Also remember the AP's are the ones with shiny shoes.
The use of agents provocateurs to undermine protest movements
Posted on 1 October 2013 by Andrew
( Source)
Ever since the lid was blown off the FBI’s COINTELPRO activities in the 1970s, the tactics of infiltration, disruption and “neutralization” have become well known to civil liberties advocates everywhere. At the local level, civil rights lawsuits took on police departments’ use of specialized “ red squads” that used similar tactics. A federal district court ruling from 1972 describes allegations put forth by plaintiffs suing the NYPD:
Informers and infiltrators provoked, solicited and induced members of lawful political and social groups to engage in unlawful activities. In the instance of infiltrating police officers, it is alleged that in addition to urging members to participate in unlawful activity, they provided funds and equipment to further that purpose. Specific instances of such conduct are cited, including the alleged inducement of members of named organizations, to which some plaintiffs belong, to participate in armed robbery, with resulting arrests, indictments and trials upon the charges, ending in acquittals, and upon another occasion to plan the bombing of a government facility ( Handschu v. Special Services Division, US District Court for SDNY, 24 October 1972).
These days, the use of such tactics range from throwing items at uniformed police while mingling among protesters to goading activists into phony terror plots. A few examples of provocateurs being used as crowd control agents can be found below:
- On 28 April 2005, residents of the Palestinian West Bank town of Bi’lin held a protest against the encroachment of their lands by Israeli occupation authorities and settlers. After the crowd began throwing rocks at IDF soldiers and Israeli police they were dispersed with tear gas, plastic bullets covered with salt and stun grenades. According the demonstrators, undercover Israeli security forces were the ones who threw stones at the police. Military sources later admitted to Haaretz that undercover forces did in fact throw stones, but only after other demonstrators began doing so. The sources stated that “stone-throwing by the undercover forces is part of the way in which they operate in such instances.” It is hard to comprehend that the undercover agents would do this merely to maintain their cover and not for creating a pretext for a crackdown on the protest ( AntiWar.com 2 May 2005; Haaretz, 29 April 2005).
- Video footage of a protest that took place on 20 August 2007 outside a North American leaders’ summit in Montebello, Quebec shows “three burly men” with face coverings, one of them was carrying a rock, aggressively charging through a crowd of protesters towards riot police. After being accused by activists of being agents provocateurs, they manage to slip behind police lines and are peacefully arrested. Retired Ottawa police officer Doug Kirkland said he agreed with the activists that the three men were probably working for the police. “If they weren’t police, I think they might well have been working in the best interests of police,” he said ( CBC News, 22 August 2007).
- On 25 August 2008, during the DNC convention in Denver, Colorado, police surrounded a crowd of hundreds of protesters, journalists and bystanders. Undercover detectives then decided to fake a struggle–purportedly to justify their removal from the crowd without being outed as undercover cops. The ACLU ( 6 November 2008) described what happened next: “the undercover detectives’ struggle was so convincing that other officers believed that Commander Kroncke was being attacked by protesters, and one officer deployed chemical agents [pepper-spray] in response.” An estimated 106 people were arrested at the specific protest and the ACLU suggests that the undercover officer’s phony resistance “may have escalated the overall situation by causing officers on the scene to fear that the protesters threatened their safety, when in fact, the struggle was only between uniformed officers and undercover officers” ( Denver Post, 6 November 2008).
- During the 2009 G20 protests in London, there were allegations from MP Tom Brake and photographer Tony Amos of suspicious protesters who were allowed to leave police cordons after throwing bottles at police and encouraging others to do so. “When the crowd became suspicious of the men and accused them of being police officers, the pair approached the police line and passed through after showing some form of identification” ( Observer, 9 May 2009).
- On 24 October 2011, police discovered a box of bricks with a ridiculous and provocative note attached to it (pictured above) at the grounds of an Occupy Minnesota protest in Minneapolis. The discovery was quickly utilized by local news outlets and a Hennepin County sheriff’s office press release to smear the movement. Protesters say the man who left the box was a likely provocateur who was pointed out to police by activists at the scene. “They watched in despair as the police briefly questioned him and then released him” ( Twin Cities Daily Planet, 25 October 2011; Minnesota Independent, 25 October 2011).
- Patrick Howley, Assistant Editor at a conservative publication known as the American Spectator, openly admitted to infiltrating a Washington DC protest at the National Air and Space Museum with the intent to “mock and undermine” in a (now scrubbed) post dated 8 October 2011. Howley joined a smaller grouping that attempted to storm the museum and ended up getting collectively pepper sprayed. “As far as I could tell,” he said, “I was the only one who got inside the museum” ( FireDogLake, 9 October 2011).
A few more random items of note can be found below:
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