The tagline for John Carpenter's 1981
cult sci-fi classic Escape from New York went,
"New York City is now a maximum-security prison.
Breaking out is impossible. Breaking in is insane." In
that movie, set in a then-unimaginable, futuristic
"1997" Gotham, criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is
charged with rescuing the president of the United
States, whose plane has been downed in the walled-in,
armed and angry prison island that Manhattan has become.
With his life and freedom riding on saving a man he
holds in contempt, Snake eventually fights an epic
battle in world-famous Madison Square Garden in his bid
to save the president.
Today, as in the movie,
many New Yorkers are angry at the president, and as in
Carpenter's grim vision of the future, at least parts of
New York City will be in a state of lockdown for the
president's arrival - with a major showdown due to take
place somewhere in the vicinity of Madison Square
Garden. In Carpenter's future, Manhattan was a walled-in
fortress island under high-tech government surveillance,
guarded by heavily armed security forces, with
helicopters perpetually overhead - a futuristic Alcatraz
Island of epic proportions.
In our 2004, the
authorities have an eerily similar vision of how the
city should be. Madison Square Garden will be walled in
by a fence or "other physical barrier" with additional
"movable barricades", complete with checkpoints
reinforced with heavy weapons. A new "closed-circuit
surveillance video system" will be introduced; armed
federal agents and police officers will be keeping
watch; and plenty of helicopters will be circling
overhead. In Carpenter's future, however, the government
was in control and New Yorkers were locked down. In our
present, the administration of President George W Bush
and the Republican Party are the ones retreating into a
fortified bunker.
Once upon a time in a past not
so long ago, New York City was viewed by many in the
Republican Party as an enemy outpost in an alien land.
Then came the attacks of September 11, 2001, and
Manhattan became the Bush administration's Ground Zero
in its "war against terrorism". On January 31, 2003,
with a supposed easy victory in the upcoming war with
Iraq looming, it seemed the perfect place for the
president to begin an inevitable march to a second term.
But like the president's flight in Escape from New
York, things have gone awry. New York once again
looks like a threatening, alien land and the party of
the president, whose greatest claim to fame is that he's
made Americans "safer", is about to treat the city as if
it were Baghdad.
Bush bubbles The
free-speech-limiting, life-disrupting,
artificial-reality-inducing security "bubbles" that
empty the globe's central cities as George Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney travel through them are already
well known. From August 30 through September 2, when the
Republican National Convention (RNC) invades New York,
the Republican Party wants to see the same - a Manhattan
emptied of life and the entire event "bubble-ized". The
estimated 48,000 people who will attend the convention,
including 2,509 delegates and 2,344 alternative
delegates, their hotels, their outings, their travels
around the city, the massive media presence (sequestered
away in the Farley Post Office Building, connected to
Madison Square Garden via an enclosed,
climate-controlled pedestrian bridge to be built across
Eighth Avenue); along with the RNC's convention
headquarters at the Garden will all be locked inside
that bubble - and kept from the sight of the feared
hundreds of thousands of citizens heading for the Garden
to tell the president he's "not welcome".
To
contain protesters and "protect" Republicans and fellow
travelers, New York City is engaging in some of the same
sorts of permit games that typified the 1968 Democratic
National Convention (DNC) in mayor Richard J Daley's
Chicago. For example, Republican New York Mayor Michael
Bloomberg's office has, with a helping hand from the
city's parks department, thwarted efforts of the
national coalition United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ)
to secure a permit for a march ending in a large-scale
demonstration in Central Park. Officials have cited
fears that the park's grass, home in the past to large
demonstrations and huge concerts, would take a beating.
Just recently, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly decreed
that the park would be off-limits, as would Times
Square. Instead, UFPJ was told it could utilize the
sure-to-be-sweltering, distant West Side Highway. Even
in Snake Plissken's Manhattan, Central Park was open.
Bloomberg and his associates clearly hoped that
a lot of tough talk, terrorist alerts and traditional
New York Police Department (NYPD) tactics - interlocking
metal barriers (if not closed pens), horses, street
closures, misinformation (telling protesters they can't
enter a certain area or sending them on wild odysseys to
non-existent protest entry points), and a conspicuous
show of uniformed and riot-gear-clad force - would
contain protesters inside a police-imposed bubble, if
not simply scare them off. The NYPD is, of course, a
massive army unto itself; a force of about 40,000,
approximately 6,500 of whom are slated to "patrol the
Garden, hotels, bridges and tunnels, protest sites and
points of interest for delegates", while another 5,500
have been assigned to patrol the subway system, commuter
trains and railroad and bus stations. Roughly one-third
of the department, armed with handguns, batons and
tear-gas canisters - and some, apparently inside a new
state-of-the-art SWAT (special weapons and tactics team)
vehicle - are to be deployed in support of the
convention.
Back in February, this was
considered more than enough manpower for whatever was
coming, and tough-talking NYPD spokesman Paul Browne
simply stated that the city's police did "not anticipate
the need for federal troops" to augment their forces.
Since then, however, fears of the size of the coming
protest - given growing dissatisfaction with the Bush
administration and possible uncontrolled, autonomous
protest actions across all five boroughs - led New York
officials to take another tack. Kelly, the city's
pistol-packing police commissioner (he carries a .38 in
an ankle holster), soon flip-flopped on his department's
position, noting, "If people want to give us help, we'll
take it."
With the chief moving in reverse, and
fearing that the NYPD might be outnumbered and
overwhelmed, New York Governor George Pataki made the
call to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge requesting
federal assistance and, on July 9, Ridge (with Pataki,
Bloomberg and former mayor Rudy Giuliani in tow)
announced that the Department of Homeland Security would
be designating the Republican National Convention in New
York (like the DNC in Boston, which is undergoing its
own lockdown) a "National Special Security Event". With
the invocation of that status, the NYPD was relegated to
a back-seat role, while the United States Secret Service
became the "lead agency for the design and
implementation of the operational security plan".
Life imitates art By the end of
August, at least portions of the Big Apple will be under
the control of the feds just as director Carpenter
imagined it. In fact, at least "75 government entities"
of all stripes including the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) and the Federal Emergency Management
Agency will be involved. The Secret Service will,
according to Bloomberg's office, be "supported by ...
[the] Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] and the
Department of Defense". Further, the FBI field office in
New York is already engaged in pre-convention work, with
nearly all of its 1,100 agents in the field "collecting
intelligence" and attending to "other security tasks".
Given the FBI's past COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence
program) exploits, there's little doubt what kinds of
activities these are likely to be. The NYPD will also be
in on the black-bag action. The NYPD's crack
Intelligence Unit was already caught, by Massachusetts
state police no less, allegedly spying on protesters out
of state.
During the convention, the department
will reportedly dispatch plainclothes and uniformed
operatives to "landmarks, tourist sites, sites related
to the convention, bridges and tunnels, airports and
other places where people gather". US Immigration and
Customs Enforcement's Federal Protective Service will
"be placing additional security at federal facilities in
the vicinity of the Republican National Convention", and
federal air marshals will be "working closely with other
federal law-enforcement agencies to support the Secret
Service".
In addition to the myriad federal
agents, uniformed and undercover NYPD cops, and various
federal and local agent provocateurs crawling about, the
military will be called out in a show of force. In the
skies above the city, along with helicopters, there will
be fighter jets from a National Guard unit based in
Troy, New York. And, as in Iraq, private contractors
won't be left out in the cold either. As private
security personnel, they will reportedly be hired to
guard hotels and other venues where delegates and
Republican officials will be holed up.
To sum up
the "security" scene: Choppers hovering above; military
fighters streaking overhead; under foot, fumbling with
cameras they never seem to know how to work, those
famously easy-to-spot undercover cops clad in bulky
sweatshirts (no matter the weather); federal suits
listening to their earpieces; protective fences; "frozen
zones" (huge swaths of "public" city streets to ordinary
citizens); metal barriers; "vehicle checkpoints around
the perimeter of the Garden manned with heavy weapons,
dogs and portable Delta barriers, which are enormous
metal contraptions that lie almost flat in the road and
can be raised very quickly with the flip of a switch";
mounted police; cops on bikes and scooters; NYPD K-9
(police dog) units; stormtrooper-esque "Hercules" teams;
conventional "arrest teams"; cops boarding commuter
trains and subway cars one stop before they reach Penn
Station, the hub nearest the Garden; permit refusals;
murmurs about the invocation of an 1845 law prohibiting
mask-wearing under certain circumstances; and Kelly and
Bloomberg periodically claiming to know protesters'
plans or issuing wild claims about the supposed plans of
violent anarchists, "hardcore groups ... looking to take
us on"; and various administration officials issuing
vague but chilling warnings of possible terrorism to
come.
Madison Square Green Zone The
intended effect of all this, in addition to keeping the
city and nation in a state of fear and making their
now-insecure leaders the most "secure" people on the
planet, is obviously to dishearten, frighten and
intimidate prospective protesters - that is, citizens
who want to exercise their right to protest against
George Bush and his policies. Just as obviously, as
happens in such situations, no one seems to be more
convinced by their propaganda than the propagandists.
Without a single protester appearing, the Republican
Party, the mayor, the NYPD and the feds are visibly
running scared. The president, the Republican Party and
the entire administration crave an empty, sterile,
"bubble-ized" Manhattan with a few orderly protesters,
divided and penned up in out-of-the-way places. They aim
to turn Madison Square Garden and the surrounding area
into something resembling the "Green Zone" in Iraq - a
little enclave unto itself, fully fortified, insulated
from the popular will or just ordinary life. The Village
Voice recently discovered that residents of Penn South,
a 3,000-unit cooperative development near Madison Square
Garden, had received a memo from their development's
management company, coupled with a press release from
Bloomberg's office, advising that "if at all possible,
[they] stay inside during the times the convention is in
session".
President Bush, who continually tells
us that our world is safer due to him, aims to arrive in
an alien "New York City" out of some lockdown sci-fi
movie - a place specially prepared to make him the
safest man on Earth. And yet New York isn't a stage set,
and the best-laid plans of frightened and controlling
officials do have a way of coming undone, just as they
did last February in New York when, having been
prohibited from marching, hundreds of thousands of
protesters, directed toward police "pens", snarled
traffic and literally took over large portions of the
city. Who knows in what strange ways life will burst
into New York despite official efforts to empty the city
and lock down Madison Square Garden?
Nicholas Turse is a doctoral candidate
at the Center for the History and Ethics of Public
Health in the Mailman School of Public Health at
Columbia University. He writes regularly for TomDispatch
on the military-industrial-entertainment complex. This
article is reposted with permission ofTomDispatch.com.
(Copyright
2004 Nick Turse.)
Jul 22, 2004
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