Bodymore Murderland

[Lord Balto]

I was at this solidarity rally and march yesterday:
http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/loc ... 53251.html

It was mostly peaceful but a lot of imposing horse-mounted cops and helicopters.

One thing I noticed that I wanted to ask the group here about: in addition to the helicopters, I also noticed white, unmarked, windowless 767s in a very low (lower than normal) flying pattern right over Center City (also an unusual path). Does anyone have any clue what that might have been? Total coincidence or does this kind of aircraft have anything to do with civil unrest?

I'll ask my brother who is an airline captain (a very rare left-wing pilot -- no pun -- but he has told me that you basically cannot say you are liberal amongst many) and see what he has to say (82_28 has managed to get his entire fam left wing over the years). You're sure they were 767s? So I can ask him what he might know.

Perhaps it was lower than I thought?

http://fortressamerica.gawker.com/tweet ... 1702548610

I didn't notice anything out in the county (Catonsville), so they must have been low. I'm thinking AWACS or the newer version, but then you would have seen the huge superstructure, unless they were right overhead. I get a lot of helicopters out here, perhaps traffic guys, but my property backs up on the woods, so they may be looking for somebody. I remember one evening they were doing what sounded like a search pattern: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,... But they need a federal investigation to figure out if the police are out of control? BS. Fire the commissioner and get somebody who knows what's going on. I should point out that a lot of the problem stems from poor pay for these scum suckers. You pay crap and you get crap--bottom of the barrel stooges. Case in point: Prince Georges County east of Washington: poor pay, real dick cops; Montgomery County north of Washington: good pay, cops are real sweethearts.

[Lord Balto]

Right you are, Luther!

In the wake of last week’s riots, federal authorities provided aircraft for surveillance flights over Baltimore, keeping a quiet aerial eye on the lookout for new outbreaks of violence, an FBI spokeswoman said Wednesday.

“The aircraft were specifically used to assist in providing high-altitude observation of potential criminal activity to enable rapid response by police officers on the ground,” said spokeswoman Amy Thoreson. “The FBI aircraft were not there to monitor lawfully protected First Amendment activity.”

Baltimore Sun, May 7, 2015: Full article here.

[Luther Blissett]

I was at the solidarity rally in Philly where we attempted to shut down the freeway when I saw suspicious plane(s) running a pattern overhead.

[Laodicean]

He ain't man enough to come down to the streets with Omar.

[IanEye]

Jan lays down and wrestles in her sleep
moonlight spills on comic books
& superstars in magazines


an old friend calls and tells us where to meet
a plane takes off from Baltimore
& touches down on Bourbon Street

[Luther Blissett]

A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

I created #BlackLivesMatter with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, two of my sisters, as a call to action for Black people after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was post-humously placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the crime he committed. It was a response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society and also, unfortunately, our movements.

Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.

We were humbled when cultural workers, artists, designers and techies offered their labor and love to expand #BlackLivesMatter beyond a social media hashtag. Opal, Patrisse, and I created the infrastructure for this movement project—moving the hashtag from social media to the streets. Our team grew through a very successful Black Lives Matter ride, led and designed by Patrisse Cullors and Darnell L. Moore, organized to support the movement that is growing in St. Louis, MO, after 18-year old Mike Brown was killed at the hands of Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. We’ve hosted national conference calls focused on issues of critical importance to Black people working hard for the liberation of our people. We’ve connected people across the country working to end the various forms of injustice impacting our people. We’ve created space for the celebration and humanization of Black lives.

The Theft of Black Queer Women’s Work
As people took the #BlackLivesMatter demand into the streets, mainstream media and corporations also took up the call, #BlackLivesMatter appeared in an episode of Law & Order: SVU in amash up containing the Paula Deen racism scandal and the tragedy of the murder of Trayvon Martin.

Suddenly, we began to come across varied adaptations of our work–all lives matter, brown lives matter, migrant lives matter, women’s lives matter, and on and on. While imitation is said to be the highest form of flattery, I was surprised when an organization called to ask if they could use “Black Lives Matter” in one of their campaigns. We agreed to it, with the caveat that a) as a team, we preferred that we not use the meme to celebrate the imprisonment of any individual and b) that it was important to us they acknowledged the genesis of #BlackLivesMatter. I was surprised when they did exactly the opposite and then justified their actions by saying they hadn’t used the “exact” slogan and, therefore, they deemed it okay to take our work, use it as their own, fail to credit where it came from, and then use it to applaud incarceration.

I was surprised when a community institution wrote asking us to provide materials and action steps for an art show they were curating, entitled “Our Lives Matter.” When questioned about who was involved and why they felt the need to change the very specific call and demand around Black lives to “our lives,” I was told the artists decided it needed to be more inclusive of all people of color. I was even more surprised when, in the promotion of their event, one of the artists conducted an interview that completely erased the origins of their work–rooted in the labor and love of queer Black women.

Pause.

When you design an event / campaign / et cetera based on the work of queer Black women, don’t invite them to participate in shaping it, but ask them to provide materials and ideas for next steps for said event, that is racism in practice. It’s also hetero-patriarchal. Straight men, unintentionally or intentionally, have taken the work of queer Black women and erased our contributions. Perhaps if we were the charismatic Black men many are rallying around these days, it would have been a different story, but being Black queer women in this society (and apparently within these movements) tends to equal invisibility and non-relevancy.

We completely expect those who benefit directly and improperly from White supremacy to try and erase our existence. We fight that every day. But when it happens amongst our allies, we are baffled, we are saddened, and we are enraged. And it’s time to have the political conversation about why that’s not okay.

We are grateful to our allies who have stepped up to the call that Black lives matter, and taken it as an opportunity to not just stand in solidaritywith us, but to investigate the ways in which anti-Black racism is perpetuated in their own communities. We are also grateful to those allies who were willing to engage in critical dialogue with us about this unfortunate and problematic dynamic .And for those who we have not yet had the opportunity to engage with around the adaptations of the Black Lives Matter call, please consider the following points.

Broadening the Conversation to Include Black Life
Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes. It goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within some Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all. Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement.

When we say Black Lives Matter, we are talking about the ways in which Black people are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity. It is an acknowledgement Black poverty and genocide is state violence. It is an acknowledgment that 1 million Black people are locked in cages in this country–one half of all people in prisons or jails–is an act of state violence. It is an acknowledgment that Black women continue to bear the burden of a relentless assault on our children and our families and that assault is an act of state violence. Black queer and trans folks bearing a unique burden in a hetero-patriarchal society that disposes of us like garbage and simultaneously fetishizes us and profits off of us is state violence; the fact that 500,000 Black people in the US are undocumented immigrants and relegated to the shadows is state violence;.the fact that Black girls are used as negotiating chips during times of conflict and war is state violence; Black folks living with disabilities and different abilities bear the burden of state-sponsored Darwinian experiments that attempt to squeeze us into boxes of normality defined by White supremacy is state violence. And the fact is that the lives of Black people—not ALL people—exist within these conditions is consequence of state violence.

When Black people get free, everybody gets free
#BlackLivesMatter doesn’t mean your life isn’t important–it means that Black lives, which are seen as without value within White supremacy, are important to your liberation. Given the disproportionate impact state violence has on Black lives, we understand that when Black people in this country get free, the benefits will be wide reaching and transformative for society as a whole. When we are able to end hyper-criminalization and sexualization of Black people and end the poverty, control, and surveillance of Black people, every single person in this world has a better shot at getting and staying free. When Black people get free, everybody gets free. This is why we call on Black people and our allies to take up the call that Black lives matter. We’re not saying Black lives are more important than other lives, or that other lives are not criminalized and oppressed in various ways. We remain in active solidarity with all oppressed people who are fighting for their liberation and we know that our destinies are intertwined.

And, to keep it real–it is appropriate and necessary to have strategy and action centered around Blackness without other non-Black communities of color, or White folks for that matter, needing to find a place and a way to center themselves within it. It is appropriate and necessary for us to acknowledge the critical role that Black lives and struggles for Black liberation have played in inspiring and anchoring, through practice and theory, social movements for the liberation of all people. The women’s movement, the Chicano liberation movement, queer movements, and many more have adopted the strategies, tactics and theory of the Black liberation movement. And if we are committed to a world where all lives matter, we are called to support the very movement that inspired and activated so many more. That means supporting and acknowledging Black lives.

Progressive movements in the United States have made some unfortunate errors when they push for unity at the expense of really understanding the concrete differences in context, experience and oppression. In other words, some want unity without struggle. As people who have our minds stayed on freedom, we can learn to fight anti-Black racism by examining the ways in which we participate in it, even unintentionally, instead of the worn out and sloppy practice of drawing lazy parallels of unity between peoples with vastly different experiences and histories.
When we deploy “All Lives Matter” as to correct an intervention specifically created to address anti-blackness,, we lose the ways in which the state apparatus has built a program of genocide and repression mostly on the backs of Black people—beginning with the theft of millions of people for free labor—and then adapted it to control, murder, and profit off of other communities of color and immigrant communities. We perpetuate a level of White supremacist domination by reproducing a tired trope that we are all the same, rather than acknowledging that non-Black oppressed people in this country are both impacted by racism and domination, and simultaneously, BENEFIT from anti-black racism.

When you drop “Black” from the equation of whose lives matter, and then fail to acknowledge it came from somewhere, you further a legacy of erasing Black lives and Black contributions from our movement legacy. And consider whether or not when dropping the Black you are, intentionally or unintentionally, erasing Black folks from the conversation or homogenizing very different experiences. The legacy and prevalence of anti-Black racism and hetero-patriarchy is a lynch pin holding together this unsustainable economy. And that’s not an accidental analogy.
In 2014, hetero-patriarchy and anti-Black racism within our movement is real and felt. It’s killing us and it’s killing our potential to build power for transformative social change. When you adopt the work of queer women of color, don’t name or recognize it, and promote it as if it has no history of its own such actions are problematic. When I use Assata’s powerful demand in my organizing work, I always begin by sharing where it comes from, sharing about Assata’s significance to the Black Liberation Movement, what it’s political purpose and message is, and why it’s important in our context.

When you adopt Black Lives Matter and transform it into something else (if you feel you really need to do that–see above for the arguments not to), it’s appropriate politically to credit the lineage from which your adapted work derived. It’s important that we work together to build and acknowledge the legacy of Black contributions to the struggle for human rights. If you adapt Black Lives Matter, use the opportunity to talk about its inception and political framing. Lift up Black lives as an opportunity to connect struggles across race, class, gender, nationality, sexuality and disability.

And, perhaps more importantly, when Black people cry out in defense of our lives, which are uniquely, systematically, and savagely targeted by the state, we are asking you, our family, to stand with us in affirming Black lives. Not just all lives. Black lives. Please do not change the conversation by talking about how your life matters, too. It does, but we need less watered down unity and a more active solidarities with us, Black people, unwaveringly, in defense of our humanity. Our collective futures depend on it.

[American Dream]

RAP NEWS 32: BlackLivesMatter

[seemslikeadream]

Fearing a 'Catastrophic Incident,' 400 Federal Officers Descended on the Baltimore Protests
By Jason Leopold

June 24, 2015 | 9:50 am
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was worried when people took to the streets of Baltimore to protest the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who died after being injured while in police custody. Specifically, they worried that protestors would vandalize a facility that housed three containers holding liquid natural gas and "cause a catastrophic incident."

"Given the current scope of activity and expected protests this upcoming weekend, the potential exists for these containers to be targeted for vandalism or worse," says a DHS intelligence update dated April 30.

Related: Autopsy Says Freddie Gray Died After Sustaining 'High-Energy Injury' in Police Van

The facility in question, located in South Baltimore, is owned by energy company Exelon Corporation, which maintained a "small security presence in the area." But given that the protests over Gray's death turned violent, the company feared that security could be "breached by protestors" — so it alerted the FBI.

Gray died April 19, sparking two weeks of protests. Six officers were charged with murder, assualt and official misconduct in connection with his death, and are due to stand trial in October.



An internal DHS map of Baltimore detailing the locations of protests and riots, along with the locations of critical infrastructure, was used by DHS personnel in the wake of Gray's death. Click here for a larger version.

The DHS intelligence document citing the possible "catastrophic incident" is one of more than 700 pages that DHS's Office of Operations Coordination (OPS) turned over to VICE News this week in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request [pdf below]. The documents provide a rare look at what was of grave concern to the federal government as the Baltimore protests over Gray's death escalated.

OPS is charged with detecting and preventing terrorist threats to the US. The office obtains intelligence about potential threats from state and local law enforcement, social media, news articles, and other divisions within DHS.

When asked for comment, DHS spokesman Sy Lee pointed VICE News to the DHS OPS website.

Baltimore was not the only city to which DHS turned its attention in the wake of Gray's death. Documents also reveal that the department monitored solidarity protests around the country, such as those that occurred in Washington, DC. A DHS message to officials there read:

All,

We are monitoring two separate protests scheduled for this evening. The first will begin with a gathering at the DuPont Circle fountain (1900 P St.) at 6pm. Their call for action on Facebook states:

"Every 28 hours a Black person is killed in America by law enforcement officers. This statistics includes Black women and girls as well. Join us on Wednesday for a speak-out as we remember Rekia Boyd and honor the lives of the many Black Women, Transwomen, and Girls impacted by state-sanctioned violence…. There is no current intel that these marches will be anything but peaceful. However, MPD will be prepared for all contingencies."

It is not uncommon for DHS to keep tabs on protests around the country, particularly in cities where federal buildings and parks are located that could attract the presence of protesters. The presence of the Federal Protective Service in Baltimore, which is DHS's police force, was called "FPS Operation Straw Temple."

An internal document from another DHS component, the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), said Operation Straw Temple resulted in the "national deployment" of personnel to support FPS's regional division and protect federal facilities in Baltimore.

"FPS HQ [headquarters] Quick Reaction Force (QRF) on standby for deployment, if required," the document read.

An April 27 document says more than 400 FPS officers and FPS protective security officers were on duty in Baltimore during the protests "protecting high-risk federal facilities."

By comparison, the documents say 1,783 National Guard troops were assigned to Baltimore City and 298 were "deployed on the streets 'on mission.'" More than 400 state troopers from Montgomery, Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Howard, Prince George's, and Harford counties were there. As were about 300 law enforcement officers from Pennsylvania, 150 from New Jersey, and 45 from Washington, DC.

Additionally, according to an April 30 unclassified "situation update," detailing the protest activity and the massive law enforcement presence, DHS said it had deployed a "twelve person CBP [Customs and Border Patrol] Special Response Team (SRT)" to support FPS operations, as well as a mobile command vehicle "to enhance interoperability with other law enforcement agencies."

FPS also "integrated representatives into the Governor of Maryland's Operations Center and NPPD Baltimore Protective Security Advisor is integrated into the Mayor's Emergency Operations Center," the document said.

DHS refers to its monitoring activities as "situational awareness," and says it does not interfere in the First Amendment rights of protesters. Baltimore was of particular concern to DHS in part because, the documents note, property and businesses were at risk.

"The violent activity continues in northwest Baltimore with the destruction of vehicles and looting of businesses," says an April 27 email distributed to DHS OPS employees.

DHS advised its law enforcement personnel to pay "special attention" to certain businesses it believed would be targeted by protesters, such as "pharmacies… malls, shopping centers, video games stores and shoe stores throughout the city (Shoe City, Footlocker & DTLR)."


VICE News' first dispatch from Baltimore after Freddie Gray's death

The April 30 intelligence document says the threat information DHS obtained came from "Internet Chatter." It also said "various threats exist towards law enforcement as such a high level of situational awareness is warranted."

One alleged threat derived from the media office of the Baltimore Police Department, which claimed that "members of various gangs including the Black Guerilla Family, Bloods, and Crips have entered into a partnership to 'take out' law enforcement officers." Baltimore police issued a press release on April 27, and the story was widely reported in the media.

But an email sent that day by a DHS employee who works in intelligence & analysis at the Maryland Fusion Center to DHS intelligence officer Earl Rose IV called into question the integrity of the Baltimore Police Department's [BPD] threat information.

"The gist of this alert asserts that the BGF [Black Guerilla Family], the Bloods, and the Crips, have partnered to 'take out' law enforcement. The alert says this is a credible threat, but, I do not know if that 'credible threat' means that they actually have specific information or that the 3 groups involved have credibility in taking that kind of action against law enforcement, I would assert that it's the latter," wrote the fusion center employee who signed his email, "Brian."

The fusion center employee, whose name is Brian, said it was "curious that the alert came out from BPD media relations section instead of BPD Intelligence Unit, which is where we typically receive this kind of info…. The tensions have heightened here in Baltimore over the last 72 hours so this alert cannot be considered without that context."

Hours later, in the same email chain, another DHS employee said, "FBI Baltimore has interviewed the source of this information and has determined this threat to be non-credible," apparently marking this the first time that it was debunked since the threat first surfaced.

The documents also say that a female Coast Guard officer assigned to the Coast Guard Yard in Baltimore was assaulted and robbed while walking her dog "in the vicinity of the ongoing civil disturbance in the city." The previously undisclosed incident resulted in the theft of the Coast Guard officer's wallet, car keys, identification, and vehicle.

As the protests spread to other cities, the FBI weighed in, characterizing the events in Baltimore as "violent criminal activity" with "direct attacks on law enforcement officials" by the protesters, according to an April 28 Joint Intelligence Bulletin from the bureau's Washington field office and Washington Threat Analysis Center that was included in the DHS cache of documents.

Related: Read more in 'Primary Sources,' the VICE News FOIA blog

The FBI bulletin said the bureau was concerned that a planned protest in Washington, DC's Chinatown district on the evening of April 28 could be used by individuals to "commit acts of violence." The bureau noted that previous protests, such as one held after the shooting death of unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, were "peaceful in nature" but also resulted in attempts to "disrupt economic centers (such as shopping malls, transportation, and sporting events)."

The intelligence bulletin said the information the FBI collected was not intended to "associate otherwise protected First Amendment activity with criminality or a threat to national security, but instead is included only for the purpose of providing situational awareness of activities that may lead to violent action, such as use of force, destruction of property, or expression of true threats, as has occurred recently within the region."

Follow Jason Leopold on Twitter: @JasonLeopold