– How the Boston Police Were Too Busy Monitoring “Occupy Boston” to Notice Tamerlan (Liberty Blitzkrieg, May 10, 2013):
After reading the article below, it’s almost impossible to think that the never-ending “war on terror” has anything to do with foreign radicals that “hate us for our freedoms.” As I and many others have noted for years, the surveillance state being put in place is intended to deal with domestic unrest. Unrest the oligarchs know is coming as a result of their unprecedented reign of theft and corruption. So now we discover that the Boston Police counter-terror intelligence unit was too busy monitoring anti-Wall Street demonstrations to notice Tamerlan Tsarnaev right under their noses.
From NBC:
In the fall of 2011, a key Boston police counterterror intelligence unit — funded with millions of dollars in U.S. homeland security grants — was closely monitoring anti-Wall Street demonstrations, including tracking the Facebook pages and websites of the protesters and writing reports on the potential impact on “commercial and financial sector assets” in downtown areas, according to internal police documents.
The police monitoring of the activities of Occupy Boston — an off-shoot of the Occupy Wall Street protests that swept the country in 2011 — came during a period after the U.S. government received the second of two warnings from the Russian government about the radical Islamic ties of alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
But the internal Boston police documents, recently obtained by a civil liberties group, could raise fresh questions about the role of Homeland Security-funded “fusion centers” like the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, or BRIC, which conducted the monitoring. The Boston unit is one of 72 such units set up to collect, analyze and share intelligence about potential terror threats. While Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has called the units “one of the centerpieces” of the nation’s counterterrorism efforts, congressional critics have questioned their effectiveness and accused them in some cases of writing “useless” reports that infringed on civil liberties.
“They were monitoring completely lawful activities,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice, a civil liberties group that recently obtained the documents on the BRIC’s monitoring of Occupy Boston under the Freedom of Information Act. She said the BRIC monitoring was an example of the “vast expenditure of government money” to collect intelligence on activities unrelated to terrorism, in violation of First Amendment rights.
A Boston police spokeswoman said the department has changed its reporting procedures since the monitoring of the protests and emphasized that the BRIC is “about a lot more than terrorism.”
Yes, it’s about squashing dissent.
The internal police documents about the activities of the BRIC show that on Sept. 30, 2011 — just two days after the second Russian warning about Tsarnaev was sent to the CIA — the Boston police unit was focused on an upcoming “Take Back Boston Rally” planned for the city’s Dewey Square.
It should now be abundantly clear who the power structure sees as the biggest threat. Folks that don’t enjoy being raped by Wall Street.
Full article here.
In Liberty,
Mike