Documents have been destroyed no doubt.

http://gawker.com/5861191/

Two people were killed in Cairo and Alexandria this weekend as Egyptian activists took the streets to protest the military’s attempts to maintain its grip on power. And guess how the state is justifying its deadly crackdown.

“We saw the firm stance the US took against OWS people & the German govt against green protesters to secure the state,” an Egyptian state television anchor said yesterday (as translated by the indispensable Sultan Sooud al Qassemi; bold ours).

I am sooooo glad the US is still the leader and shining bright light on the hilltop to provide illumination so that despots, tyrants and thugs can get good targeting on the heads of their people! /sarcasm

Mere coincidence, I’m sure. We are not a police state. Um, don’t look at those documents, please, they’re um, classified…

or:

a) They’re stuffed in Sandy Berger’s pants.

b) They’re in Dick Cheney’s man-size safe.

c) DOCs cannot be released because disclosure would represent a threat to National Security.

d) Joe Lieberman votes with us on everything but the war.

I too am gratified by this action.
Great idea. I truly hope they turn over lots of rocks so the vermin can scurry, and thus we can see them clearly.
However as eCan said, they’ve been destroyed, not archived in the first place, or they will pull a “national security” excuse, in which case it will be years, if not decades before it comes to light.

BTW, the taxpayer always pays. I’m more interested in who’s coordinating this attack on the 1st amendment and US citizens’ rights.

Edit: also hackworth beat me to the reasons as well.

Same guys that are ransacking Medical MJ Facilities. Obama/Holder.

Naw, they’ll go with National Security. It would reveal too much about sources and methods.

Though in the current environment, it wouldn’t be shocked if they just released the entire batch and took the “So what?” attitude.

Boxturtle (It ain’t like Holder will see something, these guys might as well be banksters)

Quan (the mayor of Oakland) let it slip that she had been in contact with other mayors and the DHS people coordinating their efforts.

Wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Obama was calling the shots here.

Jon Dept of Homeland Security picking up the tab is my guess.

Ask o at the next presser,”What did you know and when did you know it?”

Here’s another link

I got it from a commenter on C&L, but I can’t find which one (sorry to whomever).

Absolutely.
They have their dirty hands in it, or know about it.
They, like the rest, are “just following orders” as they attack the 1st amendment and the rights of citizens.

Found it; it was from a MountainMan23 on this post.

(Just trying to give credit where due.)

The Examiner article is a pretty good ongoing post, it needs to get to the legal people.

DHS has a black hole budget.
This is chump change for them. Wouldn’t be surprised by this at all.

Good Point. Chain of Command – Kissinger –>
Obama –> DHS –> Mayors –> Police –> bludgeon and pepper spray kids and old ladies.

Jon,

Thank you so much for bringing this story to FDL’s frontpage!

I’ve been very interested in any and all court hearings and filings regarding OWS. It is very important to keep our eyes open on this because somewhere in the near future somebody has to officially speak on it. That will be the point in which American’s will have the opportunity to see whether or not they are really Free.

Lawyering up against the 1%!

Agreed Dem Mayors don’t talk to GOP Mayors about stuff that might if leaked make the Dems look bad. Sure she leaked the actual meeting but if we knew what was said what level of force was allowed, what pretexts were discussed to send in the police, who (the banks) wanted the protests closed, attempts to discredit OWS with police agents pushing violence etc.
Those details get leaked the blue dogs and Obama lose the Left next election and we form a third party if Obama, the Feds were involved it gets worse. No GOPer could resist the chaos that would cause and not leak the details.

I’d just like to know why Kissenger is still in the DC area and allowed to push his will into our Government operations. He is another War Criminal that needs to be dropped into Vietnam!

Obama was calling the shots here.

And 0 gets his marching orders from Dick Cheney.

I’m voting for the “national security” excuse.

Henry Kissinger does not have the threat of 9/11 exposure hanging over his head. Dick Cheney does.

Yep and unlike the CIA they can work inside America although I am sure the CIA is lending whatever help they can and moving agents to Homeland security’s budget. The CIA has been burned enough by Congress hearing when they did this sort of thing before.

I’m more inclined to believe they’ll cite national security for non disclosure.

Oh, we’re so sorry. Those documents were inadvertently shredded by our young indentured servant intern.

Paying for all this extra police action nation wide must cost millions all the states are broke and laying off people, the states cannot run deficits although they can do amazing things to hide debt just ask anyone facing pension fund cuts from states that underfunded pensions.
So are the states underfunding pensions and who knows what else more and more state spending cuts are to be expected huge cuts? Or did the Feds talk to the Mayors in question and offer up some Homeland Security cash?

The only domestic work the CIA is trusted with is the smuggling of narcotics into the inner cities, a job it does well.

If the Feds are funding this then the WH is involved and aware of whats going on. At best Obama can try and do a Reagan on Iran Contra and claim he was to senile to know what was going on. Obama is to smart for that to work but if more Vets get hurt I expect Obama to start forgetting things and the Media to start doing a bunch of stories about African Americans living shorter lifespans.

Hell’s Bell’s. 10:30 won’t have the same draw for me for a while.
Boo Hoo. I guess I’ll have to go shopping. (It’s 25% off day for seniors at the Thrift Store.)

How ironic would it be if the states were paying for this with police pension funds?
How would that be for irony?

You still thirst for the day when officals had a conscience. In todays world it would be a Senior Administration Offical speaking not for attribution stating “Yeah, we had ‘em shredded. So sue us”.

Boxturtle (With an AG who couldn’t find a crook unless said crook didn’t make political donations)

There have been reports of criminals going to OWS protests and the police doing nothing about it even though OWS wants them gone street gangs for a better deal on product would have no problem finding volunteers willing to risk jail to cause OWS problems.
This would keep the police, feds and private industry security and plants free of any knowledge of unofficial violent attempts to break up OWS by crooks.

Thats why we need to find out just where the states found this money :) Either the Feds probably Homeland Security provided the cash in which case Obama knows whats going on.
Or the police are screwing themselves over and once they know that I expect OWS won’t have any problems with the police.

We also need to know who trains on the S.O.P.s. More “chilling” than the UC Davis videos was this article in the Washington Post that followed. In it, former Baltimore Police Department lieutentant Charles J. Kelly goes over “use of force guidelines” that use pepper spray as a “compliance tool”, and indicates that it can be used prior to “lifting protesters.” One of the indicators that he mentions for its use as a “resisting” is a protester pulling her arm away when grabbed. Given that even a semi-conscious person will sometimes do this, that’s a pretty low threshold for violence warranting its use, or it isn’t used for violence at all.

Combine that with the New York Times article indicating that the drilling prior to their eviction of Zuccotti Park was a “disaster drill” in “counterterrorism”, and language from the Oakland Police Association in their open letter referring to their confrontation with peaceful protesters as a “skirmish”, a term for an unplanned military battle, together with numerous reports of lying about encounters: the Portland police chief lying about a rape call being triaged, the Oakland police lying about not using stun grenades and other projectiles, Mayor Bloomberg lying about making his own decision when the raids had been coordinated between cities. A picture emerges of something deeply wrong with the Standard Operating Procedures, that they are a free for all set of procedures based on war without rules, that lying freely to the press is standard, and that secrecy and classification is rampant. All of which doesn’t seem very much like an accountable police force or a police force focused on keeping the peace.

I thirst for a time when any government “official” knew his/her ass from a hole in the ground.

The entire Dept of Injustice could be standin’ around a swimmin’ pool and only when some snot-nosed 6 year old pointed it out would they see the whale in the pool.

Watched a rugby match over the weekend. The players “brutalized” each other more than any police/OWS brutality I’ve seen.

But then again, at least in rugby they have goals.

This is why we need Wikileaks!

And just how many rugby players ended up in the hospital, hmmmmm? You playin’ the fool for shits and giggles?

WH is involved and aware of whats going on

Of course they are. OWS is a direct threat to Obama’s re-election and his banker contributors.

But you can rest assured that Obama’s hands are kept carefully clean.

Boxturtle (Has he bothered to condemn the pepper spraying at UC yet?)

Back to work.

Namaste

I think the rugby players volunteered to play the game and take the hits. Probably none of the players were vomiting up blood an hour later. Get real.

Any 84 year old women on the teams?

Romney destroyed govt docs.

Oh, I see now!

That’s why we can’t go “backwards” going forward, ’cause we’ll fall into a pool with a whale in it.

:D

It was just a harmless joke about OWS lack of goals. Don’t be so humorless.

Isn’t it public knowledge that under Obama the militarization of local police forces that began in the Bush era has continued apace with Obama’s appointment of Janet Nepolitano to head Homeland Security, an agency which should have been abolished at the getgo? These beefed up ‘security’ measures I do remember being reported upon as they applied to the Albuquerque scene, and indeed, full riot gear is in evidence there this weekend, as Thom Hartmann reported this morning, as a confrontation ensued between mostly elderly women Occupiers (bgrothus, were you there?) and variously attired police-soldiers. Somebody is giving the orders, or are they all just functioning lemminglike -actually, I don’t know which alternative is better, but we do need to know which it is. To my mind it’s possible to hope that 99% of the police are only there because they are ordered to be, for the paycheck, or both.

Meanwhile Obama is under the bed hunting for those famous shoes.

Wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Obama was calling the shots here.

Well, it would surprise me. As far as I can see, O is just a figurehead.

OTOH, I can well believe Obama’s bosses are calling the shots.

I don’t find anything funny about cops brutalizing unarmed citizens.

As far as goals go, you might want to read up on horizontal decision-making vs the vertical top-down process. I recommend the book Sin Patron as a starting point. You’d prolly call it anarchism but the stereotypical pejorative hasn’t accurately described the ideology in many decades. Punks carrying black flags and breakin’ shit aren’t anarchists, they’re punks using it as an excuse to act out.

If it’s true, how can Obushma even hope to get re-elected? The people on the ground being pepper sprayed are the same people who were going door to door for him before the election (a metaphor, of course).
I can’t wait for him to go down, and frankly, I don’t give a rats ass who he’s replaced by.

So far as I can tell OWS has had 60 days of horizontal decision-making and have yet to make a decision of any import, which tells me what I need to know of HDM.

I have a question for the lawyers. Suppose the agencies involved simply say, ‘we don’t have no such documents.’ What’s the recourse? How can that assertion be contested?

Who said they have to do things your way? The goals are simple enough. If you haven’t figured them out by now or you need somebody to explain them to you you’ve not been payin’ attention. We don’t have to do things the way the neoliberals want us to. The neoliberal way got us into this disaster, it will not get us out.

Good Point. Chain of Command – Kissinger –>
Obama –> DHS –> Mayors –> Police –> bludgeon and pepper spray kids and old ladies.

Henry Kissinger does not have the threat of 9/11 exposure hanging over his head. Dick Cheney does.

Good point. And Dick is Obama’s cousin…

BT, you can’t “blame” Obama for not responding to the current v iolence. He’s not even in the country. /s

I’d rather you not give them any ideas. :-)

Don’t be surprised if a judge rules against the public in a FOIA court action of this nature. Last year, a bankruptcy court judge ruled in favor of the 1% in an action seeking information on a highly questionable closing of St Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center, a busy New York hospital.

I believe OWS is a process, not an end, therefore end goals have yet to reveal themselves. There are process goals and outcome goals. We are so used to thinking in terms of the outcome ones, but process goals are just as if not more important.

For a simple example: say I wanna lose weight. I have a goal of 30 pounds. That’s an outcome goal. How I get there is a whole bunch of process goals (how will I organize my exercise routine today? What should I eat when? and so forth). I see OWS as a Big Giant Process Goal, changing and evolving as the seasons change and different geographical circumstances arise.

“Surprise” isn’t in it anymore, lechero, full-on disgust and informed and weidspread outrage are much more the appropriate … and likely, response.

DW

Digby:

I guess I’m the last to know, but Mr Google tells me that dozens of states have “Departments of Homeland Security” and they and other public safety departments are recipients of many millions of DHS grants to “fight terrorism.” I knew, of course, that vast amounts of federal money was flowing to state and municipal police agencies in the wake of 9/11 but I did not realize that states were explicitly replicating the federal DHS at the state level. I guess you just can’t have too many redundant policing agencies.

Also, lookee here, and this is an item IMMTHO should be on the Front Page of this site:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is a huge organization, with lots of smaller services lumped together in one big mis-matched umbrella. So when someone mentions “Homeland Security,” they can be talking about anything from nuclear security to immigration agents.

One lesser-known part of DHS is the Federal Protective Service (FPS), which is tasked with providing “integrated security and law enforcement services to federally owned and leased buildings, facilities, properties and other assets.”

That mission might be one of the reasons that officers from the FPS have been spotted at several of the “Occupy” crackdowns, including the October 31 arrests in Portland.

An OccupyPortland photographer was arrested by what appear to be officers from the Federal Protective Service, based on these photos, which include officers and vehicles bearing FPS logos.

I agree with you….remember Quan was in Washington DC when the first raid
on Occupy-Oak occurred & her whinning thereafter was she was not in Town
when the beatdown started.

And strange Obama was out of the country when the coordination to beat & jail OW protesters started.

look at the very least Quan was not in DC seeking GOP support,she was there meeting with the WH & their surrogates.That much we know.

So yes,the Dems are just as willing as the GOP to brutalize us for peacefully protesting.

This FOIA request is going to be stalled.