How Homeland Security Is Hiding the Feds' Role in Occupy Crackdown

From: PCJF Obtains New DHS Documents: Critical Analysis Shows DHS Is Playing Three Card Monte

A trove of documents released today by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a FOIA request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee reveal that federal law enforcement agencies began their coordinated intelligence gathering and operations on the Occupy movement even before the first tent went up in Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011.

On September 17, 2011, a Secret Service intelligence entry in its Prism Demonstrations Abstract file records the opening of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. The demonstration location that the Secret Service was protecting? The “Wall Street Bull.” The name of the Protectee? The “U.S. Government.”

American taxpayers might find it odd to learn that the Secret Service was on duty to protect the Wall Street Bull in the name of protecting the U.S. Government. But there it is.

The DHS’s Game of Three Card Monte to Deflect Disclosure of Law Enforement Operations

These documents, many of which are redacted, show that the highest officials in the Department of Homeland Security were preoccupied with the Occupy movement and have gone out of their way to project the appearance of an absence of federal involvement in the monitoring of and crackdown on Occupy.

On the street it would be called “Three Card Monte,” a swindler’s game to hide the ball -- a game of misdirection. The House always wins.

The DHS, as revealed in the newly released documents, has engaged in what appears to be a effort to avoid looking for Occupy related materials where it is likely to be found, including in Fusion Centers and DHS sub-divisions such as the Operations Coordination & Planning sub-division which is responsible for DHS coordination with local and federal law enforcement partners.

On November 16, DHS Press Secretary Matthew Chandler transmitted an e-mail to top ranking DHS officials, including the Chief of Staff to Janet Napolitano, the Chief of Staff to the DHS General Counsel, among others, in which he reports:

“We’re getting inquiries from CBS, AP, Daily Caller and others on an un-sourced Examiner.com piece that says that DHS and FBI are collaborating with cities by providing tactics and information on removing Occupy protestors. A check of I & A [Intelligence and Analysis] and FPS [Federal Protective Services] shows that this type of outreach is not occurring in any wholesale manner.”

The Press Secretary is careful to couch the official statement, that such is not occurring in any “wholesale” manner, leaving the door open to possible future revelations of such conduct.

But this official statement was based solely on a mid-November inquiry to two DHS sub-sections: Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) and Federal Protective Services (FPS). And by the date of that statement, Federal Protective Services and apparently also the I&A Directorate had already purged, “restricted and/or rescinded,” any Occupy related intelligence products, as discussed further here.

In other words, having looked into only two drawers - - which had already “restricted and/or rescinded” all Occupy related intelligence products - - it is not surprising that Press Secretary Chandler’s statement that no “wholesale’ coordination of Occupy related actions is based on incomplete information.

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A Universe of Self-Replicating Code

George Dyson, Edge

When I started looking at the beginnings of the modern digital universe—at the origin of this two-dimensional address matrix—I became interested in the question of what had been done with it at the beginning. Of course, one of the things was the work on the hydrogen bomb.

Another thing that surprised and delighted me was to find that a Norwegian-Italian mathematical biologist and viral geneticist, Nils Aall Barricelli, had tried to come to Princeton in 1951, as soon as he heard this machine was being built. He had trouble getting a visa, so he finally shows up in early 1953 when the machine is running, and immediately begins these experiments, to see if he could inoculate this two-dimensional matrix with random strings of one-dimensional numbers that can self-replicate and cross-breed, and do all the things that we know that code does in biology, and see what happens.

And he observed. He was an observational biologist. He saw all sorts of behavior that he read all sorts of biological implications into. He was way too far ahead of the time, so no one paid attention and this was forgotten.

We now live in a world where everything he dreamed of really did happen. And, for some reason, von Neumann never publicized Barricelli's work. I don't know if there was a personal rivalry or what happened, but von Neumann died, and his papers on self-reproducing automata were published posthumously [edited by Arthur W. Burks] and there was no mention of Barricelli. Part of it was this fear that it really would provoke the public. They called computers "electronic brains" at that time. It was scary enough that we might be building machines that would think. But the idea of producing artificial life was even more Frankenstein-like. I think that's one reason we never heard about that.

Just as we later worried about recombinant DNA, what if these things escaped? What would they do to the world? Could this be the end of the world as we know it if these self-replicating numerical creatures got loose?

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In Moscow, Little Girl Soldiers

Kristen Joy Watta, Lens

They prepare for classes and make their beds together, gently setting a teddy bear and a stuffed crocodile on pillows. They look intently at themselves as they fix oversize white bows, meant to symbolize purity, in their hair.

And they wear gas masks for training drills.

They are “the Little Spies of Putin” — or at least that’s what a French publication called them in a piece that inspired the photographer Sergey Kozmin to document them for his series “Girl Soldiers.”

They can “strip down an AK-47 Kalashnikov in the time it takes most kids to send an S.M.S.,” Mr. Kozmin said.

The young students attend the Moscow Female Cadet Boarding School No. 9 — which Mr. Kozmin calls “one of the elite military academies in Russia.” It is a state school, free to all who attend, though the competition to be admitted is intense.

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Who's the greatest threat to world peace asks Noam Chomsky: Iran, Israel or U.S.?

Europeans regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. In the Arab world, Israel and the U.S. are regarded as the pre-eminent threat.

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Henry Miller & Anaïs Nin on Death and Dreams

Henry miller talks of real Death the living death we live with : the world of work, religion, war, etc.

"The neurotic man is the man of the future he continues..."
"A man should not adapt to this world because it's a bad world. "
~ Henry Miller

Anaïs Nin on how schools are prisons and learning to find your own way

Philosophy of a Knife - 2008 - Official Trailer

According to Rotten Tomatoes:

"The true history of Japanese Unit 731, from it's beginnings in the 1930's to it's demise in 1945, and the subsequent trials in Khabarovsk, USSR, of many of the Japanese doctors from Unit 731. The facts are told, and previously unknown evidence is revealed by an eyewitness to these events, former doctor and military translator, Anatoly Protasov. Part documentary and part feature, the story is shown from the perspective of a young Japanese nurse who witnessed many horrors, and a young Japanese officer who is torn between his sincere convictions that he is serving the greater purpose, and the deep sympathy he feels for an imprisoned Russian girl. His life is a living hell as he's compelled to carry out atrocious experiments on the other prisoners, using them as guinea pigs in this shocking tale of mankind's barbarity. Philosophy of a Knife is truly one of the most violent, brutal and harrowing movies ever made."