Citibank Protester Talks About Undercover Infiltration In Occupy Wall Street

[Skip_In_Boulder]

Well, this is sort of a scary story: Marshall Garrett, one of the protesters who was arrested during Saturday’s Occupy Wall Street march for trying to hold a General Assembly in Citibank, told the Village Voice what went down that day. Apparently a plainclothed cop had been very well informed of the situation ahead of time and hidden himself in the crowd.

Here’s what Mr. Garrett told the paper:
But what was unknown to us and to a lot of people that day, including those in Times Square, was that there were undercover cops already there, paid to be disruptive and to be loud. One undercover cop present was louder than the entire group.

How did you know he was an undercover cop?

He arrested one of the protestors outside, and slammed her into the wall, and pushed her back into the bank. We all saw him at the precinct with us. He was laughing with the fellow white shirt cops, telling them about what we’d been saying, basically. It was a bit startling how inside their information was – how they were being paid to go to these protests and put us in situations where we’d be arrested and not be able to leave.

Now, it didn’t require a lot of researching to figure out Occupy Wall Street’s plans for Saturday. They had broadcasted a lot of the information out on their website, OccupyWallSt.org. But when it came down to which banks would actually be targeted for protests, you would have needed to be in Washington Square Park that day in order to be given instructions. (Protesters were split into groups and told to go and close their accounts in either Chase or Citibank.)

http://www.observer.com/2011/10/citibank-protester-talks-about-undercover-infiltration-in-occupy-wall-street/

[Luminous Animal]

1. Link to the Village Voice interview with Garrett...

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/10/marshall_garrett_citibank.php

[leveymg]

2. The legal presumption is that the meetings were open to the public, including plain-clothes cops.

The loud noise he made was a pretext to have the bank management make a complaint and call in the waiting uniformed officers. All SOP for police agents provocateur.

Always assume the cops have infiltrated and know the plan. That's why it's better not to plan actions, sometimes, if you want to avoid arrest.

[formercia]

4. That's why I never join a group

If there is 2 people in a group, the likelihood of one of them being a provocateur is 50/50. If you do get arrested, they can throw a Conspiracy charge at you.

If you can't figure out how to accomplish something on your own, it's better to find some other way to entertain yourself.

[leveymg]

6. Some things like mass protest and civil disobedience inherently require groups. But,

people should not be surprised that acts of civil disobedience -- even something so seemingly innocuous (and legal) as going as a group to withdraw funds from banks -- will result in arrest. Police are often not good lawyers and can't distinguish legal from illegal protest.

[formercia]

8. One can still be acting alone yet still with a group

OWS is like thousands of individuals acting alone yet acting together. That's what makes it so hard for the authorities to disrupt it. Without a chain of command, there are no weak points to target. Their only hope is to convince small groups or individuals to fall for their provocations.

[Scuba]

5. +1

[Lint Head]

3. The CIA is actually assisting the NYPD

[leveymg]

7. If there is coordinated police action against OWS, it's more probably DHS.

CIA-NYPD coordination dates from the '50s in operations with the FBI working with the NYPD Red Squad and BOSS. A federal and international political policing role in New York actually goes back to the 1880s. Today, such coordinated action focuses on counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics. The major problem, as I see it, is how broadly terrorism is defined.

[Monarda]

9. CIC

Since WW 2 the Army's Counter Intelligence Corps, an offshoot of the CIA, has been working with and often impersonating FBI and other domestic law enforcement groups. They have never opened their records

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter_Intelligence_Corps

[leveymg]

10. Actually, CIC an offshoot of MID predates CIA (1947). James Angleton, Dick Helms, Henry Kissinger

and other Cold War spooks and notables got their start in CIC. You are right, though, that military intelligence agencies have long had a liaison role with NYPD, and that goes back to WWI right through the present. Google: Col. Ralph Van Deman

Army Intelligence have long had a major domestic counter-insurgency role, posse comitatus Act be damned. Some have suggested that extends to a role in the MLK and other political assassinations.

[Monarda]

11. I simplified

Should have said OSS. But I didn't know about connections back to WWI. Some have suggested also that it plays/played a role in character assassinations, as well as actual assassinations.

[leveymg]

12. Of course, the domestic propaganda operations of the alphabet agencies has been a constant

part of American life, as documented by the Church Committee: http://home.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportIIb.htm

More recently, there was renewed concerns expressed a couple years ago about the resurgence of propaganda and efforts to influence domestic opinion by DIA and other military intelligence agencies. That goes hand-in-hand with the near-universal surveillance and profiling activities of NSA that have come to light in recent years.

Is there a particular issue or incident of character assassination that you want to talk about?