It's hard to know what to make of this as without the [DELETED] portions, as there's no evidence of government agencies being involved. I'm not sure why Occupy were not informed of such a plot though? Perhaps the FBI didn't think it was credible?
The part that worries me even more than the death threats was the classification of the Occupy movement as 'terrorist activity'. This opens them up to a whole catalogue of surveillance methods and methods of detention, and is a good illustration of terrorism powers being extended and misused for domestic dissent.
This misuse of the label 'terrorist' highlights the danger of employing extra-legal means to attack your enemies in other countries, it undermines the rule of law everywhere, and weakens the accountability of all law enforcement agencies. Assassination, torture, rendition, and detention without trial are all normalised now in the US for terrorists. The definition of an enemy for the state always includes some of its citizens, so you end up with scope creep where formerly completely illegal and unthinkable acts are considered normal, just because the word terrorism has been used in conjunction with a person or organisation.
Terrorist is todays communist, or yesteryears fascist, eugenicist, jap, negro, etc. Blanket arbitrary term to apply to dissenters you want to control and treat inhumanely, and society doesn't judge you for it because they are the "enemy" or "other". It incites an emotional response in people that let those holding the pen get away with way more than they should.
Slightly tangential, but I'm pretty sure eugenicists were never thought of in the same way as communists et al. In the US, eugenics was an important idea in the Progressive Era of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, and while it wasn't universally liked (the Catholic church being a notable opponent), it did have broad social approval and at least a few countries practiced eugenics in some form. This all changed with Hitler and World War II, and now eugenics is another idea sidelined to the dustbin of history. (For now?)
As Wikipedia says: "At its peak of popularity, eugenics was supported by a wide variety of prominent people, including Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, H. G. Wells, Norman Haire, Havelock Ellis, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Linus Pauling and Sidney Webb. Its most infamous proponent and practitioner was, however, Adolf Hitler who praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf and emulated Eugenic legislation for the sterilization of "defectives" that had been pioneered in the United States." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Supporters_and_critic...
Abortion of a foetus with an identifiable disability is considered acceptable today by many people, which is similar in spirit if not in practice to eugenics.
I'm sorry, but no. There's no equivalence in spirit between a crying mother deciding that it's in the best interests of her family to terminate a pregnancy and a bunch of scary-eyed fanatics trying to make humanity "better".
I'm assuming you've never known anyone go through that. It's a personal tragedy, not an intellectual issue.
"terminate a pregnancy"? Is there a name for the practice of using more convoluted words so as no to make people focus on the real meaning of the sentence?
You could have used "terminate the carrying developing offspring within the body, by terminating said offspring's capacity for metabolism, growth or reaction to stimuli".
OTOH, you mention "a crying mother", which IMHO should be compared to the other tragedy: "an innocent baby being torn apart, aspirated, poisoned or killed in some other way"
Believe me, I'm not trying to avoid the full meaning of the words. I'm merely pointing out that, contrary to what some people seem to wish to believe, the people making these decisions aren't avoiding them either.
The problem is: there's no good words to use, because they've been co-opted by political positions and value judgements. "Baby" indicates you're anti-abortion, "foetus" indicates you're pro-abortion. I went for pregnancy, because that implies the "potential to be a baby".
"Terminate" has the same problem. What are the alternatives? "Abort" is pretty much taken by the pro-lifers. It's such an emotive issue that in the UK, where there is no broad based political movement that wishes to outlaw it, medical professionals don't even have a word for it. They have words for specific procedures like EPRC, and as far as I can tell they change those terms every couple of years. And of course, the terminology is the same whether the pregnancy is still ongoing or not.
It was just a brief way of saying, "All you've communicated is that the equation of the two doesn't feel right, without giving anyone a reason to deem your view more persuasive."
This is basically what happened:
A: That seems dangerously close to eugenics, in that it's weeding out people with bad genes.
B: Oh yeah? If you distorted your view by listening to crying moms who agree with me (and not similar weepers on the other side), you'd agree with me.
Let's try something a little more intellectual: there's also the aspect that eugenics is an idea directed to the improvement of humanity (an idea I'm... suspicious of) and abortions are decision by individuals reflecting individual circumstance. I don't believe these decisions are made on the eugenics basis: that disabled people are somehow worse than other people.
Eugenics is relatively easy to judge: you can get all the facts. Individual decisions are always harder: you don't know the full circumstance. I'm not saying that their aren't abortions made for obscene reasons (terminating girls is an obvious example), but not all are.
I apologise, my comment was far too cold towards people who have been presented with that very distressing choice, I should have thought more carefully about it before posting.
I'd say the reverse: that selective abortions are (maybe, in some cases) similar in practice, but not in spirit to eugenics. The difference is that eugenics had an imperative to it. They wanted to 'improve the human race' through selective breeding of humans. They were concerned about the population genetics as a whole, not an individual.
And yes, it was very much an accepted area of thought and research in academia from the late 1800s to the end of the second world war. It wasn't until it became associated with Nazi Germany that the idea became taboo.
Or abortion of foetus if she's a girl. Or of a foetus of whatever gender if "we're too many", and one more would mean less confort for the others, less education, less whatever.
Considering that many people in these services apply the term terrorist to a lot more people and groups than Al Quaida, I really don't think it's a false equivalency.
The "War on Terror" is absurd because it's stateless and doesn't describe any one single group of people. It's a war on a very loose set of behaviors.
The average person thinks "War on Terror" and they support it because they have the people who brought down the Twin Towers in mind. Whereas people in the NSA, CIA, FBI, police stations across the country, etc, are thinking Occupy Wall Street, PETA, etc.
But Governments are neither homogenous nor monolithic. Saying 'Governments do X' is like saying 'corporations are at the root of all our problems.' Reason along those lines, and pretty soon the only rational choice is to become a hermit and avoid society entirely. After all, society is made up of people, and people are well-known to engage in murder, rape, robbery, etc. etc. Therefore, people are the problem.
If someone is engaging in murder, rape or robbery, it would make sense to call attention to this fact, and then perhaps do something about it, wouldn't it? Parts of the US government are CURRENTLY misusing the word "terrorist" as a very broad label. This is very dangerous for the reasons discussed above. It's important to call attention to this problem if we have any hope of halting it.
Yes - you call attention to the specific person engaging in those acts. When you overlook that requirement of specificity, you end up accusing people based on their membership in a class, eg 'all gypsies are thieves, X is a gypsy, therefore X is a thief.'
So saying 'the US government is doing X, and I think it's acting illegally because Y' - fine. But 'the US government is doing X and this will end badly because governments always oppress citizens' (an argument that has appeared here a lot lately) isn't fine, because it rests on a false premise.
It's clearly useful to describe a structure independently from its consitutent atoms. Anyone who doesn't do so is virtually unable to communicate.
Social structures do things, and are amenable to institutional analysis. This allows us to act without omniscience. Institutional analysis allows one to analyze institutions independently of individuals; replace all the people, and you may nevertheless expect similar outcomes. Thus we can perform institutional analysis on governments, corporations, mafias, economies, consumers, managers, startups, etc.
If this weren't the case, humans wouldn't form institutions in the first place.
I wholly agree, but surely you've noticed that many people take the observation that 'some governments sometimes do things' to mean that 'all governments inevitably do those things,' which is plainly untrue.
Governments can lie. But terrorist is not an arbitrary term to stifle dissent - it is a specific and identifiable tactic used to achieve certain goals. If somebody says black is white, it doesn't mean black and white are arbitrary labels that can be applied to anything. That's the false dichotomy that is offered to us.
Terrorist is an arbitrary term used to stifle dissent and demonide an opposition. One could use the term "freedom fighter" in it place and suddenly it has a whole new moral meaning.
We Brits know this well, as we referred to the IRA terrorists, while many Americans and Irish called them freedom fighters, while funding them.
Perhaps consider this when Nelson Mandela dies. A man who for years was considered a terrorist, but is now almost universally considered a freedom fighter.
Note: I have mode no moral judgement about either the IRA or Nelson Mandela.
The falseness is this is in the application of morality labels. "Terrorist" implies something wrong and evil. Freedom Fighter implies nobility. Both are people using violence to achieve political aims. Much like the US does. Which means many world wide have every right to consider the US a terrorist state, since that terror is by a democratically elected government.
"The first recorded incident in America occurred in 1766:
Captain William Smith was tarred, feathered, and dumped
into the harbor of Norfolk, Virginia, by a mob that
included the town's Mayor."[0]
Claims of US perpetrated terrorism aren't even limited to the founding of the country. Take the downing of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 and the Contras in Nicaragua for example[5]
Terrorism implies the use of terror, -choosing targets and tactics not to inflict the biggest/smallest damage but to scare.
Typically this results in attacks on civilians instead of attacking enemy soldiers (who have been trained to handle fear). Other typical traits: using weapons that creates visible damage, injures etc
The sets of freedom fighters and terrorists might intercept but neither is a subset of the other.
I think the main problem the US has with sticking to a clear definition of terrorism is that it usually would apply to itself as well, so that's no good..
But yes, terrorism does mean something; just the way the word is used a lot, kinda doesn't... but this doesn't change what is terrorism and what is not. Even if someone where to argue that the ends justify the means, it would not change what those means are.
The most likely candidate to me seems some fringe right-wing types flapping their mouths in an internet forum. I've heard plenty of people at that end of the spectrum averring that the Occupy movement was some sort of Marxist 5th column under orders from Obama, or variants on that theme. Right-wing fringe thinkers like to fantasize about putting their guns to patriotic use in much the same way that leftist fringe thinkers like to fantasize about general strikes and establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat.
My guess is that the FBI was monitoring the person(s) floating these ideas but didn't consider them a credible threat.
But they were calling the Occupy people potential terrorists...not the right-wingers who might've wanted to assassinate their leaders. Strange, isn't it?
No. You have a second-hand, uncorroborated report that someone within the FBI and/or DHS referred to the Occupy movement as terrorists, with no context whatsoever.
First, without context or a link to the source the report is meaningless. The documents that are cited in this report make no such characterization. Second, these two organizations are huge. It's entirely possible that someon in the FBI wrote a report describing the Occupy folks as potential terrorists - I can easily believe that occurred. That's not the same as the entire organization or even its leadership holding that position.
Context matters a lot, and so do primary sources. This sort of political free-association that you seem to enjoy quickly ends up in conspiracy-theory territory because it's not falsifiable. This is why it's so hard to talk to people who buy into UFO conspiracies; possibility is continually treated as probability, and eventually it starts to look to them like everything revolves around an attempt to conceal Aliens Among Us. You can't talk them out of it, because that's just sort of thing a PsyOps operative would do, right?
Do you remember the shitstorm in 2009 when DHS came up with a report on 'rightwing extremism'? That was a fairly dry and dispassionate overview of one type of possible domestic terrorism (http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/rightwing.pdf), but to look at the reaction in the blogosphere you'd think the Obama administration was about to carry out the bloodiest purge since Stalin. Forgive me if I don't give random extrapolations based on a single word a great deal of weight.
>No. You have a second-hand, uncorroborated report that someone within the FBI and/or DHS referred to the Occupy movement as terrorists, with no context whatsoever.
Most items in the documents indicate that people associated the Occupy movement are the primary focus of investigations. Ironically, at lease one of the incidents named "terrorism" by FBI agents is a report of pretty minor violence directed at Occupy protesters (a Drano bomb). It doesn't give the appearance that field agents spam the word terrorism as much as their press spokesperson counterparts. I suspect many field agents are just as tired of the word as I am.
So here is your context. There is a large group of groups within State and local law enforcement agencies named "Joint Terrorism Task Force" (JTTF), which has money, and other resources; and a broad mandate and expanded authority, which spends its time spying on and policing what are obviously peaceful groups of citizens protesting social and political issues. It stores its reports in a database under a heading named "counterterrorism".
The whole thing smells too much like a better organized and better funded version of the COINTELPRO program under Hoover's FBI, which I would expect was begun in a similar manner and spirit.
So here is your context. There is a large group of groups within State and local law enforcement agencies named "Joint Terrorism Task Force" (JTTF), which has money, and other resources; and a broad mandate and expanded authority, which spends its time spying on and policing what are obviously peaceful groups of citizens protesting social and political issues. It stores its reports in a database under a heading named "counterterrorism".
/Facepalm
Most of the documents in here consist of observations that OWS events were peaceful and harmless, or that where there was violence it was the exception and was rejected by most protestors.You're complaining about a JTTF coming to the conclusion that this or that OWS event is a false positive, because the JTTF has 'terrorism' in its name.
This is like arguing that doctors consider everyone to be sick because they are trained to be on the lookout for disease. I can't have a serious conversation with you if you think this way.
Though I'm not sure I agree that a counter terrorism task force should be in any way connected to investigating Occupy protests without credible and specific threats of real terrorism, here's an even better example of the misuse of powers against terrorists:
When defending the liberty of unsavory characters, I usually write of my native England. Not this week, alas. In the state of Texas, a 19-year-old man named Justin Carter sits in prison, ruthlessly stripped of his freedom for making an offensive joke. After a Facebook friend with whom he played video games described him as “crazy” and “messed up in the head,” Carter replied — sarcastically, one imagines — “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts.” He added “lol” and “jk” for good measure. For this he was arrested by Austin police, charged with making a “terroristic threat,” and thrown into prison. He may languish there until the start of the next decade.http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352432/free-justin-car...
I imagine half the male population of the US could be jailed for making similar remarks at some stage in their life.
If you give police special powers against terrorists, gradually all suspects will be considered a terrorist, because it's just easier that way. Recently a 19 year old boy has been jailed for years for one sarcastic comment, in the name of fighting terror.
It's entirely possible that someon in the FBI wrote a report describing the Occupy folks as potential terrorists - I can easily believe that occurred. That's not the same as the entire organization or even its leadership holding that position.
I agree that this is not something to be outraged about, but it is something to be watchful of and to be called out - government agencies should not refer to peaceful or even violent protesters as terrorists, and our laws should not distinguish between terrorists and other suspects in terms of the rights we give them. In this particular case I agree we need more evidence to say anything meaningful, but there are plenty of examples of misuse of powers given to our states to deal with terrorists for other purposes.
Context matters a lot, and so do primary sources. This sort of political free-association that you seem to enjoy quickly ends up in conspiracy-theory territory because it's not falsifiable.
That is mostly my objection to the use of the label terrorist - the meaning of the term has been stretched to encompass so many acts (from giving money, to riots, to bombing a market), and the judgement calls required to choose between freedom-fighter and terrorist are so subjective, that use of the term limits the horizons of any debate to a narrow exchange of slogans. It is similar to the epithet traitor when applied to Edward Snowden. It's simply a way to shut down debate without further thought, and classify others as in a group you could never parley with or understand.
What's interesting about both the Snowden case and terrorism when it comes to the US is that in both cases the government sees some acts as good, and others as bad a priori, when in character they are exactly the same. This administration leaks classified secrets all the time, but those are good leaks, whereas Snowden's leaks to journalists are bad leaks. Obama stood in the former jail cell of a terrorist at the weekend and contemplated freedom and the terrorist's struggle to end Apartheid.
These issues are complex and shouldn't be reduced to sound-bites or slogans, and the label of terrorist is particularly dangerous in the west at present as it has been used to justify ignoring our laws on human rights, privacy, and justice for whole swathes of people. As soon as you are associated (even a few degrees removed) from activity deemed terrorist, your rights no longer exist. That's extremely dangerous.
> government agencies should not refer to peaceful or even violent protesters as terrorists
You mean "potential terrorists."
And, I for one am fine with people in government speculating and planning. There is a vast difference in research and study, speculation and planning. After all, all it would take is a few OWS people to go blow up a bank or something to escalate the entire matter. Sure, it's just a few members, a splinter group, but then what do you do. Ignore the entire movement? Did the cover of OWS help them achieve some other goal, or did OWS unwittingly help them escalate the matter further.
None of this is to lay blame to OWS, but maybe something like this should have been considered, so when bad things do happen, we are more prepared.
And it's all speculation. But the minute you start holding to account speculation at the same level you hold official policy, you start serious restricting our ability to plan.
I'd hope that our government has plans on how to invade Canada should the need arise. I hope that need never arises, but I'd rather have the plan and not need it then need it and not have it.
There is a vast difference in planning something, and intending to follow through (which is always why the conspiracy laws are not just applied for planning, otherwise thriller writers the world over would be in jail).
> and the judgement calls required to choose between freedom-fighter and terrorist are so subjective
People are fond of reminding us that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter. They forget that for that statement to be true, that freedom-fighter must also be a terrorist.
Wait what? Hope that the government has plans to invade Canada? Maybe you meant defend from Canada, Prevent war with Canada, nullify Canada Army. But invade? I sure hope they don't have plans for that.
It's funny, I read the first part of Jason's comment, thought to myself "not only does the government plan, but they plan so much that they even have a plan to invade Canada", found the link, and posted it upthread". I didn't even notice him considering later on in the comment whether we did.
We do indeed have a plan to invade Canada. We've had it since the 1920s.
I know we have plans for Canada (It's one of those humorous things you hear about as an American living in Canada). Canada isn't even the point. It's that we have plans just in case we need them. Planning doesn't mean you expect things to happen.
So yes. The Government should plan, and I'd be disturbed if they didn't.
> Hope that the government has plans to invade Canada?
My wife is Canadian. My children are Canadian. I live there for 10 years. I'm not hoping that the government is planning to invade Canada. However, I hope they've planned it out, just in case.
Maybe that "in case" is a part of defending ourselves, or nullifying an aggressive act.
No, I don't hope they have active plans to invade Canada. However, if we needed to enter Canada to stop something bad from happening, I hope they wouldn't be making things up on the spot.
One does not preclude the other. People who planned to shoot Occupy leaders might be terrorists - or not, depending on what they wanted to achieve by this shooting - terrorism is a tactic, relying on fear and intimidation for a political goal, so depending on if they wanted to intimidate Occupy protestors for a political goal or not they may or may not be terrorists.
Some Occupy people could be potential terrorists too - if they wanted to use violence against peaceful citizens to achieve their political goals. Reports from Occupy protests show that at least some in the movement are not reluctant to use violence - throwing rocks, bottles, improvised incendiary and explosive devices, etc. If they ever employed such tactics against a civilian target for a political goal, it would be an act of terrorism.
I propose a third: they didn't see threats of public assassination of Occupy participants as credible. Considering the assassinations didn't happen it wouldn't be the worst course of action.
But the FBI busts people for (Islamic, left-wing, etc.) terrorism when the plans aren't serious, or the FBI themselves will help the would-be terrorists come up with plans, money, supplies, etc..
I can't remember anybody busted for "left-wing terrorism" lately... As for Islamic, there's some reason to take them more seriously, given the recent history.
Right-wing fringe thinkers like to fantasize about putting their guns to patriotic use in much the same way that leftist fringe thinkers like to fantasize about general strikes and establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat.
And yet, the "establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat" in the history of communism's spread, without a single exception, has been accomplished at the barrel of a gun, with extraordinarily bloody results.
And then there's the starvation purges of entire regions of huge populations of people.
Oh, those wily leftist fringe thinkers and their peaceful ideas!
You mistake my meaning. I don't consider the leftist fringe particularly peaceful. There are militant ideologues at both ends of the political spectrum, and I despise them all.
I've done some research before upvoting this. I thought whowhatwhy.com would be some kind of conspiracy site, but they just do investigative journalism. They are usually featured in Salon.com.
Eh, I'm with you right down to the point in the article where they start talking about this company Craft International who trained law enforcement snipers, and oh by the way were also at the Boston Marathon carrying backpacks with "markings resembling what was seen on an exploded backpack image released by the FBI."
Insinuating something both totally unrelated and highly conspiratorial is not how good investigative journalism works, and unfortunately that sort of slant takes away from my ability to fairly judge the facts of the piece.
That said, to be clear, I do appreciate the research you put in, and thanks for being thoughtful in your upvotes - just thought I'd offer that part of the article as a counterpoint.
> nobody is going to shoot you and your friends in the head for marching around
and
> They won't even point firehoses at you, or sic dogs on you. You are freer than Americans have been at virtually any other point in our country's history
Some sort of idiotic form of hyperbolic satire from reddit which does nothing but cause strife and shut down discussion. I thought this guy was hellbanned yesterday.
Interesting :-) But I still do think it's a good idea for all of us to cool off before we jump to any conclusions based on things posted by new members with links to websites few of us had heard about before, even if these websites are not just conspiracy sites.
There is a lot of anger going around in here these days - and rightfully so - but it also attracts more radical comments with less convincing comparisons to totalitarian police states and it attracts a lot of hatred against Americans.
Just look at some of the comments to this post or the post yesterday about a girl who was jailed when ABC enforcement thought she bought a beer or the post a couple of days ago about a dog that was killed while its owner was arrested for filming a police raid.
The US is a big country, and we will be able to hear these stories every day if we want to. Right now, a lot of people really want to see stories that "demonstrate" that America is a police state. It kind of suits our mood.
Well that definitely justifies upvoting a speculative conspiracy theory to the front page of Hacker News.
Given that the US is literally Nazi Germany, it's 100% believable that the FBI would murder protesters.
I wish the sheeple could see the US for what it really is: literally Nazi Germany. People like us here on HN and reddit understand what's really going on, unlike the sheeple.
0. throwaway HN id
1. unwarranted extreme historical references
2. use of the word "sheeple" on a superior tone referencing the HN and reddit crowds as some kind of "elite" that knows better than the other sheeple
I'd say "gg, man!", but I don't fully get what's your game. But I'll upvote you just for good humor :)
The documents don't say that the FBI was planning this. They say a third party was. The FBI redacted who that third party was. I'm wondering why there haven't beeny any arrests yet.
No. Conspiring to commit murder is definitely not protected by the First Amendment. And even fantasizing openly, which should be protected as long as no attempt is made to act on the fantasy, has tended to get people locked up in recent years.
If no actual preparations were made to execute the plan, it would be clear violation of the 1st amendment. What is the case of being locked up for fantasizing?
That's a nice theory, but there's a news article every fortnight these days about someone getting chucked in the slammer for a casual, jokey remark on twitter being interpreted as a "terrorist threat".
I'd rather tell that to his prosecutors, but if you want me to further his depression and risk another suicide by telling him his Constitutional rights were violated, then hey, that's your prerogative.
I won't, though, because I'm not that much of a dick. And I'd rather allow the First Amendment Center do the talking for me, since I'm not a trained lawyer.
"An identified [DELETED] as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protestors (sic) in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary.
[DELETED] planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles.
...
This [DELETED] identified the exploitation of the Occupy Movement by [LENGTHY DELETION] interested in developing a long-term plan to kill local Occupy leaders via sniper fire."
Ah, if only there was as much diligence paid to this sort of thing as to file sharing and drug enforcement and server seizures. I guess the common man isn't as important, you know?
Hey, fellow techies--this is something you should be really concerned about. Selective enforcement of the most crucial laws (don't murder, conduct attacks, etc.) is really horribly bad for business.
To be fair, a great percentage of the comments on these topics sound exactly that ignorant. Maybe there's an echo chamber effect where reasonable people just stop reading/participating in these threads, because to my eye it's been getting worse.
I can understand why someone would be driven to mock them.
It got an upvote from me because there has been an awful lot of windy political rhetoric around here lately, accompanied by a fair degree of personal invective.
These documents by themselves do not show any government complicity in a plot to kill Occupy leaders, as this article strives to imply. This was a criminal investigation into people that were allegedly talking about doing this.
As to why the targets of this investigation weren't arrested, in order to be arrested for conspiracy to commit a crime, you have to actually take a step toward executing the conspiracy. Planning or talking about it is not enough for an arrest. The FBI receives alot of information, much of it from criminals trying to save themselves, that turns out to be neither actionable nor credible. This appears to be an investigation that simply didn't go anywhere.
The question is who is [DELETED] and what would their motive be?
Killing Occupy "leaders" seems like the absolute worst way to make the Occupy problem go away. Can you even imagine the outrage?
The only way it could possibly be successful is by making it clear that if you protest you will be killed, and I like to think we're still pretty damn far from complete totalitarianism.
As always, it would come down to marketing. The secret would be to ensure that the sniper(s) appear to be lone wolves, rather than law enforcement agents. Any protests or occupations could then reasonably be split up on "safety" grounds, and at the same time the Occupy leaders would have to stay out of the public limelight for their own "safety".
The question is, why haven't [DELETED] been thrown in prison for many years? Especially after those gamers got long sentences for posting a "jk" comment in a chat room.
this just seems to indicate that the FBI was aware of a plot, by SOMEONE, to attack Occupy protestors. nowhere in the documents do I see information that the FBI itself made this plan and it would make a lot of sense if the FBI was tracking potential violence against protestors...
The use of the phrase ‘if deemed necessary,’ sounds like it was some kind of official organization that was doing the planning.” In other words, the “identified [DELETED” mentioned in the Houston FBI document may have been some other agency with jurisdiction in the area, which was calculatedly making plans to kill Occupy activists.
There's a difference between logically following an evidence and reasoning like "DELETED might mean FBI or NSA or Black Helicopters Squad - we are doomed! PANIC!!!" DELETED might mean anything, so there's absolutely no reason to give any weight to that specific speculated meaning against a meaning of "two patients of local mental asylum, when their meds were accidentally switched".
When the FBI is aware of planned terrorism against average Americans, it goes in with guns blazing and parades the bad guys out on TV to show how they foiled the terrorist plot (even if it's the FBI's own plot). In this case they identified someone who was apparently making real plans, but did nothing.
I'm going to cling on to hope that there is some kind of context missing here, because taking that paragraph at face value is terrifying.
(Example of context I hope is missing would be text like ... "In the event that members of the Occupy Movement have obtained a nuclear weapon and are threatening to detonate it ...")
Nah, probably not. Who cares about the shooting of some homeless and some damn hippies, right?
Edit: Folks, the country I grew up in and my ancestors fought for knew of a potential assassination attempt on innocent civilians, and apparently didn't care enough to warn the cops standing watch.
It makes you look like the most mediocre revolutionary that has ever walked the earth.
There are MUCH better terms (no, i'm not going to give them to you, you need to do some research) for the people you have issues with, and your interests would be better served in engaging them in debate rather than quoting XKCD (http://xkcd.com/1013/).
If it were an individual or group of terrorists planning to detonate bombs against the public, there would have been a raid and arrests and a big media show. But instead, the FBI knew that someone "planned to engage in sniper attacks" but did nothing? How could this be anything but a terrorist plot? The kind the FBI love to be seen foiling?
To my knowledge, actions against occupy-movements in the US generally didn't involve "repression of dissent" but rather "repression of wild camping where it is extremely inconvenient for everyone else".
Not everything they did was totally appropriate, but on the other hand it's really hard to dissolve such a camp without anyone getting hurt. The US certainly handled that better than Turkey.
So, police agent provocateurs providing knowledge and material support (to do things like blockade the port of Houston) is just about kicking out inconvenient campers?
"Under most U.S. laws, for a person to be convicted of conspiracy not only must he or she agree to commit a crime, but at least one of the conspirators must commit an overt act (the actus reus) in furtherance of the crime."
Does anyone know if the FBI could have arrested them on conspiracy to commit murder?
So, here is the common law/generic multistate answer (and what would have been chargeable in my old state):
If someone asked someone else to help them kill occupy leaders, this would have been solicitation (and the crime would be completed whether they said yes or no).
If they both agreed, and then committed some overt act in furtherance, it would be conspiracy. The overt act does not have to be related to the target offense of the conspiracy, just in furtherance. IE if you are being charged with conspiracy to commit murder, the overt act does not need to be "buying a gun". It could be "stealing money from an old lady that was later used to buy a gun".
Here, it just says "they planned to obtain intelligence, and then formulate a plan to kill people".
If they really just planned to have a plan, that doesn't seem like a conspiracy to commit murder, unless they all had really agreed to commit murder, and were still working out the details.
It's not really clear.
The FBI response: "... if the FBI was aware of credible and specific information involving a murder plot, law enforcement would have responded with appropriate action."
Maybe the FBI was just using some discretion. Afterall, they're not supposed to be the dept of pre-crime.
It's interesting news for sure, but using this to bash the FBI seems especially one-sided.
Had the actors in this story been different, I think the reaction would be different. Had LulzSec planned to attack some company but never did, and then they all went to prison for that, but it turns out it was just a bunch of people trying to impress each other with grand ideas, where would we stand on that story?
Doesn't the Army have contingency plans for everything? I recall there was some hubbub a little while ago when people discovered the Army has contingency plans on invading Canada or something like that.
Are you talking about War Plan Red? If so then it's not new: the plan was created in the 1920s and 1930s, and was declassified in 1974. It did cause some hubbub then.
But fear not! Canada had a counter to the plan, called Defence Scheme No. 1. The plan was to launch a surprise counter-invasion of several cities near the border (Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and Albany) then to wait for reinforcements from England.
Except no one ever told England that Canada would expect reinforcements in this situation, nor verified that they would be willing to provide them.
Cities like Halifax and Winnipeg are far more vital to Canadian industry than any of the American cities: without them, Eastern Canada would be cut off from Western Canada by rail (cutting off grain supply) and from the Atlantic by sea. It would effectively lay siege of all of Ontario and Quebec.
| Asked whether he was concerned that, if what he
| was saying was correct, it meant the FBI had not
| warned local police about a possible terrorist act
| being planned in his city, he said, “No. You’d
| have to ask the Houston FBI about that.”
Even if he were mad / concerned about it, he probably would not make a public comment to that effect. There are politics to consider here seeing as the HPD still needs to co-exist with the FBI and hopefully 'play nice' together.
To me it looks like the plan was if the protesters turned violent and attempted to burn down buildings, kill people, and go after whoever these [redacted] were there to protect, those [redacted] were going to respond lawfully with the necessary force?
First Edward Snowden and the whole PRISM thing and now this. What the hell is happening to the US government? I gotta say it doesn't look very bright from overseas
Warning: this comment gets very silly, because I think the story here is actually a very silly one, and can only be understood with a sense of humor. Yes, I'm gonna go against my hippie liberal leanings and say this story is probably mostly harmless. I believe that the plan to "engage in sniper attacks against protestors (sic) in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary" was formulated for the contingency when Occupy threatened to undermine government authority altogether, plunging the United States into anarchy. Because we know what happens next: a coup, followed by fragmentation into various regional governments, which in turn become subsumed in a race war as patriot groups and groups of parasitic degenerates battle to define the foundations on which civilization is rebuilt.
This is not an uncommon fantasy. Most people who are into guns are content to enjoy them for sport, as objects, and for limited self-defense scenarios, but a few like to have one or more elaborate fantasies for every exotic gun they own in which that gun becomes eminently practical. So some guy works for a police department that has some suppressed sniper rifles (thanks, War on Terror!) and naturally gets to thinking about the heroic ways he could use them to save the world by averting a horrible catastrophe. He knows it's all bullshit, but it's still a potent fantasy enabler.
It's no different from when you think about your hot sister-in-law, and you're thinking, "Oooh, yeah, she's so goddamned hot, I would just... wait, I would never do that to my brother. Well, supposing my brother died in a car accident. I would totally bend... wait, that would destroy my marriage. Okay, so my wife and my brother are in a car together on one of those dangerous mountain roads in South America, and it goes careening off a cliff... no, a bus containing everyone in my family except my sister-in-law goes careening off a cliff on the way to Lake Titicaca, and then we would console each other, and then, ooooh, yeah, so hot."
Except instead of a bus accident, you have Occupy undermining government authority, and instead of your hot sister in law, you have hot, hot, sexy firearms. Boom-chicka wow. I mean, it's never going to happen, but let's face it, you're only ever going to get the old familiar, and you get that, what, once a year? If all the stars align correctly, that is. And at your age, it takes a little more than the old familiar to get you remotely excited anyway. Your fantasies are all you have left. Put one such dreamer in a police department, and I'm sure some weird contingency plans get drawn up.
Sorry, I just can't get excited about a "plot" that never went beyond the stage of fantasy. When it was revealed that the FBI had a habit of finding nutty losers with terrorist fantasies, encouraging them in their planning, promising to provide them with explosives, and then "stopping" them and marking it up as an averted terrorist attack (and putting the poor saps in prison for years) everyone knew it was ridiculous. This is pretty much the same thing. Fantasy is a long way from reality. (Is there any unhappy fourteen year old who hasn't dreamed of offing a few of his teachers and classmates?) I really don't care if some weirdos in the Houston PD have daydreams of heroically saving civilization from Communists or crypto-Islamists or patchouli-scented reptilian overlords or whoever they thought Occupy was. Their only real crime (as opposed to fantasy crime) was not being able to tell the difference between a document that belongs in the "/Users/HoustonPopo/MelGibsonFanfic" folder and a document that belongs in the "/Users/HoustonPopo/ContingencyPlans" folder. Sounds like a good reason for internal disciplinary action, but not for FBI intervention.
Meanwhile, we have no idea what this plan is contingent on. The U.S. military made contingency plans for a hostile invasion of Canada, for goodness' sake.
I think it can be used for organizing people for protests, too. Of course when you make it "public" you risk being infiltrated, and the FBI knowing your plans, but at least they won't know who you are - unlike doing the same thing over Facebook or e-mail or whatnot - so they can't arrest you before you even go to the protests, like they've done to some Occupy leaders.
The part that worries me even more than the death threats was the classification of the Occupy movement as 'terrorist activity'. This opens them up to a whole catalogue of surveillance methods and methods of detention, and is a good illustration of terrorism powers being extended and misused for domestic dissent.
This misuse of the label 'terrorist' highlights the danger of employing extra-legal means to attack your enemies in other countries, it undermines the rule of law everywhere, and weakens the accountability of all law enforcement agencies. Assassination, torture, rendition, and detention without trial are all normalised now in the US for terrorists. The definition of an enemy for the state always includes some of its citizens, so you end up with scope creep where formerly completely illegal and unthinkable acts are considered normal, just because the word terrorism has been used in conjunction with a person or organisation.