Two prominent Occupy Wall Street movement activists have been arrested by the New York Police Department for allegedly possessing a cache of weapons and explosive material in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
The Occupiers, Morgan Gliedman, 27, and Aaron Greene, 31, were visited by New York City police due to a warrant for Gliedman’s arrest relating to alleged credit card theft. Once in the couple’s apartment, police claim they found the explosive materials and how-to manuals on terrorism.
According to the New York Post:
A detective discovered a plastic container with seven grams of a white chemical powder called HMTD, which is so powerful, cops evacuated several nearby buildings.
Police also found a flare launcher, which is a commercial replica of a grenade launcher; a modified 12 gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun; ammo; and nine high-capacity rifle magazines, the sources said.
Cops also allegedly uncovered papers about creating homemade booby traps, improvised submachine guns, and various handwritten notebooks containing chemical formulas.
The arrests come at a critical time due to recent allegations by the left against the FBI for having apparently infiltrated the revolutionary Occupy movement. A recent document release from the FBI revealed multiple large scale investigations into the movement had occurred, prompting a revival of the left’s decades-long attack on the FBI for having investigated radical movements.
Supporters of the FBI’s efforts have pointed out that the Occupy movement, though many participants may be well-intentioned, involved some individuals and groups with checkered histories and revolutionary aims.
The Occupy movement was heralded by mainstream media outlets as heroic and altruistic, but right-of-center critics, such as Andrew Breitbart, began to point out the movement was little more than a rebranded gathering of extremist far-left groups.
Breitbart released a series of internal Occupy emails that revealed the “new movement” was months in the making, with professional organizers such as Lisa Fithian behind the coordination. Breitbart also pointed out the similarities between Communist doctrine of the “bourgeoisie vs the proletariat” and the Occupy movement’s “1% vs the 99%” argument. Breitbart’s efforts eventually culminated in one of his final projects before his passing, the Citizens United documentary Occupy Unmasked.
One major thesis of the film was that the Occupy movement was created to move the national discussion off of deficits and debt, and onto the false dichotomy of the “rich vs the poor,” so that the Democratic Party could win in the coming 2012 presidential election and other left-of-center groups could retain power in the US political process.
As a result of Breitbart’s efforts, right-of-center grassroots media began investigating and infiltrating the Occupy movement’s camps and researching their organizers and backers. As rapes, other crimes, terrorist ties, and involvement with hostile foreign nations were discovered by independent grassroots efforts, law enforcement began to take justifiable interest in the self-proclaimed “revolutionary movement.”
Recent document releases from the FBI reveal they did indeed take interest and infiltrate the Occupy movement. Left-of-center media outlets and activists have begun to complain and claim the FBI either violated civil rights by infiltrating them or otherwise wasted resources by having done so. Some, such as the UK Guardian, have gone as far as claiming “the FBI dismantled a political movement.”
Clearly, the FBI acted on its responsibility to protect the constitutionally guaranteed rights of Americans by monitoring the Occupy movement, as evidenced by the recent arrests and previous thwarted bomb plots.
The Occupy movement was not dismantled by the FBI or other law enforcement agencies. Rather, the Occupy movement was exposed by right-of-center grassroots citizen journalists exposing the dark secrets US mainstream media refused to share with the public.
Media outlets like Andrew Breitbart’s magnified the voices of the grassroots, and law enforcement appropriately acted on the data that had been presented to the public.
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