CD: OWS and Police Intelligence

Michael Greenberg's "The Problem of the New York Police" in the current New York Review of Books is a must-read for anyone concerned about the Occupy movement and its hopes to snatch democracy from the jaws of oligarchy and a police state. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/oct/25/problem-new-york-police/. An excerpt:

     "The culture of surveillance that has arisen at New York’s police department during the past decade has likely been enhanced by the unspoken rule of self-perpetuation that seems to govern most entrenched bureaucracies. Once you have a working unit of two thousand trained employees, with a budget in the hundreds of millions, broad public support, and no political checks or oversight, the temptation to extend your reach, to keep the machine in motion and identify more targets for investigation and create more and more files, is enormous.

     "Occupy Wall Street protesters have been especially vulnerable targets. Gideon Oliver, president of the New York chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, which, in partnership with the Legal Aid Society, has been providing free counsel to OWS arrestees, told me that in criminal court he and others have increasingly seen signs that peaceful political activists are landing on terrorist watch lists. Martin Stolar recently was defending an Occupy client in court for trespassing. In pre-trial proceedings evidence came from an Intel detective, implying, Stolar told me, that his client, a well-known activist within the Occupy movement, had been under surveillance and singled out for arrest. “At trial,” Stolar said, “they put a lowly uniform cop on the stand, to shield Intel.”