The Day's News...

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  Five Somali pirates drowned when a wave washed off their getaway boat as they squabbled over over how to split their $3 million ransom. The ransom had been paid to the pirates to end the world's biggest ship hijacking; the canister full of cash was parachuted onto the gargantuan oil tanker Sirius Star, which was captured in November with 25 crew members, 450 nautical miles southeast of Kenya in the boldest seizure to date by Somali pirates.

• Japan's new biometric immigration control system has been breached by a South Korean women who had been deported in 2007 for overstaying her visa and then slipped back in. She successfully got past the fingerprint system by purchasing a forged passport in South Korea and getting a piece of clear tape to put over her finger. The tape contained a fingerprint of someone who was not in the Japanese database.

• C.S.A. Patron Saint Jeff Monson--world champion submission grappler, UFC heavyweight championship challenger, and committed long-time anarchist--seems to have displayed some seriously bad judgment recently: a warrant has been issued for his arrest in Washington state after a photographer for ESPN The Magazine, who was with Monson as part of a profile for the magazine, took a picture of him apparently in the act of spray-painting anarchist and anti-war graffiti on the Washington state capitol building. The photo was published along with the profile in the December 29th issue of the magazine.

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of the Day: "However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results."--Winston Churchill
  

Actions In Oakland In Response To Police Shooting

As you may be aware, a cop shot and killed a man in Oakland, California on New Year's Day. The details make the incident particularly galling for many: the man, an unarmed African American, was laying prone beneath two cops while they restrained and handcuffed him. A third cop standing above them pulled his firearm and shot the victim, Oscar Grant, in the back, killing him. The incident, which took place on a commuter train platform, was witnessed by dozens of people and filmed from multiple angles, allowing news and evidence of the killing to spread rapidly.

On Wednesday, January 7th, a week after the killing, a protest march convened at the train station where the killing occurred. After listening to speeches for two hours, the crowd began marching towards downtown Oakland. At a nearby intersection, the windows of a police car were smashed and a dumpster was set on fire. Riot police arrived soon after and attempted to disperse the crowd with tear gas and targeted arrests. Marchers retreated and splintered, with some groups smashing the windows of businesses both local and corporate, torching two cars and smashing the windows of many others, and burning more dumpsters. As the rioting continued into the night, over a hundred marchers were eventually cornered by a large number of riot cops and arrested.

Yesterday, the windows of an Oakland police station were smashed during the night by anarchists. Further demonstrations are planned and solidarity actions are likely to continue in the coming days.

Corporate media reports of the mini-riot have focused on the damage caused to locally-owned small businesses and the destruction of private vehicles. The windows of a business called Creative African Braids were smashed, and the car of a local school teacher, a man taking tap-dancing lessons, and a local reporter were smashed or set on fire, all apparently at random. Part of what has attracted the media to this element of the story is that the owners of the damaged cars and businesses are mostly African Americans, as were many of the marchers seen carrying out the vandalism, muddying the racial narrative. It remains unclear how local businesses came to be targeted and by whom.

Undoubtedly, this aspect of the events in Oakland will cause the greatest controversy among anarchists. As the rhetoric of European insurrectionists has gained prominence in the American anarchist community, the literal manifestation of bombastic slogans like "Burn them all, big and small!" is bound to make some reconsider their language. Insurrectionary ideologues will likely accuse those made quesy by the sight of smashed Black-owned small businesses of bourgeois spinelessness or some other liberal pejorative.

Hopefully, a discussion of strategy will prevail in this debate. As long as an ideological commitment to one form of action or another remains the norm, whether pacifist or insurrectionary, strategy will be dictated by dogma instead of actual conditions. It's possible to have no sympathy whatsoever for small-time capitalists and still argue that destroying cars and stores at random, regardless of who does it, makes for bad strategy. It's also possible to argue the opposite and not have a fetish for window breaking. The C.S.A. encourages anarchists to discuss these events on their strategic merits rather than the dictates of their preferred doctrine.

As perceptive readers can probably discern from the tone above, the C.S.A. sees the destruction of random small businesses and the cars of tap-dancing students as a strategic mistake. The targeted attacks that have occurred in Oakland on cop cars, police stations, and the symbols of global capital such as banks, are far more effective at conveying the motivations of anarchists, and make a small but real dent in the institutions that actively reproduce capital and the state.

Lending support to undirected vandalism is often a misguided attempt to discover or encourage a direct action ethos among non-anarchists. But ignoring the context of actions and focusing exclusively on tactics is folly (Kristallnacht was a riot that involved a lot of window smashing, too.)

As a matter of power dynamics, hair braiding businesses probably cannot compare as oppressive institutions to cops and banks, and their wholesale destruction would lead no where. Anarchists who wish to participate meaningfully in solidarity actions ought to focus their attention on the institutions in their own communities that enforce hierarchies of oppression and privilege, whether those are physical spaces or social dynamics or something else entirely, not soft targets that are incidentally located along a parade route.

Riot Cop Shot in Athens

From the BBC: "A Greek riot policeman has been left seriously injured after being shot in central Athens.

Greece's police chief says bullet cases matched the Kalashnikov rifle used in another attack on police in December. The officer, 21-year-old Diamandis Matzounis, was part of a unit guarding the culture ministry when the pre-dawn attack took place.

Greece's police chief, Lt Gen Vassilis Tsiatouras, said an automatic rifle and a handgun were used, and that a hand grenade was also thrown during the attack.

He said the rifle was the same as that used on 23 December, when two gunmen hidden within the grounds of Athens University opened fire at a riot police bus as it passed by. (Editors' Note: Either the BBC or the Greek police are being disingenuous here. The only way to know if two bullets were fired from the same gun is to compare the 'fingerprint' of tiny scratches left on two intact, untouched bullets, a difficult and imprecise process that requires lab testing. All that can be reasonably claimed at this point is that the two bullets were of the same caliber, in this case 7.62x39mm, the caliber of an AK-47, the most common firearm on the planet. The AP makes even more far reaching claims here, citing ever-reliable and preternaturally rapid Greek ballistics tests. If that matters at all.)

The incident took place in the Exarchia district, close to where Alexandros Grigoropoulos was shot last month. "

Occupied London is reporting that cops immediately moved in to Exarchia and began raiding, beating, and arresting people in bars, cafes, and anarchist community spaces. At least 72 and as many as 100 people have been detained.

A piece posted on Athens Indymedia, translated here, speculates that the two shooting incidents were orchestrated by the state to "neutralize the climate [created by] the shooting, in cold blood, of Alexis Grigoropoulos, and to create once again some sympathy for the police - who at the moment are spat on in the streets by pretty much everyone for anything they do. They are trying to create, at the same time, an atmosphere of violence and terrorism for all the rest who resist in any possible way."

While the C.S.A. detests conspiracy theories and generally believes that the state is blamed far too often for behavior that is usually just wing-nutty or misguided (which could often describe those who do the blaming as well, in addition to lazy), the jury would seem to still be out on this one. Either those responsible are wing-nutty and misguided, or some element within the Greek state is feeling desperate. Regardless, the Greek cops will undoubtedly make the most of this in their effort to restore equilibrium.

Of course, the percise motivations and identities of the shooters is no more important in this case than in the shooting of Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Hopefully Greek anarchists can avoid being sucked into the melodrama of bourgeois justice and will continue building on their impressive gains of the last month.

The Day's News...

• The Israel Defense Force has begun calling houses before they are targeted for destruction. Palestinians reported that in some cases, the caller leaves a message on their voice mail warning that the IDF will bomb any house where weapons or rockets are found. During the 2006 war with Hezbollah, Israelis used text messages to warn residents of incoming rockets. Last week, as the airstrikes against Hamas began thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons. Hamas has been sending Hebrew-language text messages to Israelis' phones, warning them that "all cities" will be threatened by the terror group's rocket attacks.

• The FBI said on Monday it had launched one of the largest hiring blitzes in its 100-year history, involving 2,100 professional staff vacancies and 850 special agents, aimed at filling its most critical vacancies. The agency said it currently has more than 12,800 agents and about 18,400 other employees. FBI Assistant Director John Raucci of the Human Resources division said the federal law enforcement agency is seeking to bring more people on board with skills in critical areas, especially language fluency and computer science.

• A French warship captured 19 Somali pirates on Sunday when it came to the rescue of two cargo ships threatened in the Gulf of Aden. The French naval vessel "Jean de Vienne" was on patrol off the Somali coast as part of a European Union anti-piracy force when it came to the rescue of a Croatian cargo vessel and a Panamanian ship crossing the Gulf of Aden.The European Union set up an anti-piracy naval task force under British command last month involving warships and aircraft from several nations in the first such naval operation of its kind. The 19 Somali pirates, armed and equipped with tools to board the vessels, were captured and have been handed over to Somali authorities, the statement said.

• C.S.A. Strategy Quote Of The Day: "The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die."--Michel Houellebecq
  

Seeking Contributions For A Timeline Of Events In Greece

The C.S.A. is putting together a timeline of events in Greece over the past month for the forthcoming issue of Rolling Thunder. Any readers interested in contributing to this article should post items in the comments of this post with the date of the event, description, and a link, if possible.

Apologies for not updating recently; things have been busy at The Center. In addition to a spate of print articles for a variety of outlets, we're working on a complete overhaul of this site that will result in a major upgrade over Blogger, with much improved functionality and superior aesthetics. More details to come.

And remember, tips for news articles are always accepted and often published. Send them to lobsterbeard@gmail.com