Olympics in Boston? Residents should prepare for missiles on rooftops

If Boston hosts the 2024 Summer Olympics, the government will likely treat it as a National Security Special Event (NSSE). That means the Boston Police Department and the Massachusetts State Police would fall under the authority of the US Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security, and Federal Bureau of Investigation, which would be in charge of security operations.

All people within the NSSE “security” zone – possibly the entire Boston metro area and beyond – could lose a host of constitutional rights, including the right to protest on public land, and the right to not be searched or questioned absent any reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.

If you doubt the police state will come to Boston, click here, here and here to read how London and Brazil turned into a militarized police state during the Olympics.

Click here & here to read how the UK placed missile launchers on rooftops around London.

We don't even have to mention how China dealt with the Olympics, now do we?

DHS run Fusion Centers will receive funding to expand its already unaccountable and secretive surveillance apparatus. Moreover, history suggests that the people targeted by the permanent surveillance regime won’t be elite athletes or business leaders; it will be poor people, communities of color and political activists.

“In Athens, the reports are that three-quarters of the venues went into disuse and that was after several years of trying to maintain them and spending several million dollars per venue trying to maintain them, but over time they were unable to continue to do that,” Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist told WBUR’s All Things Considered. “That was probably the most extreme example of white elephants and waste.”

He added that other cities have been more successful in incorporating and using the Olympic venues after the Games, but that there are still ongoing costs. He said in London, a plan to convert an Olympic stadium into a soccer stadium ended up costing over $400 million when they had to reconfigure the field and stadium.

Zimbalist has researched the costs of hosting the Olympics and has written about it in his book “Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup.” He said the costs of the Games could exceed $10 or $15 billion in total financing costs. He said Boston’s cost estimate is not realistic and the Olympics always have cost overruns.

“When the promoters of the Olympics Games try to convince the public officials to support the Olympic effort, they come in with a bare bones plan with very few frills, and then over time once the commitment is made all of the elaborations, all of the frills come on top of that,” Zimbalist said.

Proponents have already said that the security at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 (an NSSE-designated event) provides a security model for a possible 2024 games. And Dave Zirin reported at The Nation in November that the International Olympic Committee was particularly interested in Boston “because of how the city was able to shut itself down after the Boston Marathon bombing”.

That’s a chilling statement. On Friday April 19, 2013, Bostonians woke up to shocking news: the government was taking the unprecedented step of asking residents in the Greater Boston region to remain in their homes. People were not to go to work. The public transit systems were shuttered. To say that it felt like a declaration of emergency law is not an exaggeration.

For those of us who remember the 2004 DNC in Boston, comments about our city’s efforts then serving as a model for security in 2024 are troubling. In the days leading up to the DNC, authorities built a protest cage for “free speech” sealed by razor wire, overhead netting, and chain fencing, monitored by rooftop snipers. Federal authorities claimed that the cage was an adequate accommodation for our freedom of speech.

After the ACLU and National Lawyers Guild challenged the restrictions, a federal judge called the cage “an offense to the spirit of the First Amendment”:

Protesters, demonstrators, and dissidents outside a national political convention are not meddling interlopers who are an irritant to the smooth functioning of politics. They are participants in our democratic life. The Constitution commands the government to treat their peaceful expression of dissent with great respect –respect equal to that of the invited delegates.

If the Olympic games come to Boston, the civil liberties landscape for the people of Boston will be forever damaged, long after the Olympics has left.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/08/boston-us-candidate-host-2024-olympics-rights-violated
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-klein/the-olympics-unveiling-po_b_117403.html
https://teapartywpbfl.wordpress.com/2012/07/27/london-2012-olympics-the-staging-ground-for-the-coming-police-state-bread-circuses/
http://www.wbur.org/2015/01/10/boston-2024-olympic-bid