Is Obama targeting journalists over #OWS?

At this point, NOTHING could surprise me about Dear Leader and any alleged crackdowns on press freedoms. Obama has chased whistleblowers more than Bush, has been less transparent in some ways than Bush, and so forth.

So, I'm not surprised, per Naomi Klein, about this:

The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists.

While her prose is a bit overblown at times, there's nonetheless enough evidentiary smoke to at least make it plausible that some degree of federal coordination or push is behind at least some local-level police activity. In NYC, let's not forget some cops there have been getting CIA training for years.

The "proof," if anything, will be how Team Obama treats the FOIA request.

And (Nov. 27) a number of her claims are at least somewhat overblown. When Alternet says that, it says something. Of course, this IS Naomi Wolf.

That said, it's pretty clear that the U.S. Conference of Mayors had at least some interaction with the Department of Homeland Security, and an international policing NGO, the The Police Executive Research Forum, whose involvement is even more off-putting, as it has Canadian and British representatives, too, and both those nations are under control of conservative governments.

At the same time, various mayors and police chiefs continue to claim their actions were locally decided.

So, Team Obama gets to claim these are localized decisions while everybody denies "coordination." Mayors and police chiefs downplay their fears of OWS, fears of appearing to lose control of their cities and more.

PERF's involvement? International First World neoliberalism is starting to worry.