Remember the furore when Oakland Mayor Jean Quan let slip that the violent responses to the Occupy movement were coordinated with the Feds?
Well, between the claims and counterclaims it gets a little murky about who under Dept of Homeland Security exactly was working with whom on what. And if the DHS was involved, and the FBI, what other depts might be engaging in this organized smothering of free assembly with mass arrests, kettling, and pepper spray (wait, I thought that was a condiment)?
One way to answer the questions is to file a FOIA with the departments that might be involved.
Watchdog group the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund filed one with the CIA specifically about the Brooklyn Bridge mass arrests.
Follow me under the fleur de kos for resolution of the cliffhanger...
I'll admit I don't know much about this particular organization, but that's beside the point here. Freedom of Information Act requests are for anyone to request.
Enacted in 1966, and taking effect on July 5, 1967, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) provides that any person has a right, enforceable in court, to obtain access to federal agency records, except to the extent that such records (or portions of them) are protected from public disclosure by one of nine exemptions or by one of three special law enforcement record exclusions. A FOIA request can be made for any agency record. Before sending a request to a federal agency, you should determine which agency is likely to have the records you are seeking. Each agency’s website will contain information about the type of records that agency maintains.
So, the CIA's response to this? Basically "That would be illegal. We won't EVEN LOOK."
The CIA is not specifically denying that it has records and documents that would reveal its role in the coordinated crackdown that evicted the encampments in major cities within a short period of time. Rather, the agency asserts that it won’t look for such records and documents.
"The CIA is apparently asserting that because its involvement in law enforcement's crackdown of the Occupy movement would be barred by law, it is not possible for the CIA to conduct an effective search for information responsive to our inquiry into its role in the operation," stated Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the PCJF. “In other words,” she continued, “because the actions would be illegal, they would also be off the books.”
Far from claiming it does not possess responsive records, the CIA stated in its letter to Ms. Verheyden-Hilliard that because such activities would be barred by law, "our records systems are not configured in a way that would allow us to perform a search reasonably calculated to lead to responsive records. Therefore, we must decline to process your request." (emphasis added by diarist)
So, seems someone has missed the whole freaking point of an "intelligence" agency, which would be to find out stuff that's hidden. Perhaps they need to reconfigure their fucking system with an audit trail.
And an intelligence agency with a history that includes being duped by Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen would, I hope, be very interested in finding out if they did have someone going rogue, so to speak.
I hope there was nothing to find. Maybe there wasn't.
But for them not even being arsed to look is completely unacceptable, and yet one more reason it is so hard to trust that our governmental institutions remember who they bloody work for.