05/06/15 – Michael Gould-Wartofsky – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, and I got to sift through my tabs here.
Here we go.
The War Has Come Home, a five-step guide to the police repression of protest from Ferguson to Baltimore and beyond.
It's at tomdispatch.com and also running under Tom's name, I think, today at antiwar.com.
If not today, yesterday or tomorrow or something.
Anyway, it's under Tom Englehart's name at antiwar.com.
It's by Michael Gould Wartofsky.
Welcome to the show, Michael.
How are you?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
So, really great article here.
You go through and break it down in a very thick listicle format how we are all losing our rights and especially the right to dissent and protest and participate in power if we're not on the inside of power, basically, in this country, criminalizing democracy.
The revolution within the forum continues, basically.
Anyway, yeah.
That's right.
So, why don't you just go ahead and take us through it?
It's a very important piece.
I hope people look at it.
Step one, you say equate dissidents with domestic terrorists.
But come on, that's pretty hyperbolic.
That's just maybe some right-wing talk radio doing that, right?
Well, certainly not if you're from Baltimore or Ferguson or any of the other cities that have seen major protests this year and last year.
From starting last summer, the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, as well as its so-called Threat Management Division, have been sending out warnings to law enforcement, basically equating those who are protesting in Ferguson and elsewhere with ISIS or with attempts to recruit people to ISIS.
Elsewhere, they say that the prospect of civil unrest also raises the potential for civil disobedience, and so they see this as a threat.
In New York City, Bill Bratton, our police commissioner, has gone forth with developing a new special ops unit called the Strategic Response Group, which he said was, quote-unquote, designed for dealing with events like our recent protests or incidents like Mumbai or Paris.
So there's a kind of equation here going on between what law enforcement sees as threats from unarmed peaceful protesters and threats from armed militants around the world.
And some of those tactics that they've been developing around the world, they've imported back to the United States, as we saw in Chicago during the NATO protests with the sort of black site in Homeland Square.
So those are some examples.
Well, now, let's get into some of those examples in a second, but I want to get back to just the theory about, you know, who these forces are being used against and how, why people are protesting and the point of view of the state, why they would equate that with terrorism is because the way they think of it, right, I guess, if they think of it at all, really, is that if you're going to participate in the democracy in America, you pick your party, you join it, and you go to their convention or something.
That's basically it.
They're looking at, you know, protesting in the streets, which, of course, might come with a broken window or two or whatever it is, usually not too much worse than that.
But they look at that as, my God, it's like a third of a revolution or something, you know, as though they're, you know, they're almost powerless and the Reds are going to come and sack them and overthrow the state.
So they overplay the danger of that kind of thing.
And it's just at the time that people have less and less access to the institutions that they actually could exercise some power through, that they have to resort to more protesting.
And they're seeing and then the population itself is seen as more and more alien from the state that supposedly represents them.
I mean, not that they ever really did, but it just seems like we're on this slippery slope getting worse and worse on the one we've probably been on all along, you know?
That's right.
You know, I think they see active citizens, people who are participating in their democracy in a way that's not prescribed by the elites as enemy combatants, as potential threats to the homelands.
Right.
And I think this is the infrastructure, the architecture of this was put in place in the years after 9-11.
Those of us who were part of the anti-war movement know that.
But it's really come a long way since then.
And that's sort of what I was trying to get into here.
Right.
Now, so get into the examples of what has changed in the recent times.
So for one thing, the sheer scope of the resources that are being directed towards the repression of protest, it's really staggering.
The 1033 program is one example where the Pentagon has been sending weaponry, military grade weaponry, and other controlled property, as they call it, to local law enforcement.
And that doesn't have to be used for counterterrorism.
You know, even if they admit that there's no terrorism involved, they can use it against peaceful protest.
DHS, for example, has another program called the Homeland Security Grant Program.
They funnel over a billion dollars a year to local law enforcement that provides everything from these Bearcats that we see in the streets of Baltimore, military counterattack vehicles, as they're known, to battle dress and body armor and, you know, all the things that we're seeing in these streets.
The Department of Justice has another program.
So it's really a vast it's a vast sort of channel tunnel for for these resources to be funneled into the repression of peaceful protest at the local level, as well as, you know, if it ever rose to the level of national unrest, I'm sure they'd be they have a few other tricks up their sleeve.
So those are some examples of, you know, just some of the resources that, by the way, are on that on that program.
Did you hear about what happened in Montana a couple of weeks ago where they voted to, you know, basically disassociate from the 1033 and the Homeland Security Program there?
That's right.
That's right.
I think this is a point of unity for a lot of people on the left and the right are seeing this as something that needs to be stopped before it goes any further.
So, man, Montana is a great example of that.
And that's a great one for for liberals and libertarians to argue, you know, and outflank the right on the right and say, hey, man, real law and order people respect the Constitution before the Homeland Security Department, buddy, and that kind of thing.
Right.
And get them where it hurts.
And George Washington.
That's right.
And also those who see that, you know, the kind of law and order that they claim to be enforcing is really not good for either law or order.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
OK, so sorry to interrupt there.
But I just want to point out that seems like a pretty important victory, especially coming from a conservative state.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And so now and you make a very important point here about less than lethal weapons and their use and their increased use and that kind of thing.
I bet you could wrap it up in about a minute and a half.
Absolutely.
So so.
We're looking at everything from the kind of classic less lethal weapons, that is, weapons that are designed to incapacitate their targets from, you know, the classic sort of rubber bullets and tear gas to the new generation of less lethal technologies.
There's something called the bozo bullet.
It looks like a clown's nose.
You basically put it on your service weapon.
If you're a police officer, a DHS officer turns it into a less lethal gun for as long as you have it on there.
You take it off.
It's a lethal gun again.
But that makes it potentially more likely that you're going to reach for that gun.
And we've seen, you know, we've seen people sort of police departments adopting the use of less lethal weapons, but then using them in lethal fashion.
So, you know, we've seen people sort of targeted and in some cases shot at, you know, by by DHS officer in L.A., for example, at a march in Manhattan and a march in Oakland.
People are actually pulling out their handguns.
So it's not just less lethal force we're talking about here.
It's also the prospect of lethal force.
Yeah.
And then, like you say, increasing amount of use where maybe they wouldn't have shot you.
And now these days are supposed to be a less lethal alternative to a gun.
Now it's a more dangerous alternative to a hand.
That kind of thing.
Anyway, so now I got to take this break.
But we'll be right back in just a second with Michael Wartofsky.
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All right, guys.
Welcome back.
So we are talking about the police state with Michael Alexander Gould Wartofsky.
The Homeland Security state, well, never really did have a bunch of Al-Qaeda running around.
So let's just target the hippies or whoever else wants to be so uppity as to think they can protest in the street against what their government is doing to them.
And so Michael Alexander Gould Wartofsky, he's really broken it down here at Tom Dispatch dot com and Antiwar dot com under Tom Englehart's name there at Antiwar dot com.
He's really broken down a lot of how this is working, as we can already see, and how it's getting much worse.
Can you talk tell us about the LRADs, the sound cannons?
Now, those are for persecuting Iraqis with, right?
Yeah, that was their original intention and was was designed for military use.
It's what's called the sound cannon in colloquial terms, a long range acoustic device, and it concentrates and directs acoustic energy at its targets at up to 152 decibels, something that's really acknowledged by the police themselves as unsafe for human ears.
And this has been deployed in recent years.
It was originally deployed only to communicate police orders.
That was supposed to be the only the only use of it.
We saw it in New York City in 2004, again in 2011 as a document in my book on the eviction of the Occupy Wall Street occupiers from Zuccotti Park.
But we really haven't seen it sound deterrent feature in action until recent months when it was deployed as a quote unquote aerial denial, area denial device against protesters in Ferguson and Manhattan.
Area denial device.
That's nice.
It is nice.
Yeah, I get that a nice little set of initials and move on.
And of course, I love this.
Well, we gave him a howitzer, but we told him just bang it with a wrench as a bell, as a warning.
But don't ever shoot anybody with it.
You know.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Give it give it 10 years.
Right.
And here we are today.
Yeah.
Amazing.
It took that long.
Is that really the first use of it?
Or did they do this back at the 2008 conventions and that kind of thing?
I forget now.
They they tried.
They tried to use it very, very briefly in Pittsburgh at the G8 protest there.
But there's a lot of controversy.
So they backed off.
But it's now in active use and its use has been really seen all over the country in these recent protests.
Yeah, we're used to it now.
It's like mom and apple pie.
It's the American way we shoot protesters with sound cannons because, hey, why not?
That's right.
And that's like this weapon.
It's like Bill Hicks talking about they got a big weapons catalog open.
What's this one do, Tommy?
Let's just they're just playing.
Basically, that's right.
That's right.
These are these are so many toys to them.
Yeah.
And and so what does that make us?
You know, that's the thing.
All right.
Now, so what's the skunk?
Tell me about that.
So this is what's what's known as a stink bomb.
Some some of us might be familiar with the more harmless renditions of this from our childhood, but this is really something used to mark protesters with by smell.
Right.
And it's described by by some people who have experienced it as a combination of quote unquote dead animal and human excrement.
It's something that law enforcement can shoot at a target and and just knock them down and then and then mark them so that they can know later who they were shooting at once the crowd disperses.
So, you know, there's no way you can get that off of you once you've been shot with it.
And they're eagerly stockpiling this stuff all across the country, starting out in Ferguson.
So this is the latest in the sort of less lethal warfare.
And this particular one is a war on our senses.
Yeah, well, and I don't know, it kind of it's just an example of, hey, what won't they do?
Right.
Whatever they can think of to go ahead and implement that's, you know, at least somewhat within the budget.
Go ahead.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
All right.
So, yeah.
Now, this is where we get into the real Orwellian part is number four on your list here.
Michael, replace humans with robots and predictive technology.
In other words, outsource all the decision making to inanimate objects.
That's right.
That's right.
And, you know, they they've been working on this for a while.
It's not it's not fully autonomous yet, but they have these remotely piloted aircraft, as we know, conventionally known as drones, vehicles, land vehicles and other robotic platforms that are now being deployed on the ground and in the air to to surveil our protest activity and also to connect to to other sort of surveillance detection systems.
So this is now being sort of perfectly integrated with with all the other technologies that they have at their hands.
And this is in use.
Drones are now in use by at least 19 police and sheriff's departments, as well as National Guard in nine states or more for this purpose.
So this is this is something that the new frontier at the new frontier of protest policing.
There's there's also something known as predictive policing or PredPol, which sort of calculates where they think a crime is going to be committed, where the big data tells you it's most likely to be committed and when and who might be responsible.
So so this is some next level stuff here.
Well, and the thing is, too, is it'd be impossible probably to argue that it's worthless, although as long as it's a government program, hopefully none of it will be too effective.
But in theory, you know, identifying the the most often arrested people in a neighborhood, I'm trying to remember, I think it was in Los Angeles or, you know, part of Los Angeles where they were doing this and it was actually working pretty well and they were able to the computer was able to see patterns in behavior that the cops, you know, by themselves wouldn't have picked up on and that kind of thing.
And so as long as it's just a little bit useful, you know, if they can even guess that maybe one time it'll help them save a kidnapped child or something like that, then how could anybody resist it?
Just again, as long as it can be implemented, it will be implemented.
It will be implemented.
That's right.
The thing is, it's not being implemented to rescue kidnapped children from from what we know.
I mean, it's it has it has been deployed, you know, to to sort of great fanfare by departments like the LAPD and now the NYPD, which is working with Microsoft to to implement this across the domain with the domain awareness system.
But but we're really talking about following us in real time at all times and trying to give intelligence analysts what they call, quote, a comprehensive view of potential threats.
So we're not talking about people who have already committed crimes or who are likely to kidnap children.
We're talking about those those people who are identified by the state as potential threats to them.
Right.
Yeah, now, and I guess we're at the point where, as you mentioned, the cops are using drones somewhat.
Do we have are there any American cities where the cops just unapologetically fly drones over the city all day long, kind of watching that kind of thing yet?
Yes.
So Los Angeles is one of those cities.
They have two Dragon Flyer X6 drones for use.
They admit that they use these during protests.
There were there was quite a few eyewitness reports of police helicopters and drones kind of working in tandem in Baltimore.
And then there was there was an attempted implementation of this in Seattle as well.
But Seattle pushed back.
The people in Seattle pushed back and the local government was forced to sell those drones down to the LAPD and get rid of them.
So it is possible to resist this this kind of latest offensive robotic offensive, if you will.
But I think it's going to take a lot more than what we've seen to stop it.
Yeah, I was noticing a thing that I guess was Glenn Greenwald wrote about how they've worked very hard to coin this phrase bulk collection because it sounds not necessarily softer, I guess, but just nice.
And besides the point from calling it mass surveillance, which is, you know, as you put it there, which is what this is, they it predicted policing doesn't work unless they're collecting on all of us.
And so now it's just a question of, you know, how many extra drones does the Pentagon have and how soon can they, you know, get reapers and predators up in the air over L.A. and and the rest of America's major cities seems like, you know, with the cameras and the rest of this stuff, it's just a matter of time.
It is.
And I think I wouldn't be surprised if they developed a 1033 program for drone technology at some point.
Right.
And now.
So what was the thing about Minnesota and the mall and the joint task force here and make friends and follow people?
So this is this is something this is this is also the sort of new generation of protest policing where it's not just a conventional police forces, the uniformed police that we're talking about or even plainclothes police.
We're talking about private security units that are working together with national intelligence agencies and and other law enforcement.
And in this case, we saw them all.
America has its own sort of counterterrorism unit called the Risk Assessment and Mitigation Unit.
And they were caught.
This was some great investigative work that was done by the intercept.
They were caught building fake Facebook accounts and building dossiers on 10 or more local activists who were planning a peaceful protest at the Mall of America.
And they work together with the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which is anchored by the FBI, work together with them to to to follow these people, track these people ahead of the protest, and then use that information once people have been arrested for protesting on America property to pursue challenges, charges against these people.
And it turned out that the Mall of America's legal unit was was coordinating with the local government and with law enforcement to press these charges.
So this is this is, again, sort of make friends and follow people is one way of putting it.
But this is really the new age of media, social media surveillance.
And we need to be aware of these things when we're on these social media sites.
Yeah, well, and, you know, it's funny because when you put it that way, especially the Mall of America thing, it's such a perfect example of the empire coming home here, where as long as we have a terror war, it's such an obvious target.
Of course, you know, they have this thing to protect from lone wolf, ISIS inspired wackos or whatever.
And then, of course, if somebody is going to have a protest, they're going to go ahead, they're going to conflate the two adversaries in their eyes so that they can use the powers for one in the name of the other and that kind of thing.
The same story is being told all over America, you know, the whole the whole country's one big Mall of America anyway.
That's right.
And, you know, that's it's just people got to recognize as long as we keep making enemies overseas, our government is going to keep these excuses for these kind of clampdowns on the rest of us.
But that's right.
And we remember we can recall George W.
Bush's words shortly after 9-11, you know, everyone should go shopping.
But make sure that's the only thing you're doing right in this Mall of America.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Because they're watching you real close.
Right.
I'm reminded.
I'm not sure, but I would be willing to bet that they went and got, you know, Las Vegas casino security to give them advice how to lock that thing down.
That's smart.
All right.
Hey, thanks for coming on the show.
Great interview.
Appreciate it.
Thanks so much for having me, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That is Michael Alexander Gould Wartofsky, and he is the author of the new book.
Sorry, I didn't say this at the beginning.
He's the author of the new book, The Occupiers, the making of the ninety nine percent movement.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow dot com.
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