Is It Fascism Yet?

Sunday in Iran, 33 women were arrested for protesting outside a courthouse where five women were on trial for leading a campaign to gain more legal rights for women. The women were charged with “endangering national security, agitating against the government and taking part in illegal gatherings.” The arrests were part of a crackdown against protesting against the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Sound familiar? It should.

Protesting has an become an increasingly criminalized activity here in this country during the Bush administration. In February the New York Times reported on the “extra scrutiny of detainees” during the 2004 protests at the Republican National Convention. Over 1,000 people were arrested during the RNC protests, many of them wrongly and illegally, lawsuits say. New York police had a “special set of rules in place for the R.N.C., and they didn’t necessarily comport with the law,” according to Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

A New York judge recently declared illegal the videotaping of protestors—which had become a common practice in recent years. When I was working on a story on the 2004 Republican National Convention, I remember being struck by all the cops with video cameras, wearing “TARU” jackets (for Technical Assistance Response Unit), standing on the edges of the protests, filming. It was creepy, not something you’re supposed to see here in America. I remember asking a cop why they were videotaping the protestors.

“We’re not,” he said, training his camera on the protestors.

“They’re just recording,” another cop told me breezily. “It has nothing to do with the protestors. It’s protocol. It’s not used for surveillance.”

The New York judge on the case didn’t buy that, either. From now on cops are only allowed to videotape protests when they have reason to believe a crime will be broken; which unfortunately still gives them a broad leeway. While I was reporting this story I talked to someone who used to work in national intelligence who said that he believed it was possible these videotapes were being used to create files on protestors. “Face recognition" technology would make it possible to take individual faces out of crowds and identify them.

If it all sounds scarily Iron Curtain-ish, it is. And how about spying on protest groups? In early 2004, the City Council of the District of Columbia, in its “Metropolitan Police Department’s Policy and Practice in Handling Demonstrations in the District of Columbia," found that D.C. police had used “undercover officers to infiltrate political organizations in the absence of criminal activity” and that there had been “repeated instances of what appear to be preemptive actions taken against demonstrators including preemptive arrests"—including at President Bush's 2001 inauguration.

But videotaping and infiltrating is actually the least of it. Police departments throughout this country have for some time now been using so-called “nonlethal weapons” against protestors—in other words, police are attacking innocent Americans as if they weren’t just criminals, but enemies in a war zone.

You may have heard of nonlethal weapons—or as the manufacturers prefer to call them, “less than lethal weapons,” because they do, in fact, kill people—from news reports about the Iraq war. They’re the weapons our military often uses for “crowd control” in Iraq and other places, they’re how we subdue supposed “insurgents.” They’re also commonly used against U.S. citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, some would even say their moral or patriotic duty to dissent.

The nonlethal weapons industry is vast, and it is scary. It includes the manufacture of rubber bullets, gasses, tasers, billy clubs, and much more that is very high-tech and very cruel. Do a search on “nonlethal weapons” and start poking around on some of the manufacturers’ web sites; these militarists seem to be very psyched about war, and the profits to be made from war, and also the prospect of a military conflict with Iran. They are very convinced that nonlethal weapons are an appropriate response to street protest. When I saw Obama and Hillary marching tight-smiled in Selma, all I could think of was: what would the police be doing to these marchers today, if these high-profile politicians weren’t there, locking arms with them?

So plain has the relationship between nonlethal weapons and protest become that many nonlethal weapons manufacturers now actually market their products as tools for quelling what they chillingly term “civil disturbances”—that's Orwellian for protests. The web site for Defense Technologies, a leading nonlethal weapons manufacturer and supplier to the NYPD, features a promotional video in which images of rabid-looking protestors waving signs are set against apocalyptic-sounding music and a deep voice intoning, “Seattle, 1999, riots at the WTO conference, and we are there! Washington, D.C., 1999, disturbances outside the World Bank meeting, and we are there!” A “hostile subject” is then seen being wrestled to the ground, his face doused with pepper spray.

It isn’t just advertising, unfortunately. At the 2003 FTAA protests in Miami, protestors were not only pepper sprayed but beaten, shot with rubber bullets, and tasered. In 2004, the Miami Activist Defense and National Lawyers Guild filed a federal lawsuit challenging “the mass false arrests”—over 800 of them—“of, and unreasonable force against, lawful demonstrators,” and charging local law enforcement with coordinating “an all-out assault on the First Amendment, engaging in widespread political profiling,” sweeping the streets “of anyone viewed as being an anti-FTAA activist, effectively suspending the Fourth Amendment in the city for 10 days."

Meanwhile protests in this country have been overwhelmingly non-violent—especially considering the size of many of them (500,000 at the RNC and not one violent act on the part of protestors). The police response to protest has been the opposite. A willing media has run to the story of the “violent anarchists,” etc.—a bunch of hogwash. A few months after the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, the New York Times was forced to retract a report that demonstrators had “hurled Molotov cocktails, rocks and excrement at delegates and police officers" after Seattle authorities admitted that protestors had thrown no objects at human beings. It was propaganda.

You'd be hard-pressed to find anything in the extensive writing on Seattle showing evidence of protestors causing any harm to others; but there's a great deal of evidence that police did. Protestors shut down the WTO through marches and organized acts of civil disobedience, the blocking of key sites and traffic. An unprecedented coalition of labor, students, religious groups, environmental groups, NGOs and random others had committed themselves to non-violence before the protest even started. The opposition to the WTO was free-ranging, representing the basic tenets of the Global Justice movement: that extra-governmental organizations with no accountability to voters should not be permitted to make global decisions on matters of trade and environmental policy, typically favoring multinational corporations over the interests of the environment, the poor and the working man and woman, exporting American jobs in the process.

And for believing in all this—which sounds to me like the themes of a Frank Capra movie—and for willing to put their bodies on the streets for their beliefs, protestors were met with billy clubs and pepper spray. It was Bill Clinton who authorized that.

If it hasn't sunk in that this is going on—and why should it when it never appears on national television—check out footage of the 2003 FTAA protests in Miami available on Indymedia. Watch a law-abiding lawyer named Elizabeth Ritter get shot in the head. Ritter, an unintentional icon of the Global Justice movement, said she had had no problem with the FTAA itself when she came out for the protest. She was protesting the immense police presence there.

In what has become an increasingly common response to protest, post-911, the Miami police spent tens of millions of dollars and engaged the muscle of multiple federal law enforcement agencies in dealing with what turned out to be a gathering of only a few thousand people. For the FTAA meetings, Miami became the host to over 40 local, state and federal agencies under a “Law Enforcement Joint Operations Command” financed with $8.5 million from the then $87 billion budget for the War on Terror.

(Someone should do a thorough auditing of these enormous anti-protest budgets and see just where and to whom all this money is going. In 2004, Savannah spent $25 million for the G-8 protests, to which only around 400 people showed up. Republican governor Sonny Perdue took the unusual step of declaring six Georgia counties under a state of emergency due to the threat of “unlawful assemblages, threats of violence, or otherwise”—an order which gave police great freedom in making arrests and breaking up any “gatherings of people.” 20,000 state, local and federal cops were there to handle what turned out to be a ragtag group of protestors including people in wheelchairs. Who made bank on all that $25 million?)

On November 22, 2003, in Miami, 2500 police in riot gear massed across Biscayne Boulevard and drove about a thousand peaceful protestors away with rubber bullets, tear gas, “paint balls” full of pepper spray, “bean bags” full of lead shot and other nonlethal weapons. Elizabeth Ritter was among them. A tall, no-nonsense-looking woman in a red linen blazer, she carried a sign which said, “FEAR TOTALITARIANISM.” “What are you doing?” she demanded of a line of advancing riot police shooting rubber bullets into the crowd. “You are attacking these young people. They have a right to be here. Come on.” The police continued advancing. As Ritter turned around, they shot her in the back five times with rubber bullets.

“Did you shoot me?” Ritter demanded, turning back around. “A lady in a suit who has been walking peaceably in front of you for half an hour?” She showed the back of her wounded leg to a cameraman from Indymedia. Minutes later, as the police marched forward, Ritter crouched beneath her sign, and again police shot her, through the sign, in the head.

“You all saw it!” Ritter screamed at the cadre of reporters and cameramen.

But few people in the America have ever seen such footage. It didn’t turn up on the national or even local TV news; the lead story that night was Michael Jackson’s surrender from Neverland. Nor did New Yorkers see footage of what really happened at the anti-Iraq war protests in the city in February of 2003. The NYPD repeatedly sprayed pepper spray into crowds of peaceful demonstrators, in addition to breaking up crowds with horses and batons. Footage from Indymedia shows officers holding large cans (called “aerosoles”) and spraying pepper spray in the faces of people who are doing nothing but standing on the street or sidewalk.

“Even at locations far from the main action, the police deployed pepper spray,” says a New York Civil Liberties Union report on the protest.

While it may sound like something Granny carries in her handbag, pepper spray—or Oleoresin Capsicum (OC)—is actually an inflammatory agent more powerful than tear gas. It causes the eyes to slam shut and temporary blindness set in due to dilation of the optical capillaries. Inflammation of the lungs restricts all but life support breathing. Pepper spray has been linked to over 100 fatalities in the United States; and yet every officer in the NYPD now carries it as part of his or her usual gear.

“Pepper spray is absolutely illegal”—at least in war, that is, but not for use against American protestors, Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project, a non-lethal weapons N.G.O., told me in 2004. “Certain chemicals which meet the definition of a ‘riot control agent’ can be used by law enforcement. Governments were unwilling to give up tear gas in the Chemical Weapons Convention. They wanted to be able to gas their own citizens,” he said.

How could it be, that something soldiers aren't even allowed to use against the enemy is allowed to be used against U.S. citizens? Banned by international agreements such as the Biological Weapons Convention and the Geneva Convention, nonlethal weapons exist in a largely unregulated realm, ignored by Congress. Their proliferation in American law enforcement goes back to 1993 and the Battle of Mogadishu. After the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident, where an Army helicopter was shot down and 18 American servicemen were killed by rioting civilians, there was a push by the Department of Defense to develop weapons for conflicts that are not technically war, conflicts where the United States has a role “peacekeeping.”

In its “Policy for Non-lethal Weapons,” published in 1996, the D.O.D. said that nonlethal weapons—“explicitly designed and primarily employed so as to incapacitate personnel or materiel” by "means other than gross physical destruction”—would allow for “military action in situations where use of lethal force is not the preferred option.” Meaning, we’re not technically in a war, but we want to act like we are, so we better not kill too many people, just “incapacitate” them.

Then in 1997, Congress established the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate under Marine Corps command. The JNLWD, based in Quantico, Virginia, makes recommendations and proposals to the Department of Defense on the nonlethal weapons being developed by wings of the military and the burgeoning nonlethal weapons industry. Most nonlethal weapons companies are advised by former military commanders; all companies sell freely to both the military and police departments.

This transfer of weaponry from the military to law enforcement was actually set up by the Clinton administration. In a “Memorandum of Understanding Between the Department of Defense and Department of Justice On Operations Other than War and Law Enforcement,” signed by a post-WACO Attorney General Janet Reno in 1994, an agreement was set forth “to conduct a program to enhance D.O.D. Operations Other Than War (OOTW) and D.O.J. and other Law Enforcement (LE) operations through a sharing and joint development, to the extent permitted by law, of technology and systems applicable to both.” The memorandum cited “a growing convergence between the technology required for military operations and the technology required for law enforcement. Moreover, recent technological advances suggest a current ability to enhance the effectiveness of both OOTW and LE missions.” That's a gobbledygook way of saying we're declaring war on the American people.

In a striking linkage between protest and Operations Other Than War, the Army’s Center for Lessons Learned issued a paper in 2000 saying that, "Over the last nine years, peace operations in Haiti, Somalia, and Bosnia placed demanding challenges on our soldiers and leaders… Having the right tools to execute missions in volatile and dangerous situations enhances the capability to succeed. Non-lethal weapons provide that enhanced capability… Recent history shows that the most likely threats are from civil disturbances… Examples include: (1) Peace operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina …(2) According to news reports, groups organized and instigated civil disturbances in Seattle, WA, to protest U.S. support of the World Trade Organization.” In other words, we make no distinction between a war zone and a U.S. city in the midst of a (legal, peaceful) protest.

The nightsticks and hoses that were the order of the day in Selma are quickly receding before the forces of technology. More exotic non-lethal weapons are coming to Operations Other than War abroad and at home. The Air Force Research Laboratory has spent $40 million on a Humvee-mounted “directed-energy weapon” which microwaves the skin, causing an unbearable burning sensation. HSV Technologies in San Diego is developing a super-taser that can paralyze “subjects” from as far away as a mile. And the JNLWD has been studying the use of “calmatives”—central nervous system depressants, or knock-out drugs.

Calmatives were used by Moscow police in the hostage crisis of 2002, causing the death of 118 people, roughly one in seven of the 763 Moscow hostages taken. But to some in the U.S. military, this was still seen as a victory. “This situation may very well cause Chechens to rethink their support of these terrorist groups,” said the Center for Contemporary Conflict, a think-tank for the Navy. There’s military logic for you.

The rationale from police departments continues to be that nonlethal weapons are more “humane” because theoretically they do not kill people. “If you’re given a choice between tear gas and police officers with sticks over their heads wielding them into a crowd then obviously the gas is much more preferable,” Miami Police Chief John Timoney told me in 2004. “Non-lethal weapons are much more humane than nightsticks, absolutely.” But the Miami Police used nightsticks as well as pepper spray against protestors at the 2003 FTAA protest, and many people suffered injuries due to the use of nonlethals in that shameful debacle, including one man who got a “paint ball” embedded in his face.

At the RNC, the NYPD rolled out a high-tech sound device which was first deployed in Iraq in 2003—a megaphone the size of a satellite dish which is being used to deliver warnings and, on command, emit a piercing tone so excruciating to humans that it causes crowds to disperse. It’s not yet known whether it will also cause deafness.

What's next? American citizens being burned with microwave weapons, just because they don't agree with this government, this war—perhaps the coming war with Iran? The police presence at protests has, tellingly, been toned down somewhat since the opposition to the Bush administration and the war in Iraq has grown. But what happens if or when there's another terrorist attack and protestors again become a handy target for the propaganda of fear? What happens when the Bush administration starts telling us we have to deliver the Iranian people from their oppressive government? We can ask them then who will deliver us. We can get out on the streets and deliver our own loud message. We’re Americans, and that means something holy: we fight back.