It's not just prosecutors favoring police, it's judges too supporting them no verdicts, and the entire class of law enforcement supporting police terrorism as "law and order".They will not intervene against their own soldiers, their own mechanisms that keep their power and control, keep us arrested, over charged, keep people in court and incarcerated. Keep property divided. Keep people patrolled and targeted with no prevention of deadly police force. They rely on deadly police force, it keeps the classes and maintains racial terrorism. Why would they ever "reform" that?
So we now know for sure that someone, or some parties including or with the assistance of law enforcement, fed false information to the media contributing to the framing of a couple in San Bernardino as jihadists or "extremists" stoking islamaphobia and heightening fear of terrorism, resulting in anti Muslim terror throughout the US. No motive otherwise has been revealed, there was no reported disagreement, and there are still many reports that it was initially 3 large (white) men. The stories are still inconsistent with some articles saying there were no "extremist" posts on social media, however that can be interpreted, and other posts saying that instead there was planning on direct personal messages, which the state is saying could be missed by its "intelligence"... as if. Either way this casts enough doubt on the villification of this couple, I highly suggest if anyone posted on San Bernardino's terrible ordeal of mass violence, they clarify the new information which the fbi was under no coercion to release?, and double up on countering irrational racist white supremacist demonization of the Muslim community, based on continuing US terrorism against them.
I don't have any doubt there will be legislation to seemingly address the movement against police terrorism. What I fear is these new laws regarding the police are likely to say more about regulating our behavior around police than to address over policing, racist criminalization, mass incarceration or police executions of black life. Police reform is unlikely to create any consequences that might prevent police use of force real time on patrol instead focusing on how police behave after someone has been murdered.
WASHINGTON –- On the fourth floor of a federal courthouse just blocks from the Capitol, two very different pictures are being painted of a 43-year-old Syrian man who has been held by the U.S. military for over 12 years more than 1,300 miles awa…
"On Tuesday, Dr. Steven Miles testified that forcible extractions of detainees from their cells are “a form of punishment” and that the overall treatment of hunger strikers was part of a “punitive strategy to deter hunger striking,” according to an account from the human rights group Reprieve, which is helping to represent Dhiab.
"Three medical experts have now testified that there is something rotten at the core of Guantánamo — treatment of hunger strikers is not proper medical care but a punitive strategy to try to break them,” Reprieve attorney Cori Crider said in a statement. “We’ve forced the government to give Mr. Dhiab his wheelchair back, but they still won’t promise not to take it away tomorrow. The authorities have shown time and again that without the Court stepping in, they will abuse our client, and we are here trying to put a stop to it."
The police are a huge bureaucratic organization- If the police incorporate cams into their daily dehumanization of predominantly poor, nonwhite or marginalized communities then with all of their *resources* (read: weapons, funding and technology) they should be going through all of their footage and recording not just police executions but the unwarranted stops, frisks, detainment and harassment of people not to mention arrests. (And reporting them! )
There is so much more to the institution of policing than arrests- like the constant fear and threat of surveillance and violence. In fact the police have always been tools of militarized armed surveillance- adding cameras would only solidify that (not *improve* it). Cams would mostly benefit the police because it would both pacify unrest and make their surveillance appear more socially acceptable. In a terrible way it would normalize mass authority surveillance by causing us to believe it is to our benefit (as reform)! !!!
I say this all in response to pleas for police reform. Any more roles and hiring to collect data *even* if it did provide more transparency of police harassment (not just arrests) would just result in more funding and concentrated moral authority for police as an institution. The police as an agency, organization and institution do more harm than good- and should be abolished. Except in terms of controlling the population and protecting this terrible economic system through fear and violence- at which they excel, and are rewarded for with promotions and pensions as well as immediate power and privilege. #hierarchyfail
i do think it's important to distinguish and define for ourselves the difference between violence and terrorism particularly because so much terrorism is done in the name of fighting terrorism.
redundant enough?
Terrorism is a means of political communication when all other means are exhausted and the conditions that triggered a group to mobilize collectively (or unfortunately, hierarchically) remains unchanged or heightened.
It can reflect conflicting desires between a state and non state entities for ethnic regional or political reasons though it is also used primarily by the state in a more consistent way to subordinate a population to control their demands. To prevent demands from growing to a point of conflict where the oppressed group begins to respond with political violence. Usually both factions have their own set of preferences to achieve stasis. They may begin at one level of violence but as their preferences conflict with each other, that violence will change or escalate.
In general I believe that terrorism is a product of these superiorly enforced possessive super structures such as governments, borders and nation states. If it wasn't for these management structures that seek to homogenize land and people for their own ends, i think we can't say how violence would or would not be dealt with. I do think that political violence, violence for the sake of or because of power, would be much less normalized or necessary.
cities under siege: the new military urbanism (via becoming-vverevvolf)
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has some explaining to do this week, after a federal judge ordered the agency to provide a more thorough explanation to justify why it withheld information from a graduate student’s Freedom of Information Act request for documents regarding an alleged 2011 assassination plot against leaders of Houston’s Occupy movement.
The requests — which were filed last year by Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral candidate Ryan Noah Shapiro, who is researching the plot — sought all records “relating or referring to Occupy Houston, any other Occupy Wall Street-related protests in Houston, Texas, and law enforcement responses.” Shapiro noticed a reference to the plot in FBI documents about the Occupy movement that were unsealed in 2012 after a civil-rights group filed a FOIA request.
An FBI document that Shapiro showed to VICE News describes the plot against Occupy Houston:
“An identified [redacted] as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protestors [sic] in Houston, Texas, if deemed necessary…. [Redacted] 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.”
The FBI said it had identified 17 pages of records relevant to Shapiro’s FOIA request, but it only released five of them, all highly redacted. Shapiro then filed suit against the FBI.
FBI FOIA Chief David Hardy defended suppressing the information in a motion to dismiss Shapiro’s lawsuit. Hardy noted that the request concerned material that the FBI had given to local authorities who were investigating “potential criminal activity” by Occupy Houston protesters. The FBI was working with them to assess potential terrorist threats posed by Occupy Houston and determine whether it had advocated overthrowing the US government. Hardy .
The FBI and the Department of Justice invoked the Bureau’s “general investigative authority” and its “lead role in investigating terrorism and in the collection of terrorism threat information” as a basis for its exemption from FOIA, but this did not convince Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of the US District Court for the District of Columbia. She agreed with Shapiro that the FBI’s justification was “overly-generalized and not particular.”
“At no point does Mr. Hardy supply specific facts as to the basis for the FBI’s belief that the Occupy protestors [sic] might have been engaged in terroristic or other criminal activity,” Collyer wrote in an opinion that denied part of the FBI’s motion to dismiss. “Neither the word ‘terrorism’ nor the phrase ‘advocating the overthrow of the government’ are talismanic, especially where FBI purports to be investigating individuals who ostensibly are engaged in protected First Amendment activity.”
VICE News asked the Department of Justice for its reaction to Judge Collyer’s opinion, but it declined to comment. (Read Full Text) (Photo Credit: Occupy Houston @ Facebook)
'Terrorist Group Formation and Recruitment'
'Terrorism Group Persistance and Dynamics'
University of Maryland was appointed by DHS Department of Homeland Security to research terrorism or political violence.
Just so you know what the academic industrial complex is up to...
"The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) is now hiring a Junior Radicalization Researcher to work at START’s headquarters at the University of Maryland, College Park. This is a full-time position, with an initial term of 12 months (start date of October 22 preferred, although as late as November 1 potentially possible).
START is a multi-university consortium of researchers focused on the causes and consequences of terrorism and other non-state security threats and headquartered at the University of Maryland in College Park, MD. The Empirical Assessment of Domestic Radicalization (EADR) project seeks to test extant theories and generate new knowledge about the radicalization process through the construction of a database known as Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) and a large number of structured case studies. PIRUS consists of extremists who were radicalized within the United States to the point of committing ideologically inspired violent or non-violent illegal acts. The case studies consist of in-depth profiles of individuals’ trajectories into extremism and the factors and mechanisms that facilitated changes in beliefs and behaviors over time."
START Program- Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
http://www.start.umd.edu/start/announcements/announcement.asp?id=601
rant
there is so much to detest and sometimes even the little things lose their shine we live in a terrorist regime
unless there is some sort of call out or break in day to day reality (disrupture) and people not only stop acting from a place of apathy, but from a place of conformity to this fucking political process, we're gonna fucking die under a magnifying glass.
we need to break the police narrative. we need to break the reform narrative. we need to break the 'work real hard for your boss' narrative. the narrative of assimilation. of moving up in the ranks, competing, earning power oh yeah, we need to break the power narrative the social war narrative that fucks up our lives everyday
i mean some people are just resigned to oppression because they believe it is the responsibility of an outside force (whether religious or political) to save them. they either view death as a revolution (transformative rapture) or wait for some 'end of times' sort of 'right' mixture of sparks and masse to.. what.
our struggle is already nearly insurmountable with difficulty on an individual and interpersonal level- society causes anxiety, marginalization, alienation and silencing preventing most from recognizing their own oppression. we are busy deconstructing our own fucked up internalized shit meanwhile the world is still being run by dictators and patriarchs, secret societies, armies and a dominant moral cisheterosexist social code.
i don't want individual liberation; i need collective revolt. through our revolt we will build spaces to fucking exist in and breath for five goddamn seconds but we can also build capacity to project back outwards into the meaningless void that captures our bodies and minds- the social war.
it's like people need to wait for the point of no return or some big flashing neon sign or billboard so we can realize we need to act in solidarity with one another. we need to act. it's like people have already decided that OUR struggle together against doom is so futile they can't possibly imagine acting against it, so they just justify their inactivity or passivity because of 'measured risk' or this predetermined narrative (whether biblical or fucking theoretical).
because if this is fascism, then OUR struggle (as opposed to the audacity of our individual struggles in society) against society and the mechanics, structure and function of this capitalist and authoritarian regime is INEXHAUSTIBLE. we cannot possibly do enough to destroy enough to breathe enough angst into the void that is this fucked up clusterfuck of powermongering shitfuckery. and we shouldn't have to water our shit down or apologize for calling out oppression or have to paste our anger into cookie cutter soundbites that sound good for the status quo.
there are not going to be LESS police. there are not going to be LESS pressures/stresses. what the fuck are people fucking thinking voting for some privileged master at the top of the symbolic representation system. that urges assimilation and 'equality' like we're not HERE and QUEER and fucking over this system that compels us with expectations and false idols.
it's gotta be subliminal messaging or some shit because i'm like HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE THIS WHAT THE FUCK. people are not taught to think, to talk, to share, to listen, to FUCKING LISTEN, to fucking think that we could fucking have our own ideasl that we could put them into practice without them being commodified/ without creating consumers, without oppressing people!
what. the. fuck.
meanwhile in classrooms all over amerika today people said the pledge of allegiance, they talked shit on republicans and democrats by fucking label, they ate their fucking cheerios while reading the new york times thinking they are well read engaged 'citizens', they violated people, they justified their urges for power, they thought about moving up at work, they thought about how to get laid, they thought about being more popular than their friends, they thought about making enough money to buy some technological apparatus, they thought about food but not growing it, they thought about consuming and consuming and consuming but not CREATING or compassion.
we have no energy consciousness. we are not taught consent. we do not learn various and varying interpersonal communication skills. we are not taught to explore our sexuality, our ideas, our identities, to make ourselves fluid and not binaried or fucking isolated and uniform. we are taught to be miserable and to work for the benefit of a few. every aspect of our lives tries to bully us into conforming.
the only way i feel i can exist and have it be 'worth it' at all at this point of realizing how fucking produced i have been by this chaotic unjust factory of a so called 'civilized' thoroughly colonized society is by thoroughly challenging or betraying every value that has been inculturated into me. this will be my revolt. there is no 'creating the new' we are only possibly capable of unlearning the old and in that process we practice things that are new to us- ideas and energies and methods that can attempt to not replicate oppression. all we have is the attempt.
it's an attempt! god will not grant us any serenity for our attempt. 'god' the figurative, a theoryhead, a complex symbology of humyn identity and meaning. we will die, but do you see? this society will not die with us! if you live up this world for all its excess as you consume it will consume you. there is much to betray, comrade. let us do what we cannot not do, what we must. let us forget what we 'can' do, or what is possible. and let us only, always and continuously attempt.
So this is amazing, definitely worth the read:
“Nonviolence is an inherently privileged position in the modern context. Besides the fact that the typical pacifist is quite clearly white and middle class, pacifism as an ideology comes from a privileged context. It ignores that violence is already here; that violence is an unavoidable, structurally integral part of the current social hierarchy; and that it is people of color who are most affected by that violence. Pacifism assumes that white people who grew up in the suburbs with all their basic needs met can counsel oppressed people, many of whom are people of color, to suffer patiently under an inconceivably greater violence, until such time as the Great White Father is swayed by the movement’s demands or the pacifists achieve that legendary “critical mass.”
People of color in the internal colonies of the US cannot defend themselves against police brutality or expropriate the means of survival to free themselves from economic servitude. They must wait for enough people of color who have attained more economic privilege (the “house slaves” of Malcolm X’s analysis[47]) and conscientious white people to gather together and hold hands and sing songs. Then, they believe, change will surely come. People in Latin America must suffer patiently, like true martyrs, while white activists in the US “bear witness” and write to Congress. People in Iraq must not fight back. Only if they remain civilians will their deaths be counted and mourned by white peace activists who will, one of these days, muster a protest large enough to stop the war. Indigenous people need to wait just a little longer (say, another 500 years) under the shadow of genocide, slowly dying off on marginal lands, until-well, they’re not a priority right now, so perhaps they need to organize a demonstration or two to win the attention and sympathy of the powerful. Or maybe they could go on strike, engage in Gandhian noncooperation? But wait-a majority of them are already unemployed, noncooperating, fully excluded from the functioning of the system.”
Ankara Turkey. Notice the baton is upside down to inflict more damage.
Terror Exercises in the Police State. June 6th, 2013.
Los Angeles, CA
“We are driven,” he continued, “by fears of what might happen, not by things that havehappened.” He noted that since Sept. 11, 2001, there have been 42 terrorist plots in the United States. All but four of them were halted. Three of those succeeded and killed a total of 17 people. “Not that this isn’t a tragedy,” he said, “but, really, in a society that has 15–16,000 homicides every year, it isn’t a lot.
can we talk about fascism now or do you still need to see it in more 'conventional' forms?
it takes adam kokesh getting targeted for people to realize the police assault you then charge you with assault.
fuck people. fuck the police.