> BIG MEDIA PLAN ATTACK ON WTO OPPONENTS
>
> by Larry Duncan, co-producer of Labor Beat - Dec. 16, 1999
>
>
> How will the Government of, by, and for the Corporations prepare its
> counterpunch to the political victory of the anti-WTO forces in Seattle?
> The recent 60 Minutes II (Dec. 14, 1999) segment on the 'anarchists'
> suggests that the new world order is getting ready to play the 'terrorism'
> wild card.
>
> Why did 60 Minutes II pick a group of Oregon anarchists? Labor journalist
> Hal Sutton notes his concern "about the way in which the focus on street
> violence in Seattle has obscured a much more fundamental development that
> occurred during the WTO protests -- the strike by the International
> Longshore and Warehouse Union that effectively closed the West Coast to
> shipping on Nov. 30...the fate of that job action has been completely
> obscured by media coverage of the street violence and police repression."
>
> Getting some of their footage from independent media activists, the show's
> producers painted these particular WTO protesters as a group fixated on
> violence. Tony Cecala, publisher of The Holistic Networker, commented that
> "60 Minutes II...aired an incredible schmear of the entire Seattle event
> tonight. Incredible indy footage was labeled as 'anarchist footage that
> THEY hoped to use to show police brutality'. This footage was probably
> submitted in hopes of a fair showing and was used in a complete betrayal
of
> the truth. I watched in utter disbelief. Of the forest of information
> regarding the events they focused on a single leaf on a single tree. They
> linked the entire movement to anti-technology, anti-capitalist anarchist
> extremists."
>
> The producers of 60 Minutes II then went on to interview a theoretician of
> the Oregon anarchists who, the show noted emphatically, exchanges letters
> with uni-bomber David Kazinski. This detail was again savored in
> questioning of a handful of young anarchists interviewed throughout the
> segment. The object: paint the anarchists as bombers. The formula,
> simplified, is the following: WTO protesters = anarchists = bombers =
> terrorists.
>
> The show's producer, CBS/Westinghouse, in case there is anyone out there
> who doesn't already know, is not simply in the business of randomly
> reporting interesting news events. How deeply is the collusion among the
> Pentagon, CIA and the major networks plus CNN is hard to pin down, but the
> circumstantial evidence is plentiful. The Dec. 14 60 Minutes II segment
was
> simply laying the early groundwork for a new corporate media/government PR
> project: groups opposed to corporate globalization are terrorists.
>
> The fact that this is a falsehood should not deter them. For how they will
> get around this minor detail we can look to the reports now beginning to
> emerge that describe police agents provocateur operating within the ranks
> of street protesters in Seattle:
>
> Jim Desyllas, Seattle reporter for <www.emperors-clothes.com> writes: "The
> cops would blockade three or five blocks of an area, give the angry kids
> room to operate, keep gassing them -- when you gas a person, let me tell
> you, it gets them fighting mad. Tuesday night the police gassed all of
> downtown. This was going on from 3 PM, till 6 PM. Gas everywhere. The kids
> broke a few windows -- McD's, Starbucks -- small stuff -- burned a few
> garbage cans. The police were using these people as extras. It was staged.
> I believe also the police had their own people in there, encouraging
people
> to break stuff -- if people think I may be exaggerating, I saw supposed
> protesters -- they were screaming and so on -- and then later, when
> everything was over, the same people tackled other protesters and put
> handcuffs on them."
>
> Another eyewitness, Peter Corr, notes that, as windows were being broken
at
> Starbucks, a police line which was watching the crime did not move, let
> alone make arrests. Corr believes that the police did not want to
interrupt
> a pretext to crack down on demonstators later. Not until the cameras got
> their fill of it.
>
> These tactics of the police and authorities fit in well with a long
> tradition of dirty tricks against forces organized against oppression.
> During the 60's it was COINTELPRO. In the 70's you had such strange
> concoctions as the preposterous Symbionese Liberation Army, which somehow
> fell out of the sky one day without any legitimate community, labor or
> leftist organization ever hearing about them. As a set piece for the
> bourgeois radical-chic Patty Hearst, the SLA was a cop operation from the
> get-go, festooned in high guerrilla drag with machine guns and
> criss-crossed bullet belts. And in the 80's there was the case of the
> NASSCO shipyards union organizing campaign in San Diego, sabotaged by an
> exposed police agent. He infiltrated the legitimate militants'
organization
> and made sure he was heard a lot talking about bombing the shipyard. The
> organizers were arrested in their car while innocently giving this
> provocateur a ride with dynamite sticks hidden in his bag. The police
> somehow knew just what to look for.
>
> These warnings should not be construed as a blanket accusation that
> so-called anarchist groups or individuals advocating adventurist tactics
> are ipso facto agents. But organizations which allow themselves to be
> labeled by the corporate media as using violence as a key mode of
operation
> leave themselves open to easy penetration and manipulation by police
> agents. I make a few suggestions:
>
> 1. The Anti-WTO forces should be alert to future attempts to paint
> opponents of corporate globalization schemes as terrorists. If some secret
> government agency itself created a nasty incident in which innocent
victims
> were hurt in some 'anarchist-type' bombing, it would not be the first time
> a government did such an act to manipulate public opinion.
>
> 2. The Anti-WTO movement should organize protests and pressure campaigns
> directed at CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN demanding that it open wide their
studios
> and interview shows to spokespersons who want to discuss the political,
> substantive reasons for opposing the WTO and similar scams. We need to
> demand that the media look at the real news here, not people with purple
> hair smashing store windows. Why wasn't the story about the Longshoremen's
> protest strike against the WTO reported? That wasn't as newsworthy as
> garbage cans being overturned?
>
> 3. We need to continue to develop and support the growing independent,
> anti-corporate media movement in print, cable-tv, radio, and internet, to
> insure that when the corporate media lie machine cranks up, we will have
> our own strong networks of information dissemination. Rest assured, we
will
> need them because the lies have already started and there are going to be
> some whoppers.
>
>
> Larry Duncan
> lduncan@igc.org