Occupy Wall Street doesn’t want to be associated with the young West Village couple who were allegedly busted over the weekend with a houseful of explosives, weapons and a bomb-making guide. Morgan Gliedman, 27, and Aaron Greene, 31, were arrested Saturday after police reportedly found seven grams of highly explosive HMTD powder, a flare launcher, a shotgun, ammo, rifle magazines and instructions on making bombs, including a printout entitled “The Terrorist Encyclopedia,” at their home. An early report from the New York Post identified Mr. Greene as an “Occupy Wall Street activist,” but this afternoon the movement’s public relations arm said there is no evidence to support links between Mr. Greene and Occupy.
“There is nothing in the news stories to support a link between OWS and the individual arrested; his name is unfamiliar to many OWS activists,” the statement posted on the Occupy Wall Street Press Relations Working Group page said. “A very large number of people came through Zuccotti Park, and there are countless Occupy-related groups nationwide, so it is very difficult to ascertain if one person participated in anything related to OWS.”
The Occupy Wall Street statement on the arrest of the young bombers described attempts to link the movement to the incident as part of an ongoing police smear campaign.
“Since its beginnings in September 2011, Occupy Wall Street has vigorously used its Constitutional rights to protest Wall Street greed, and is firmly committed to non-violence,” said the statement. “Nonetheless, Occupy has been subjected to extensive surveillance and repression, and the NYPD takes every opportunity to link OWS to crime.”
Back in July, Occupy Wall Street was publicly linked to a 2004 murder case after unnamed sources said DNA from the scene of the brutal killing of Juilliard student Sarah Fox matched a chain protesters used to hold open the entrance of a subway station to give free rides. The link was soon chalked up to a “laboratory error.”
According to the Post, Mr. Greene was also a Harvard alum who also did graduate work at the university’s Kennedy School of Government. Mr. Greene reportedly had “five prior run-ins with the police” on charges including assault and weapons possession.
Despite Mr. Greene’s troubles with the law cops reportedly arrived at the couple’s West Ninth Street home because Ms. Gliedman was wanted for credit card theft. The house is just two blocks from the street where three young activists affiliated with the Weathermen died in 1970 when a bomb exploded in their makeshift townhouse lab.
Politicker hasn’t found any public materials linking either Mr. Greene or Ms. Gliebman to Occupy Wall Street. As of this writing, the NYPD has not responded to a request for comment about the couple’s connection to the group.
More is known about the background of Ms. Gliedman, who is reportedly nine months pregnant, than the history of her male companion. Her father is Dr. Paul Gliedman, the director of radiation oncology at the Brooklyn Division of Beth Israel Hospital, and her mother is a real estate agent, Susyn Schops Gliedman. Ms. Gliedman graduated from Dalton in 2002. According to a Facebook page for “Morgan Gliedman” that was recently deleted, she went on to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A “Morgan Rose Gliedman” wrote for a monthly journal at that school, F Newsmagazine, in 2009. That January, she penned a piece for the paper with tips for “enjoying life as a starving artist.”
