FBI, Homeland Security Coordinated With Banks And Universities To Crush Occupy Wall Street

It seems as if the vast conspiracy theories surrounding the violent crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street Movement throughout the United States were not just the crazy thinking of a bunch of paranoid anti-government types. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, requesting documents under the Freedom of Information Act, found that the FBI, The Department of Homeland Security, and local police coordinated their efforts with the heads of Universities and the big banks themselves.

The bloody crackdown involved smoke canisters violent arrests, cutting off protesters’ blood supplies with handcuffs, and being held in chains for hours until they urinated in their pants. The documents, reproduced here and easily found on the internet, show a coordinated effort by the banks and other corporate entities working in lockstep with the American government to crush a peaceful protest against corporate interests.

The documents were released in between Christmas and New Year detail the plot involving six American universities sites where campus police funneled information about students involved with OWS to the FBI with the administrations’ knowledge, banks which sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security, detailed plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, made by the FBI and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire. Many of the files remain redacted in the name of National Security.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, says that the documents show that even though the OWS protest were largely peaceful in nature, the government went out of their way to label the protests “terrorist” in nature. She said:

“FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) … reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat … The PCJF has obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conductingsurveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country.”

Verheyden-Hilliard points out the close partnering of banks, the New York Stock Exchange, and at least one local Federal Reserve with the FBI and DHS, and calls it “police-statism”:

“This production [of documents], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI’s surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement … These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

Jason Leopold of Truthout.org, has been seeking these documents for years under Freedom of Information Act requests, but he feels that the release of the documents at this time was strategic in nature. He feels that the government is hoping that protestors, seeing that there have been plans for assassination of “terrorists” could be a strong sterent for the protestors to again take to the streets.

Do you think the Occupy Wall Street movement was targeted by the government and private industry to be taken out?