Harvard Crimson Prints Bizarre (and Belated) Story About Zionist Palestinian Rights Protest on March 3rd
I was there counter-protesting, for 9/11 truth. I recall several people taking photos, but I was there to the end and did not see anyone get arrested. In fact, this Patrick Keaney who is portrayed as nobly getting himself arrested for the sake of the damsel in distress, was quite upset with me during the protest because I confronted him about 9/11, in particular the demolitions, including building 7, which he dismissed in so many words as conspiracy bullshit.
As I said, this whole story seems to have been woven out of whole cloth. Not only did I witness no arrests that day, but you would think that the Crimson would have covered such a dramatic development on March 4th or thereabouts, not over a month later. Now, does Harvard share info with the feds? I don't doubt it for a second and have in fact been approached myself by an undercover Harvard spook while truthing. To suddenly decide to expose this issue with what may well be a fake story featuring heroic Zionist Palestinian rights activists (who also happen to be Green party apparatchiks like Mr. Keaney who was involved in Jill Stein's campaign for governor a few years back) is very fishy indeed, and yet another sign that 9/11 truth has a lot of folks at Harvard sweating Crimson bullets... :)
Arrests Draw Fire from ACLU
Published On Sunday, April 13, 2008 11:46 PM
By JAMISON A HILL
Crimson Staff Writer
The nation’s preeminent civil liberties group is accusing the University of maintaining a political intelligence unit within the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD), an allegation that comes after two protesters were arrested during a demonstration in the Square.
The protesters allege that undercover HUPD officers were photographing the demonstration, according to John Reinstein, the legal director of the Massachusetts division of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
“What we found really quite surprising and disturbing is that the Harvard police department has an undercover, plainclothes, political intelligence unit which so far as I know has never been acknowledged by them before,†Reinstein said.
HUPD spokesman Steven G. Catalano declined to comment, and a University spokesman did not comment as well.
The protesters, Patrick Keaney and Lisa Nieves, were arrested March 3 in front of the Holyoke Center according to the HUPD’s police log. The log said that “officers were monitoring a demonstration†prior to the arrest.
“Two demonstrators became confrontational and acting in an aggressive manner toward one of officers,†the log said.
Keaney was charged with resisting arrest and Nieves was charged with disturbing the peace. The charges against Nieves have since been dropped, though Keaney’s case is still pending in the Cambridge District Court, according to Reinstein.
Reinstein said that the ACLU has filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act to discover whether Harvard shares the intelligence it gathers with the federal government. Other schools have connections with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), local teams of law enforcement and intelligence specialists formed to investigate terrorism.
According to the FBI’s Web site, there are JTTFs in 100 cities across the U.S., including one in Boston.
Shareef Fam, a member of the Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights who was at the protest, said that the protest was nonviolent and that he spoke with uniformed police officers about keeping pedestrian passageways clear at the beginning of the event. He said that Nieves was taking pictures during the protest, which was called by Harvard students, with the intent of distributing the photos later to the rest of the protesters present.
Reinstein said that Nieves noticed a bystander in plainclothes taking photos of the protest and decided to go photograph him. When she did, the man informed her that he was an undercover police officer with HUPD and placed her under arrest for refusing to delete the photos. Kearney said that the officer would have to arrest him if he was going to arrest Nieves and so Kearney was also arrested, according to both Fam and Reinstein.
“It’s a little unnerving to find Harvard undercover police spying and taking pictures of Harvard students on public property,†Fam said.
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more on harvard undercover cops
Now what makes this bizarre pseudo story interesting to me is that as I mentioned I *have* myself been approached by what I suspected to be an undercover Harvard cop maybe about a year and a half ago while truthing in the square (If you've seen A Day in the Life of Real Truther on YouTube it happened in the area where I hadthe many big posters up with people walking back and forth.
The guy, a young middle aged moustachioed dude, struck up a conversation about 9/11, in which he claimed to have no opinion or knowledge about the demolitions but that he could say with certainty that AA77 really did hit the Pentagon.
He proceeded to tell me that he would know, because he has connections in the military, and to prove some kind of point he pulled out his wallet to show me several gun permits for deifferent states. I noticed a Harvard staff ID in his wallet and mentioned that I was also a staff person--what part of the university did he work for? He dodged the question. I forget the exact details but when I was packing up to leave he was either still around or had come back and we started talking. i said I was walking to my car, if he wanted to continue chatting he would have to walk with me. He did.
When it came time to part ways, he paused and asked me the question that I am getting tired of answering, which is "What do you hope to accomplish with all of this, anyway?" Each time someone asks me this (and many had before he did) I wonder what part of 9/11 Truth Now they don't understand. But realizing this was no innocent question, I gave him my best true answer, which is that I understood crimes had been committed and were going unpunished and that while we may not ever achieve justice in the matter I would at least retain my moral integrity by doing the right thing.
"Good answer" he said. Glad you liked it, see ya, bye.
So the next day I was at my usual lunchtime perch outside the Harvard Science Center when an older gent with a vaguely european mediterranean accent (nudge nudge) approached me to ask about my demonstration. Ah yes, he said, the world is very corrupt, good for you. I myself am a scientist, he told me, I know President Bok, and such and such Dean, etc. I know how things are, you know? You seem to be a smart fellow--you know, I'm looking for someone to help me with my business--like I said I'm a scientist, I work on environmental technologies--energy efficient systems, you know, the kind of stuff places like Harvard pay big money for. Everyone wins, you see, the save on energy costs, we make a good living, and help the environment. I forget which one of us gave the other his card (I think I gave him mine, with no intention of course of going to work for him, not that I ever heard from him again) and we parted ways.
I couldn't help but recall my encounter with the mysterious Harvard staffer the previous evening, the one who liked my answer about retaining my moral integrity. I couldn't help but feel like someone was trying to bribe me, to buy my silence... What would *you* have thought? And now this story appears. Hmmm...
more confusion about Harvard undercover arrest story...
http://cambridgecommon.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/student-arrest-at-peacef...
Monday night at dinner, I heard that a student was taken under arrest earlier in the day at the vigil for victims of the recent violence in Gaza. My friend who participated in the demonstration, outside the Holyoke Center, said that plainclothes police officers approached the student as she was attempting to photograph the event.
A quick search of the Crimson archives yielded bupkis. Is this just a rumor? Anyone know exactly what went down? Was it only Cambridge police, or HUPD, too? A student gets arrested at an outdoor, public event and no one at the daily makes a peep?
http://www.harvarddems.com/node/3547#comment-17730
WTF? Has anybody heard anything about this? I know Katie posted some questions back in March when those people got arrested, but... the ACLU? "Political intelligence"? The FBI? This is some weirdness. If HUPD (a private organization paid for by our tuition) is secretly monitoring student activism on behalf of the federal government, that's pretty obviously unacceptable...
No mention on Boston
No mention on Boston Indymedia which is the one place I would expect to find news of such an arrest well documented...
http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/index.php?limit_start=190
The charade develops...
Please note: Cambridge Common is the Left Gatekeeping blog at Harvard that hosted this pathetic "debate".
http://cambridgecommon.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/free-speech-at-harvard/#...
Free Speech At Harvard?
April 14, 2008 · No Comments
Hat tip to our friend Markus over at Dem Apples.
The Harvard Crimson is reporting that the American Civil Liberties Union has discovered that Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) runs a political spying unit. Aside from the meta-concerns like the fact that such a unit would presumably be reading this blog, this is a disturbing though not very surprising revelation.
I have heard stories from people who were involved in the 2001 Living Wage Campaign that corroborate such activity. During the time of the sit-in, campaigners had planned an action that was coordinated partially over email but not advertised publicly at all. When they showed up to the location of the action, HUPD was waiting for them. It seemed that the only way that HUPD could have known the action was taking place was if the authorities had been spying on the group, either electronically or by other means.
More shadiness of this kind took place during the Stand For Security Campaign last year. During the hunger strike and the daily actions that accompanied it, a plainclothes man with a nice camera was taking pictures of us almost every day. I went up to him one day to see what he was taking the pictures for and he told me that they were for the Harvard Gazette. I am sure the Harvard Gazette has photographers, but this guy was there almost every day and he was not taking pictures of things that you would really put into a magazine.
Whether these things are all connected or not, the fact remains that there is a dangerous culture here at Harvard around political speech. From HUPD’s political intelligence unit to arrests of activists (including last year’s arrest of students protesting FBI Director Mueller), Harvard is not a welcoming place for dissent outside of the prescribed (and controlled) “rational discourse.â€
At the heart of the American academy there should be the widest latitude given to political dialogue, unfortunately most evidence shows that this is not the case. A group of students here at Harvard are beginning a campaign to broaden the range of free speech and democracy on campus. If you would like to get involved, email HarvardSDS@gmail.com (but you might not want to use an Harvard email account lest HUPD and the FBI find out that you are a terrorist).
RT's censored reply:
Yeah like the fact that you all suppress discussion of the truth about 9/11. First of all, no one remembers anyone being arrested at the rally on March 3rd. Second of all, nothing you all are doing is any threat to the establishment since you go along with the 9/11 fraud and its racist "war on terror" spawn. You are trying to have it both ways--claim the high ground while facilitating the work of the administration and its cronies in a huge crime against humanity. Sorry but none of this shit is going to fly anymore. Your agenda is pretty darn clear and no last minute charade about being persecuted for your banal activism is going to help you weasel your way out of explaining why exactly you have been fighting to conceal the truth about 9/11.
Anyway, my guess is that they are going to be going around warning students (especially thse suffering from Battered Muslim Syndrome) that ol' RT who has been seen filming activists and posting the results on YouTube might well be an undercover cop, if not CIA! And that his 9/11 "truth" message is just a way of entrapping young activists!
no mention on Antiwar Gatekeeping listserve...
Honestly, WTF is going on here? It looks more and more like this incident never happened, and if so it means that either or both the HUPD and Harvard Crimson are making it up... very strange. The Crimson doesn't surprise me, but HUPD I took to be fairly professional...
https://lists.riseup.net/www/arc/hipjplanning/2008-03/
2008/03 (11 emails) chronological thread page 1/1
[hipjplanning] Solidarity Vigil for Gaza: Monday, March 3 in Harvard Square, Adaner Usmani, 03/01/2008
[hipjplanning] IOP POLICY GROUP ON CIVIL LIBERTIES, Adaner Usmani, 03/06/2008
[hipjplanning] Confronting Empire: Five Years of War in Iraq, Adaner Usmani, 03/09/2008
[hipjplanning] Fwd: [harvardforwar] WALK TO SUPPORT THE WAR (TOMORROW), Adaner Usmani, 03/10/2008
Re: [hipjplanning] Fwd: [harvardforwar] WALK TO SUPPORT THE WAR (TOMORROW), Mark VanMiddlesworth, 03/10/2008
[hipjplanning] TOMORROW (tues): Psychology, War, and Human Rights, Tatiana Chaterji, 03/10/2008
[hipjplanning] Show solidarity for Pakistan's detained judges, Aqil Sajjad, 03/13/2008
[hipjplanning] ANTI-WAR RALLY THIS WEDNESDAY, 2:30PM, Adaner Usmani, 03/18/2008
[hipjplanning] Darfur: An Insider's Perspective - Wednesday at 6 pm in Sever 113, Joanna Naples-Mitchell, 03/18/2008
[hipjplanning] TOMORROW! WAGE PEACE -- 2:30pm, Science Center, Alyssa Matthew Aguilera, 03/18/2008
[hipjplanning] winter soldier reportbacks, Adaner Usmani, 03/23/2008
what's wrong with these pictures?
Keaney and Nieves arrested by Cambridge Police at 3:29 p.m.:
Keaney and Nieves arrested by Harvard Police at 12:53 (which would have been the end of the demonstration, roughly... I was there, saw none of this)
Â
Follow up story in Harvard Crimson
a comment I left at the Harvard Democrats' blog...
Oh I see... Today's Crimson clarifies everything! The FBI is looking to protect protestors. And I imagine that includes counterprotestors like the "Support the troops" folks who show up at peace rallies, or 9/11 truthers who show up at, say, pro-Palestinian rallies. So what's the issue then? Do we or do we not demonstrate in order to be seen and indeed photographed? I'd like to think that someone going over my own FBI file might learn a thing or two. And from what I hear from my elders getting a copy of said file decades later makes for a marvelous trip down memory lane, a personal scrapbook including transcripts of conversations, photos (and these days video no doubt) collected at no cost to oneself and handed over with a smile once the state-sponsored paranoia has become outdated! Anyway, don't blame me--all of this hysteria came out of the 9/11 fraud against America and the world. So long as you don't question the premise that there is a global arab muslim jihadist conspiracy to overthrow democracy and establish a global caliphate then you will have to accept that many people will consider these measures quite acceptable!
From the Crimpson:
Both Catalano and the FBI declined to say whether Harvard has appointed someone to a Boston joint terrorism task force.
Special agent Gail A. Marcinkiewicz said, however, that the FBI does not film protests.
“The right to protest is protected under the First Amendment,†she said. “What we are interested in are the people who are thwarting or interfering with people who are protesting.â€