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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 10/21/11

Bring In The Drones: Agent Provocateurs And Moral Protest

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Message John Grant

As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause -- a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator -- and I wasn't giving up before I had my story.

 

Patrick Howley

Editorial Assistant, The American Spectator

 

 

Here's a story from the annals of fools posing as journalists.

 

After a pepper spray melee [1] October 8th at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC in which several people I know were painfully sprayed, it was revealed that one of at least two provocateurs whipping up the guards and cops was a writer from a right-wing magazine, The American Spectator.

 

Op-ed News photographer Cheryl Biren [2] was at the museum and noticed a beefy man in a black t-shirt whose aggressive actions seemed to her the actions of a "provocateur." She sent out a query with 27 shots of the man to see if anyone knew who he was. He's seen charging a guard in Biren's photo below; the man directly behind him in a tan jacket is American Spectator Editorial Assistant Patrick Howley.

The beefy man shoves the guard, with Patrick Howley behind him
The beefy man shoves the guard, with Patrick Howley behind him
(Image by Cheryl Biren/opednews)
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Those of us who have worked for decades as non-violent antiwar peace activists talk about these sorts of individuals in cretinous terms. They are the bane of our existence. Why? Because they intentionally whip things up to a frenzy to distract from a protest's intended message. They do this by provoking the police into what might be termed cop-riot-mode where they feel the need to indiscriminately whack people with batons and/or spray them with pepper spray.

 

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I'm a 72-year-old American who served in Vietnam as a naive 19-year-old. From that moment on, I've been studying and re-thinking what US counter-insurgency war means. I live outside of Philadelphia, where I'm a writer, photographer and political (more...)
 

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