Department of the Army ATP 3-39.33 — Civil Disturbance

Preface 

ATP 3-39.33 provides discussion and techniques about civil disturbances and crowd control operations that occur in the continental United States (CONUS) and outside the continental United States (OCONUS). United States (U.S.) forces deploy in support of unified action, overseas contingency operations, and humanitarian assistance worldwide. During these operations, U.S. forces are often faced with unruly and violent crowds who have the intent of disrupting peace and the ability of U.S. forces to maintain peace. Worldwide instability coupled with U.S. military participation in unified-action, peacekeeping, and related operations require that U.S. forces have access to the most current doctrine and techniques that are necessary to quell riots and restore public order.

 The principal audience for ATP 3-39.33 is Army commanders and staff elements at all echelons who are tasked with planning and directing civil disturbance missions. 

Commanders, staffs, and subordinates ensure that their decisions and actions comply with applicable U.S., international, and host nation (HN) laws and regulations. Commanders must ensure that Soldiers operate according to the law of war and the rules of engagement (ROE) (see FM 27-10). Unless stated otherwise, masculine nouns or pronouns do not refer exclusively to men.…

ATP 3-39.33 applies to Active Army, Army National Guard/Army National Guard of the United States, and U.S. Army Reserve unless otherwise stated.

The proponent of ATP 3-39.33 is the U.S. Army Military Police School (USAMPS). The preparing agency is the Maneuver Support Center of Excellence (MSCoE) Capabilities Development and Integration Directorate; Concepts, Organizations, and Doctrine Development Division; Doctrine Branch.

Department of the Army ATP 3-39.33

Civil Disturbance

April 2014
Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

gjohnsit — The pitchforks are coming out in Europe

When you think of governments ready to fall in Europe, you probably think of Greece or Spain. Instead it is Italy that is warning of a violent insurrection.

 Events in Italy are turning serious. President Giorgio Napolitano has warned of “widespread social tension and unrest” in 2014 as the Long Slump drags on.
   Those living on the margins are being drawn into “indiscriminate and violent protest, a sterile lurch towards total opposition”

The protest movement in Italy is literally called the Pitchfork Movement (Movimento dei forconi). Their demands are no less than the overthrow of the government.

Daily Kos
The pitchforks are coming out in Europe
gjohnsit

Zack Kaldveer — Secret Trade Deal Spawns 'We Will Not Obey' Movement

In October, the Madison City Council unanimously passed a resolution declaring the city a “TPP-Free Zone,” and promising that if Congress passes the Trans Pacific Partnership, a global trade agreement, “We will not obey” it….

The Berkeley Peace & Justice Commission (PJC) has approved a TPP-Free Zoneresolution, and says the Berkeley, Calif. city council could take it up this month….
There’s a long list of reasons to oppose the TPP. Food safety is right at the top—especially with a former Monsanto lobbyist leading U.S. negotiations on agricultural issues.
Specifically, the TPP would require countries to accept food that meets only the lowest safety standards of the collective participants. That means consumers could soon be eating imported seafood, beef or chicken products that don’t meet even basic U.S. food safety standards. And the (FDA) would be powerless to shut down imports of these unsafe food or food ingredients.

Countries, including those in the European Union, could also find it increasinglydifficult to ban, or even require the labeling of, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) if biotech companies determine that those countries’ strict policies restrict fair trade and infringe on the companies’ “rights” to profit.

To top it off, corporations would be allowed to resolve trade disputes in special international tribunals, effectively wiping out hundreds of domestic and international food sovereignty laws. Products labeled fair trade, organic, country-of-origin, animal-welfare approved, or GMO-free, could all be challenged as “barriers to trade.”

With the world’s food supply, and consumers’ health, already endangered by chemical-intensive industrial agriculture and climate change, the U.S. and other governments should be looking for ways to promote sustainable food and agriculture policies, not restrict governments’ abilities to do so. Instead, the Obama Administration is subverting the principles of democracy in favor of handing a few transnational corporations unprecedented power to put profits above the health and well-being of consumers.
Fortunately citizens are protesting. And city and county governments are claiming the power to resist.

Truthout
Secret Trade Deal Spawns 'We Will Not Obey' Movement
Zack Kaldveer, Organic Consumers Association | News Analysis

Is food safety the last straw?

Annie-Rose Strasser — Right-Wing Truckers Plan To Jam DC’s Major Commuter Highway, Arrest Members Of Congress

Getting really nutty out there. Breakdown of civil order looming? Let's see if the security forces treat the truckers as they did Occupy. It's almost certain that many of them will come armed. This could get interesting as they say.

... if the protest grows large enough, it could spell even more trouble for DC: The trucker event is slated to go on for three days, and will coincide with the weekend of the previously-planned Million Vet March, where veterans can express their outrage over the government shutdown.

Think Progress
Right-Wing Truckers Plan To Jam DC’s Major Commuter Highway, Arrest Members Of Congress
Annie-Rose Strasser

OccupyWallStreet — Anonymous Call to Action: #Nov5th 2013 — the Lion Sleeps No More

Greetings world. We are anonymous. We are the people.
Governments of the world: take this message as your last will and testament. The game is officially over. Social media has given birth to something new. Now it's time to set the record straight. This video is intended as that spark that gets delivered straight into the hearts and minds of the world. This video is an idea – a shared idea – so listen very carefully and make sure you are sitting down.

On the 5th of November 2013, Anonymous call for a day of global civil disobedience. This time we target all government facilities across the globe.Calling all free thinkers: the time for civil disobedience is now.

OccupyWallStreet News
Anonymous Call to Action: #Nov5th 2013 — the Lion Sleeps No More

Aaron Swartz — Guerilla Open Access

Guerilla Open Access

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable. 

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back. 

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. 

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? 

Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy

Political disobedience v. civil disobedience — there's a big difference

Our language has not yet caught up with the political phenomenon that is emerging in Zuccotti Park and spreading across the nation, though it is clear that a political paradigm shift is taking place before our very eyes. It’s time to begin to name and in naming, to better understand this moment. So let me propose some words: “political disobedience.”

Occupy Wall Street is best understood, I would suggest, as a new form of what could be called “political disobedience,” as opposed to civil disobedience, that fundamentally rejects the political and ideological landscape that we inherited from the Cold War.

Civil disobedience accepted the legitimacy of political institutions, but resisted the moral authority of resulting laws. Political disobedience, by contrast, resists the very way in which we are governed: it resists the structure of partisan politics, the demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and the very ideologies that dominated the post-War period.

Read the rest at The New York Times Opinion

Occupy Wall Street’s ‘Political Disobedience’

by Bernard E. Harcourt, chair of the political science department and professor of law at The University of Chicago and author of “The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order.”
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

This is an important article for understanding what is going on now worldwide. This is a refusal to participate in existing institutions, rejecting them as immoral and rapacious. "Occupy Wall Street" suggests that the focus is financial and economic. However, Harcourt argues that it is more comprehensive than that, encompassing major social, political and economic institutions. In this sense the protests can be seen as the next step in the expansion of political liberalism, that is, further integration of liberty, equality, and solidarity.

It also answers Slavoj Zizek's harsh criticism of the European rioters, “opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst,” Harcourt shows why he thinks that this entirely misses the point because it is trapped in what the protestors call "old thinking."