Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed Speak at Occupy Lincoln Center

The human microphone resonated loudly outside of Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera House last Thursday night.  31 years after its premiere in Rotterdam, one of the finest American operas, Philip Glass' epic Satyagraha, finally had its Metropolitan Opera debut last month.  Thursday night was its final performance.  Composer Glass had been asked by Occupy Lincoln Center and Occupy Opera to address hundreds of demonstrators outside the house.  He agreed.

Between the final curtain of the opera and Glass' speech, NYPD barricades were erected between opera goers and demonstrators.  People upstairs at the Met could see the hundreds of demonstrators and police outside through the building's windows.

Writing at The Awl, Seth Colter Walls, who was there, described the scene, comparing the police scenes in the opera itself to those outside:

At one juncture, the shadows of acrobats who are miming, in slow motion, the violence of police against Civil Rights protestors are visible through windows scrimmed with newspapers. Meantime, projections of documentary videos showing similar truth-forces play around the borders of those same windows. When the shock troops break the historical fourth wall, slicing the newspapers into ribbons as they move from the deep American south into the forward-stage world of Gandhi's compatriots, the viewer's response may be to object on the basis of some temporal-spacial order. Police can't just do that, can they? They can't magically cross continents and decades in order to tamp down any social movement they choose, right?


The constricts that power itself is obliged to observe are actually amorphous, at least from the outside; it's hard to know exactly where they really lie, or when, or to what degree, they may ever be changing. This accounts not just for what we may now commonly describe as Kafkaesque machinations of legal systems, but also citizens' wariness regarding nascent social movements. (Are they "really" doing something important? Are they "good" at whatever it is? Are they "likely" to succeed regarding issues "coherently" expressed?)


This is all part of power's language. So, on Thursday night, were phrases like: "Exit down the ramp to the right," which is what opera-goers heard from police trying to keep the Occupy movement cleanly separate from the people who had just watched Satyagraha. The blitheness with which these official police suggestions were ignored, or even taken as "suggestions," was striking. So too, given the very recent history in Zuccotti Park, was the total lack of consequence suffered by those disobeying these directions. Wearing a suit—even a cheap one—has its privileges.


A few opera-goers assisted the front line of Occupy protesters in opening up a split between two barricades. A cop, hearing the unclanking kiss of the metal hooks, looked on somewhat confusedly as protestors elected not to simply swarm into the plaza. "This is dumb," a young man told the cop. "We don't need these separating us." Then a couple reinforcements came to the solitary cop's aide; before long the integrity of the barricade was restored.

Sean Murray, a doctoral student at CUNY,  commented at Wall's post, noting:

I attended the opera (on a $20 rush ticket) and exited after Glass appeared onstage and the applause had ended. When I got down to the plaza, the police were still not letting operagoers approach the barricade, and in fact I witnessed a man (not in a suit) get arrested for simply walking down the steps attempting to reach the OWS protesters (who I joined on the sidewalk). It was only after most people had left that the police allowed the two groups to meet.

Philip Glass showed up, and read the closing words from the opera, which are from the Bhagavad Gita:

When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.

Here he is:


Here is composer Laurie Anderson, shortly afterward:


And composer Lou Reed, who had earlier helped illegally move the barricades, to let people in.  He declares "The police are OUR army:


Some blogs taking up this particular demonstration, observe that many demonstrators complained that opera has become inaccessible to the 99%.  Although not quite true, opera houses, symphonic concert halls and many other fine arts venues are places designed to accommodate the very wealthy in special sections, boxes and private reception rooms within those spaces.  The main patrons of these groups, and most of their board members truly represent the 1%, by and large.  What used to be called  The New York Theater at Lincoln Center is now called the David H. Koch Theater.  Merchant of death David Rubenstein has his David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center.  Must be sweet.  Every time somebody in a field in south Lebanon or Angola loses a leg to an old land mine or cluster bomb, it represents money this sweet-talking thug put into Lincoln Center.

I would like to see more artists involved in OWS in 2012 than has been the case this year.  It is certainly true that a lot of artists are involved, but they are mostly popular artists, with only a sprinkling of personalities or top names from the fine arts.

The reality that among the first victims of funding cuts in education and government agencies are fine arts programs and classes, and that this has been going on for decades, hasn't been covered as much as it should have been.  Arts programs all over the country were the prototypes for moves designed to lower taxes on the 1%.

Colorful End to a Rainy, Windy, Messy Day

Above:  looking out over the wet ice on Neklason Lake, toward Hatcher Pass and the Talkeetna Mountains.

Below:  looking west, toward the sunset.

Most Powerful Ron Paul Video Yet - Eat This, Obama!

hat tip - Steve

South Carolina Poet Laureate Marjory Wentworth: "I Do Feel Obama's Treatment of Bradley Manning Was Abusive"

South Carolina poet Laureate Marjory Wentworth, and U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan E. Mendez, are currently being interviewed at Firedoglake's Saturday Book Salon.  Both Mendez and Wentworth have been highly critical of the Obama administration's torture and detention conditions of Army Private Bradley Manning. 

The Obama administration has refused to allow Mendez access to Manning without the presence of a third party in the cell.

Darcy Burner to Obama and Holder: Do Your Job!

Washington State resident Darcy Burner and Maryland Rep. Donna Edwards are the only two out-of-state candidates I have donated to.  I will be donating once again to Rep. Edwards' upcoming campaign.

What Darcy Burner says here is pure understatement.  Holder was appointed by Obama.  It is Obama's responsibility to uphold the law every bit as much as it is Holder's.

If Obama was doing his job, hundreds, if not thousands, of bankers would now be getting ready for trial.

Scott McAdams: Obama Has Destroyed the Hopes of A Generation of Democrats

I was driving over to Palmer early this afternoon for a session with a group fighting the insane idea of the Wishbone Hill coal mine.  Listening to Shannyn Moore's radio show, I was happy to hear Scott McAdams, her guest.  He is in Anchorage to host the Alaska Democratic Party's Annual Holiday Auction. 

Last month McAdams, who was the Democratic Party nominee in the 2010 Alaska U.S. Senate race, formed a political action committee called It's About Alaska:

McAdams has filed paperwork with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, establishing the group It's About Alaska. The group's stated purpose is to support candidates who "commit to putting Alaska's people and communities ahead of non-Alaskan special interests as elected leaders." It seeks to have influence on next year's elections.

 Scott ran a very controlled U.S. Senate campaign in 2010.  He came in 3rd in votes, but first in honesty.  He learned a lot, and may be a cinch for my party's nomination to fight against Don Young next year.   Even if Diane Benson, the Democrat I most admire, announces another run against Don, I might back Scott in the primary.

I was a bit shocked to hear Scott state on Shannyn's program - just before the 1:00 p.m. break - that (I am paraphrasing here) Obama has destroyed the hopes of a generation of Democrats.  When the podcast of that show segment is posted, I will transcribe the entire segment for accuracy and more detail.

Watching Obama's team destroy any hopes of CO2 emission progress coming out of the UN Durban conference this week, one might even take this further:  Obama, by forfeiting US leadership in meaningful climate change action, is dooming billions of people yet to be born.

George W. Bush must be green with envy.

Whittier Snow in Wasilla

Judy and I lived in Whittier for seven years, where she taught school and I ran the boat harbor, charter boats and my own fishing boat. 

We lived there during what was perhaps its Golden Age.  When we moved to Whittier from Cordova in 1976, Begich Towers had just been remodeled, after its intense Good Friday Earthquake damage.  The harbor, built in 1973, was fairly new, and a window out onto western Prince William Sound.  A lot of young people lived there then, working for the Alaska Railroad, Crowley Maritime, the local stores and bars, and for the City of Whittier.

We owned a sailboat, my gillnet boats, and a 14-foot Boston Whaler.  Thousands of free hours were spent out on some of most glorious water on this planet. And exploring the lands above them on hikes and ski trips.

A lot of commercial ideas that later became the town's small business backbone didn't yet exist in 1976.  There were virtually no fishing charters out of Whittier.  The kayaking shuttles were only an idea proposed from time to time.  Only two boats fished out of Whittier in the winter in 1976.  They were the first of the pot shrimp fleet, whose rapid rise in the 1980s and early 90s over-fished the area.

When the harbor expansion was complete in October 1981, my idea of a facility that catered evenly to commercial fishing boats, charter vessels and Anchorage residents with recreational vessels had won out against the powerful Anchorage-based interests who had tried to shape a design that would focus on the wants and needs of the Anchorage doctors, dentists, attorneys, politicians, realtors and developers who called the Whittier Harbor "theirs."

Part of the reason I wasn't enthusiastic about building what PWS residents called "a bigger puker (at that time, "puker" was a derisive term for recreational boats and yachts, as opposed to commercial fishing boats) harbor," rather than one more centered on commercial development, was that the Anchorage recreational boat owners were so pathetic when it came to taking care of their boats in the Winter.

I held "winterization seminars" every September.  The basic recommendation was for people to get their boats out of the water and on to dry land if they weren't going to actively use them through the winter. 

Why?

In Whittier (or Valdez or Seward) it can snow so hard that it accumulates at a rate of a foot per hour.  On 4 and 5 February, 1955, it accumulated 145 inches of snow there in 24 hours.

The snow is often very, very wet and heavy.  It can sink an unattended boat in a matter of minutes.  Often, during winter snow storms, the snow will start falling with no wind, at about 30 degrees F.  As the storm develops, it warms.  The wind comes up.  Soon it reaches 35 degrees, and rain mixes with snow.  Because of the wind, the new, wet snow accumulates on only the windward side of the vessel, making capsizing as big a problem as sinking from topside weight alone.

I loved running that harbor and fighting for its expansion.  But I was blissful, after moving on, that I no longer had to fight those storms so hard, mostly to protect "puker boats" that should have been in storage on the beach anyway.

Since moving to the Valley in 1983, we've probably seen less than one snow storm every five years that has been as wet and messy as those we saw almost every winter month in Whittier. 

Yesterday it looked like we were going to have one.  And then again Friday morning.  Early this morning, we got about four inches of concrete-like wet snow in 30 minutes.  Then it stopped.

But the eight inches or so of glumpy, clumpy snow we did get took me several hours to move out of the way today.

Good exercise.  Hopefully, that's it for this year for such wet snow.

From Occupation to "Occupy": The Israelification of American Domestic Security

By: Max Blumenthal

[I'll be writing more on this soon, as I find more time.  However, this is a definitive article on an important subject - Philip Munger]

Published Friday, December 2, 2011 at Alakhbar English

In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote “mutual response,” collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent “Occupy” movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, “Law enforcement agencies responding to…Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.”

Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in “counter-terror” operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police – whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media – reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9/11 American security landscape.

The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel’s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg.

Having been schooled in Israeli tactics perfected during a 63 year experience of controlling, dispossessing, and occupying an indigenous population, local police forces have adapted them to monitor Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods in US cities. Meanwhile, former Israeli military officers have been hired to spearhead security operations at American airports and suburban shopping malls, leading to a wave of disturbing incidents of racial profiling, intimidation, and FBI interrogations of innocent, unsuspecting people. The New York Police Department’s disclosure that it deployed “counter-terror” measures against Occupy protesters encamped in downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park raised serious questions about the extent to which Israeli-inspired tactics have been used to suppress the Occupy movement in general.

The process of Israelification began in the immediate wake of 9/11, when national panic led federal and municipal law enforcement officials to beseech Israeli security honchos for advice and training. America’s Israel lobby exploited the climate of hysteria, providing thousands of top cops with all-expenses paid trips to Israel and stateside training sessions with Israeli military and intelligence officials. By now, police chiefs of major American cities who have not been on junkets to Israel are the exception.

“Israel is the Harvard of antiterrorism,” said former US Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer, who now serves as the US Senate Sergeant-at-Arms. Cathy Lanier, the Chief of the Washington DC Metropolitan Police, remarked, “No experience in my life has had more of an impact on doing my job than going to Israel.” “One would say it is the front line,” Barnett Jones, the police chief of Ann Arbor, Michigan, said of Israel. “We're in a global war.”

Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham School of Law’s Center on National Security and a leading expert on terror and civil liberties, said the Israeli influence on American law enforcement is so extensive it has bled into street-level police conduct. “After 9/11 we reached out to the Israelis on many fronts and one of those fronts was torture,” Greenberg told me. “The training in Iraq and Afghanistan on torture was Israeli training. There’s been a huge downside to taking our cue from the Israelis and now we’re going to spread that into the fabric of everyday American life? It’s counter-terrorism creep. And it’s exactly what you could have predicted would have happened.”

Changing the way we do business

The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is at the heart of American-Israeli law enforcement collaboration. JINSA is a Jerusalem and Washington DC-based think tank known for stridently neoconservative policy positions on Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians and its brinkmanship with Iran. The group’s board of directors boasts a Who’s Who of neocon ideologues.
Two former JINSA advisors who have also consulted for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, went on to serve in the Department of Defense under President George W. Bush, playing influential roles in the push to invade and occupy Iraq.

Through its Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP), JINSA claims to have arranged Israeli-led training sessions for over 9000 American law enforcement officials at the federal, state and municipal level. “The Israelis changed the way we do business regarding homeland security in New Jersey,” Richard Fuentes, the NJ State Police Superintendent, said after attending a 2004 JINSA-sponsored Israel trip and a subsequent JINSA conference alongside 435 other law enforcement officers.

During a 2004 LEEP trip, JINSA brought 14 senior American law enforcement officials to Israel to receive instruction from their counterparts. The Americans were trained in “how to secure large venues, such as shopping malls, sporting events and concerts,” JINSA’s website reported. Escorted by Brigadier General Simon Perry, an Israeli police attaché and former Mossad official, the group toured the Israeli separation wall, now a mandatory stop for American cops on junkets to Israel. “American officials learned about the mindset of a suicide bomber and how to spot trouble signs,” according to JINSA. And they were schooled in Israeli killing methods. “Although the police are typically told to aim for the chest when shooting because it is the largest target, the Israelis are teaching [American] officers to aim for a suspect's head so as not to detonate any explosives that might be strapped to his torso,” the New York Times reported.

Cathy Lanier, now the Chief of Washington DC’s Metropolitan Police Department, was among the law enforcement officials junketed to Israel by JINSA. “I was with the bomb units and the SWAT team and all of those high profile specialized [Israeli] units and I learned a tremendous amount,” Lanier reflected. “I took 82 pages of notes while I was there which I later brought back and used to formulate a lot of what I later used to create and formulate the Homeland Security terrorism bureau in the DC Metropolitan Police department.”

Some of the police chiefs who have taken part in JINSA’s LEEP program have done so under the auspices of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a private non-governmental group with close ties to the Department of Homeland Security. Chuck Wexler, the executive director of PERF, was so enthusiastic about the program that by 2005 he had begun organizing trips to Israel sponsored by PERF, bringing numerous high-level American police officials to receive instruction from their Israeli counterparts.
PERF gained notoriety when Wexler confirmed that his group coordinated police raids in 16 cities across America against “Occupy” protest encampments. As many as 40 cities have sought PERF advice on suppressing the “Occupy” movement and other mass protest activities. Wexler did not respond to my requests for an interview.

Lessons from Israel to Auschwitz

Besides JINSA, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has positioned itself as an important liaison between American police forces and the Israeli security-intelligence apparatus. Though the ADL promotes itself as a Jewish civil rights group, it has provoked controversy by publishing a blacklist of organizations supporting Palestinian rights, and for condemning a proposal to construct an Islamic community center in downtown New York, several blocks from Ground Zero, on the basis that some opponents of the project were entitled to “positions that others would characterize as irrational or bigoted.”

Through the ADL’s Advanced Training School course on Extremist and Terrorist Threats, over 700 law enforcement personnel from 220 federal and local agencies including the FBI and CIA have been trained by Israeli police and intelligence commanders. This year, the ADL brought 15 high-level American police officials to Israel for instruction from the country’s security apparatus. According to the ADL, over 115 federal, state and local law enforcement executives have undergone ADL-organized training sessions in Israel since the program began in 2003. “I can honestly say that the training offered by ADL is by far the most useful and current training course I have ever attended,” Deputy Commissioner Thomas Wright of the Philadelphia Police Department commented after completing an ADL program this year. The ADL’s relationship with the Washington DC Police Department is so cozy its members are invited to accompany DC cops on “ride along” patrols.

The ADL claims to have trained over 45,000 American law enforcement officials through its Law Enforcement and Society program, which “draws on the history of the Holocaust to provide law enforcement professionals with an increased understanding of…their role as protectors of the Constitution,” the group’s website stated. All new FBI agents and intelligence analysts are required to attend the ADL program, which is incorporated into three FBI training programs. According to official FBI recruitment material, “all new special agents must visit the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to see firsthand what can happen when law enforcement fails to protect individuals.”

Fighting “crimiterror”

Among the most prominent Israeli government figure to have influenced the practices of American law enforcement officials is Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service and current member of Knesset who recently introduced legislation widely criticized as anti-democratic. During the Second Intifada, Dichter ordered several bombings on densely populated Palestinian civilian areas, including one on the al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza that resulted in the death of 15 innocent people, including 8 children, and 150 injuries. “After each success, the only thought is, ‘Okay, who’s next?’” Dichter said of the “targeted” assassinations he has ordered.

Despite his dubious human rights record and apparently dim view of democratic values, or perhaps because of them, Dichter has been a key figure in fostering cooperation between Israeli security forces and American law enforcement. In 2006, while Dichter was serving at the time as Israel’s Minister of Public Security, he spoke in Boston, Massachusetts before the annual convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Seated beside FBI Director Robert Mueller and then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, Dichter told the 10,000 police officers in the crowd that there was an “intimate connection between fighting criminals and fighting terrorists.” Dichter declared that American cops were actually “fighting crimiterrorists.” The Jerusalem Post reported that Dichter was “greeted by a hail of applause, as he was hugged by Mueller, who described Dichter as his mentor in anti-terror tactics.”

A year after Dichter’s speech, he and then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff signed a joint memorandum pledging security collaboration between America and Israel on issues ranging from airport security to emergency planning. In 2010, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano authorized a new joint memorandum with Israeli Transport and Road Safety Minister Israel Katz shoring up cooperation between the US Transportation Security Agency – the agency in charge of day-to-day airport security – and Israel’s Security Department. The recent joint memorandum also consolidated the presence of US Homeland Security law enforcement personnel on Israeli soil. “The bond between the United States and Israel has never been stronger,” Napolitano remarked at a recent summit of AIPAC, the leading outfit of America’s Israel lobby, in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The Demographic Unit

For the New York Police Department, collaboration with Israel’s security and intelligence apparatus became a top priority after 9/11. Just months after the attacks on New York City, the NYPD assigned a permanent, taxpayer-funded liaison officer to Tel Aviv. Under the leadership of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, ties between the NYPD and Israel have deepened by the day. Kelly embarked on his first trip to Israel in early 2009 to demonstrate his support for Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, a one-sided attack that left over 1400 Gaza residents dead in three weeks and led a United Nations fact-finding mission to conclude that Israeli military and government officials had committed war crimes.

Kelly returned to Israel the following year to speak at the Herziliya Conference, an annual gathering of neoconservative security and government officials who obsess over supposed “demographic threats.” After Kelly appeared on stage, the Herziliya crowd was addressed by the pro-Israel academic Martin Kramer, who claimed that Israel’s blockade of Gaza was helping to reduce the numbers of “superfluous young men of fighting age.” Kramer added, “If a state can’t control these young men, then someone else will.”

Back in New York, the NYPD set up a secret “Demographics Unit” designed to spy on and monitor Muslim communities around the city. The unit was developed with input and intensive involvement by the CIA, which still refuses to name the former Middle East station chief it has posted in the senior ranks of the NYPD’s intelligence division. Since 2002, the NYPD has dispatched undercover agents known as “rakers” and “mosque crawlers” into Pakistani-American bookstores and restaurants to gauge community anger over US drone strikes inside Pakistan, and into Palestinian hookah bars and mosques to search out signs of terror recruitment and clandestine funding. “If a raker noticed a customer looking at radical literature, he might chat up the store owner and see what he could learn,” the Associated Press reported. “The bookstore, or even the customer, might get further scrutiny.”

The Israeli imprimatur on the NYPD’s Demographics Unit is unmistakable. As a former police official told the Associated Press, the Demographics Unit has attempted to “map the city’s human terrain” through a program “modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank.”

Shop ‘til you’re stopped

At Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport, security personnel target non-Jewish and non-white passengers, especially Arabs, as a matter of policy. The most routinely harassed passengers are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who must brace themselves for five-hour interrogation sessions and strip searches before flying. Those singled out for extra screening by Shin Bet officers are sent to what many Palestinians from Israel call the “Arab room,” where they are subjected to humiliating questioning sessions (former White House Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala encountered such mistreatment during a visit to Israel last year). Some Palestinians are forbidden from speaking to anyone until takeoff, and may be menaced by Israeli flight attendants during the flight. In one documented case, a six-month-old was awoken for a strip search by Israeli Shin Bet personnel. Instances of discrimination against Arabs at Ben Gurion International are too numerous to detail – several incidents occur each day – but a few of the more egregious instances were outlined in a 2007 petition the Association for Civil Rights in Israel filed with the country’s Supreme Court.

Though the Israeli system of airline security contains dubious benefits and clearly deleterious implications for civil liberties, it is quietly and rapidly migrating into major American airports. Security personnel at Boston’s Logan International Airport have undergone extensive training from Israeli intelligence personnel, learning to apply profiling and behavioral assessment techniques against American citizens that were initially tested on Palestinians. The new procedures began in August, when so-called Behavior Detection Officers were placed in security queues at Logan’s heavily trafficked Terminal A. Though the procedures have added to traveler stress while netting exactly zero terrorists, they are likely to spread to other cities. “I would like to see a lot more profiling” in American airports, said Yossi Sheffi, an Israeli-born risk analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Transportation and Logistics.

Israeli techniques now dictate security procedures at the Mall of America, a gargantuan shopping mall in Bloomington, Minnesota that has become a major tourist attraction. The new methods took hold in 2005 when the mall hired a former Israeli army sergeant named Mike Rozin to lead a special new security unit. Rozin, who once worked with a canine unit at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, instructed his employees at the Mall of America to visually profile every shopper, examining their expressions for suspicious signs. His security team accosts and interrogates an average of 1200 shoppers a year, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

One of the thousands who fell into Rozin’s dragnet was Najam Qureshi, a Pakistani-American mall vendor whose father accidentally left his cell phone on a table in the mall food court. A day after the incident, FBI agents appeared at Qureshi’s doorstep to ask if he knew anyone seeking to harm the United States. An army veteran interrogated for two hours by Rozin’s men for taking video inside the mall sobbed openly about his experience to reporters. Meanwhile, another man, Emile Khalil, was visited by FBI agents after mall security stopped him for taking photographs of the dazzling consumer haven.

“I think that the threat of terrorism in the United States is going to become an unfortunate part of American life,” Rozin remarked to American Jewish World. And as long as the threat persists in the public’s mind, Israeli securitocrats like Rozin will never have to worry about the next paycheck.

“Occupy” meets the Occupation

When a riot squad from the New York Police Department destroyed and evicted the “Occupy Wall Street” protest encampment at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, department leadership drew on the anti-terror tactics they had refined since the 9/11 attacks. According to the New York Times, the NYPD deployed “counterterrorism measures” to mobilize large numbers of cops for the lightning raid on Zuccotti. The use of anti-terror techniques to suppress a civilian protest complemented harsh police measures demonstrated across the country against the nationwide “Occupy” movement, from firing tear gas canisters and rubber bullets into unarmed crowds to blasting demonstrators with the LRAD sound cannon.

Given the amount of training the NYPD and so many other police forces have received from Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus, and the profuse levels of gratitude American police chiefs have expressed to their Israeli mentors, it is worth asking how much Israeli instruction has influenced the way the police have attempted to suppress the Occupy movement, and how much they will inform police repression of future examples of street protest. What can be said for certain is that the Israelification of American law enforcement has intensified police fear and hostility towards the civilian population, blurring the lines between protesters, criminals, and terrorists. As Dichter said, they are all just “crimiterrorists.”

“After 9/11 we had to react very quickly,” Greenberg remarked, “but now we’re in 2011 and we’re not talking about people who want to fly planes into buildings. We’re talking about young American citizens who feel that their birthright has been sold. If we’re using Israeli style tactics on them and this stuff bleeds into the way we do business at large, were in big trouble.”

Washington Senator Cantwell Criticizes BC Salmon Virus Coverup - Will Begich and Murkowski Weigh In?

BC salmon rearing pens - filled with antibiotics

In British Columbia there has been a lot of concern about the possible impact of Infectious Salmon Anemia Virus passing from farmed Atlantic Salmon to wild stocks.  Media outlets and politicians in Washington State have been paying more attention to the host of issues related to revelations coming out on this than have been ours here in Alaska.

Back in August, I wrote a post that brought up the Cohen Commission inquiry, which was constituted mostly to investigate declines in Fraser River Sockeye returns.  This week, media attention has turned toward new revelations:

A decade before this fall's salmon-virus scare, a Canadian government researcher said she found a similar virus in more than 100 wild fish from Alaska to Vancouver Island.

Canadian officials never told the public or scientists in the United States about those tests -- not even after evidence of the virus discovered in October was treated as an international emergency, according to documents and emails obtained by The Seattle Times.

The researcher's work surfaced only this week after she sought and was denied permission by a Canadian official to try to have her old data published in a scientific journal.

Scientists and wild-fish advocates long have feared the arrival of infectious salmon anemia, or ISA virus, a pathogen linked to aquaculture that has killed millions of farmed salmon in Europe and Chile. 

They say it could mutate and devastate wild fish stocks.

The virus never has been confirmed on the West Coast by follow-up tests, but word of the earlier research raises new questions about the Canadian agency charged with assessing the risk.

Environmentalists in Canada and some U.S. politicians worry that Fisheries and Oceans Canada may be ill-equipped to deal aggressively with the risk because it's responsible both for protecting the country's wild fish and for promoting British Columbia's salmon farms.

Washington State Senator Maria Cantwell has already voiced her concern on the ISA issue:

Sen. Maria Cantwell is calling for stronger communication between American and Canadian officials following the disclosure that Canada failed to reveal the results of tests that appear to show the presence of a potentially deadly salmon virus nearly a decade before a salmon-virus scare this fall.

A Canadian researcher's work surfaced this week after she sought and was denied permission by a Canadian official to try to have her old data published.

Researchers with Simon Fraser University in British Columbia announced in October they had detected infectious salmon anemia, or ISA, in two wild juvenile Pacific salmon collected from the province's central coast, prompting fears the influenza-like virus could wreck the Pacific Northwest salmon fishing industry.

U.S. scientists say they're disappointed the Canadians never mentioned the researcher's earlier, 2002 work.

The proximity of the Fraser River, which enters salt water just below Vancouver, BC, to Washington fisheries is important to fishers down there.  However, the  relationships between wild Southeastern Alaska salmon stocks and those of BC on the high seas, and inflow toward spawning areas, are very important too.

Let's hope that Alaska's salmon scientists and politicians get involved in the quest for truth on how this has been handled, and on how serious this problem actually might be.

One thing that is quite obvious from the way Dr. Kibenge's 2002-2003 findings were handled internally is that when agencies are charged both with policing and promoting an industry - in this case salmon farming - scientific truth and transparency is often the first victim.  We've seen probable evidence of this in Alaska, with the hounding and vilification of Drs. Charles Monnett and Jeffrey Gleason by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, the US Justice Department and the Department of the Interior.

The Alaska media has been notably silent on important aspects of these issues.

Ron Paul Running Hard-Hitting Anti-Gingrich Political Ads

Some feel Mitt Romney might lock up the GOP nomination by late February. I'm not so sure. Gingrich's surge since the Herman Cain campaign began its terminal death spiral early this week, is also chipping away at Romney support, as the whacky Evangelical GOP bloc would probably support a Catholic over a Mormon any day of the week.

While the media continues to mostly ignore Ron Paul, his support - always deep, if not wide - is growing.  Not very fast, but he is polling between about 5% and 16%, depending upon the state race and poll.