Popular Mechanis Details New York’s High-Tech Police State

According to Popular Mechanics, owned by the legendary propaganda and yellow journalism outfit run by the Hearst Corporation, “New York has become a testing ground for urban terrorism prevention in a major city,” that is to say New York is a highly evolved police state.”At 51,000 strong,” Popular Mechanics explains, “the NYPD employs more than 1.5 times as many people as the FBI, and its anti-terrorism initiative is a synchronized effort between the department’s Intelligence Division and the Counter Terrorism Bureau. The Intelligence Division coordinates the Hercules teams, which are composed of specialist cops rotated in from throughout the force. The Counter Terrorism Bureau takes on a more focused role, functioning as the department’s think tank on terrorism prevention and overseeing various subdepartments such as the NYPD/FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force. The effort even stretches far from New York, with nine liaisons assigned to such overseas hot spots as Tel Aviv, Israel; Amman, Jordan; and London.”

Not unlike Stasi operatives, members of New York’s Intelligence Division roam about in street clothes, looking for suspicious activity. “Abad Nieves … is a detective with the Intelligence Division of the New York Police Department (NYPD). Casually clad in slacks and a black leather jacket, he monitors the response of people loitering in the area. Is anyone making notes or videotaping? Does anyone seem especially startled by the out-of-the-blue appearance of a heavily armed NYPD squad?”

Of course, just about any normal person would be “startled by the out-of-the-blue appearance of a heavily armed NYPD squad,” as before “everything changed,” that is before America became an in-your-face police state, such occurrences were indeed rare.

Now?

We are expected to accept unquestioningly such a scene - formerly restricted to the province of tinhorn dictatorships and totalitarian backwaters - as quite normal and we are not expected to react with surprise or alarm. Obviously, such a response is an overt indication to New York’s special militarized police that one is with al-Qaeda, as is apparently the act of videotaping or writing notes (obviously, amateur videographers and writers are with al-Qaeda).

But then scaring the dickens out of people is precisely the point.

“The response we usually get is, ‘Holy s-!’” Nieves told Popular Mechanics. “That’s the reaction we want. We are in the business of scaring people - we just want to scare the right people.”

No indication who the “right people” are, but allow me to venture a guess - the commoners in general, who must accept the fact their country is in the process of mutating into a high-tech, high profile police state. For the average reader of Popular Mechanics, the obvious conclusion would be that Mr. Nieves wants to scare al-Qaeda, never mind there is no al-Qaeda in New York, or anywhere else in the country.

More propaganda, offered by accomplished and well-versed engineers of propaganda, follows:

The people the NYPD hopes to scare are the ideological brothers of the Islamic extremists who have successfully attacked New York City twice in the past 13 years. To stop these terrorists, the department fundamentally changed the way it protects the city after 9/11.

Of course, there is not a scintilla of evidence “Islamic extremists” attacked New York on September 11, 2001, a commonly enough accepted fairy tale generated in large part by the 9/11 whitewash commission and dispensed by a complaisant corporate media.

In regard to the first attack on the World Trade Center in the early 1990s, there is plenty of evidence the attack was carried out by the FBI, as Ralph Blumenthal eluded in, of all places, the New York Times, the so-called newspaper of record.

“Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast,” Blumenthal reported on October 28, 1993, in a story that appeared smack-dab on the front page of the Times. “The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad Salem, should be used, the informer said.”

In other words, the FBI allowed the plot to go forward, as the fairy tale that dangerous and violent Muslims who hate us for our freedom and lurked villainously in the shadows had to be created and stick. “In the aftermath of the world Trade Center bombing of February 26, 1993, the FBI concocted misleading scientific reports and pressured two leading scientists to perjure their testimony in order to support its prosecution of the men accused of the bombing,” the Washington Post reported.

According to Ted Gunderson, a high-ranking retired FBI official, “Imad Salem, an FBI informant, was hired to make the 1993 car bomb that exploded in the World Trade Building. Salem was to thwart the plotters by substituting harmless powder for the explosives, but Gunderson says FBI handler John Anderson took Salem off the case and didn’t act on the threat. The van was supposed to park next to a pillar in the underground garage, but another car was in the way. Therefore, the bomb-loaded van was parked as close as possible, killing six people and injuring more than 1000 people. A New York Times article published Oct. 28, 1993, confirms the FBI’s foreknowledge of the 1993 attack and includes excerpts of Salem’s conversation with FBI officials,” writes Alejandra Rodriguez .

Gunderson says that two years later the FBI carried out the Oklahoma City bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. Publicly available reports on the events of that day say that the bomb used was a fertilizer bomb. But according to Gunderson, a fertilizer bomb is not powerful enough to do the extent of damage that was done. Gunderson claims the bomb used was an electro-hydro-dynamic gaseous fuel device, known to intelligence agents as a barometric bomb…. Gunderson says Timothy McVeigh, the man executed for the crime, was recruited by CIA as an assassin and the Oklahoma City bombing was only an assignment.

Of course, Mr. Gunderson is considered a “conspiracy theorist,” never mind his highly esteemed years as a high-ranking FBI official - the hacks at the Hearst yellow journalism department, Popular Mechanics division, are not inclined to leaven their story with his off-script accusations.

Popular Mechanics continues:

Although there have been no attacks in New York since 9/11, police officials work under the assumption that Al Qaeda and its sympathizers are constantly plotting against the city. As an example, they point to a 2002 plan by an Ohio truck driver named Iyman Faris to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge by cutting its cables. Hercules teams are frequently stationed on the bridge, and the department keeps a boat in the waters beneath it at all times. Faris, who later pleaded guilty to aiding Al Qaeda, ultimately called off the operation with a coded message reading: “The weather is too hot.”

Colorful, just like something out of a John le Carré novel, no? However, the NYPD and its massive secret police organization - rolled out as an example of how the rest of the country might best gear up for the one hundred or more year GWOT - should have absolutely no fear al-Qaeda will strike again, that is not unless the neocons need another “Pearl Harbor event” for future wars, maybe against China or Russia, as neocon are fond of theorizing.

It is quite interesting Popular Mechanics would mention the hapless Iyman Faris as evidence al-Qaeda is busily at work, feverishly plotting the murder of kindergarten children and janitors.

“The American al-Qa’eda operative unmasked last week as having planned to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge was first detained in March, and has been used by the FBI for months as a double agent,” the UK Telegraph reported on June 23, 2003. “Installed in a safe house in Virginia, Faris sent messages to his terrorist commanders by mobile phone and email.” Virginia, of course, is the home base of the CIA.

Naturally, no mention of this in the Popular Mechanics story, as the point is not to tell the truth, or anything even remotely resembling the truth, but rather to perpetuate the myth-in-progress that al-Qaeda is out there - sleeping or whatever al-Qaeda operatives do when they are not visiting topless bars, failing flight lessons, or reporting to military bases - and our response should be to accept that the government is turning the country into a police state.

As evidence New York is the model for a high-tech police state, consider the following: “In addition to the Counter Terrorism Bureau, [police commissioner] Kelly’s department has built an $11 million Real Time Crime Center, giving detectives in the field immediate access to data about suspects and crime patterns. He equipped street cops with BlackBerries and portable radiation detectors. The city is currently in the process of installing 500 surveillance cameras throughout the city, many of them trained on subway entrances and other potential terrorist targets.”

Kelly worked for Interpol and NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence, David Cohen, is former head of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. In short, only people with the appropriate skillset need apply.

By definition, terrorism prevention must be pre-emptive. To stop attacks before they occur, local police must build and maintain relationships within their communities to gather information, staying on the lookout for activities that might raise flags. That’s the logic behind the NYPD’s Operation Nexus, implemented in late 2002. Nexus reaches out to businesses to collect intelligence and raise awareness about terrorist tactics. The 9/11 hijackers attended flight schools, for example, and now cops have identified 80 other categories of business-everything from martial arts studios to scuba shops-that terrorists might use to acquire training or materials.

As it turns out, however, this effort has concentrated not on al-Qaeda with its now infamous FBI double-agents, but rather American citizens attempting to exercise their constitutional right to petition the government, an activity that has fallen out of favor with our rulers and their minions.

“The New York City Police Department carried out an extensive national and international spying operation on protesters leading up to the Republican National Convention in 2004,” Democracy Now reported earlier this year. Teams “of undercover officers were sent across the nation, to Canada and to Europe to spy on groups and individuals planning to take part in the protests in New York.”

“Those with any awareness of contemporary history might well be reminded of G. Gordon Liddy’s infamous Watergate-era plan to abduct key US political activists opposed to Nixon’s Vietnam War during the lead-up to the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami,” notes blogger Mugu Brainpan, commenting on the out-of-jurisdiction snoop effort by New York’s finest.

“For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews,” the New York Times reported on March 26th, 2007. “From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show.”

But potential troublemakers were hardly the only ones to end up in the files. In hundreds of reports stamped “N.Y.P.D. Secret,” the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, the records show.

These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies.

But then, in the new “threat environment,” with the North American Union all but breathing down our necks, national borders are irrelevant. Ask any illegal crossing over the Rio Grande or trekking across the Sonoran Desert.

Popular Mechanics would have us believe all this nefarious police state activity is required to save us from al-Qaeda when in fact, as example after example demonstrates - from COINTELPRO to massive NSA surveillance, to name but two - the real purpose of the ascendant police state is not to protect us from terrorism, that is unless you consider opposition to the occupation of Iraq or globalization terrorism, as our rulers obviously do.

It is, rather, part and parcel of a high-tech police state unleashed on the population at large, especially those of us who dare to resist. For the rest of the population, too timid to resist or too dumbed-down to understand the full dimension of history, it serves as an object lesson - keep your head down, do as you are told, accept the popular albeit obviously fallacious and infantile terrorist mythology, and the Intelligence Division, the NYPD/FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force, the Counter Terrorism Bureau and their black-clad thugs will leave you alone, that is if you pay appropriate homage.

Popular Mechanics is not only obliged to provide the appropriate propaganda in the dedicated effort to convert a once proud constitutional republic into a soviertized police state, it is in fact specifically tasked.

After all, it was William Randolph Hearst who so famously quipped to an illustrator in the employ his New York Journal in the lead-up to the contrived Spanish-American War: “You provide the pictures and I’ll provide the war.”

It is the duty of Popular Mechanics to not so much provide pictures, but rather lurid verbiage describing cave-dwelling terrorists who are determined to destroy our freedom.

Of course, only a totalitarian government possesses the unique ability to do that.

Truth News | Kurt Nimmo | Thursday, November 29, 2007