Whoa, Kansas City, WTF?

On May 9, 2016, the Kansas City Public Library Plaza Branch hosted an event entitled “Truman and Israel,” featuring [former Bush Administration official and current Washington Institute for Near East Policy distinguished fellow Dennis] Ross, and sponsored by the library, the Truman Library Foundation, and the Jewish Community Foundation (JCF) of Greater Kansas City. Given that there had been a shooting at the Jewish Community Center in Kansas City several years back, the library agreed to allow off-duty police to be on the scene. However, the library set two conditions. First, nobody could be forcibly removed for asking an unpopular question. Second, nobody could be removed at all without consulting with the library staff, who would only allow an individual to be removed if staff concluded they were an imminent threat. In addition to the off-duty police officers, private security guards associated with the JCF were also present. In spite of these precautions, a local peace activist, Jeremy Rothe-Kushel, was removed. When [Steve Woolfolk, director of public programing at the library] tried to sort things out he was arrested.

[...]

Rothe-Kushel was first in line and managed to ask Ross a question. After Ross answered, Rothe-Kushel, who was still standing at the microphone at this time, attempted to offer his own response to Ross. A private security guard grabbed Rothe-Kushel, who asked the guard not to touch him, before being grabbed more aggressively. At this point, one of the off-duty police officers came over, and according to Woolfolk three different individuals were grabbing Rothe-Kushel. Woolfolk walked over, and with his hands at his sides, stood between the security detail and Rothe-Kushel. He told the security detail that he was director of programming for the library and that Rothe-Kushel had indicated that the would leave voluntarily if asked to. The security detail let go of Rothe-Kushel and he left.

[...]

[Woolfolk] went to find his supervisor, but before he could do so Woolfolk says an off-duty and out of uniform police officer grabbed him from behind and threw him against a pillar. Per Woolfolk, the officer never announced who he was or told Woolfolk he was under arrest, but just kept telling him to “stop resisting.” As Woolfolk told the Dissent NewsWire, he informed the officer, “I’d be happy to do whatever he wanted, and that all I was resisting was the urge to fall face first onto the floor.” According to Woolfolk, a second police officer, this one in uniform, delivered several blows to Woolfolk’s knee, causing him to be diagnosed with grade 1 torn MCL. Eventually he was thrown over a chair and handcuffed. When he asked what he was being arrested for, the officer told him he didn’t know.

  BORDC

What the fuck?!

Woolfolk stands charged with interfering with the arrest of Rothe-Kushel. Rothe-Kushel, like Woolfolk feared, was charged with trespassing and resisting arrest. “Nobody, be it an individual or an agent of the state, should be able to take it upon themselves to silence a point of view simply because they disagree,” Woolfolk informed the Dissent NewsWire. Yet, it would appear that not only is that exactly what happened, but a librarian who tried to make sure that a public library remained a public forum was arrested, as well.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

History Repeats

From a discussion of the book "The Burglary" by Betty Medsger who was the Washington Post reporter who received the stolen FBI documents that revealed the illegality of J. Edgar Hoover's infiltration and spying upon peace activists in the 60s  (click to enlarge):

Discussion at FireDogLake Book Salon.

Do Not Be Planning a Trip to Egypt

Code Pink leader, activist Medea Benjamin, on her way to Gaza, was detained, jailed and manhandled by Egyptian officers (her arm was pulled out of its shoulder socket), and then deported to Turkey. The US consulate did nothing to try to help her. Story here.

Drip, Drip, Drip

One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.

And here it is: Glenn Greenwald at the Interept: How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.

[...]

Claims that government agencies are infiltrating online communities and engaging in “false flag operations” to discredit targets are often dismissed as conspiracy theories, but these documents leave no doubt they are doing precisely that.

There's an App for That

Okay, not an app, but an educational/instructional pamphlet for activists.  It begins:

Federal law enforcement agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have a dark history of targeting radical and progressive movements. Some of the dirty tricks they use against these movements include: infiltration of organizations to discredit and disrupt their operations; campaigns of misinformation and false stories in the media; forgery of correspondence; fabrication of evidence; and the use of grand jury subpoenas to intimidate activists. Today’s activist must know and understand the threat posed by federal law enforcement agents and their tactics as well as several key security practices that offer the best protection.

You can read the pamphlet here.

You Can Fight Nationalism

But you can’t win.

RIP Garry Davis.

Peace activist Garry Davis, who dramatically renounced his US citizenship in the dark days of the Cold War and founded a government for self-declared "world citizens" like himself, has died.

Davis passed away in a hospice in the New England state of Vermont, where he had lived for many years, last Wednesday.

[...]

He would have been 92 last Saturday. The cause of death was not known, but he had been suffering from cancer in recent years.

"Garry Davis was an astonishing human being," said David Gallup, the current president of the World Service Authority, who spoke with him almost daily.

"He was working up to the very last minute... I thought he was going to go on forever," Gallup told AFP.

A one-time Broadway actor who flew B-17 bombers over Germany in World War II, Davis was 26 when he walked into the US embassy in Paris in 1948, renounced his American citizen and declared himself a citizen of the world.

[...]

Davis -- like many people in the aftermath of World War II -- dreaded the prospect of a third global conflict, this time involving nuclear weapons.

In a move that stirred up a lot of publicity, he disrupted a session of the UN General Assembly in Paris in September 1948 and called for the newly-formed world body to transform itself into a single government for the entire planet.

His idea attracted support from the likes of physicist Albert Einstein, novelist Albert Camus and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, and more than 20,000 people turned out for a rally he organized in the French capital.

[...]

Lacking papers from any traditional government, Davis traveled on a "world passport" issued by the World Government [which he founded], promoting what came to be known as the One World Movement -- and getting arrested or deported on several occasions as he did so.

[...]

Based in Washington, the non-profit World Service Authority still issues machine-readable, 30-page World Passports which, it says, have been stamped with visas by more than 150 countries "on a case-by-base basis."

One passport has been issued to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and another to intelligence leaker Edward Snowden after his US passport -- though not his US citizenship -- was revoked.

[...]

Over the decades, some 1.5 million people have registered as world citizens, while the World Service Authority has issued some five million identity documents of various kinds, including up to 750,000 passports, Gallup said.

  Yahoo

A World passport. What a great idea.

The Late Great Howard Zinn

Today, January 27, is the second anniversary of the death of Howard Zinn. An active participant in the Civil Rights movement, he was dismissed in 1963 from his position as a tenured professor at Spelman College in Atlanta after siding with black women students in the struggle against segregation. In 1967, he wrote one of the first, and most influential, books calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. A veteran of the US Army Air Force, he edited The Pentagon Papers, leaked by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and was later designated a "high security risk" by the FBI.

  alJazeera

That link contains a tribute to Howard by Noam Chomsky.

Also, if you have never read Zinn’s A People's History of the United States , do yourself a favor. I tried to give it as a present to kids entering high school so they could get some interesting reality with their dry history texts, but none ever expressed appreciation. Imagine that. I was lucky enough in college to have an introductory history course taught by a professor who used the Zinn method of teaching (not Zen). Even then, I was older than the bulk of the lecture hall freshmen, and they didn’t seem to be interested in the class any more than the said high schoolers were in Zinn's book. If you’re an older citizen who likely missed out on American history in any fashion other than Names and Dates of Big People and Big Events, check out A People's History of the United States . While I prefer to have a book (or a Kindle) in my hands, you can read it free online, which is awesome.

Tell your kids.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.