Hello,
I thought you would be especially interested in this new piece from
from Tomdispatch, Nick Turse's "NYC, the NYPD, the RNC, and Me, Fortress Big
Apple 2007" http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174843
Nick Turse, Tomdispatch Associate Editor and author of the upcoming book The
Complex on the new military-industrial-everything complex, was one of almost
2,000 demonstrators arrested, many unlawfully, at the Republican Convention in
New York City in 2004. This piece is framed by his account of how he recently
settled his lawsuit, one of hundreds, over his illegal arrest that day (for
sitting on a subway with a WAR DEAD sign around his neck) -- with a payment and
an apology from the city of New York.
But the heart of this piece is his exploration of how, since 2004, the Big
Apple has been transformed into an Escape From New York-style Homeland Security
State-let -- filled with new surveillance technology, stealth helicopters,
mobile "Sky Watch" towers, and "zero-tolerance" law enforcement policies. It's
a striking account of how New York became a city increasingly watched over (in
the most literal sense) by a secretive, corruption- and crime-ridden police
force, eager to shut-down dissent, that is anything but New York's "finest."
In practice, this is part of what the Global War on Terror has meant here --
the granting of an endless license for the draconian to become part of normal
life, of what passes for a world of "safety" and that involves techniques and
technology once associated with Orwell's dystopian novel 1984..
Turse lays out how this has happened and what it means in vivid detail. He
concludes: "In the eerie afterglow of 9/11, haunted by the specter of
terrorism, in an atmosphere where repressive zero-tolerance policies already
rule, given the unparalleled power of Commissioner Kelly -- called "the most
powerful police commissioner in the city's history" by NYPD expert Leonard
Levitt -- and with a police department largely unaccountable to anyone (as the
only city agency without any effective outside oversight), the Escape from New
York model may indeed represent Manhattan's future."
Please take a lookÂ
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