Friday night, May 29 saw an increase in protests in major cities across the United States, episodes of arson not resulting in injury, and violent escalation by local police forces, including attacks targeting the media. Protesters are demonstrating disapproval of an alleged murder in broad daylight of a black man in police custody in Minnesota, in which a white police officer, assisted by at lease three other officers, restrained and then kept his knee on the neck of a handcuffed, prone man for over 8 minutes. The victim repeatedly pleaded for his life, bled from the nose, stopped moving, and then apparently died. Protesters are demanding justice, and systemic changes to a criminal justice system plagued by racially motivated human rights abuses.
Four days after the alleged murder, the officer was finally charged for the crime, but not the other officers. The officer had 18 charges of misconduct on his record, all but 2 were dismissed, and had been involved in several shootings. This marks the 11th death recently by Minneapolis police with possible civil rights or racial motives. This also comes during a time in which three white men shotgunned a black jogger in Georgia and were not charged with a crime for over 2 months, and an innocent black woman was shot in Kentucky by police raiding the wrong house using a “no-knock” warrant, seeking a suspect they already had in custody.
Early investigative reporting says that the victim and the accused murderer worked together as “bouncers” at a night club, a position sometimes associated with criminal activity.
President Trump signaled on Thursday May 28 official top-cover for violence against protesters, when the White House re-Tweeted the President’s tweet quoting a racist Miami police chief from the 1960’s, advocating use of deadly force to summarily punish property crime, and maintain civil order during civil rights protests. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/us/looting-starts-shooting-starts.html
This also likely signals approval of violent suppression, counterintelligence, and anti-terrorism methods and operations to Federal and local officials, or could be perceived as support, including the use of agents provocateurs to discredit non-violent protests, to provoke violence as a pretext for the use of deadly force, and as approval for covert anti-terrorism operations against protesters and organizers, as allegedly also happened against Black Lives Matter protesters, Occupy Wall Street protesters, and Standing Rock and other environmental and climate change activists. Recent announcement of suspects from various criminal and political extremist “outsider infiltrators”, and the deployment of military intelligence to the city supports this reasonable inference at the moderate level of confidence.
The reference to Miami’s former police chief is a reference to follow his well known operational playbook to disrupt and destroy human rights protests and organizing. It will use the all-too-familiar playbook of counterintelligence operations against people of color, after a high profile incident of police misconduct: disrupt, discredit, chaos, divide, destroy, repeat. These operations nearly always result in the eventual acquittal of the offending officer, suppression of dissent, and the return to status quo: systemic human rights abuse in the name of social control and law and order, oppression of minorities who are primarily viewed- by the Right- as a national security threat, and impunity for offending officers.
The official response to protests on Friday operated according to this counterintelligence playbook familiar to U.S. human rights defenders since the 1960’s and before: agents provocateurs (frequently undercover police or criminal informants) broke windows, vandalized cars, threw bottles, and even started fires to elicit further violence and to discredit protests.
Mainstream media then uses these minor but well-filmed property crimes to characterize the protests as violent, discredit their causes, and dismiss them, while also allowing cover for police to escalate violence, declare the protests illegal, and engage in mass detention of protesters- as illustrated by adoption of these methods in the recent protests in Hong Kong.
Protesters are provoked to violence through use of tear gas, rubber bullets, police charges against peaceful protected activities, blatant acts of violence and provocation by officers such as shoving, punching, tear gassing, and beating. The worse provocations are from well-publicized police and public officials statements in defense of the police, purposeful failure to assure the public of swift due process, press conferences blaming the victim, and gaslighting the public and media about the meaning of clearly witnessed human rights violations.
After several days of agitation, provocateurs and criminals are given a short period of free reign to bring devastation to the local area of the crime- and subsequent epicenter of protest, featuring frequent pictures of looters and cheering crowds, before order, in the form of a small army of (white) heavily armed officers- often state police- arrives. But not until after protests ultimately bring several nights of damage and stoked fear, resulting in severe economic and social penalty and the destruction of the local community, whose spirit gave rise to a public expression of protest and dissent. Ultimately, the victim has become the villain. Order is restored, by the police, using a show of force, and the real audience, white America, breathes a deep sigh of relief. To quote the head of the KGB in the film “Chernobyl”, “we have a villain, we have a hero, this is all the justice that is required.”
As with Baltimore, or Ferguson, Missouri before it, this racist playbook never results in significant improvement of human rights either locally through police reform and accountability, or nationally, substantially challenging the racist, Right-wing ideology of the Miami police chief and other justice and intelligence leaders, that minorities fundamentally represent a national security threat which must be addressed using punitive pages from the counterintelligence social control playbooks, developed for use against foreign Cold War enemies and the domestic segregation-era anti-civil rights struggle; a white nationalist ideology.
Moreover, mass detentions are more worrisome now in a Pandemic, because detainees are likely stripped of protective equipment and held together in conditions that do not allow maintaining social distancing and other public health methods. The mistreatment of detainees in civil rights protests is also well documented historically, and detainees are often pressured to become informants or otherwise subjected to harassment and retaliation.
Furthermore, escalatory tactics in general threaten to increase the risk of exposure to Covid-19 infections both in police, and the in “minority” (non-white) communities already disproportionately effected by the illness and lack of access to healthcare. Deliberate escalation in this regard cannot be ruled out given the current failure to protect incarcerated prisoners from Covid-19, the U.S. history of mass acts of racial violence, including the familiar “civil rights protest turned into riot” playbook, and alleged crimes against humanity and other racist policies (such as torture, or immigrant mass detention and mistreatment) by current high ranking Federal officials.
Because of violence, the frequent use of escalatory tactics, and the exceptionally high rate of Covid-19 infection and lack of organized public health measures to combat it, WorldConsul must advise against travel to the United States, especially for non-Caucasian travelers.
WorldConsul estimates a retaliatory cycle of human rights abuses against civil rights protesters to be a near certainty. This will likely effect protesters, organizers, and human rights activists, using the perceived violence of the recent protests as a pretext (though it has been largely property crime). Deployment of hundreds of DoD/soldiers to Minneapolis raises the confidence of this assessment to moderate. Again, the modern cointelpro playbook shows this will in turn justify the use of mass surveillance and counterintelligence “investigation” and “disruption” methods of the FBI, intelligence agency-law enforcement fusion centers, and anti-terrorism law and operations. Travelers even unknowingly associating with targets of these operations are subject to extrajudicial investigation and punishment based on the standard of “reasonable suspicion” alone, which a former leader of Department of Justice anti-terrorism operations admits are “ridiculously low”. [Frank Figliuzzi, MSNBC interview, April 27, 2020.]
WorldConsul estimates this round of human rights escalation and abuse will continue at least through the November 3, 2020 U.S. Presidential election, at low-to-moderate confidence. The current President’s election in 2016 started through the use of the race-based attack on then President Obama’s citizenship, known as the “birther” conspiracy, has continued through his first term, and he is behind in recent polls to his likely challenger due to poor handling of the Covid-19 emergency. President Trump, and Attorney General Barr today (May 30) both blamed “radical left bad people” “far-left extremists” as the “outside agitators”, which promises to further politicize the crisis, and lead to attempts to use it in the elections.
William Barr’s claim that “far-left agitators” and the designation of “Antifa” as a terrorist organization likely marks the beginning of aggressive counterterrorism activities against the Left, particularly organizers, using military elements, ahead of the elections, which will interfere in the elections or even attempt to interfere with them, and delegitimate them, resulting in further cycles of unrest.
WorldConsul 