…the planning involved by the police in dismantling a nonviolent demonstration is almost identical to the Navy SEALs preparation for catching and killing a terrorist mastermind.

I really want to disclaim that I’m not talking about some conspiratorial Black Helicopter shit, except for the fact that in its most basic essence this was literally Black Helicopter shit.

Case in point:

The New York Times, “After an Earlier Misstep, a Minutely Planned Raid”:

Police officials planned the operation for weeks. They watched how the occupations in other cities played out. They held conference calls with colleagues in other cities. They increased so-called disorder training — counterterrorism measures that involve moving large numbers of police officers quickly — to focus on Lower Manhattan.

The last training session was on Monday night, on the Manhattan side of the East River. The orders to move into Zuccotti Park came down at the “last minute,” said someone familiar with the orders, which referred to the assignment only as “an exercise.”

“The few cops that I know that were called into this thing, they were not told it was for going into Zuccotti Park,” said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The only people who were aware of them going into Zuccotti Park were at the very highest levels of the department.”

Vs.

 

The New Yorker, “Getting Bin Ladden”:

Brian, James, and Mark selected a team of two dozen SEALs from Red Squadron and told them to report to a densely forested site in North Carolina for a training exercise on April 10th. (Red Squadron is one of four squadrons in DEVGRU, which has about three hundred operators in all.) None of the SEALs, besides James and Mark, were aware of the C.I.A. intelligence on bin Laden’s compound until a lieutenant commander walked into an office at the site. He found a two-star Army general from JSOC headquarters seated at a conference table with Brian, James, Mark, and several analysts from the C.I.A. This obviously wasn’t a training exercise. The lieutenant commander was promptly “read in.” A replica of the compound had been built at the site, with walls and chain-link fencing marking the layout of the compound. The team spent the next five days practicing maneuvers.