Pre-Empting Dissent
Andrew Cornell
I couldn’t tell whether it was the officer’s boot or knee that was pinning my head to the sidewalk as another cop cinched my arms together behind my back with plastic ties. I could tell that all around me people were running and yelling, panicked, and that the friends I had come with were also on the ground in various states of incapacitation. It was a rough arrest for the minor infraction of “Parading Without a Permit”—the charge NYPD officers were using to justify indiscriminate mass arrests of people otherwise lawfully protesting the Bush Agenda during the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC). The arrest was especially rough considering that my friends and I weren’t even in the march in question. We were a block away trying to see what was going on when police in riot gear swarmed us.
The forty-six hours I spent in custody before being arraigned was about average for the 1,200 or so individuals arrested on the evening of August 31st, as was the extent of the criminal behavior for which I was being held. Of the 1,821 detained throughout the week of RNC demonstrations, 1,480 were charged only with code violations (comparable in severity to a parking ticket)—most frequently Disorderly Conduct or the “Parading” charge. A majority of the remainder were accused of misdemeanors such as “Obstructing Government Administration.” [1] Near universal agreement existed amongst the demonstrators and many unlucky bystanders held in the Tombs: we had been “pre-emptively arrested”—swept off the streets almost before the demonstrations began. We weren’t alone in this assessment.
A day later, the front page of the New York Times carried a story clearly stating the policing strategy at play throughout the convention. “Using large orange nets to divide and conquer, and a near-zero tolerance policy for activities that even suggest the prospect of disorder, the New York Police Department has developed what amounts to a pre-emptive strike policy, cutting off demonstrations before they grow large enough, loud enough, or unruly enough to effect the convention.” [2] The day before, the Times had used similar language, claiming that police were “primed to pre-empt disorder before it could occur.” [3]
The description of police tactics as a “pre-emptive strike policy” by the paper of record exemplifies the manner in which the language of pre-emption has begun to circulate widely in public discourse since the concept was employed in the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS). As is well known, the NSS document argues that ensuring the security of citizens and national interests under contemporary circumstances requires the U.S. to abandon earlier foreign policy paradigms such as containment or deterrence and to assert its right to “act pre-emptively” against gathering threats posed by terrorists and rogue states. While scholars and analysts have extensively debated the strategy’s impact on foreign relations, its legal basis, and the extent of its departure from previous security doctrines, insufficient attention has been paid to how the concept of pre-emptive action has been taken up in other spheres of social life and political activity, including the policing of domestic opposition groups, and to what effect. [4]
Pre-empting the possibility of “disorder” at the RNC, of course, meant preventing thousands of people from exercising speech and assembly rights and extensively violating due process. It would be a mistake to ignore the relation such policing practices hold to the recent revelations of widespread NSA wiretapping and FBI surveillance of non-violent social justice groups. And if the techniques used during the RNC were anomalous in extent, they were not so in character. The police operation resembled and further developed a strategy designed to limit opposition to a Free Trade Area of the Americas summit that took place in Miami, Florida in November of 2003. In each situation, security agencies overrode the fundamental rights of citizens engaged in political activity and justified their actions, implicitly or explicitly, with reference to the special conditions necessitated by the War on Terror.
Of course, policing techniques that could be considered pre-emptive did not originate in the post-9/11 period. The grisly execution by Chicago police of the sleeping Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, like many other COINTELPRO operations, serves as a macabre example from the 1960s era. Yet, the U.S. has relied on pre-emptive military action in the past as well (think Guatemala, 1954). New to the current moment—in the military as well as the policing realm—is the elevation of pre-emption to the level of doctrine and its open espousal. As the strategy of pre-emptive military invasion has become known as the Bush Doctrine, local officials responsible for violent pre-emptive sweeps at summit demonstrations have been eager to enshrine their methods as well. Shortly after the RNC demonstrations a police spokesman, referring to NYC Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, noted that, “The rapid-response techniques seen this week have become known around the department as the ‘Kelly Doctrine.’” [5]
Import the Logic
In Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that two concepts of “exception” serve, even if not always explicitly, to justify the Bush administration’s current military activities. First, the threat posed by terrorists and rogue states is considered severe enough to justify a “state of exception,” which in the German legal tradition is conceived of as a temporary suspension of the rule of law in order to protect the republic in a time of war or other crisis. Hardt and Negri warn that, “when the state of war and thus the state of exception become indefinite or even permanent, as they do today,” the troublesome character of a delimited state of exception becomes all the more dangerous. Secondly, the authors claim, “the American “exception” refers to the double standard enjoyed by the most powerful, that is, the notion that the one who commands need not obey.” [6]
These observations are useful in comprehending how mass arrests, preventative detention, warrant-less wiretaps, and infiltration of non-violent political organizations have become defensible operating procedures in the United States in recent years. The pre-emptive policing of domestic opposition groups imports the logic of pre-emption used in the international arena.
The NSS argues that “for centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack.” The exceptional nature of these current threats, it argues, necessitates the pre-emptive path. More particularly, they demand we “adapt the concept of imminent threat.” [7] It is specifically in this erosion of the meaning of “imminent,” however, that critics such as Noam Chomsky locate the fundamental corruption of the policy: launching an attack when no threat is immediately impending must be seen as preventative, not pre-emptive action, and therefore an unjustifiable violation of sovereignty. [8]
When the New York Times revealed Bush had ordered the National Security Agency to monitor the phone calls and emails of more than a thousand individuals connected to anti-terror investigations without obtaining warrants, a brazenly illegal practice, he justified the program with both forms of “exception.” [9] The nature of the war on terror demanded laws be overlooked. At the same time, the authorization of executive war powers gave him the right to override such provisions. The one who commands need not obey.
Physical and the Ideological Components
Though it did so less explicitly, the pre-emptive policing of the FTAA and RNC protestors relied on similar logic. In both Miami and New York City, the physical repression of officers on the street was effectively paired with extensive media campaigns demonizing and linking protestors to terrorists prior to the events. The specter of the “anarchist” proved central to the process in both cities. When the City of Miami asked for federal assistance to cover costs of policing the FTAA summit, Congress obliged by slicing an 8.5 million dollar aid package out of the massive $87 billion fund requested by President Bush to prosecute the war in Iraq. [10] Shortly thereafter, the Miami Police Department invited journalists from trusted media sources to “embed” in police units throughout the demonstrations, as war correspondents had embedded with the Army during the invasion of Iraq, not only biasing coverage but also reinforcing the idea that policing demonstrators was parallel to routing Hussein’s forces or rounding up insurgents in Falluja. [11] Covering a police raid on an activist center shortly before the demonstrations, Miami’s NBC affiliate reported, “Suspected anarchist after suspected anarchist went to jail. They went to great lengths to try to disrupt things, but police kept the peace.” [12] Such phrasing, of course, implies that holding anarchist beliefs is itself a punishable crime.
A year later, New York media and city officials took a cue. Six weeks before the RNC demonstrations, the cover of the Daily News announced an “Anarchist Threat to City.” The paper claimed to have uncovered internet postings by anarchists suggesting demonstrators snare the subway system by tricking bomb-sniffing dogs into detecting explosives. “So in addition to guarding against the most vile, organized and destructive of terrorists,” the story concluded, “[Commissioner Raymond] Kelly and company have to combat a shadowy, loose-knit band of traveling troublemakers who spread their guides to disruption over the Internet.” [13] Doubting the Daily News’ credibility, the New York City Independent Media Center attempted to verify the information cited, but was unable to find proof that the internet posting ever existed. [14] As the Times, Post, Sun and other sources contributed to the emerging moral panic, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made some of the most overt—and ridiculous—connections between anarchists and terrorists. On September 3rd he reasoned,
It is true that a handful of people have tried to destroy our city by going up and yelling at visitors here because they don’t agree with their views. Think about what that says. This is America, New York, cradle of liberty, the city for free speech if there ever was one and some people think that we shouldn’t allow people to express themselves. That’s exactly what the terrorists did, if you think about it, on 9/11. Now this is not the same kind of terrorism but there’s no question that these anarchists are afraid to let people speak out. [15]
Certainly, all protestors were not described as anarchists—the good protestor/bad protestor dichotomy remained a central trope throughout the summer—but in a variety of cases significant slippages occurred. The September 1st Daily News, for example, contained the headline, “Nearly 1,000 anarchists nabbed in Manhattan havoc.” Over 1,000 individuals were arrested the previous night, but they were certainly not all anarchists, and the Daily News had no way of determining how many were.
Boogeyman representations such as these present demonstrators in a threatening light that discourages others from sympathizing or participating. They also legitimate the intensity and extra-legal nature of the police action taken against those who do take to the streets by implicitly referencing the exceptional threat police have to protect the public from. Terrorists could take advantage of the chaos of protests. In fact, demonstrators are (anarchists and anarchists are) terrorists. Pinning the terrorist label on social justice activists has become increasingly easy, as the FBI is “apparently expanding the definition of ‘domestic terrorism’ to include citizens and groups that participate in lawful protests or civil disobedience.” [16] Documentation obtained by the ACLU reveals the FBI collected names and license plate numbers of participants in a Colorado Springs anti-war demonstration, sent under-cover agents to participate in a collegiate animal rights conference, and monitored the Arab Anti-Defamation League and pro-Affirmative Action groups in Michigan, classifying each as “domestic terror” threats. [17] Clearly, if the flaw of pre-emptive foreign policy lies in the administration’s erosion of the meaning of “imminence,” the pre-emptive policing of the administration’s domestic opponents is doubly untenable. In that realm, not only has the concept of imminence but eroded, the meaning of “threat” has as well.
The Scope of the War
The degree to which activists have come to be seen not only as a threat to order in their own right, but also as bound up with threats from abroad, raises an important question: should we view the association of activists with terrorists as merely an expeditious rhetorical strategy designed to minimize disruption and damage to Starbucks’ windows, or should we consider it as some indication of how officials at various levels of government view the character, scope, and purpose of the War on Terror? Hardt and Negri argue that a “war against a concept or set of practices,” such as the current War on Terror, “has no definite spatial or temporal boundaries…A war to create and maintain social order can have no end….One cannot win such a war, or rather, it has to be won again everyday. War thus becomes virtually indistinguishable from police activity.” In such a situation, “international relations and domestic politics become increasingly similar and intermingled” and the outside enemy and domestic “dangerous classes…are thus increasingly indistinguishable from one another and serve together as the object of the war effort.” [18] This perspective coheres with the demand forwarded by organizations representing low-income and immigrant communities during the FTAA and RNC protests: “End the war at home and abroad!”
Activists become one pedigree of an “internal enemy” in the War on Terror. The other iterations of the internal enemy, of course, are migrants, Muslims, South Asians and people of Middle-Eastern descent, who have also (and much more severely) been subjected to pre-emptive surveillance, detention and denial of due process. Linking activists with terrorists cuts both ways. It not only suppresses leftist dissent but also bolsters the supposed war, which has negative repercussions on the marginal communities in the U.S. most effected by that initiative. Anarchists stand in for actual terrorists, keeping the threat of “shadowy, loose-knit” groups anxious to “wreck havoc” in the public mind. Such a presence helps justify repressive security policies and budget priorities despite a lack of Al-Qaida attacks in the U.S. since 2001.
As the practice and language of pre-emption circulate through different social fields, from foreign policy, to popular culture, to policing legitimate civic engagement and public protest, pre-emption threatens to become routinized, normalized, and increasingly accepted as legitimate policy despite its clearly anti-democratic character, making targeted domestic communities and foreign states all the more vulnerable.
Notes
[1] “Police and Protestors Spar a Last Time, Over the Peace,” New York Times, 9-4-04, page 1.
[2] Michael Slackman & Diane Cardwell, “Police Tactics Mute Protestors and Messages,” New York Times, 9-2-04.
[3] “At Least 900 Arrested in City as Protestors Clash with Police,” New York Times, 9-1-04.
[4] Examining the pre-emptive policing of other groups in the United States, especially immigrant communities, is also a crucial task, but not undertaken here.
[5] “At Least 900 Arrested in City as Protestors Clash with Police,” New York Times, 9-1-04. During the FTAA demonstrations, the mayor of Miami claimed his tactics constituted a “model” which other cities should follow. The Miami Model. DVD. FTAA IMC Media Working Group, 2004.
[6] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, (New York: Penguin, 2004), pages 5-10.
[7] George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, section 5. www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss5.html
[8] Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, (New York: Metropolitan, 2003).
[9] James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Let U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,” New York Times, 12-16-05.
[10] Douglas Hanks III, “Miami Secures Money to Run Americas Free Trade Talks,” Miami Herald, 11-6-03.
[11] The Miami Model. DVD. FTAA IMC Media Working Group, 2004.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Patrice O’Shaughnessy, “Fury at Anarchist Convention Threat,” Daily News, 7-12-04, page 6.
[14] Personal correspondence with Josh Breitbart, NYC IMC, 1-22-05.
[15] “Protestors Try to Get in Last Word Before Curtain Falls,” 9-3-2004, page 8.
[16] “New Documents Show FBI Targeting Environmental and Animal Rights Groups Activities as ‘Domestic Terrorism,” Press Release. www.aclu.org/safefree/spying/23124prs20051220.html
[17] www.aclu.org/spyfiles
[18] Hardt and Negri, 14-15.
Andrew Cornell: Pre-Empting Dissent
Pre-Empting Dissent
Andrew Cornell
I couldn’t tell whether it was the officer’s boot or knee that was pinning my head to the sidewalk as another cop cinched my arms together behind my back with plastic ties. I could tell that all around me people were running and yelling, panicked, and that the friends I had come with were also on the ground in various states of incapacitation. It was a rough arrest for the minor infraction of “Parading Without a Permit”—the charge NYPD officers were using to justify indiscriminate mass arrests of people otherwise lawfully protesting the Bush Agenda during the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC). The arrest was especially rough considering that my friends and I weren’t even in the march in question. We were a block away trying to see what was going on when police in riot gear swarmed us.
The forty-six hours I spent in custody before being arraigned was about average for the 1,200 or so individuals arrested on the evening of August 31st, as was the extent of the criminal behavior for which I was being held. Of the 1,821 detained throughout the week of RNC demonstrations, 1,480 were charged only with code violations (comparable in severity to a parking ticket)—most frequently Disorderly Conduct or the “Parading” charge. A majority of the remainder were accused of misdemeanors such as “Obstructing Government Administration.” [1] Near universal agreement existed amongst the demonstrators and many unlucky bystanders held in the Tombs: we had been “pre-emptively arrested”—swept off the streets almost before the demonstrations began. We weren’t alone in this assessment.
A day later, the front page of the New York Times carried a story clearly stating the policing strategy at play throughout the convention. “Using large orange nets to divide and conquer, and a near-zero tolerance policy for activities that even suggest the prospect of disorder, the New York Police Department has developed what amounts to a pre-emptive strike policy, cutting off demonstrations before they grow large enough, loud enough, or unruly enough to effect the convention.” [2] The day before, the Times had used similar language, claiming that police were “primed to pre-empt disorder before it could occur.” [3]
The description of police tactics as a “pre-emptive strike policy” by the paper of record exemplifies the manner in which the language of pre-emption has begun to circulate widely in public discourse since the concept was employed in the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS). As is well known, the NSS document argues that ensuring the security of citizens and national interests under contemporary circumstances requires the U.S. to abandon earlier foreign policy paradigms such as containment or deterrence and to assert its right to “act pre-emptively” against gathering threats posed by terrorists and rogue states. While scholars and analysts have extensively debated the strategy’s impact on foreign relations, its legal basis, and the extent of its departure from previous security doctrines, insufficient attention has been paid to how the concept of pre-emptive action has been taken up in other spheres of social life and political activity, including the policing of domestic opposition groups, and to what effect. [4]
Pre-empting the possibility of “disorder” at the RNC, of course, meant preventing thousands of people from exercising speech and assembly rights and extensively violating due process. It would be a mistake to ignore the relation such policing practices hold to the recent revelations of widespread NSA wiretapping and FBI surveillance of non-violent social justice groups. And if the techniques used during the RNC were anomalous in extent, they were not so in character. The police operation resembled and further developed a strategy designed to limit opposition to a Free Trade Area of the Americas summit that took place in Miami, Florida in November of 2003. In each situation, security agencies overrode the fundamental rights of citizens engaged in political activity and justified their actions, implicitly or explicitly, with reference to the special conditions necessitated by the War on Terror.
Of course, policing techniques that could be considered pre-emptive did not originate in the post-9/11 period. The grisly execution by Chicago police of the sleeping Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, like many other COINTELPRO operations, serves as a macabre example from the 1960s era. Yet, the U.S. has relied on pre-emptive military action in the past as well (think Guatemala, 1954). New to the current moment—in the military as well as the policing realm—is the elevation of pre-emption to the level of doctrine and its open espousal. As the strategy of pre-emptive military invasion has become known as the Bush Doctrine, local officials responsible for violent pre-emptive sweeps at summit demonstrations have been eager to enshrine their methods as well. Shortly after the RNC demonstrations a police spokesman, referring to NYC Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, noted that, “The rapid-response techniques seen this week have become known around the department as the ‘Kelly Doctrine.’” [5]
Import the Logic
In Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that two concepts of “exception” serve, even if not always explicitly, to justify the Bush administration’s current military activities. First, the threat posed by terrorists and rogue states is considered severe enough to justify a “state of exception,” which in the German legal tradition is conceived of as a temporary suspension of the rule of law in order to protect the republic in a time of war or other crisis. Hardt and Negri warn that, “when the state of war and thus the state of exception become indefinite or even permanent, as they do today,” the troublesome character of a delimited state of exception becomes all the more dangerous. Secondly, the authors claim, “the American “exception” refers to the double standard enjoyed by the most powerful, that is, the notion that the one who commands need not obey.” [6]
These observations are useful in comprehending how mass arrests, preventative detention, warrant-less wiretaps, and infiltration of non-violent political organizations have become defensible operating procedures in the United States in recent years. The pre-emptive policing of domestic opposition groups imports the logic of pre-emption used in the international arena.
The NSS argues that “for centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack.” The exceptional nature of these current threats, it argues, necessitates the pre-emptive path. More particularly, they demand we “adapt the concept of imminent threat.” [7] It is specifically in this erosion of the meaning of “imminent,” however, that critics such as Noam Chomsky locate the fundamental corruption of the policy: launching an attack when no threat is immediately impending must be seen as preventative, not pre-emptive action, and therefore an unjustifiable violation of sovereignty. [8]
When the New York Times revealed Bush had ordered the National Security Agency to monitor the phone calls and emails of more than a thousand individuals connected to anti-terror investigations without obtaining warrants, a brazenly illegal practice, he justified the program with both forms of “exception.” [9] The nature of the war on terror demanded laws be overlooked. At the same time, the authorization of executive war powers gave him the right to override such provisions. The one who commands need not obey.
Physical and the Ideological Components
Though it did so less explicitly, the pre-emptive policing of the FTAA and RNC protestors relied on similar logic. In both Miami and New York City, the physical repression of officers on the street was effectively paired with extensive media campaigns demonizing and linking protestors to terrorists prior to the events. The specter of the “anarchist” proved central to the process in both cities. When the City of Miami asked for federal assistance to cover costs of policing the FTAA summit, Congress obliged by slicing an 8.5 million dollar aid package out of the massive $87 billion fund requested by President Bush to prosecute the war in Iraq. [10] Shortly thereafter, the Miami Police Department invited journalists from trusted media sources to “embed” in police units throughout the demonstrations, as war correspondents had embedded with the Army during the invasion of Iraq, not only biasing coverage but also reinforcing the idea that policing demonstrators was parallel to routing Hussein’s forces or rounding up insurgents in Falluja. [11] Covering a police raid on an activist center shortly before the demonstrations, Miami’s NBC affiliate reported, “Suspected anarchist after suspected anarchist went to jail. They went to great lengths to try to disrupt things, but police kept the peace.” [12] Such phrasing, of course, implies that holding anarchist beliefs is itself a punishable crime.
A year later, New York media and city officials took a cue. Six weeks before the RNC demonstrations, the cover of the Daily News announced an “Anarchist Threat to City.” The paper claimed to have uncovered internet postings by anarchists suggesting demonstrators snare the subway system by tricking bomb-sniffing dogs into detecting explosives. “So in addition to guarding against the most vile, organized and destructive of terrorists,” the story concluded, “[Commissioner Raymond] Kelly and company have to combat a shadowy, loose-knit band of traveling troublemakers who spread their guides to disruption over the Internet.” [13] Doubting the Daily News’ credibility, the New York City Independent Media Center attempted to verify the information cited, but was unable to find proof that the internet posting ever existed. [14] As the Times, Post, Sun and other sources contributed to the emerging moral panic, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made some of the most overt—and ridiculous—connections between anarchists and terrorists. On September 3rd he reasoned,
It is true that a handful of people have tried to destroy our city by going up and yelling at visitors here because they don’t agree with their views. Think about what that says. This is America, New York, cradle of liberty, the city for free speech if there ever was one and some people think that we shouldn’t allow people to express themselves. That’s exactly what the terrorists did, if you think about it, on 9/11. Now this is not the same kind of terrorism but there’s no question that these anarchists are afraid to let people speak out. [15]
Certainly, all protestors were not described as anarchists—the good protestor/bad protestor dichotomy remained a central trope throughout the summer—but in a variety of cases significant slippages occurred. The September 1st Daily News, for example, contained the headline, “Nearly 1,000 anarchists nabbed in Manhattan havoc.” Over 1,000 individuals were arrested the previous night, but they were certainly not all anarchists, and the Daily News had no way of determining how many were.
Boogeyman representations such as these present demonstrators in a threatening light that discourages others from sympathizing or participating. They also legitimate the intensity and extra-legal nature of the police action taken against those who do take to the streets by implicitly referencing the exceptional threat police have to protect the public from. Terrorists could take advantage of the chaos of protests. In fact, demonstrators are (anarchists and anarchists are) terrorists. Pinning the terrorist label on social justice activists has become increasingly easy, as the FBI is “apparently expanding the definition of ‘domestic terrorism’ to include citizens and groups that participate in lawful protests or civil disobedience.” [16] Documentation obtained by the ACLU reveals the FBI collected names and license plate numbers of participants in a Colorado Springs anti-war demonstration, sent under-cover agents to participate in a collegiate animal rights conference, and monitored the Arab Anti-Defamation League and pro-Affirmative Action groups in Michigan, classifying each as “domestic terror” threats. [17] Clearly, if the flaw of pre-emptive foreign policy lies in the administration’s erosion of the meaning of “imminence,” the pre-emptive policing of the administration’s domestic opponents is doubly untenable. In that realm, not only has the concept of imminence but eroded, the meaning of “threat” has as well.
The Scope of the War
The degree to which activists have come to be seen not only as a threat to order in their own right, but also as bound up with threats from abroad, raises an important question: should we view the association of activists with terrorists as merely an expeditious rhetorical strategy designed to minimize disruption and damage to Starbucks’ windows, or should we consider it as some indication of how officials at various levels of government view the character, scope, and purpose of the War on Terror? Hardt and Negri argue that a “war against a concept or set of practices,” such as the current War on Terror, “has no definite spatial or temporal boundaries…A war to create and maintain social order can have no end….One cannot win such a war, or rather, it has to be won again everyday. War thus becomes virtually indistinguishable from police activity.” In such a situation, “international relations and domestic politics become increasingly similar and intermingled” and the outside enemy and domestic “dangerous classes…are thus increasingly indistinguishable from one another and serve together as the object of the war effort.” [18] This perspective coheres with the demand forwarded by organizations representing low-income and immigrant communities during the FTAA and RNC protests: “End the war at home and abroad!”
Activists become one pedigree of an “internal enemy” in the War on Terror. The other iterations of the internal enemy, of course, are migrants, Muslims, South Asians and people of Middle-Eastern descent, who have also (and much more severely) been subjected to pre-emptive surveillance, detention and denial of due process. Linking activists with terrorists cuts both ways. It not only suppresses leftist dissent but also bolsters the supposed war, which has negative repercussions on the marginal communities in the U.S. most effected by that initiative. Anarchists stand in for actual terrorists, keeping the threat of “shadowy, loose-knit” groups anxious to “wreck havoc” in the public mind. Such a presence helps justify repressive security policies and budget priorities despite a lack of Al-Qaida attacks in the U.S. since 2001.
As the practice and language of pre-emption circulate through different social fields, from foreign policy, to popular culture, to policing legitimate civic engagement and public protest, pre-emption threatens to become routinized, normalized, and increasingly accepted as legitimate policy despite its clearly anti-democratic character, making targeted domestic communities and foreign states all the more vulnerable.
Notes
[1] “Police and Protestors Spar a Last Time, Over the Peace,” New York Times, 9-4-04, page 1.
[2] Michael Slackman & Diane Cardwell, “Police Tactics Mute Protestors and Messages,” New York Times, 9-2-04.
[3] “At Least 900 Arrested in City as Protestors Clash with Police,” New York Times, 9-1-04.
[4] Examining the pre-emptive policing of other groups in the United States, especially immigrant communities, is also a crucial task, but not undertaken here.
[5] “At Least 900 Arrested in City as Protestors Clash with Police,” New York Times, 9-1-04. During the FTAA demonstrations, the mayor of Miami claimed his tactics constituted a “model” which other cities should follow. The Miami Model. DVD. FTAA IMC Media Working Group, 2004.
[6] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, (New York: Penguin, 2004), pages 5-10.
[7] George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, section 5. www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss5.html
[8] Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, (New York: Metropolitan, 2003).
[9] James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Let U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,” New York Times, 12-16-05.
[10] Douglas Hanks III, “Miami Secures Money to Run Americas Free Trade Talks,” Miami Herald, 11-6-03.
[11] The Miami Model. DVD. FTAA IMC Media Working Group, 2004.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Patrice O’Shaughnessy, “Fury at Anarchist Convention Threat,” Daily News, 7-12-04, page 6.
[14] Personal correspondence with Josh Breitbart, NYC IMC, 1-22-05.
[15] “Protestors Try to Get in Last Word Before Curtain Falls,” 9-3-2004, page 8.
[16] “New Documents Show FBI Targeting Environmental and Animal Rights Groups Activities as ‘Domestic Terrorism,” Press Release. www.aclu.org/safefree/spying/23124prs20051220.html
[17] www.aclu.org/spyfiles
[18] Hardt and Negri, 14-15.