Oh really? Obama tells UN America Opposes Violence to Suppress Dissent

By Dave Lindorff

President Obama’s address to the UN General Assembly was such an astonishing string of brazen lies and falsehoods it must have had the assembled international delegates choking on their tea or coffee. Whether he was declaring that “together we have worked to end a decade of war” even as he was just blocked from unilaterally launching a war against Syria, or saying “we have limited the use of drones,” when his administration has upped their use from 51 strikes in Pakistan under the prior Bush administration to 323 so far under his own administration, as David Swanson has so meticulously documented in his Top 45 Lies in Obama’s Speech at the UN, it was all lies. 

But for Americans, perhaps nowhere was his lying so blatant and obscene as when he vowed that “we will not stop asserting principles that are consistent with our ideals, whether that means opposing the use of violence as a means of suppressing dissent...” This, after all, was being said just one week after the second anniversary of the launching of the Occupy Movement, which we now know, thanks to documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice under the Freedom of Information Act, was crushed nationwide by a campaign of violent police assault coordinated at the highest levels of the FBI, Homeland Security Department and other federal police and intelligence agencies. 

The US government’s heavy-handed campaign to destroy Occupy, and the concern it showed even before the first protester set foot in Manhattan’s financial district on September 17, 2011, showed how terrified the nation’s corporate elite and their political servants in Washington are of any mass political movement, however small, that doesn’t “play by the rules.”

Washington had lately grown comfortable with the protests of anti-war activists and social justice activists who, over the last decade or more had fallen into a run of politely coming together for permitted marches and demonstrations in Washington, New York or other venues, seeking permission first to gather, and then to march along predetermined routes which would be lined by police barricades, and riot-gear-equipped and militarized police.  Even arrests were choreographed with police in advance, so that prominent activists could get themselves cuffed and booked, all with dignity and calm on the part of arresting officers.

Occupy was different, harking back to the 1960s and early ‘70s, when first civil rights activists, and later anti-war activists, didn’t bother with such niceties, and just showed up, protesting where they pleased and marching where they pleases, and sometimes, not going home at the end of the day, preferring to stay and obstruct ongoing normalcy. There we had police riots, mass arrests, and heavy confrontations -- even the killing of demonstrators, by soldiers at Kent University and by police at Jackson State...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new uncompromising four-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1978