Political Policing 1st Edition

The State.
Political Policing Preparation Notes 1998, 1999

First Edition

© Joseph Paul Mc  Carroll 1998,1999,2018,2019,

2020,2021,2022,2023, 2024,2025,2026

Con tutti I modi. Il promennagio.

Die Staat.Die Vehmgericht. Massnahmen

Les jeus de France. Le patron.

Blagairt na bleachtairi. Ri-Ra is Ruaile Buaile. "Nos". Bolscaireacht. An phle.

“Hearsay” – RUC/Military Intelligence Assassinations

Operational intelligence – movements, car registration, numbers, appearance (height, build, hair colour and length), distinguishing features, residence, home layout.

General/political intelligence – agents of influence.

Police intelligence gathering, – firstly by police surveillance and “routine” patrols.

Secondly, by informant’s casual information forwarded on the basis of the police being representatives of civil society.

Thirdly, informers, paid agents of the police and military intelligence inside revolutionary organisations.

Fourthly, agents provocateurs of the police and army within revolutionary organisations, whose role is to encourage illegal activity which would ‘draw out’ the revolutionaries with the aim of providing a pretext to bring revolutionaries to the courts on artificial grounds.

Latter unconstitutional in the United States, the freest country in the world, police provocation is a defence in the United States.

Instances of police/military intelligence in the North

The 'players' – RUC Special Branch and Military Intelligence and MI5. Army involved on basis that disturbances are at such a level that “aid to civil power” by army is necessary for the maintenance of political power by the middle and capitalist classes.

Sources

-     I Political Murder in NI by Martin Dillon (Sunday Times Insight Team)

• II Court Reports e.g. Trial of Robert McConnell (November/December 1980) lists from SAS intelligence i.e. Sergeants Mc Nair and Gow. Murder of IRSP leaders and attempted murder of Bernadette McAlliskey.
• III Books from clergy – SAS in Ireland by Fathers Murray and Faul.
• IV Murders of UDA, 1980’s, Pat Finucane

Systems of Operation

1. Direct contact between M.I./S.B. and agents.
2. Three – person method

MI5 employee

Go-between e.g. businessmen

Agent

1. FBI/CIA double cut-out

FBI/CIA Agent

Go between No.1

Second intermediary

Agent

Political Policing Notes

Against Individuals

Displacement/eviction

Unemployment, Berufsverlot

Harassment and intimidation

Murder, “accidents”, assassination in certain cases

Stigmatisation

Impoverishment

Discrediting by MI5.Political, financial and sexual misconduct.(Channel 4,1987,MI5 officer)

Against Movements

Massacres of civilians e.g. Bloodly Sunday a tactic used against a mass movement movement,pacification.

Making organisations illegal

Prohibition on arms/drilling/organisation etc. marches, demonstrations.

Provocation of mass movements to bring forth terrorism. Attitude of Socialists. Kitson.

Economic Policing Methods

Strikebreaking e.g. Australia docks, 1998

Proscription of strike movements e.g. ballots, union recognition, financial penalties.

Injunctions against picketing, union ballots, recognition disputes

Political Policing. 2.

Against Individuals – social “punishment”

Sleep deprivation, white noise, street scenes with hooligans, thieves, murderers etc.

Targeting – slander, discrediting

Isolation and interruption of communication in prisons, colleges, revolutionary paramilitary movements

Rumour-mill.Intervention

Preparatory

Surrounding with silence – shopkeepers silent to revolutionaries who are kept in silence (not spoken to by some ) similarly, solitary confinement). Not spoken to by bus drivers, not spoken to in labour exchanges but are spoken to (temporarily) in employment usually in a gruff, aggressive and offensive manner.

Attacks on visitors to 'targets' e.g. running over by police vehicles to isolate.

The State. I

State and war .. von Clausewtz

… Imperialism … military-industrial complex

State as organiser of property relations

Policing .. political policing … provocation .. state as armed body of men i.e. monopoly on violence (Liberals)

Economic .. state as guarantor against absolute poverty i.e. starvation.

State as provider of means of subsistence .. public works

Ideological. State as ideological member of capital, religion, education, … law

History of the State

Covert. Philosophy of the State(Hegel). From  without .. (Marx)class society,change from without.Lenin, without the state.

Engels, The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State

Antithesis of the state = communism i.e. abolition of classes

1. Ancient society
2. Slave society
3. Feudalism
4. Capitalism/imperialism

Development of trade i.e. world market and commodity exchange gave rise to the capitalist state.

Transition to capitalism out of the slogan of liberty, universal suffrage, “democratic republic”.

The State. II

Bolshevism

Reading

1. The State and Revolution. Lenin.(1916).Lenin C0llected Works, Vol. 29 pp 470-88
2. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels (M&E SW. Vol 3.)
3. On War, Von Clausewitz
4. Employment law, Smith & Wood
5. Employment Law in Britain and Europe, Lord Wedderburn, L&W
6. Political Strikes, Peter Hain
7. Logic, Hegel
8. Philosophy of Right, Hegel, One
9. Leo Huberman, Man’s Earthly Goods
10. Company Laws and the Development of Capitalism, Tom Hadden
11. Passages form Antiquity to Feudalism, Perry Anderson
12. Lineages of the Absolutist State, Perry Anderson
13. HobsbawmThe Age of Revolution 1789 – 1848
14. HobsbawmThe Age of Capital 1848 – 1875
15. HobsbawmThe Age of Empire 1875- 1914
16. HobsbawmThe Age of Extremes
17. ISJ No 54 A Callinicos
18. ISJ No 45 C Harman
19. R.H.Tawney, Religion and the rise of Ideological Capitalism
20. The Guinea Pigs, McGuffin,Penguin
21. Political Murder in Northern Ireland, Dillon
22. Political Policing in North America and Latin America
23. Schizophrenia, Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry (secular religious/cults), Thomas Szasz, Syracuse University Press
24.  The Myth of Mental Illness, Thomas Szasz,Pan

Occult Intelligence (Marx)

Police theatre and psychology.

1. Police agents dress in colours on a “stage” in targets’ houses/flats e.g. a shelf
2. Police and intelligence agencies through their files and agents recruit lookalikes of different height and build to walk past their target in the street in situations which will draw the attention of the target.
3. Police suborn former members of revolutionary groups to take part in targeting e.g. with promise of US visas.
4. Police play culminates in physical attacks on the targets by drunkards, drug addicts and pushers, criminals etc.
5. Police try to wear down their target through sensory deprivation and sleep deprivation e.g. banging heavy doors in the night in a flat to simulate battle shock e.g. noise of artillery shells beneath the targets or by playing tapes of babies crying or by playing tapes of voices of actors intimidating the targets' associates or by procuring taxis to drop off passengers beneath the windows of a target’s flat or by playing a recording of the sound of high-heeled shoes in the flat beneath the target.
   Note: this sensory deprivation may require structured modification of the flat or dwelling of a police tout in the immediate vicinity of that of the target.
6. Imprisonment
7. House arrest. Legal and extra-judicial (the “dictatorship of the bourgeoise”). Limited to outings once a day. Messages relayed by lumpen elements who take up residence next door.
8. Star hambers (secret courts)
9. Employment ban i.e. ban on entering the professions. Menial work allowed by way of exception, but only so long as the police superintendent allows.
10. Poisoning with lysurgic acid (LSD) or other tranquillisers to reduce target to a deeper low of inactivity and apathy in the face of serious psychological torment.

Political Policing by J. Keane

Police Measures

The south of Ireland is hailed as a land of a modern economic miracle in a world which is ravaged by economic crisis and an ideal holiday destination for the world’s tourists. Republicans and socialists were driven out of the North in the eighties. They found no trace of Irish hospitality or the land of a thousand welcomes when they sought respite in the south.

In the late eighties, a furious police repression gripped the south. The organ grinders of imperialism, the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States trained the southern police and military in sensory deprivation. They were an avid audience which was only too willing to put on a display of state power for those who questioned the regime of rapacious exploitation in the south.

Socialists were hounded from one abode to another. Police cars followed their every movement as they sought employment as labourers. Every door was slammed in their faces. A squad of thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts and the family members of the army and police were thrown into action to intimidate, attack and disorientate the socialists.

The army’s special contribution to the police terror was to psychologically break the small groups of class conscious voters. In blocks of flats e.g. Saint Teresa’s Gardens they simulated the effects of 'shell shock' by banging heavy steel doors through the night. The other residents had been moved out or they already enjoyed the luxury of second homes and false identities. Taxi drivers were engaged to run their engines under the windows of these flats. A noisy display was put on in an otherwise deserted area. Effectively, socialists were under house arrest. The dregs of society were joined by many of the shopkeepers – in this death by silence, they refused to speak to the police target. Human intercourse and communication was (for the police target) at a virtual zero.

A false world of misleading impressions and insinuation was built up around police suspects. Other socialists who offered support were similarly intimidated.

This regime of police terrorism did not occur merely in the eighties. It was a fact of life for communists from the 1930’s but gained a new intensity with the exploitation of Irish labour, by American big capital. The British government played their part in this furious assault.

The old revolutionary parties were a source of information for the police, military intelligence and the intelligence agencies who joined together to crush a country which was going through a paroxysm of despair, exploitation and revolutionary unrest.

An important role in this police repression was played by the local defence force (FCA). Over a quarter of a million men in the south have been through the FCA and they and their families are infected with the contagion of police repression. The popular impression of the FCA as a group of drunken youngsters who go on military training once a year is false and misleading. The shock troops of reaction – whether it be police repression or state paramilitary  measures – have always been drawn from the lumpen proletariat – the filth of society – and the lower middle class, whether the crisis is of the making of a political imposter such as Louis Napoleon in France in the 1850’s where he called his lumpen battalions the Garde Mobile or of Adolf Hitler in Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s where the crumbling lower middle class and degenerates were drafted into the ranks of the Sturm Abteilung and Schutzstaffel. Those societies which are mired in profound social and economic crisis know no other law than that of the jungle. Their politicians, priests and judges repeat the mantra, “amid the clash of arms, the laws are silent”. No legal redress was available.

Revolutionaries of one shade or another have not simply been the target of police psychological terror. The police have sent gangs like the Catholic Action to beat up communists. In the 1940’s Geoff Palmer was thus attacked on O’Connell Bridge and left for deaf in one ear. Another form of police and military activity which is designed to physically cripple revolutionaries draws on the world of "occult intelligence" (Marx, Introduction to Capital,Volume 1). The police and military have the capacity to effectively render useless a limb. They do this in a number of ways e.g. by jailing a socialist, confining him in solitary, tearing off his prison garb, exposing him to harsh temperatures in the colder seasons and frequently paying him a visit in the night of confinement to tear off the meagre rags which they have left him to shelter himself. Many old communists learned of these techniques in the forties and let others know of the limited protection against them.

Psychological warfare continues outside the prisons in the police occult. The police and military have been trained by the CIA in other techniques which have as their aim the disorientation of their targets. The police screen the FCA, army, the police and criminals for persons who bear a resemblance to the suspects, their families and their relatives.

Hairdressers groom these soldiers, their wives and their families to assume the appearance of the target's mannerisms and speech patterns are carefully studied. Accents and dialects are mimicked. All clothes which are imported into the country are on the police and state records – similar clothing is found to dress the police offal. A parade of police lookalikes meets the target in the street. The effect is to create a disorientating impression. At certain times a poignant police verbal 'reminder' enters the isolated world of the police target.

Modern technology has given a new dimension to these police measures. Telephone calls are routinely intercepted to gain information. Voice coaches train the police agents to affect the voice of police targets. The police then use these agents to make hoax calls to their target to feed false information and gain valuable information. Nuisance calls have also become a feature of police activity in the North of Ireland. The police give their custodians the telephone numbers of their targets and encourage them to make nuisance calls. The friends, relatives and contacts of the target are intimidated. In the south of Ireland communication between class conscious workers is hampered by the diversion of calls (and between a litigant and his lawyers).

The police forces and armies of the capitalist countries which are under America’s heel have been well trained in psychological warfare but their police measures draw on the traditions of various countries. In Ireland, the family represents a powerful social institution. The police and army try to employ the families of their 'targets' in their repression. Wives, partners, husbands, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and so on are invited into police activity. A recent development in this process is the use of psychiatric detention. Hospitals are for some revolutionaries the new prisons. Today inexperienced youthful revolutionaries often find themselves in mental crisis and are locked up. There is, however, another dimension to this business.

In the 1950’s, the Central Intelligence Agency experimented on prisoners and soldiers with the laboratory hallucinogen, lysergic acid (LSD). In Ireland the CIA has used this drug when they have infiltrated an agent into the immediate vicinity of a police target. The use of barbiturates by the RUC was recorded in the early 1970’s in Newry. (The RUC’s hand-me-down remedies are no match for the experience of the CIA.) (The Achilles heel of the revolutionary nationalists was that they were not prepared to expose the CIA for their crimes and an avalanche of repression and police/army murders in the North were facilitated by the poisoning of the most advanced members of the old revolutionary movement).

Police Action against Political Groups

Many revolutionary groups have experienced, over the past one hundred and fifty years since the birth of the socialist movement – the unwanted attention of police agents. These are classified by the criminal lawyers as informants, paid informers, agents provocateurs, and agents of influence. They play a key role, today, in the neutralisation and policing of revolutionary groups.

Police agents are drawn from the former soldiery, the part-time soldiers, the shopkeepers, the beggars, former policemen, lazzarone, the criminal classes – in particular rent boys, police prostitutes and the assorted offal of capitalist society. In the North of Ireland, loyalist gangs and the Orange Order are fertile ground for police recruits. The North is a part of Ireland which is mired in profound political crisis.

The most important police agent in any group is the agent of influence. These agents are put in place with care by the intelligence agencies i.e. the sewer police. Their task is to provide information on the political developments and to attempt to influence the decisions and the policy of revolutionary groups. Often, they display a tendency to lead revolutionary groups which have limited practical experience into politically compromising positions. The most insidious development in recent revolutionary history has been the demand that sexual freedom be included in the demands of the revolutionary parties. There is no theoretical basis in revolutionary tradition or theory or practice for this demand. The preaching of sexual freedom is calculated to utterly discredit the revolutionary parties and groups which adopt this airy-fairy notion. The demand for 'sexual freedom' ruined the International Working Men’s Association in the United States in the last century. (In any case, the legal prohibitions on homosexual activity was long ago removed from the statute book).

A much favoured trick of the intelligence agencies and police is to use their agents in one political group to spy on those of other political groups. They turned their most agile agents into the service of one political group to gather information on a group which they believe to be dangerous. In Ireland, the most dangerous political group for the police and army, North and South, is the IRA. The police hounds have a vociferous appetite for information on the IRA. (the Republicans are revolutionaries of a socialist tinge. Their movement is strongest in the North and despite minor periodic revivals in the south has run its revolutionary course from the viewpoint of the overwhelming majority of Irish workers. Nevertheless, Irish workers cherish the goal of national liberation.)

Let us move away from the activities of police agents inside the small revolutionary groups and turn back to the role of intelligentsia in class society. The universities, libraries, media – tv, newspapers and radio and education system practise a strict censorship of socialist theory and socialist practical activity. The librarians have banned socialist literature including the works of an exclusively scientific nature on economics from the libraries. They will allow only sceptical publications in Irish libraries. There are occasional exceptions to this unwritten police regulation.

The universities are the finishing schools of the intelligentsia. They are staffed by the educated representatives of the ruling class. The university libraries are the storehouses of knowledge in every society. The university libraries in the North of Ireland are largely stripped of any socialist literature. The literature of a revolutionary nature is of purely historical interest. The hand of the police is often seen in university censorship by inexperienced revolutionaries, but this is not usually the true situation. The middle class pick their best minds to staff the universities and they do not as a body tolerate the intrusion of the socialist truth. The origin of censorship and the dissemination of incomplete, botched and useless ideas in the university libraries is the work of the middle-class intelligentsia.

The best students are no longer rewarded with doctorates and first-class degrees. The most class-conscious and best educated working class students are forced to run a gauntlet of disciplinary measures, expulsion and suspensions. The Queen’s University of Belfast was an open prison for revolutionaries in the sixties, seventies, and eighties.

In the University of Ulster campus at Jordanstown the political activity of socialists is prohibited.

The electronic media is a modern means of mass communication. Its role is to disseminate information on behalf of the ruling class. Crime hysteria, nationalist passions; ethnic hatred, religious fervour, idle gossip and sundry nonsense is disseminated through this medium. (or idiots, there are programmes on animal psychology and veterinary procedures). The current affairs programmes are a powerful medium for the propaganda or ideas of the ruling class in the form of its politicians. Social issues are given little coverage,the description of the capitalist economy and its periodic crises are accorded an also-ran status.

Sensory Deprivation (1)

Drug disorientation. LSD

Intimidation – throwing stones at windows, breaking windows and vile abuse.

Slamming of neighbours’ doors after you pass them.

Police agents rushing past the target to cultivate a feeling of unease and haste.

Police agents as “actors” – hot and cold demeanour, nice and nasty.

Police agents help and hinder information about background of other agents.

A parade of lookalikes of lovers, relatives, comrades usually similarly dressed.

'Covering' behaviour. Active disinformation – getting a target to believe that he is being protected by persons who are in fact police agents.

Misinformation. Telling target that certain persons are dead who had a formative influence on him/her.

Visions of the past and future of target.Lookalikes who are taller, fatter, younger, older etc.

Misnomers. Shop assistants called by different names by police agents who have carried out regular surveillance to establish the movements of target.

Isolation and observation/containment. A police agent always follows a target around the workplace to establish who their friends and acquaintances are in order to isolate them by spreading lies etc., while maintaining the apparition of friendship.

Requirements. Mobile communications e.g. mobile phones, police build up, control programmes, infiltration of police/military agents, constant surveillance.

Sensory Deprivation (2)

House arrest. The message “Out Once!”. Attacks by hoodlums. Dogs littering the entrance to the targets house/flat. Trained to this by army dog handlers. Breaking of windows by children in service of the police- paid by local shopkeepers.

Pretence of poverty by police agents. Wear ragged clothes, drive clapped-out cars, claim to live in public housing. Enjoy opulent lifestyles, have good houses and good clothes, in reality.

False friends who pretend to assist and socialise.

Agents within unions. These agents are given the task of withholding membership cards so that there is no record of union membership or franchise.

Isolation within political parties. Different members are told to buy answer phones, police intelligence feeds back information on numbers dialled by the target so that agents of influence can intimidate them. Out of date phone numbers are fed to the target when he seeks free legal assistance or contact with other members. Numbers given out by police infiltrators are only of those with whom they are in league.

Innuendo. Even socialist magazines carry “secret messages” (Dr. Paddy Joe Manley) directed at a target to break his/her morale.

Nuisance telephone calls.

Agents who are recruited – those whom the target has assisted," those to whom life has been unkind", former revolutionaries, political agents.

Sensory Deprivation (3)

Social isolation. Shop assistants are under police instructions not to speak first to targets.

They will simply state the price of the goods purchased. They will never thank the customer for the purchase of the goods.

Agency. Agency is the basis of "occult intelligence". The police agents pretend to be agents of the revolutionary organisation of which the target is a member.

Discrediting target

1. sexual “misconduct”
2. financial “misconduct”
3. political “misconduct”

Treatment of 'targets' after they have exhausted their usefulness. Criminalisation and imprisonment. Physical injury. Pensions from civil service.

Theft from target cash reserves.

Physical injury to police targets. Overworking the target to lift heavy loads which will cause spinal injury. Injuries to the legs of the target by imprisonment in solitary confinement in a damp cell on an especially cold night. Head injuries – faked “accidents” where the target falls on his head.

Targeting by manipulation of the auditory and cognitive senses. Radio presenters are vetted by the police .They must play tunes which are intended to manipulate the sensitivities of the target.

Agency. The agent 'covers' himself/herself by witnessing purchases by the target by turning their back to the target. They in turn feel 'covered' when the target is passing their house once every 24 hours on the same side of the street twice.

Sensory Deprivation (4)

Economic damage. Overcharging for essential materials and services.

Economic damage. Ban on entering the professions. Exemptions on employment for persons who take up building labourer’s employment.

Sexual entrapment. Flirtatious harlots sent to entrap young revolutionaries – trained in the art of flirtation in host country of intelligence agency.

Cuckholding targets. Target is cuckholded by being left to rear the child of another partner of his wife or partner.

Emotional deprivation. The target is denied any emotional of sensual comfort. His amours are degraded and abused and themselves targeted.

Interception of communications. Letters, phone calls etc.

Occult Intelligence

House stake-outs – Observation Posts’s

Telecommunications

• call re-routing
• hoax calls
• nuisance calls
• police agents posing as comrades making hoax calls to create confusion and sow disinformation

Letter interception

Active disinformation – police characterisations of revolutionary groups in dramas by professional actors in the form of soap operas and films.

The Abuse of Psychiatry

The imprisonment, murder, employment bans, bans on entering the professions, evictions, isolation, censorship and manipulation are the well-known tools of the state in its battle against those people who fight for profound social transformation. All of these methods are commonplace in the North of Ireland where society is mired in profound political, social and economic crisis.

Psychological warfare – the occult art of the police/ army and political police – is an increasingly important form of state terror as it pursues its campaign of suppression of revolutionary organisations. In the North of Ireland, the British government is pouring vast sums of money into policing of the open and violent type.

We shall focus on the psychiatry as it manifests itself in Ireland as a whole. To all extents and purposes the whole of Ireland falls under the sway of British and American capital (U.S. concern for human rights in the North of Ireland is a hoax. The United States is the disseminator of psychological warfare techniques).

When a person of socialist views is targeted, the state is at both ends of the process. The army and police in the south use covert measures to inflict psychological damage on their target. Sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation are the preferred options of the ruling class in the south. When these are to no avail, they resort to the poisoning of their victims with drugs. One favoured substance which is often used is lysergic acid (LSD). This is a legally prohibited substance under the Misuse of Drugs Act in Britain and Ireland.

When the victim has been reduced to a degree of insensibility and social incapacity – and the old revolutionary parties usually cooperate in this process – the psychiatrists inference with their blandishments and offer “rehabilitation”. They sign away their charge’s future to a life of social isolation and misery. Their “diagnosis” stigmatise the target as “schizophrenic”, “manic depressive disorder” or “suffering from a personality disorder”. These “diagnoses” are the “judgment” of the ruling classes of their targets.

In return for their services, the psychiatrists are rewarded with a life of luxury – fine mansions, luxurious cars and expensive holidays.

In Fermanagh – in the North of Ireland – one psychiatrist is infamous for this police trickery. She is doctor Diane Cody of Belcoo. Dr Cody is a person who appeared in the Tyrone and Fermanagh Psychiatric Hospital in 1992. She had arrived from Dublin.

Strangely, she was fully acquainted with the area of Dublin in which one of her “patients” had been subjected to a regime of house arrest, psychological abuse, stabbing, physical attack, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation. This “patient” was detained against their wishes and injected with  drugs forcibly. The recovery process from sensory deprivation requires a long-term period of rest and socialisation. Psychotherapeutic treatment was refused when requested. (Doctor Diane Cody did not revisit the specific features of the sensory deprived in her charge despite frequent accounts of mental torture and physical attack).

(It is useful, in this instance, to note that after one physical attack in the period of 1990-91 the hospital authorities in Saint James Hospital in Dublin refused to record the fact that the police target had been attacked without provocation by a well-known Dublin criminal, Gerry Cahill. They insisted on recording the incident as a “fight” which implies that there was an element of joint causation).

The police in Dublin live an existence of relative abundance in a city which has an enormous disparity of wealth and deep impoverishment. Their counterparts in the North are equally privileged. Both societies are characterised by social decay and growing political crisis. The psychiatrists are a feature of the state repression of dissidents. The police profit from the shattering of the health of the dissidents. The police agents in the political parties play their part in the isolation of the police targets and the psychiatrists profit handsomely from the forcible administration of mid-altering substances to the police targets.