners are so important: because they generate trust and credibility not attributed to politicians, former prisoners can be key to resolution talks. Holding political prisoners is another means of avoiding a political solution to conflict - the continued detention of key Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti testifies to that. Similarly, leaders of the current non-violent popular campaign against Israel’s separation wall - Abdullah Abu Rahmeh and Bassem Tamimi, for instance - know why they are repeatedly arrested and put behind bars. 


This component - that arrests devastate individual families but also decimate collective struggle - underpins regular Palestinian campaigns over prisoners; current escalating hunger strikes and solidarity actions are protesting prisoner conditions, in particular the practice of solitary confinement.


But meanwhile, the terms of the Israel-Hamas brokered prisoner swap - one Israeli, whose name the world knows, for 1027 faceless Palestinians - has generated some absurd comments on the value each side places on human life. In reports of how much Israelis care about the soldier Shalit - all true - there is somehow the inference that Palestinians don’t cherish their loved ones in the same way. But it is clearly more approachable a task to keep one soldier's name in people's hearts and in the headlines, than it is with countless thousands of Palestinian men. And the undertaking is smoothed by a media skew on the subject: taking part in a panel discussion on reporting the conflict last year, I heard a European journalist explain that Shalit was an easier pitch because he seemed innocent and blameless, while Palestinian prisoners didn’t generate the same assumptions. 


Meanwhile, the cold exchange rate of a thousand prisoners to one Israeli obviously doesn't mean that Palestinians morally agree with this equation; it just points to the brutal asymmetry of forces and capacity in this struggle.


There is, however, one setting in which the two sides stand on level ground. When the prisoner deal was announced this week, there were jarringly rare images of both Israelis and Gaza strip Palestinians joyously celebrating the same news story. There it was, in that moment: an equality borne of shared humanity.


Rachel Shabi is a journalist and author of Not the Enemy: Israel's Jews from Arab lands.

Egypt's State Brutality Continues Unabated

By Guest Poster "Sayf Maslul" 

Jihan Hafiz reports on mass protest demanding accountability for crimes against prisoners.

Mapping America’s Shadowy Drone Wars

By Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt,
October 17, 2011
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

These last weeks, there have been two “occupations” in lower Manhattan, one of which has been getting almost all the coverage — that of the demonstrators camping out in Zuccotti Park. The other, in the shadows, has been hardly less massive, sustained, or in its own way impressive — the police occupation of the Wall Street area.

On a recent visit to the park, I found the streets around the Stock Exchange barricaded and blocked off to traffic and police everywhere in every form (in and out of uniform) — on foot, on scooters, on motorcycles, in squad cars with lights flashing, on horses, in paddy wagons or minivans, you name it. At the park’s edge, there is a police observation tower capable of being raised and lowered hydraulically and literally hundreds of police are stationed in the vicinity. I counted more than 50 of them on just one of its sides at a moment when next to nothing was going on — and many more can be seen almost anywhere in the Wall Street area, lolling in doorways, idling in the subway, ambling on the plazas of banks, and chatting in the middle of trafficless streets.

This might be seen as massive overkill. After all, the New York police have already shelled out an extra $1.9 million, largely in overtime pay at a budget-cutting moment in the city. When, as on Thursday, 100 to 150 marchers suddenly headed out from Zuccotti Park to circle Chase Bank several blocks away, close to the same number of police — some with ominous clumps of flexi-cuffs dangling from their belts — calved off with them. It’s as if the Occupy Wall Street movement has an eternal dark shadow that follows it everywhere.

At one level, this is all mystifying. The daily crowds in the park remain remarkably, even startlingly, peaceable. (Any violence has generally been the product of police action.) On an everyday basis, a squad of 10 or 15 friendly police officers could easily handle the situation. There is, of course, another possibility suggested to me by one of the policemen loitering at the park’s edge doing nothing in particular: “Maybe they’re peaceable because we’re here.” And here’s a second possibility: As my friend Steve Fraser, author of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace, said to me, “This is the most important piece of real estate on the planet, and they’re scared. Look how amazed we are. Imagine how they feel, especially after so many decades of seeing nothing like it.”

And then there’s a third possibility: that two quite separate universes are simply located in the vicinity of each other and of what, since Sept. 12, 2001, we’ve been calling Ground Zero. Think of it as Ground Zero Doubled, or think of it as the militarized recent American past and the unknown, potentially inspiring American future occupying something like the same space. (You can, of course, come up with your own pairings, some far less optimistic.) In their present state, New York’s finest represent a local version of the way this country has been militarized to its bones in these last years and, since 9/11, transformed into a full-scale surveillance-intelligence-homeland-security state.

Their stakeout in Zuccotti Park is geared to extreme acts, suicide bombers, and terrorism, as well as to a conception of protest and opposition as alien and enemylike. They are trying to herd, lock in, and possibly strangle a phenomenon that bears no relation to any of this. They are, that is, policing the wrong thing, which is why every act of pepper spraying or swing of the truncheon, every aggressive act (as in the recenteviction threat to “clean” the park) blows back on them and only increases the size and coverage of the movement.

Though much of the time they are just a few feet apart, the armed state backing that famed 1 percent, or Wall Street, and the unarmed protesters claiming the other 99 percent might as well be in two different times in two different universes connected by a Star-Trekkian wormhole and meeting only where pepper spray hits eyes.

Which means anyone visiting the Occupy Wall Street site is also watching a strange dance of phantoms. Still, we do know one thing. This massive semi-militarized force we continue to call “the police” will, in the coming years, only grow more so. After all, they know but one way to operate.

Right now, for instance, over crowds of protesters the police hover in helicopters with high-tech cameras and sensors, but in the future there can be little question that in the skies of cities like New York, the police will be operating advanced drone aircraft. Already, as TomDispatch regular Nick Turse indicates in his groundbreaking report, the U.S. military and the CIA are filling the global skies with missile-armed drones and the clamor for domestic drones is growing. The first attack on an American neighborhood, not one in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, or Libya, surely lurks somewhere in our future. Empires, after all, have a way of coming home to roost. Tom

America’s Secret Empire of Drone Bases

Its Full Extent Revealed For The First Time 

They increasingly dot the planet. There’s a facility outside Las Vegas where “pilots” work in climate-controlled trailers, another at a dusty camp in Africa formerly used by the French Foreign Legion, a third at a big air base in Afghanistan where Air Force personnel sit in front of multiple computer screens, and a fourth at an air base in the United Arab Emirates that almost no one talks about.

And that leaves at least 56 more such facilities to mention in an expanding American empire of unmanned drone bases being set up worldwide. Despite frequent news reports on the drone assassination campaign launched in support of America’s ever-widening undeclared wars and a spate of stories on drone bases in Africa and the Middle East, most of these facilities have remained unnoted, uncounted, and remarkably anonymous — until now.

Run by the military, the Central Intelligence Agency, and their proxies, these bases — some little more than desolate airstrips, others sophisticated command-and-control centers filled with computer screens and high-tech electronic equipment — are the backbone of a new American robotic way of war. They are also the latest development in a long-evolving saga of American power projection abroad — in this case, remote-controlled strikes anywhere on the planet with a minimal foreign “footprint” and little accountability.

Using military documents, press accounts, and other open-source information, an in-depth analysis by TomDispatch has identified at least 60 bases integral to U.S. military and CIA drone operations. There may, however, be more, since a cloak of secrecy about drone warfare leaves the full size and scope of these bases distinctly in the shadows.

A Galaxy of Bases

Over the last decade, the American use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned aerial systems has expanded exponentially, as has media coverage of their use. On Sept. 21, the Wall Street Journal reported that the military has deployed missile-armed MQ-9 Reaper drones on the “island nation of Seychelles to intensify attacks on al-Qaeda affiliates, particularly in Somalia.” A day earlier, a Washington Post piece also mentioned the same base on the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago, as well as one in the African nation of Djibouti, another under construction in Ethiopia, and a secret CIA airstrip being built for drones in an unnamed Middle Eastern country. (Some suspect it’s Saudi Arabia.)

Post journalists Greg Miller and Craig Whitlock reported that the “Obama administration is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of a newly aggressive campaign to attack al-Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen.” Within days, the Post also reported that a drone from the new CIA base in that unidentified Middle Eastern country had carried out the assassination of radical al-Qaeda preacher and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.

With the killing of Awlaki, the Obama administration has expanded its armed drone campaign to no fewer than six countries, though the CIA, which killed Awlaki, refuses to officially acknowledge its drone assassination program. The Air Force is less coy about its drone operations, yet there are many aspects of those, too, that remain in the shadows. Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. John Haynes recently told TomDispatch that, “for operational security reasons, we do not discuss worldwide operating locations of remotely piloted aircraft, to include numbers of locations around the world.”

Still, those 60 military and CIA bases worldwide, directly connected to the drone program, tell us much about America’s war-making future. From command and control and piloting to maintenance and arming, these facilities perform key functions that allow drone campaigns to continue expanding, as they have for more than a decade. Other bases are already under construction or in the planning stages. When presented with our list of Air Force sites within America’s galaxy of drone bases, Haynes responded, “I have nothing further to add to what I’ve already said.”

Even in the face of government secrecy, however, much can be discovered. Here, then, for the record is a TomDispatch accounting of America’s drone bases in the United States and around the world.

The Near Abroad

News reports have frequently focused on Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas as ground zero in America’s military drone campaign. Sitting in darkened, air-conditioned rooms 7,500 miles from Afghanistan, drone pilots dressed in flight suits remotely control MQ-9 Reapers and their progenitors, the less heavily-armed MQ-1 Predators. Beside them, sensor operators manipulate the TV camera, infrared camera, and other high-tech sensors onboard the plane. Their faces are lit up by digital displays showing video feeds from the battle zone. By squeezing a trigger on a joystick, one of those Air Force “pilots” can loose a Hellfire missile on a person half a world away.

While Creech gets the lion’s share of media attention — it even has its own drones on site — numerous other bases on U.S. soil have played critical roles in America’s drone wars. The same video-game-style warfare is carried out by U.S and British pilots not far away at Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base, the home of the Air Force’s 2nd Special Operations Squadron (SOS). According to a fact sheet provided to TomDispatch by the Air Force, the 2nd SOS and its drone operators are scheduled to be relocated to the Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field in Florida in the coming months.

Reapers or Predators are also being flown from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, March Air Reserve Base in California, Springfield Air National Guard Base in Ohio, Cannon Air Force Base and Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Ellington Airport in Houston, Texas, the Air National Guard base in Fargo, N.D., Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, and Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, N.Y. Recently, it was announced that Reapers flown by Hancock’s pilots would begin taking off on training missions from the Army’s Fort Drum, also in New York state.

Meanwhile, at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, according to a report by the New York Times, teams of camouflage-clad Air Force analysts sit in a secret intelligence and surveillance installation monitoring cell-phone intercepts, high-altitude photographs, and most notably, multiple screens of streaming live video from drones in Afghanistan. They call it “Death TV” and are constantly instant-messaging with and talking to commanders on the ground in order to supply them with real-time intelligence on enemy troop movements. Air Force analysts also closely monitor the battlefield from Air Force Special Operations Command in Florida and a facility in Terre Haute, Ind.

CIA drone operators also reportedly pilot their aircraft from the Agency’s nearby Langley, Va., headquarters. It was from here that analysts apparently watched footage of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, for example, thanks to video sent back by the RQ-170 Sentinel, an advanced drone nicknamed the “Beast of Kandahar.” According to Air Force documents, the Sentinel is flown from both Creech Air Force Base and Tonopah Test Range in Nevada.

Predators, Reapers, and Sentinels are just part of the story. At Beale Air Force Base in California, Air Force personnel pilot the RQ-4 Global Hawk, an unmanned drone used for long-range, high-altitude surveillance missions, some of them originating from Anderson Air Force Base in Guam (a staging ground for drone flights over Asia). Other Global Hawks are stationed at Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota, while the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio manages the Global Hawk as well as the Predator and Reaper programs for the Air Force.

Other bases have been intimately involved in training drone operators, including Randolph Air Force Base in Texas and New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force Base, as is the Army’s Fort Huachuca in Arizona, which is home to “the world’s largest UAV training center,” according to a report by National Defense magazine. There, hundreds of employees of defense giant General Dynamics train military personnel to fly smaller tactical drones like the Hunter and the Shadow. The physical testing of drones goes on at adjoining Libby Army Airfield and “two UAV runways located approximately four miles west of Libby,” according to Global Security, an online clearinghouse for military information.

Additionally, small drone training for the Army is carried out at Fort Benning in Georgia, while at Fort Rucker, Ala. — “the home of Army aviation” — the Unmanned Aircraft Systems program coordinates doctrine, strategy, and concepts pertaining to UAVs. Recently, Fort Benning also saw the early testing of true robotic drones — which fly without human guidance or a hand on any joystick. This, wrote theWashington Post, is considered the next step toward a future in which drones will “hunt, identify, and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans.”

The Army has also carried out UAV training exercises at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, and earlier this year, the Navy launched its X-47B, a next-generation semi-autonomous stealth drone, on its first flight at Edwards Air Force Base in California. That flying robot — designed to operate from the decks of aircraft carriers — has since been sent on to Maryland’s Naval Air Station Patuxent River for further testing. At nearby Webster Field, the Navy worked out kinks in its Fire Scout pilotless helicopter, which has also been tested at Fort Rucker and Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, as well as Florida’s Mayport Naval Station and Jacksonville Naval Air Station. The latter base was also where the Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) unmanned aerial system was developed. It is now based there and at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington state.

Foreign Jewels In The Crown

The Navy is actively looking for a suitable site in the Western Pacific for a BAMS base, and is currently in talks with several Persian Gulf states about a site in the Middle East. It already has Global Hawks perched at its base in Sigonella, Italy.

The Air Force is now negotiating with Turkey to relocate some of the Predator drones still operating in Iraq to the giant air base at Incirlik next year. Many different UAVs have been based in Iraq since the American invasion of that country, including small tactical models like the Raven-B that troops launched by hand from Kirkuk Regional Air Base, Shadow UAVs that flew from Forward Operating Base Normandy in Baqubah Province, Predators operating out of Balad Airbase, miniature Desert Hawk drones launched from Tallil Air Base, and Scan Eagles based at Al Asad Air Base.

Elsewhere in the Greater Middle East, according to Aviation Week, the military is launching Global Hawks from Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, piloted by personnel stationed at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland, to track “shipping traffic in the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Arabian Sea.” There areunconfirmed reports that the CIA may be operating drones from the Emirates as well. In the past, other UAVs have apparently been flown from Kuwait’s Ali Al Salem Air Base and Al Jaber Air Base, as well as Seeb Air Base in Oman.

At Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the Air Force runs an air operations command and control facility, critical to the drone wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The new secret CIA base on the Arabian peninsula, used to assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, may or may not be the airstrip in Saudi Arabia whose existence a senior U.S. military official recently confirmed to Fox News. In the past, the CIA has also operated UAVs out of Tuzel, Uzbekistan.

In neighboring Afghanistan, drones fly from many bases including Jalalabad Air Base, Kandahar Air Field, the air base at Bagram, Camp Leatherneck, Camp Dwyer, Combat Outpost Payne, Forward Operating Base (FOB) Edinburgh, and FOB Delaram II, to name a few. Afghan bases are, however, more than just locations where drones take off and land.

It is a common misconception that U.S.-based operators are the only ones who “fly” America’s armed drones. In fact, in and around America’s war zones, UAVs begin and end their flights under the control of local “pilots.” Take Afghanistan’s massive Bagram Air Base. After performing preflight checks alongside a technician who focuses on the drone’s sensors, a local airman sits in front of a Dell computer tower and multiple monitors, two keyboards, a joystick, a throttle, a rollerball, a mouse, and various switches, overseeing the plane’s takeoff before handing it over to a stateside counterpart with a similar electronics set-up. After the mission is complete, the controls are transferred back to the local operators for the landing. Additionally, crews in Afghanistan perform general maintenance and repairs on the drones.

In the wake of a devastating suicide attack by an al-Qaeda double agent that killed CIA officers and contractors at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Khost in 2009, it came to light that the facility was heavily involved in target selection for drone strikes across the border in Pakistan. The drones themselves, as the Washington Post noted at the time, were “flown from separate bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Both the Air Force and the CIA have conducted operations in Pakistani air space, with some missions originating in Afghanistan and others from inside Pakistan. In 2006, images of what appear to be Predator drones stationed at Shamsi Air Base in Pakistan’s Balochistan province were found on Google Earth and later published. In 2009, the New York Times reported that operatives from Xe Services, the company formerly known as Blackwater, had taken over the task of arming Predator drones at the CIA’s “hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

Following the May Navy SEAL raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, that country’s leaders reportedly ordered the United States to leave Shamsi. The Obama administration evidently refused, and word leaked out, according to the Washington Post, that the base was actually owned and sublet to the U.S. by the United Arab Emirates, which had built the airfield “as an arrival point for falconry and other hunting expeditions in Pakistan.”

The U.S. and Pakistani governments have since claimed that Shamsi is no longer being used for drone strikes. True or not, the U.S. evidently also uses other Pakistani bases for its drones, including possibly PAF Base Shahbaz, located near the city of Jacocobad, and another base located near Ghazi.

The New Scramble For Africa

Recently, the headline story, when it comes to the expansion of the empire of drone bases, has been Africa. For the last decade, the U.S. military has been operating out ofCamp Lemonnier, a former French Foreign Legion base in the tiny African nation of Djibouti. Not long after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it became a base for Predator drones and has since been used to conduct missions over neighboring Somalia.

For some time, rumors have also been circulating about a secret American base in Ethiopia. Recently, a U.S. official revealed to the Washington Post that discussions about a drone base there had been underway for up to four years, “but that plan was delayed because ‘the Ethiopians were not all that jazzed.’” Now construction is evidently underway, if not complete.

Then, of course, there is that base on the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. A small fleet of Navy and Air Force drones began operating openly there in 2009 to track pirates in the region’s waters. Classified diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, however, reveal that those drones have also secretly been used to carry out missions in Somalia. “Based in a hangar located about a quarter-mile from the main passenger terminal at the airport,” the Post reports, the base consists of three or four “Reapers and about 100 U.S. military personnel and contractors, according to the cables.”

The U.S. has also recently sent four smaller tactical drones to the African nations of Uganda and Burundi for use by those countries’ militaries.

New and Old Empires

Even if the Pentagon budget were to begin to shrink, expansion of America’s empire of drone bases is a sure thing in the years to come. Drones are now the bedrock of Washington’s future military planning and — with counterinsurgency out of favor — the preferred way of carrying out wars abroad.

During the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, as the U.S. was building up its drone fleets, the country launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and carried out limited strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia, using drones in at least four of those countries. In less than three years under President Obama, the U.S. has launched drone strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. It maintains that it has carte blanche to kill suspected enemies in any nation (or at least any nation in the global South).

According to a report by the Congressional Budget Office published earlier this year, “the Department of Defense plans to purchase about 730 new medium-sized and large unmanned aircraft systems” over the next decade. In practical terms, this means more drones like the Reaper.

Military officials told the Wall Street Journal that the Reaper “can fly 1,150 miles from base, conduct missions, and return home. … [T]he time a drone can stay aloft depends on how heavily armed it is.” According to a drone operator training document obtained by TomDispatch, at maximum payload, meaning with 3,750 pounds worth of Hellfire missiles and GBU-12 or GBU-30 bombs on board, the Reaper can remain aloft for 16 to 20 hours.

Even a glance at a world map tells you that, if the U.S. is to carry out ever more drone strikes across the developing world, it will need more bases for its future UAVs. As an unnamed senior military official pointed out to a Washington Post reporter, speaking of all those new drone bases clustered around the Somali and Yemeni war zones, “If you look at it geographically, it makes sense — you get out a ruler and draw the distances [drones] can fly and where they take off from.”

Earlier this year, an analysis by TomDispatch determined that there are more than 1,000 U.S. military bases scattered across the globe — a shadowy base-world providing plenty of existing sites that can, and no doubt will, host drones. But facilities selected for a pre-drone world may not always prove optimal locations for America’s current and future undeclared wars and assassination campaigns. So further expansion in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia is a likelihood.

What are the Air Force’s plans in this regard? Lt. Col. John Haynes was typically circumspect, saying, “We are constantly evaluating potential operating locations based on evolving mission needs.” If the last decade is any indication, those “needs” will only continue to grow.

Nick Turse is a historian, essayist, and investigative journalist. The associate editor ofTomDispatch.com and a senior editor at Alternet.org, his latest book is The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books). This article marks another of Turse’s joint Alternet/TomDispatch investigative reports on U.S. national security policy and the American empire.

Copyright 2011 Nick Turse

People Power vs. The Police State

The NYPD Has Erected A Ring Of Steel Around Liberty Plaza, But Occupy Wall Street Vows To Resist.

By Nick Turse
October 13, 2011
Courtesy Of "Alter Net"

"The more, the merrier,” was how the white-shirted police inspector put it as he stood on the periphery of Liberty Plaza while activist and Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello played for Occupy Wall Street protesters on Thursday afternoon.

people in the jam-packed park, it could have been a commentary on his department’s presence.The periphery of Liberty Plaza, formally known as Zuccotti Park, resembles an armed camp with surveillance equipment, police vehicles, armed officers, and metal barricades ringing a city square filled with unarmed activists, who openly advocate non-violence.The response is as disproportionate as it is superfluous, a point driven home by the utter apathy displayed by many of the security forces on the scene…today.Tomorrow, the occupiers face the real possibility that the overwhelming police presence will spring to life in order to evict them, end the four-week people’s occupation and snuff out the new society they’re building.

“More” was the operative word.While the NYPD commander was glad-handing a elderly protester who was asking about his thoughts on all the 

The NYPD’s Numbers Game

The sheer numbers tell the story when it comes to the NYPD’s response to the Occupy Wall Street movement.On this misty morning as the park was just coming to life, there were 22 uniformed police officers, as well as two white-shirted commanders, already ringing the square.A rainbow coalition, men and women: 

Thompson, Brancaccio, Yusuff, Badillo, Jacob, Sanchez, Lagani, they stood looking disinterested, or texted on their smart phones or answered tourists’ questions, forming an intermittent chain of dark blue enforcers with little to enforce.

similarly ring the park, leaving openings only at the plaza’s four corners.Roughly 150 individual fences surround the park itself, counting those that are doubled up and can be used to seal the plaza entirely should the police decide to do so. 

Their numbers were exceeded (and augmented) by the metal barricades that 

Along Liberty Street sit a phalanx of police vehicles that come and go, but mostly stay put.In front of One Liberty Plaza, the 54-story tower just north of the park (whose owners, Brookfield Properties, also own Zuccotti Park), I counted seven squad cars, two full-size police vans, one police minivan and one, to lapse into political incorrectness, “paddy wagon.”In most of these vehicles uniformed police officers sat talking on phones, texting, eating or dozing.Later in the morning, the total count had increased to 16 police vehicles, in addition to a number of unmarked cars, most of which proved to belong to police officers, too.

The police state ethos did not, however, end with the NYPD presence surrounding the park’s perimeter.Across Broadway and up Liberty Street, the security forces maintained a reserve contingent of 11 police cars, five police vans, and one paddy wagon from precincts all over the city: the 1st, 5th, 9th, 10th, 13th, 20th, 83rd, 94th(Brooklyn!), as well as the Fleet Services Division which oversees the NYPD’s inventory of cars.There was even a large NYPD Communications Division bus that sat in front of the century-old New York Chamber of Commerce building.Through the lone window not blocked by curtains I could see a sergeant, sitting and texting, while sipping from a juice bottle.

Spies Like Us

Even before the protesters began their occupation of the block-long, half-acre park of granite walls and honey-locust trees, the NYPD had a permanent presence on site.Just across the street, a fixed, black NYPD security camera provides the police with an all-seeing eye on the surrounding environs.Across the intersection from it, just above the sign for Liberty Street (and apparently with no intended irony), a large sign announces “NYPD Security Camera In Area.”

That stationary camera is, however, apparently not sufficient for the NYPD’s surveillance needs.Not 10 feet from the NYPD camera sign sits an unmarked white truck with a 15-foot, camera-topped pole sticking out of its roof.Only its license plate brands it as the property of the police department.

One block down, at the foot of the park on the corner of Liberty and Cedar Streets, an NYPD sky watch tower -- a Panopticon-like structure outfitted with black-tinted windows, a spotlight, sensors, and multiple cameras (originally used by hunters to shoot quarry from overhead and now also used by the Department of Homeland Security along the Mexican border)provides further overwatch.

The Beginning Of The End?Or A New Beginning? 

Later in the day, I took a second inventory of the police presence ringing the park.As I walked the plaza perimeter I saw that the run-of-the-mill beat cops in blue and their white-shirted superiors had been joined by members of NYPD's Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU), the outfit that films protests, suit-wearing plainclothes detectives, sore-thumb plainclothesmen (middle-aged white men, wearing out-of-fashion jeans and white sneakers who just happen to loiter on the edges of protests) and even a uniformed member of the Disorder Control Unit -- the special cadre tasked with suppressing riots.

In all, the NYPD’s numbers had increased to 42 police on the immediate periphery of the park (not counting who knows how many undercover officers), but just about all the policing any of them actually did was hassle reporters and daytrippers, telling them to keep moving and stand in the park, not on the sidewalk if they wanted to gawk, talk or text -- precisely what most of the cops were doing at one point or another themselves.

On Wednesday night, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that Zuccotti Park would be closed for cleaning at 7am Friday and scrubbed down in a four-step process, one quadrant at a time.“After it’s cleaned, they’ll be able to come back,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said of the protesters later.“But they won’t be able to bring back the gear. The sleeping bags, that sort of thing, will not be able to be brought back into the park.”

During an emergency General Assembly at Liberty Plaza to deal with the city’s plans, one activisthad an answer for Bloomberg and Kelly. "We see this as a pretext to shut the occupation down,” he told the crowd."They will not foreclose our home! This is an occupation, not a permitted picnic. We won't allow them to come in!"

At dawn, the apathy of napping, texting police officers may be replaced by an aggressive attempt by the city to take back the park.They have the numbers and the equipment and more is certainly on the way.The protesters are, however, confident and defiant -- vowing to link arms and non-violently resist the police. 

More than one Occupy Wall Street protester said today that a police crackdown would strengthen the movement, and in its short history, heavy-handed police tactics have galvanized the most support for the new society taking shape in Liberty Plaza.“Get up, get down, there’s revolution in this town,” protesters chanted as sirens wailed during their emergency assembly.

Tomorrow may be the most salient test yet of the young movement’s people power in the face of police-state tactics.The NYPD has overwhelming force, but right now, Occupy Wall Street still holds the park and is still building, they shouted in unison today, “The society that we envision for the world!”

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and a senior editor at AlterNet. His latest book is The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso). 

5 Reasons The Right Is Terrified Of Occupy Wall St.

Photo Credit: Nick Turse


The Occupy Wall Street Movement Is So Frightening To The Right Because It May Directly Affect Voter Behavior In The Upcoming Election.

By Robert Creamer
October 12, 2011
Courtesy Of "Alter Net"

The Occupy Wall Street movement really frightens the Right Wing. It is not frightening to the Right because of Congressman Eric Cantor's feigned fear of "the mob" that is "occupying our cities." It is not frightening because anyone is really worried that Glenn Beck is correct when he predicts that the protesters will "come for you, drag you into the street, and kill you."

That's not why they are really frightened -- that's the Right trying to frighten everyday Americans.

There are five reasons why the Right is in fact frightened by the Occupy Wall Street movement. None of them have to do with physical violence -- they have to do with politics. They're not really worried about ending up like Marie Antoinette. But they are very worried that their electoral heads may roll.

• All elections are decided by two groups of people:
• Persuadable voters who always vote, but are undecided switch hitters. This group includes lots of political independents.
• Mobilizable voters who would vote for one Party or the other, but have to be motivated to vote.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement is so frightening to the Right because it may directly affect the behavior of those two groups of voters in the upcoming election.

circumstances. As a result the outcome of the 2012 election will hinge heavily on who gets the blame for the horrible economy -- and who the public believes, or hopes -- can lead them into better economic times.

1). The Narrative. People in America are very unhappy with their economic 

Political narratives are the stories people use to understand the political world. Like all stories, they define a protagonist and antagonist. And political narratives generally ascribe to those central characters moral qualities -- right and wrong.

For several years, the Tea Party-driven narrative has been in the ascendance to explain America's economic woes. Its vision of the elites in government versus hard-working freedom-loving people has heavily defined the national political debate.

Of course at first glance it's an easy case for them to make. The President, who is the head of the over-powerful, "dysfunctional" government, is in charge. Things aren't going well -- so he, and the government he runs, must be at fault.

Street banks, CEO's and top one percent -- those are the culprits who sunk the economy and who have siphoned off all of the economic growth from the middle class. They and their enablers in Congress -- largely Republicans -- are the problem. To address the underlying economic crisis facing everyday Americans we must rein in their power.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has helped force the alternative narrative into the media and public consciousness. The recklessness and greed of the big Wall 

This narrative is very compelling and, of course, it is true. It's not that many voices haven't framed the debate in these terms for years. But by creating a must- cover story, the Occupy Wall Street movement has forced it onto the daily media agenda. That is great news for Progressives. The longer it continues, the better.

Right Wing pundits have disparaged the Occupy Wall Street movement for not having specific "policy proposals" -- but the Right knows better. The Occupy Wall Street movement is advocating something much more fundamental. It is demanding a change in the relations of power -- reining in the power of Wall Street, millionaires and billionaires - the CEO class as a whole. It is demanding that everyday Americans -- the 99% -- share in the increases in their productivity and have more real control of their futures -- both individually and as a society. Now that's something for the Right to worry about.

2). Inside-Outside. Especially in periods when people are unhappy, the political high ground is defined by who voters perceive to be elite insiders and who they perceive to be populist outsiders. Who among the political leaders and political forces are actually agents of change?

In 2008, Barak Obama won that battle hands down. The Tea Party Movement muddied the water. It portrayed themselves as "don't tread on me" populist outsiders doing battle with President Obama the elite, liberal insider.

Of course this ignores that the Tea Party was in many ways bought and paid for by huge corporate interests -- but in the public mind it was a very compelling image.

The Right Wing has always had its own version of "class conflict." Its "ruling class" is defined as the elite, intellectuals, bureaucrats, entertainers and academics that are out to destroy traditional values and undermine the well-being of ordinary Americans.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, coupled with the movements in Wisconsin and Ohio earlier this year, present an entirely different -- and accurate -- picture of who is on the inside and who is not.

3). Momentum. Politics is very much about momentum. Human beings are herding creatures -- they travel in packs. People like to go with the flow. Whether in election campaigns, or legislative proposals, or social movements, or football games -- the team with the momentum is much more likely to win.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has put the progressive forces in society on the offense -- it has begun to build progressive momentum.

4). Movement. The Occupy Wall Street movement has managed to turn itself into a real "movement." Movements don't involve your normal run-of-the-mill organizing. Normally organizers have to worry about turning out people -- or voters -- one person or one group at a time. Not so with movements.

Movements go viral. They involve spontaneous chain reactions. One person engages another person, who engages another and so on. Like nuclear chain reactions, movements reach critical mass and explode.

That's what makes them so potentially powerful -- and so dangerous to their opposition.

Often movements are sparked by unexpected precipitating events -- like the death of the fruit stand vendor in Tunisia that set off the Arab Spring. Sometimes they build around the determined effort of a few until that critical mass is reached.

In all cases movements explode because the tinder is dry and one unexpected spark can set off a wild fire.

Movements mobilize enormous resources -- individual effort, money, person power - by motivating people to take spontaneous action.

The Occupy Wall Street movement in New York has spread to scores of cities -- and the fire shows no sign of flaming out. It will fuel the engagement and remobilization of thousands of progressive activists and volunteers who had been demobilized and demoralized, but the sausage-making of the DC legislative process. That is a huge problem for the right that was counting on despondency and lethargy among progressives to allow them to consolidate their hold on political power in 2012.

5). Inspiration. More than anything else, in order to mount a counter-offensive against the Right wing next year, Progressives need to re-inspire our base. We need to re-inspire young people and all of the massive corps of volunteers who powered the victory in 2008.

Inspiration is critical to mobilization. It is also critical to persuasion. Swing voters want leaders who inspire them.

Inspiration is not about what people think -- it's about what they feel about themselves. When you're inspired you feel empowered. You feel that you are part of something bigger than yourself, and that you -- yourself -- can play a significant role in achieving that larger goal.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has begun to inspire people all over America. That's because people are inspired by example. They themselves are inspired if they see others standing up for themselves -- speaking truth to power -- standing up in the face of strong, entrenched opposition. People are inspired by heroic acts -- by commitment -- by people who say they are so committed that they will stay in a park next to Wall Street until they make change. That's what happened in Egypt and Tunisia. That's what happened in Wisconsin this spring.

The legacy of the Occupy Wall Street movement could very well be the re-inspiration of tens of thousands of Progressives -- and the engagement of young people that are so important to the future of the progressive movement in America.

Right-wingers will plant provocateurs in an attempt to stigmatize the Occupy Wall Street movement with violence -- to make it look frightening. But if the Movement continues with the kind of single-minded purpose and commitment that we have seen so far, the Occupy Wall Street movement may very well make history. It has already become an enormous progressive asset as America approaches the critical crossroad election that could determine whether the next American generation experiences the American Dream or simply reads about it in their history books. 

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com. He is a partner in Democracy Partners and a Senior Strategist for Americans United for Change.