Targeting the RNC Welcoming Committee: A Case Study in Political Paranoia

[Joanne98]

February 9, 2009

Tom Burghardt (Antifascist Calling)<1>

Political repression comes in all shapes and sizes: from the beat cop smashing the head of a demonstrator to the bureaucrat adding a name to a watch list. While the former has an immediate and shocking effect, the latter, more insidious and far-reaching in its probable consequences to the individual, is less amenable to redress. Once indexed, always indexed.

Certainly one of the more sinister trends in America today are the multiplicity of partnerships among state security agencies and their analogues in the corporate world. Indeed, many CIA or FBI officers upon retirement join the highly-lucrative and unaccountable world of corporate spying. Nowhere are these revolving-door relationships more toxic to a democracy than in the area of political intelligence.

A March 27, 2008 document prepared by the now-defunct Highway Watch (HW), a "public-private partnership" administered by the virulently anti-union American Trucking Associations (ATA)--a key member of the oxymoronic Coalition for a Democratic Workplace--and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Operations Center (DHS) has been published by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks.

Authored by Cory Kutcher, a former intelligence analyst with HW's Information Sharing & Analysis Center (ISAC) and now a government analyst "in the Defense and Space Industry" according to LinkedIn, the dossier is a veritable case study in political paranoia and pseudo-academic posturing. Breathless allegations and dire pronouncements abound which helped set the stage for wholesale repression.

The focus of Kutcher's report was the anarchist/anti-authoritarian RNC Welcoming Committee (RNC-WC). Right from the outset, misrepresentations served the purpose of eliciting a harsh response from police. Kutcher warns "it is likely that they will target transportation infrastructure."

In HW's paranoid scenario, blocking traffic and civil disobedience was transformed into a scenario where hordes of masked anarchists utilizing a "diversity of tactics" threatend chaos in the furtherance of "terrorism."

Background

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Targeting_the_RNC_Welcoming_Committee:_A_Case_Study_in_Political_Paranoia