Max Blumenthal: How Israeli Occupation Forces, Bahraini Monarchy Guards Trained U.S. Police For Coordinated Crackdown On \u201cOccupy\u201d Protests
\nBy Max Blumenthal – Al-Akhbar – 02 December, 2011<\/p>\n
New York \u2013 In October, the Alameda County Sheriff\u2019s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote \u201cmutual response,\u201d collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.<\/p>\n
At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff\u2019s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent \u201cOccupy\u201d movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, \u201cLaw enforcement agencies responding to\u2026Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.\u201d<\/p>\n
Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in \u201ccounter-terror\u201d operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police \u2013 whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media \u2013 reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9\/11 American security landscape.<\/p>\n
The Israelification of America\u2019s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel\u2019s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg.<\/p>\n
Having been schooled in Israeli tactics perfected during a 63 year experience of controlling, dispossessing, and occupying an indigenous population, local police forces have adapted them to monitor Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods in US cities. Meanwhile, former Israeli military officers have been hired to spearhead security operations at American airports and suburban shopping malls, leading to a wave of disturbing incidents of racial profiling, intimidation, and FBI interrogations of innocent, unsuspecting people. The New York Police Department\u2019s disclosure that it deployed \u201ccounter-terror\u201d measures against Occupy protesters encamped in downtown Manhattan\u2019s Zuccotti Park is just the latest example of the so-called War on Terror creeping into every day life. Revelations like these have raised serious questions about the extent to which Israeli-inspired tactics are being used to suppress the Occupy movement. …more<\/a><\/p>\n