Here's my favorite: "Activists are showing a well-organized network made up of anti-Bush sentiment; the mixing of music and political rhetoric indicates sophisticated organizing skills with a specific agenda. Police departments [in New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston] have been contacted regarding this event."
That's from a superspook memo by New York City's undercover operation created to make the world safe for the 2004 Republican National Convention. "Between musical sets," the memo continued, "there would be political speeches and videos."
Oh, the "sophistication" of it all -- videos, music, rhetoric and, most ominously, an unspecified "specific agenda."
Battle stations!
The "well-organized network" so cleverly infiltrated and exposed by NYC sleuths was "an organization of artists called Bands Against Bush," which was "planning concerts." Somehow, in some way, those concerts threatened peace and security in the political summer of 2004.
Or so thought the Big Apple's Band of Imbeciles, the sherlock "operation ... mounted in 2003 after the Police Department, invoking the fresh horrors of the World Trade Center attack and the prospect of future terrorism, won greater authority from a federal judge to investigate political organizations for criminal activity."
And just who and what were snared by NYC's watchful dragnet of "criminal activity"? Those nefarious musical groups, of course, wielding videos and rhetoric; also "members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies."
Now keep in mind that these theatre companies and church groups armed with two-color brochures (which, after all, can inflict serious paper cuts) were nevertheless planning peaceful protests against the truly well-organized network of the right-wing booboisie meeting in praise of the other well-organized network of officeholding war criminals. But naturally, little wannabe J. Edgars everywhere were on guard.
Just as naturally, their municipal keepers now protest that their supersleuths' supersecret findings "were not written for consumption by the general public"; hence the public has "no right of ... access," especially since the entire heap of paranoid garbage might very well be "misinterpreted."
No, I think we get it. But then again, we're amateurs, you see. So said the city's senior counsel, who's now besieged by civil lawsuits stemming from his city's 2004 Red Scare arrest of 1,806 music-playing, rhetoric-spewing, brochure-toting national security threats: "The documents contain information filtered and distilled for analysis by intelligence officers accustomed to reading intelligence information."
Besides, special decoder rings and armbands are required.
What's not required here is a lecture on this disgrace. Its police-state essence is all too obvious. I will note, however, that there are eight, highly competent but unemployed U.S. attorneys available to represent the plaintiffs against Mayor Bloomberg's Band of Imbeciles -- a mere monkey-see, monkey-do subset of our federal imbeciles.
It's good to see the "war on terror" is focused.
On the contrary, it is abominable to see the terr' war types focUS citizens over, again.
Posted by: Vic Anderson | March 27, 2007 at 09:40 PM