Breaking News: Big Media
Caught Red-Handed?
The New York Times: Time-honored Bastion of real Journalism? Or Bought-and-Paid-For Liars? You be the judge.
By D.J. Raspe - DJRaspy.com
Brooklyn, NY -- I bet you're wondering why I'm formatting this particular entry of the #OccupyDigest differently than all the previous ones. Well, you're probably not wondering, actually, but I'm going to tell you anyway. I'm formatting it like a newspaper, because, quite frankly, it has become clear to me that the traditional sources of publication, the Big Media Outlets like the New York Times, are no longer worthy of the damned format that they have used for centuries.
The Revolution is still going strong - American Autumn, 2011"What's that, Raspy? Explain yourself!", you might be saying. All right, I will. As if the damning picture at the top of this Digest entry has not adequately said it for me. You see, I want to explain it, and I will do so with a story, a personal anecdote of how my day went yesterday (October 1st...I'm writing this on the morning of October 2nd). Bear with me. I'm kinda long-winded. But even though I've not slept since yesterday morning, and I'm really, really tired, this story...this unmitigated OUTRAGE of a story must be told, so I'm going to tell it.
You see, I've been following the events of the #OccupyWallStreet Movement and other similar #Occupy Movements across the country for a little over 2 weeks now. 16 days, to be precise, and I've noticed something. The news changes. Sometimes, articles that I set aside to revisit later when I am ready to type up my #OccupyDigest come up mysteriously missing from search results. I always wondered about that. Now, I do not any longer have to wonder. The New York Times has given me a glimpse, probably quite inadvertantly, of the reason for this. It appears that there is quite a bit of reason for me to conclude that they have been changing the f***ing news!
So anyways, I was, as normal, following the unfolding events of the #OccupyWallStreet Movement, and, as you probably know by now if you've been paying attention, there was a bit of an incident at the Brooklyn Bridge yesterday, involving #OccupyWallStreet and our good ol' friends, Mssrs. Charlie PoPo of the NYPD. Yup. Once again. (Deja-vu, anyone?)
Now, I was watching the Livestream of the #OccupyWallStreet March on the Brooklyn
The current Occupy Map has more dots on that. Haven't uploaded that one yet, though, so here's the one from before. Bridge, and I saw the arrests taking place. Want to know what I saw? I saw a somewhat smallish crowd of Police Officers, both blue and white uniformed (probably about 20 or so) in the middle of a vast crowd of protesters, performing their usual "job-duties" of tackling peaceful protesters to the ground (and they do it so well). They had, as per their normal tactics, 5 or 6 police officers to each protester they were taking down. (So very brave, those wonderful white shirted heroes of the NYPD, huh?) And there were maybe 3 or 4 Blue Shirts holding and pushing the crowd back.(Wow...all these talks about white shirts and blue shirts kinda reminds me of brown shirts...I wonder why? Hint: It CERTAINLY isn't because of U.P.S. Drivers.)
As the "festivities" were taking place, I got the heads up from a G+ friend about a report via Twitter on the #OccupyWallStreet hashtag that I customarily follow to get up-to-date information on what's going on on the ground. That is, after all, what Twitter is for, particularly in times of Revolution, I've noticed. The time was approximately 3:30 P.M. Here is the tweet:
""OccupyWallStNYC #OCCUPYWALLSTREET
@democracynow is reporting that @NYTimes reporter N. R. Kleinfeld being arrested now. He wrote this nytimes.com/2011/10/01/nyr… #occupywallstreet" (Note: The link given in this tweet turned out to be non-functional, indicating that the story thus linked had been moved.)
Remember that name, N.R. Kleinfeld. It might be important later.
Getting back to my story, I continued to follow the events, doing what I normally do, which is posting real-time updates to Google Plus and Facebook about what I was learning, because that's what Independent Media does these days. And I'm Independent Media.
Almost 2 hours later, at 5:17 P.M., I was commenting on a G+ friend's thread about the recent events at #OccupyWallStreet, and one of her circled popped on the thread and started taking place in the conversation. A little while later, after maybe 10 - 20 comments, he told us that a friend of his was on the the ground at the protests, and was being arrested even as they spoke. I asked him if he could get his friend to tweet out some information as to what was going on over there on the Brooklyn Bridge.
We got the following tweet in reply, which I posted on my G+ Profile:
"Update on #OccupyWallStreet Brooklyn Bridge Arrests:
I can confirm that one of the Protesters arrested at the Brooklyn Bridge today was one +Dan Smith, who has left this update on a friend's page:
"Dan Smith - A rrested and on ny transit bus now.. cuffed but flexible enouugh to text
Just wish they didnt split up me And my gf.. Diff places.. Too many ppl to charge in one place.. Been cuffed on a bus for over an hour"
The news reports all over the place, including the Livestream AND several online Big Media outlets were saying that dozens were getting arrested there, and some were even reporting that the protesters were claiming that they had been tricked by the NYPD into marching onto the bridge, and then were suddenly hemmed in by them, coralled together, and arrested as multiple buses were called to the scene, in which to detain them!
Now, I happen to have a bit of a foundation in military tactics. It's kinda a hobby of mine to study things like that, since I've been publishing an audiobook of the Sanguo Yanyi here at DJRaspy.com for several years, and military tactics play a huge part in that story. And according to the descriptions given at various sources at the time, the tactics being employed by the NYPD were pretty much standard ambush tactics. Let part of the enemy walk past and then attack their flanks. This tactic has been utilized by vastly outnumbered armies for several thousand years, because it works remarkably well. (Note: The Big Media outlets have been trying to downplay the numbers of protesters for weeks now, and yet, the NYPD feels the need to employ tactics designed for vastly outnumbered forces? Do you smell something fishy here? I do.)
So now it's about 5:30 P.M., and there's all sorts of arrests taking place, and I'm still following the story as it unfolds. Yet, still the news reports were, even at that time, reporting numbers ranging from 40 to 50 arrests. This seemed a pretty consistent figure, considering the numbers of confirmed of arrests in the preceding weeks had also been relatively small. All in all, this seemed like a fairly routine clash of Protesters and Cops, not terribly different than the Battle of the Auction, which took place on September 22nd (the one involving the now-notorious Anthony Bologna and the "Pepper Spray" Incident).
It might be important to note that about that same time (actually, 2 minutes later, at 5:19 P.M., I discovered that CNN's coverage of the incident lasted a whole 10 - 15 seconds, and pretty much consisted of a ticker post and a tiny video clip, then it was on to another story. Establishment Media = #SuperFAIL).
The situation remained somewhat standard for another hour or so. The NYPD appeared to still be doing at 6:30 what they had been doing at 5:30. I, however, had to take a quick shower and then head out to the Spearfish City Park to help convene the first meeting of the #OccupyBlackHills General Assembly. More details on that later. It is VERY important to note here that when I left for the General Assembly, the up-to-the-minute news reports had confirmed 73 arrests in the incident at the Brooklyn Bridge. My last thought as I was heading out the door? "Wow. The NYPD's on the warpath today. 73? That's more than they've arrested in the past 2 weeks combined, almost!"
After the General Assembly, I went to work and did my thing, and got home after about 2:30 A.M. And checking my Social Media feeds, what do you suppose I saw? I saw all sorts of articles posted all over the place about how several HUNDRED had been arrested at the Brooklyn Bridge! Several hundred! The first article I read was posted at the Huffington Post, where it was told that 400 had been arrested, over 300 more than there had been when I had left the house, and my computer, but a few short hours past! The numbers just kept growing bigger and bigger with the more articles that came in. Time Magazine quoted the number as at least 700, with a mention that a Police Officer at the scene expressed the opinion that the number might have been closer to 1000.
Regardless of the numbers of arrests, the important thing was how they were arrested. I will now attempt to piece together the events of what I call the "Battle of Brooklyn Bridge" from various accounts given to the Independent and the Establishment Media.
What is known that, early in the afternoon, on October 1st, a large crowd of marchers, at the very least several hundred strong, marched to the Brooklyn Bridge to protest. There is some controversy about whether or not the Police attempted to warn them back. The NYPD has issued statements, and even video seemingly supporting those statements, that they had warned the Protesters not to march onto the Brooklyn Bridge, or they would be arrested en masse. And indeed, it appears that the protesters were arrested en-masse. But here's where the situation becomes entirely murky.
First, here's an eyewitness account from one of the protesters involved in the events of that day, posted on Reddit yesterday. Here's an excerpt from the article:
I was in the middle/back of the march, and most of us were led directly onto the roadway without a word being said from tons of nearby police. We were simply following the march.
The cop basically escorted us walk up the ramp without saying anything. I didn't even realize we weren't on a pedestrian walkway until I saw cars merging with us ahead. At that point, there were still police everywhere, but saying nothing, so I thought it was sanctioned.
About a hundred feet behind me, the cops cut off the rest of the marchers and directed them to the walkway. These cops followed us as a safety escort I thought, but about a third of the way up the bridge the march came to a stop, and protesters flooded into the right lane of traffic stemming the flow of cars.
Because I was located at the end of the large group of protesters on the roadway, there was no way to know why the march had stopped, but I found out later, police had blocked the path.
After a failed "March!" chant, protesters began to sit down, and yell at us to sit down.
At this point, the police were approaching us from behind, and I was thinking "fuck this shit, I wanted to protest wallstreet/taxes, not the brooklyn bridge, let's get the hell out of here."
One man sat down far behind everyone else and was quickly arrested. Ahead I could see about a dozen people climbing about 20-30 feet of steel lattice to get onto the pedestrian walk way.
So my friends and I moved to the side of the bridge and because we were located at the back of the march, we were able to walk backwards towards the police. The police had pulled out an orange net/fence across 3 of the 4 lanes behind us and were trying to trap us in, but a large group of people rushed to get past the net and we were allowed out and back into Manhattan.
If I had been a mere 100 feet further up, I most likely would have been trapped by the crowds of protesters sitting. I'm not sure how many people they let past the net after the initial rush of people trying to get out.
Shady? It gets shadier. Check out the two videos posted yesterday by NYPD, to support their statement that they tried to stop the Protesters from entering the Bridge. Let's analyze, shall we?
First, here is the article posted by the New York Times (figures) stating that the NYPD warned the Protesters. I'll quote from the article here.
The videos, which were released on Sunday morning, show the police issuing two separate warnings to marchers who were either poised to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on its roadway, rather than the pedestrian walkway, or had already begun doing so.
Now, the Police Videos, with accompanying analysis. Ready for this?
In this first video, we see the officers of the NYPD arranged in a line across the bridge, blocking the Protesters from moving forward. Okay, fine. That's standard Police procedure right there.
Notice that the protesters, as indicated in the above Reddit article I posted, sat down in the middle of the bridge. This first video shows the NYPD clearly warning the protesters away. Yet they are all sitting there, shouting "Shame! Shame! Shame!" and not leaving. Why? Perhaps they want to get arrested. Perhaps. But what of the numerous reports around the Internet that they were allowed onto the Bridge? Notice that the line of NYPD's finest that are ordering the Protesters away in this video are in the middle of the bridge, and not at the entrance. That is a very, very important fact to note, and you can see it for yourself in this video that the NYPD themselves posted at the New York Times.
But if the NYPD were in the Middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, and warning the protesters of #OccupyWallStreet to turn back, why are the protesters just sitting there, and shouting "Shame! Shame! Shame!" instead of actually turning back and going back to the mainland to continue their protest? The answer to that question might, indeed, be answered in this second video that the New York Times was so kindly as to publish for the NYPD. Have a look-see.
What do we see in this video? We see another video of the NYPD warning protesters away, for one thing. But I want you all to note some very, very interesting features of this video, if you will.
Notice that the NYPD are facing towards the Protesters. That's no big task. You can see it with your own two eyes. Notice, also, that the Protesters have what appears to be TREES at their backs. You notice that? Sure, I figured you would. You're not blind, after all.
And ask yourself: How many bridges have a bunch of trees growing on them? Does the Brooklyn Bridge? Did you see any trees growing on the Brooklyn Bridge in the first video, which was shot in the middle of the Bridge? No. You did not. Because they are not there.
So we can reasonably conclude, from the second video, two things.
1) The Protesters in the second video had not yet moved on to the Brooklyn Bridge, and had the city at their backs. And...
2) The NYPD Officers in the second video were facing AWAY from the Brooklyn Bridge, and were, indeed, attempting to stop the protesters from marching forward onto the Bridge.
Now, what, I ask, can we infer from this? Well, on their own, these videos would seem to support the NYPD's case that they attempted to stop the March from entering the Bridge...if you're blind. But you're not blind. You can see as well, if not better than I can. So, piecing together, even just from these videos, the scenario which took place, we can see that some protesters were allowed onto the Bridge, and then Police stepped in behind them, and blocked the rest of the protesters who were behind them from going to join them on the bridge. And now, we have our answer to the question, "Why didn't the protesters on the bridge turn around and go back to the mainland?" Because they couldn't. They were hemmed in, on BOTH sides, by NYPD. At that point, the only way OFF that bridge was either to go through the Police Lines, which would have not been a good idea to try to do peacefully, and peaceful is the name of the game in this protest. Or the other option would have been to jump off the bridge, and maybe drown.
Now, here's where we discuss a little bit about a very, very standard military tactic, which is no doubt not at all beyond the scope of security forces like the NYPD.
It's called an "Ambush". The more classic term is "Ambuscade".
You see, when a small, outnumbered force wants to overwhelm a much, much more numerous adversary, they have to figure out a way to, essentially, cut that adversary into separate, and isolated pieces.
The tactic, which would be confirmed by any military personel with at least a basic background in tactics, goes like this. When you have an enemy army coming at you, you pick appropriate terrain...a canyon works good, or in this case, a bridge, which only has two ways in or out. Then, you station a small force in the middle of the canyon...or bridge...and wait for your opponents to arrive. You let a part of the army pass into the canyon, or in this case, bridge. After you do that, you step in behind them and cut them off from the rest of their forces. At that point, the people in the canyon...or bridge...are cut off and isolated from their fellows, and have nowhere to go. They're utterly hemmed in...coralled like cattle, and you can deal with them however you wish. This is the standard ambush tactic which has been employed by military commanders for thousands of years, virtually unchanged, because it quite simply works. And works well.
I'm not going to tell you what to believe. But what I WILL tell you is that, from the evidence presented, ESPECIALLY the damning evidence presented by the NYPD itself, there is a lot of evidence to support the notion that the NYPD did, in fact, ambush the protesters of #OccupyWallStreet at the Brooklyn Bridge. You've seen it for yourself. I'm not going to tell you what to think here. I'm not even going to come out and tell you to believe that the NYPD was lying. I want to know, from the evidence presented, what do you think happened?
On that note, I'm going to leave you with a picture of the Day here.
Scene from Occupy Wall Street - Image courtesy of Daniel H. Patterson.