You’ll also note that Occupy London has been pretty much left alone by the cops.

There’s also a lot of confusion here, being extreme doesn’t make it wrong.

It sounds paranoid and nuts to think that those people might be arrested and whisked away to indefinite, lawyerless detention by the military, but remember: This isn’t about what’s logical, it’s about what’s going on in the brains of people like Lindsey Graham and John McCain.

At what point do those luminaries start equating al-Qaeda supporters with, say, radical anti-capitalists in the Occupy movement? What exactly is the difference between such groups in the minds (excuse me, in what passes for the minds) of the people who run this country?

That difference seems to be getting smaller and smaller all the time, and such niceties as American citizenship and the legal tradition of due process seem to be less and less meaningful to the people who run things in America.

Here’s another way to ask the question: On which side of the societal fence do you think the McCains and Grahams would put, say, an unemployed American plumber who refused an eviction order from Bank of America and holed up with his family in his Florida house, refusing to move? Would Graham/McCain consider that person to have the same rights as Lloyd Blankfein, or is that plumber closer, in their eyes, to being like the young Muslim who throws a rock at a U.S. embassy in Yemen?

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/indefinite-detention-of-american-citizens-coming-soon-to-battlefield-u-s-a-20111209#ixzz1glCYwzo5

Nafeez Ahmed, military analyst and author of “The Crisis of Civilization” is even more direct. Speaking of his native Britain, he says:

Similarly, in the UK since 2004 the government has held extraordinary emergency powers granted under the little-known Civil Contingencies Act. The Act paves the way for the rise of totalitarian state power. Under the powers enabled by the Act, the government can unilaterally decree a state of emergency at its own discretion without public consultation or parliamentary approval. Once a state of emergency is declared, all
manner of powers can come into play. Ministers can introduce new laws, “emergency regulations”, by Royal Prerogative without recourse to parliament. These laws can include anything from destroying or confiscating property, banning protests and public assemblies of any kind, instituting curfews, prohibiting travel, deploying the army on British soil, sealing off whole cities, shutting down websites, censoring media, and so on. Worse still, the state could classify whatever it wants as new criminal offences.

The problem is that the Act has nothing to do with responding to real emergencies. According to the journal of the British Association of Public Safety Communication Officials, the government has “no clear direction or dedicated budget and a complete lack of Act-specific assessment” relevant to actually preparing the country for concrete national emergencies or disaster scenarios. They rightly ask, “If the Government is truly committed to protecting the nation, why are Ministers not using the powers provided by the Civil Contingencies Act to proactively monitor the true state of preparedness across the country?”

http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2011/12/occupy-planet-earth-resisting.html

However just as in the Animal Rights movement it is possible that there are mad fellow travelers who literally are terrorists.

Policing imaginary threats: priceless. (Actually quite expensive.)

Unless assembling to enjoy a footie is revolutionary?

It’s the ideas the establishment fears. Not the actions.

`(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;

`(B) appear to be intended–

`(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;

`(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or

`(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

`(C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.’.

The novelty wares off almost instantly.

I have seen nothing in recent history that gives me reason to think that the government will exercise any kind of restraint in this area. Hell, even explicitly peaceful protests have the potential to become violent given the right circumstances (the right circumstances all too often being a few well placed “less-than-lethal” rounds, or batons to the face) . That potential alone can be used as an excuse to lump the protestors in with terrorists. Then it’s bye-bye protestors, and bye-bye protests since anyone who supports those “terrorists” are by definition terrorists themselves.

It is a reasonable question to ask whether the language being used to communicate the risks is being used to encourage violence by the Police against the protestors but this does not seem to be the case.