Informers get no respect in Santa Cruz

[Keith Millea]

Interesting story,and why we need Indymedia.


http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/10/394916.shtml

Likely spies in Santa Cruz last seen heading for Portland

author: Santa Cruz indy
This is a repost of an article at Santa Cruz indymedia. The observation of some highly suspicious individuals was first reported a couple weeks ago, and this is a more formal description. Apparently some folks who called themselves travelers showed up and went to all the popular cafes and meeting spots, and strongly wanted to find all the radical activity. They proposed things like taking over a local drugstore, and people were very dubious when one of them thought people had seen them talking to police and offered a preemptive excuse for it.
They have left town, saying they're going to Portland. Santa Cruz, CA is a pretty town of 50,000, with accessible beaches and mountains, and someone high rents tempered by a poor job market. Its university has Oxford-style organization, with a reputation for being the most progressive campus in the California system. Both the city of Santa Cruz and the university have had a list of incidents of nonviolent political civil disobedience (tent cities, two recent occupations of the student recreation center and a classroom), graffiti vandalism, a bomb under a policeman's car. The most noteworthy incidents were animal rights protests that defied the principles of ALF which call for no attacks on any life including humans ; someone started a stem cell researcher's house on fire at 4am with his kids inside and also firebombed an environmental health specialist's neighbor's car. There is a big trial going on where the local animal rights pamphleteers who had listed these rodent researchers in a long list are being charged.
This all sums up to an environment where one might expect that the federal agencies would send undercover informant recruits to Santa Cruz, before anywhere else.
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Three people recently entered some radical spaces in Santa Cruz and behaved in ways that led many people who encountered them to conclude that they were police agents. What follows is a description of these individuals and a summary of the sequence of events that led people to draw these conclusions. Although it may seem at first glance that they might just be some stupid naive kids eager to impress, read the whole story first because it does look really bad. In fact, the best thing that could be said of them is that they're dangerously stupid and would therefore also be very unsafe people for that reason. Unfortunately no pictures were obtained.


THE CHARACTERS
Identifying themselves as "anarchist travelers", all of these people look like they're around 18-20, white, average height and size, wear alternative/"punk"-looking but strangely very clean clothes, and are very clean overall.
- "Kao" is male, cleanshaven, shoulder-length brown hair (often in a camo headband), "conventionally attractive" features, anarchy-sign "tattoo" (?) on the side of his neck. Claims to be from Louisiana.
- "Carrie", "Casey" or possibly "Cammie": female, with braces, blond "fauxhawk" with sides shaves and some kind of rat tail or dread in the back, juggles a little, carries a ukulele around with her. From Laguna Beach, supposedly.
- Another male who didn't really say anything to anyone, no one seems to have caught his name, bearded, wearing a plaid shirt and carhartts.

THE STORY
The trio arrived late in the evening to the occupied Grad Student Commons at UCSC (see http://occupyca.wordpress.com/ ). They were mistakenly let in even though the informal policy was to only let in people who were known and trusted by someone inside. They were really vague about how they wound up there, where they were coming from or how they had heard about the occupation, but were interested very specifically in checking out the space and inquiring about future plans. Kao, who has a very macho "militant" demeanor, seemed to be in charge and doing most of the talking. They immediately wanted to inspect the barricades, "to see if they could be put together better"; Kao said he had military training and wanted to know about future plans such as other buildings to occupy. Kao was talking about organizing the takeover of another building himself and asked questions like "Do you have blueprints?" After making everyone extremely uncomfortable within about 5 minutes, and after a conversation in which Kao gave a lot of really vague and weird answers about what they were doing there, they were asked politely to leave on the grounds that they weren't known or trusted by anyone inside and people were going to sleep soon. During this conversation Kao also said that if anyone thought he was an informant, they should check out the anarchy sign tattoo on his neck.

Carrie came back the next day. Without asking anyone if it was ok, without anyone telling them they'd be allowed in the space again, she had left her phone plugged in in the main room, on and open. She asked for it back; it was returned to her (some people feel this was also a mistake). She was not allowed inside and a friend of ours had a long conversation with her. She expressed eagerness to do anything possible to support the occupation and reiterated that she and Kao were ready and willing to assume major roles in any future occupation or escalation of tactics, mentioning some buildings downtown and on campus that she thought could be taken over and/or destroyed. This is where it gets really fucked: She said that last night, after they were asked to leave, they got a ride downtown with a cop - as if in case we had followed them and watched them get into a cop car (no one actually saw where they went). She said the cop was really chill and they talked about the occupation. She said the cop told him they weren't "scared" of the occupiers and they should do something more intense and dramatic (like occupying a store downtown or blowing up a science building on campus). It is apparent to us that anyone who gets into a police car and chats about illegal activities is as good as a snitch whether that is actually their job or not.

Kao and Carrie also showed up at Sub Rosa infoshop and Chavez co-op and were asked to leave both places because people were uncomfortable with their behavior in those spaces, and because of what people had heard about them. They told people they were headed to Portland next.

STAY SAFE, FUCK THE POLICE
in solidarity,
your friends in santa cruz

[Jan Klimkowski]

Keith - thanks.

That reads like an agent provocateur scene from Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, though entirely without wit, intelligence and thanatoid insight.

Good on Santa Cruz Indymedia for exposing these stooges who think, ahem, they don't have to smell like the street, and that it's "chill" to ride home from a demo with cops.

:creep:

Whether they know it or not, Kao and Carrie appear inspired by Vineland's creepy Federal drug prosecutor, Brock Vond, who philosophises as follows:

Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep — if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching — need to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. [...] They'd only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning. (p. 269) [...] the long-haired bodies, men who had grown feminine, women who had become small children, flurries of long naked limbs, little girls naked under boyfriends' fringe jackets, eyes turned down, away, never meeting those of their questioners, boys with hair over their shoulders, hair that kept getting in their eyes ... the sort of mild herd creatures who belonged, who'd feel, let's face it, much more comfortable, behind fences. Children longing for discipline.

From Vineland, Thomas Pynchon

[Keith Millea]

Jeezus Jan,
Took me four reads of that paragraph to finally get your meaning.Pynchon messes with my head.I have a great friend(long time no see)who is a writer/poet,and Gravities Rainbow was his favorite book.I think I'll post one of his poems here.

Anyways,I'll be on the lookout for the Anarchist neck tattoo,they're headin' my way.And who's gonna tell those students that there are already spies in their ranks?Yeah mon,false flag fire bombings.That will get them all the wiretap warrants they need......... :eating:

[Jan Klimkowski]

BeJeezus, Keith - some things are worth reading more than once. :proud:

Pynchon dedicated his incomparable and timeless masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow, to his friend, the writer, folksinger and counterculture icon, Richard Farina.

Pynchon is also a buddy of neo-luddite and historian of SDS, Kirkpatrick Sale.

MSM once speculated that Pynchon was the Unambomber...

Vineland is a much underrated book, which explores with wit and immense insight, precisely how the Sixties counter culture got fucked. By The Man's exploitation of our flawed human condition.

If you don't want to try Gravity's Rainbow yet, I would heartily recommend Vineland.