>>But even when the FBI came knocking around here last week
>>they were operating on information on activists that was years old.
>>
>>Don't believe the police hype.
>
>
> This is quite true. Gerry Adams says in "Before the Dawn" that
> internment mostly affected veterans of the 1956-1962 Border Campaign.
> By 1971, many of them had drifted from republicanism, but they found
> themselves locked up without trial nine years later nonetheless, while
> almost all of the younger, active PIRA was not picked up.
>
> This is generally true of any intelligence outfit - if a group is not
> actively killing people or causing large-scale property damage and havoc,
> the intelligence gathered is usually several years out of date.
Based on my experience with the cops and what I've observed them doing, I think they operate on two main assumptions when it comes to repressing activists:
1) Spectacular activism: The authorities will always focus on those activists who are perceived as doing illegal things, such as throwing molotovs, plotting illegal activities, and so on. They don't pay much attention to the other work that activists do, which means that they don't understand the bigger goals of activism, which pretty much confirms that the activists canard about cop provocateurs in our movement is mostly a myth. The authorities don't understand the big picture and they focus on spectaculr manifestations of our dissent.
2) Leaders: Given that cops come from hierarchical organizations and given that they operate under the standard ideologies of our society, they assume that activist groups and movements must have leaders. Leaders can be arrested, threatened, imprisoned, shot, and co-opted. Nothing infuriates a cop more is when they ask a group of activists who their leader is and the activists respond with "we have no leaders." The leaderless nature of the anti-globalization movement has vexed the authorities. They've had to resort to a strategy that identifies the biggest mouths as being the leaders. Arrest patterns of activists at summit protests show that the cops go to meetings and identify those who are the most vocal and visible as the "leadership."
Chuck