Occupy’s 84-year-old pepper spray victim: Is this the most iconic image of the movement? By Maura Judkis When Occupy marched in downtown Seattle on Tuesday night, a priest, a pregnant teenager and an 84-year-old community activist were doused in pepper spray. Although there have been many striking images of violence and peace in Occupy encampments, and many faces of the movement, none may be as immediately striking as this image of Dorli Rainey, taken by Joshua Trujillo.

Above Photo and text from the Washington Post November 16, 2011

Iconic photo from Vietnam War -civilians became legitimate targets as large parts of the country became free-fire Zones and soldiers were told to increase their daily body count. Americans remember that some 60,000 US soldiers lost their lives in that useless wasteful war while forgetting that some two million Vietnamese lost their lives in the same period.

And my response is that the USA is a violent nation from pepper spray and tear gas to State Sanctioned executions to torture to Cluster Bombs and Napalm / White Phosphorus .

As Ann Coulter and others suggested these protesters should be shot just like in the good old days at Kent State or in Alabama when people questioned the status quo they were met with fire hoses, attack dogs, batons , whips, tear gas and live rounds .
Of course no matter what the tea party gang did police were supposed to look the other way even if they brought a rifle to a presidential photo op or shot and killed an abortion doctor.
But when liberals and progressives march it is downright anti-American.

The news we are not meant to see?

So anyway let's see if we can put this in a bit of context. There are many people in the Occupy Movement who consider using billions of dollars to fight unnecessary wars as a crime in part because it robs the citizens of billions which could go to improving the lives of the average citizen.
The pepper spraying and the baton wielding heavily armed militarized police is really just the tip of the ice berg.
America and the West has helped to turn most of our earth into a war zone. Not just downtown Seattle or Oakland but entire nations such as Iraq and Afghanistan have become the new Wild West where there is only rough justice handed out by US and UK and NATO soldiers who have been told to up their body counts and are informed that these nations have become free fire zones .
As the American people acquiesced to allowing their government to torture POWs to killing civilians in Iraq because they might be terrorists or insurgents or as some would claim merely people defending their own country invaded by foreigners.

This is America's illegal immoral war of Aggression against the people of Iraq "Shock and Awe" in Baghdad 2003.
While Westerners watched this unfold in real time at home on their TVS and computer screens they acted like it was a video game-it wasn't beneath the fire works thousands of innocent civilians were being maimed or killed in the name they say of freedom ,justice and the American Way.

For instance thisis what counts as American Moral Superiority over the rest of the nations of our world.
The use of these forms of interrogation techniques were widespread through out Iraq and Afghanistan .
They used to be called torture but in the new enlightened era they are called euphemistically as "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" .
Language itself becomes part of the overall overarching propaganda message of the USA .
And those who dare question the state are called anti-American, UnAmerican or traitors.

The foreign invaders are in fact the Americans (and those they bully into joining them) who have now replaced the other previous colonial powers such as Britain, France, Germany, the Dutch and Italians etc.
To those occupied it doesn't make much of a difference as tens of thousands are locked up abused and tortured or hundreds of thousands killed only to be characterized as being merely "Collateral Damage".
When four American contractors/mercenaries are killed in Falluja its front page news and the headline on CNN etc. but a million dead Iraqis is seen as nothing . The lives of non-Americans are not as precious as the lives of American citizens.
An American citizen at home in America is expected to behave and follow the laws of the land but when in a foreign country they can do as they please rape, murder, torture and they have no one to answer to.

To put it another way all non-Westerners are suspects til proven otherwise.
Is this the civilized world they want to save that metes out this horror on a daily basis to the innocent civilians of foreign countries so that they will conform to the rules of Western Multi-National Corporations and banks.

As Glenn Greenwald points out in a recent article U.S. takes the lead on behalf of cluster bombs at Salon.com, November 12, 2011

...Slightly more than two months after he was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama secretly ordered a cruise missile attack on Yemen, using cluster bombs, which killed 44 innocent civilians,including 14 women and 21 children, as well as 14 people alleged to be “militants.” It goes without saying that — unless you want Rick Perry to win in 2012 — this act should in no way be seen as marring Obama’s presidency or his character: what’s a couple dozen children blown up as a part of a covert, undeclared air war? If anything, as numerous Democratshave ecstatically celebrated, such acts show how Tough and Strong the Democrats are: after all, ponder the massive amounts of nobility and courage it takes to sit in the Oval Office and order this type of aggression on defenseless tribal regions in Yemen. As R.W. Appel put it on the front page of The New York Times back in 1989 when glorifying George H.W. Bush’s equally courageous invasion of Panama: “most American leaders since World War II have felt a need to demonstrate their willingness to shed blood” and doing so has become “a Presidential initiation rite.”

But one aspect of the December, 2009, attack that perhaps did merit some more critical scrutiny was the use of cluster bombs, weapons which“scatter hundreds of bomblets over a large area but with limited accuracy and high failure rates.” The inevitability of “duds” — “unexploded ordnance” — poses a great risk to civilians, often well after the conflict has ended, since — like land mines — they often detonate when stumbled into by children and other innocents long after they disperse. According tothe Cluster Munitions Coalition, cluster bombs “caused more civilian casualties in Iraq in 2003 and Kosovo in 1999 than any other weapon system.” As Wired pointed out, while the U.S. used these weapons in both Iraq and Afghanistan, “neither the Taliban nor Saddam used cluster bombs against U.S. troops.”

Is pepper spaying 84 year old a priest and a pregnant teenager ok now in America's move towards being a police state???

Is it that most Americans and for that matter most Canadians are only bothered by these images being shown on TV in Newspapers and on YOUTUBE and not the acts themselves.
Most Canadians and Americans do not want to know about or see pictures of protesters being treated roughly by police. As far as most Americans and Canadians are concerned the police should just do whatever's necessary to stop these protesters they just don't want to know about the grizzly details.
The public has the same attitude about how terrorist' suspects are handled or POWS.
Well those incarcerated on the battlefield were once called Prisoners of War now to make it easier to abuse and torture suspects we now are told to call those incarcerated "detainees" -a mild mannered word to cover up American and Western brutality.
As we have been informed most people just want to hear or see nice happy human interests stories.
When given pictures or news of stark reality they are unable to properly process it.
War for instance is a matter of bravery and triumphalism the public does not want the truth but rather purple passages about bravery under fire.
The public does not want to be forced to look at the carnage of war that civilians torn to pieces by Cluster Bombs dropped on their villages , towns or cities. Cluster Bombs are designed to do the maximum damage not on buildings but on human targets -each cluster bomb contains thousands of bomblets which rip through flesh and bone. Cluster Bombs are referred to as ' Daisy Cutters'.
Cluster Bombs which have been banned by most countries is of course a favorite type of bomb used in the Drones the US drops on villages in the mountain regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Obama administration like the Bush administration has taken the lead in defending the use of Cluster Bombs because the US government and military actually like what Cluster Bombs do because is a weapon of terror.
The idea behind such munitions is that they kill and or maim in such a gruesome manner that it is believed the people being bombed will stop fighting or giving aid to America's Enemy the terrorists -
But should America and the West stoop to the level of terrorists.
How far down this slippery slope are Westerners and Americans in particular ready to go.
Pretty far given the thousands of Libyan civilians who have been obliterated by NATOs carpet bombing of the country.
Or just take note of the brutal beating and torturing of Qaddafi including being sodomized by a knife and then shot in the head summary execution Mafia or Mossad /CIA style.

and now back to our regular programming on the Occupy Movement:

Occupy Protesters Evicted From Zuccotti Park
The police destroyed personal property of Occupiers loading these belongings into dumpsters
National Lawyers Guild supports the Occupy Movement-arguing the Mayor and others are denying the basic fundamental rights of American citizens who wish to express their grievances to their government .

The Young Turks -Cenk Uygur points out Mayor's Bloomberg's excuses and lies about Zuccotti Park and what is allowed and what is not.

There Is A Jubulance In Zuccotti Park
Lawrence O'Donnell MOXNEWS.com
November 15, 2011 MSNBC
http://MOXNews.com

Bill Maher gives his support to the basic goals and agenda of the occupy movement
It is not a matter of anti-capitalism but of an accountable fair regulated form of capitalism.
Bill Maher at occupy LA interview with Clark Davis
Uploaded by littletammy20 on Nov 8, 2011

Occupy Wall Street through the eyes of the world