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In MN, Massive Police Raids On Suspected Protestors
X0563511 alerts us to events in Minneapolis and St. Paul in advance of the Republican convention (which has been put on hold because of Hurricane Gustav). Local police backed by the FBI raided a number of homes and public buildings and confiscated computers and other material. From Salon.com: "Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than 'fire code violations,' and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying. Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning — one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided." Here is local reporting from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "Aided by informants planted in protest groups, authorities raided at least six buildings across St. Paul and Minneapolis to stop an 'anarchist' plan to disrupt this week's Republican National Convention. From Friday night through Saturday afternoon, officers surrounded houses, broke down doors, handcuffed scores of people and confiscated suspected tools of civil disobedience ... A St. Paul City Council member described it as excessive, while activists, many of whom were detained and then released without charges, called it intimidation designed to quash free speech."
FUCK THE POLICE!
... this is how you START them. This coming from someone from Seattle who lived on Capitol Hill during the WTO riots and had police overreact and create a situation when none existed.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Were they planning on doing something illegal? I doubt it.
In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as "Do you have Terminator ready?" as they lay on the floor in handcuffs.
I don't call this freedom.
Actually, you COULD travel inside the USSR without showing papers. Train and airplane tickets were anonymous and you did not need to show ID to board a train or an airplane.
And the sheriff's office, and the FBI, and DHS, and ICE, and the mainstream media, and us...
Yep, us too. Every US citizen bears some responsibility. We should demand media coverage of these obvious civil rights violations, these people aren't violent anarchists, they are citizens protesting the government. We should demand a police force that upholds the law instead of subverting it. We should elect the leaders who will do the most to protect our civil rights.
We've been tolerating this kind of behavior since 9/11 out of fear. It's time to admit to ourselves that we overreacted to the events of 9/11 and allowed our government to trash our civil rights in the name of protecting us.
We let fascists take our country from us in the name of making a 'war on terror.'
Vote. Email or write your local, state and federal representatives. Email local and national news. Protest.
Thank you Dave Raggett
From: http://www.nornc.org/
This isn't a peaceful assembly if you ask me:
"How we get there (the strategy):
1. Start Strong - Throw all of our energy into the first day. We'll kick this off right and stretch the militarized police state out so far that it can no longer contain and suppress our voices and desires.
2. Transportation Troubles - This includes blockades downtown (at key intersections), on bridges (10 bridges over the Mississippi River in the metro area), and other sporadic and strategic targets (busses, hotel and airport shuttles etc)."
This is the group that the Star article describes as having been arrested.
The police have a higher standard to hold to because they're the professionals. If they can't follow the law then they have no business enforcing it.
Ferdinand was a classmate of John McCain, you insensitive clod!
This happened in NY City in 2004 during the Republican Convention although the police waited until the convention had started. My brother was one of the thousands swept up in the sweeps the police did to clear protesters from the street. His lawsuit is still pending, most likely he will wind up with a nice settlement, but the goal was to get these "troublemakers" off the street and that was accomplished. The same marching orders are likely in effect for the Republican Convention this year, and by the time the lawsuits are settled in four years the next election will be on the horizon. Kind of depressing that the police can get away with this bs.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
I mean I don't want to barge ahead. We only read the accounts of one side, but if it is even remotly true the US of A is far from being a free country. Why would the police even want to intimidate people that way? Only if there was a political reason. Semi-random police brutality is one thing, but the report looks like those were fairly large scale orchestrated moves by the police to influence politics. When the police stops working as law enforcment and starts working for a political party how far is that from a banana republic?
And then the W guy comes up and talks about spreading democracy in the middle east? How about spreading it in Minneapolis?
They took along *anything* and *everything* that might be related to possible riots. When they raided a home that wasn't actually the correct home, they still detained people for over and hour while they obtained the correct warrant. When I read that I posted that I was concerned that when I arrived at home that I too would find cops on my doorstep because after all, that was the point of all of this horseshit.
When you finally hear from the other side you learn that the "buckets of urine" was actually gray water used to flush the toilet (my father developed a tank system in the 1980s that used shower/tub water to flush the toilet which saved us so much money that the water company came out 3 or 4 different times to replace the meter because they thought it was defective).
I have been ashamed to be an American for a long ass time but between the Ramsey County Sheriff's response to this event, the confiscation of camera equipment in the name of Homeland Security for the RNC, and using Blackwater mercenaries in New Orleans in preparation for Gustav I am not quite sure I am actually living in the United States of America anymore.
I am disgusted to be a Minnesota and United States resident. This is fucking shameful and horrifying. There is absolutely no excuse for this type of free speech violation. This is a stupid political rally, not a fucking war on our soil. Personally I'd love to join the protests but I seriously fear for my freedom and my life. I am not against the RNC but I am definitely against the manner in which protesting is being handled.
FUCK YOU AMERICA.
For live footage of raids and other First Amendment violations, check out The UpTake on Qik.com.
In my experience, hearing just one side of a story almost always leaves out important facts.
Before we go apeshit, shouldn't we maybe get the government's / police's side of the story?
I'm not saying that nothing bad happened here, just that until we know (or at least give an opportunity to be voiced) both sides of the story, we're really flying blind.
Well they DID ban French fries for a while.
There were protests at the convention. One involved a bunch of veterans pulling a publicity stunt by blocking access to the convention. One of the spokespeople said they were hoping they could incite a response and prove that democrats did not care about veterans. In the end, the ringleader was allowed in to talk to an Obama staff member. You see that is what civilized people do. Talk out their grievances. When you over react and begin to violate civil rights, you simply prove that the corruption and greed they are protesting against is real. This is why the KKK is allowed to wander around aimlessly and harmlessly on city streets. They just want to start something, and blame the other guy. The protestors, like the terrorist, have won. The republican party has proven itself a bunch of whiners, unable to cope with the real world.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
They might have refused because they didn't want the person on whom they were serving a warrant to call up their lawyer and have him hover over the officers' shoulder to make sure they didn't overstep the bounds of the warrant.
TOUGH SHIT.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Right, so what you're saying is that because it's not as bad as a century ago, it's OK? There was also a point where not actively following the state's religion would get you killed. That doesn't make today's religious hysteria acceptable, even if it's not as bad relatively speaking (though it seems we're headed back in that direction).
Please get out of the country now, for everyone's sake.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Here's your "better explanation." Not that it will change your thinking in the least.
Also, since when was ownership of a firearm evidence that someone intends to perpetrate a crime? The NRA would like to have a word with you.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I'm talking about the political and legal history of the United States since 1860. Compared to the American Civil War, the First World War and the Second World War, the crackdown on civil rights has been tame, compared to the dangerous faced with new asymmetrical weapons and tactics.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because what happened before was worse doesn't make this ok.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The Star-Tribune SUCKS. Can't trust them. I've lived in Twin Cities.
My sources (in MN) say that that most the buckets were gray water and a few were because there was no bathroom (the place was over crowded.) Not to mention there is no crime for pissing in a bucket.
In addition, the Star Trib spends time on the anarchist group when most the raids were OTHER groups that were not anarchist and the paper didn't explain that and left it for the reader to mis-characterize all the other people involved in the raids when most of them were peaceful people gathering on private property.
They were NOT civil to reporters in all situations. Plus in some cases the people they held were the people asserting their constitutional rights. (there no warrants in most cases.)
Plus if you have been following, there were reports of the FBI trying to get students to be informants for them... One student spoke out about it months ago; one wonders what kind of characters volunteer for it-- and how trustworthy they are if they hate these protesters to begin with and that is why the agreed to be a voluntary government spy.
here is another link
http://www.twincities.com/ci_10346122?source=most_viewed
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
In February 2002, the World Economic Forum was held in New York City, and I planned to (and did) protest it. The alter-globalization movement had been protesting these things for years. New York newspaper headlines screamed that "anarchists" had better not come to NYC and cause trouble with the WTC still smoking and all of the claptrap. What made it even more nonsensical is it hadn't been planned for an NYC meeting, Giuliani had convinced them to move the meeting to NYC after 9/11/01, despite knowing the WEF always brought out massive demonstrations since evil types like Bill Gates always hobnobbed at such events. So working to bring a demonstration magnet to NYC after 9/11, and then decrying that there demonstrators would bother New Yorkers still grieving from 9/11 sounded a little hollow.
Anyhow, a friend of mine suggested we go to a building in New York called ABC No Rio. They are a "progressive community space" type of place they have art shows there, live bands, a progressive/zine library, a feed the poor group Food Not Bombs and that type of thing. Anyhow we went in and they were organizing a demonstration. I should point out I had never been there and my friend had rarely been there, we were just nearby and at the spur of the moment he wanted to see if a friend of his was there.
I should also point out that of all the progressive demonstrations in the US in the past twenty years, I can't recall an instance of physical violence against someone. There may have been one or more cases, but I can't think of any. A handful of way-out folks smashed windows in Seattle, burned down some new unoccupied houses in a new housing development somewhere out west and the like, and in the case of the latter a massive federal investigation sent some of those people to jail. So one has to question the need for a massive federal "monitoring" of progressive groups is needed for. Especially considering the history of these things - Nixon had a bunch of burglars break into the Democratic Party election headquarters, the FBI used these extraordinary powers granted to it to interfere in the political sphere - stating as a goal the need to stop a "black messiah" from arising, which including bugging Martin Luther King Jr. and leaking tapes they made of him to the press, particularly extra-marital affairs. When Warsaw Pact secret police did such things in their countries, it was decried as tyranny here - when our secret police work to dismantle organization of African-American and progressive people (as the FBI did, Google COINTELPRO), it is soon forgotten and you hear the need for the PATRIOT Act and the like giving power to the same people who abused it for political purposes before.
Anyhow me and my friend leave ABC No Rio. We hail a taxi and go about half a mile to Greenwich Village. My friend wants to go to a bar he went to a few months before, but can't find it. Anyhow, he realizes we are headed in the exact opposite direction than we should be, so we both do a 180 degree turn and start walking the way we had been coming. A man in his late 40s who looks very out of place for Greenwich Village on a Friday night was about 10 meters behind us. He sees us loop around and then has a look in his eye for a second, and then he also spins around and walks the other way. All things considered, especially his facial reaction when we both did a sudden 180 and began walking towards him, I know as sure as the sky is blue that he was following us, and that he was following us because we had gone into ABC No Rio. ACLU lawsuits and that type of thing after the WEF protests, and after the Republican National Convention talked about the extent of the surveillance, and fortified in my mind what I already instinctively knew was true. What scared me was the extent of the surveillance. I would dislike, but would not be as alarmed by them monitoring who went in and out of that building (where nothing was even happening! Except for planning a legal political demonstration that even the AFL-CIO was protesting in). But to follow two guys across New York City, through cab rides, on foot, who had very little to do with even organizing the demonstration much less doing anything violent during it, spooked me.
The US civil war had concentration camps (both sides equally and wretchedly, little to no rations meaning starvation, no clothes or shelter winter or summer,just whatever uniforms they were caught in that soon turned to rags, and that's it, disease was rampant, etc) and a lot of generic genocide involved with it, especially the rape of the south, Sherman burned everything, farms, cities, he didn't care, total war as he went, he burned and hung. And both sides used what weapons they had extensively. The only reason they didn't use poison gas is it wasn't invented yet. The weaponry though was still horrific, and medical care started out with no pain killers and went downhill from there. Causalities, direct battle deaths or later on from injuries and disease, was around 600,000 for a combined around 4.5 million soldiers. For comparison, WW1 - 115,000 US deaths, WW2 400,000.
The US civil war was a *big deal* not to be discounted as some little popgun war.
The Ba'athist parties are about all thats left of that classical Socialist-Fascism
And guess who supported Saddam and the Ba'athists in Iraq in the 1980s? Republican presidents Reason and Bush Sr. Guess who was on Bush's staff or is now on Jr's staff who helped Saddam? Here are some photos of Rumsfeld and Saddam together. They're shaking hand like old pals. At first Secretary of State Cheney also supported Saddam during Bush Sr's term in office. Support for Saddam only ended after he invaded Kuwait who, Saddam had accused of and was later verified, was slant drilling into Iraq to pump Iraqi oil as if it was Kuwaiti oil. Before his invasion of Kuwait Saddam could do no wrong no matter how many people he used chemical weapons against.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
First, the Democratic and Republican National Conventions this year are in VERY different places. Did you consider that perhaps the attitude of the police in Minneapolis might be just a LITTLE different than that of the police in Denver? In fact, I can just about guarantee that they are.
Not to mention the attitude of the FBI. The FBI, after all, has demonstrably adopted the attitude of the governing administration over the last 8 years. It is to be expected that if the FBI overreact, it will be in regard to the Republican convention, not the Democratic. Thus, bias is built into the system by the very people who complain about the "offenses".
Second, if you really, honestly, wonder why Republicans have been bashed so much lately, maybe you should consider the fact that a great many (a majority, in fact) of the American people are PISSED OFF at the Republican Party over the outrageous botch job they have made of our government over that same 8 years.
Do not misunderstand me! I am NOT a Democrat! But any person who pretends to possess some objectivity about the matter MUST admit that the Republicans have gone a very long way to make a hash out of what used to honestly be a perfectly decent democratic republic form of government. They have botched literally everything: foreign policy; domestic social policy; privacy; "the war on terrorism" (what a joke); "the war on drugs" -- an even bigger joke; fiscal policy; education; the economy; taxes; and the personal freedoms of the citizens of this country. Not ONE of those areas is better off today than it was when Bush took office. Not one. And during most of those 8 years they were IN CONTROL over not only the white house but Congress as well.
THERE IS NO EXCUSE. There is nobody to blame. The Republicans have f*cked things up so badly that I despair of things returning to normal within my lifetime.
Once again: I am not a Democrat, and I do NOT trust Democrats to fix everything. But that has NO bearing on whether the Republicans messed things up. They did. Badly, and big time.
The argument that things have been worse at other times in our history won't wash. All of those things were BETTER, 8 years ago. Period. And the Republicans literally have nobody to blame.
So before you go accusing people of discriminating or acting preferentially against Republicans, you should ask yourself: "Do they have legitimate REASONS for doing what they do?"
You might find, if you are honest with yourself, that the answer is "yes".
Anyone who RTFA would see the author's observation that "...Denver was the site of several quite ugly incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether."
So if the submitter had an agenda to conceal that abuses happened in Denver, he did a crappy job of it.
However, the Denver abuses seem to have been mostly garden-variety police thuggery; these Minnesota raids involved the FBI and included months-long espionage and infiltration. One of the groups specifically targeted is "I-Witness Video", a group that did a great job capturing exposing thuggery and perjury by police during the 2004 Republican convention.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
And compared to Joe Stalin, Jeffrey Dahmer was a piker at murder. Your point?
I'll also note that WWI and WWII were actual declared wars. We are not in a state of war with any nation at the moment.
More people die from drowning every year than were killed on 9/11; to claim that we face a terrorist danger necessitating that we abandon our civil liberties is ridiculous.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
So aircraft flying into some of the tallest buildings on Earth, and one flying to the largest office building on Earth and leaving 3,000 dead is an "idea"?
No, that isn't a war. That's a CRIME. Like a bank robbery or somebody going off to kill everybody in the local school or church or post office. Like, for that matter, Timothy McVeigh and his buddies. Oh, make no mistake, it was a horrific crime. One even more effective that the Japanese subway gas attacks. I assure you that I take no pleasure in being in the World Trade Center Health Registry, like all the tens of thousands of us who still don't know how much damage those attacks did to us.
But it was not an act of war. Especially since even if we want to blame the Taliban, most of the world's governments, including our own, were loudly proclaiming that they weren't the legitimate government of Afghanistan even before 9/11.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
From TFA:
Deputies seized a variety of items that they believed were tools of civil disobedience: a gas mask, bolt cutters, axes, slingshots, homemade "caltrops" for disabling buses, even buckets of urine.
From another article by the same newspaper, the Star-Tribune:
"The alleged urine, Nestor maintained, was actually three buckets, two of which contained dirty water used to flush toilets while conserving water. The third was seized from an illegal apartment occupied by someone not connected to the RNC protests. There was no bathroom in the illegal apartment and urine was collected in a bucket, Nestor said."
As for the rest you list, when were they made illegal?
I'm not saying it's right to raid their houses and arrest them just for having it, but I'm having a hard time coming up with legal ways to protest using buckets of urine and equipment for disabling buses.
One bucket of urine in an illegally occupied apartment, the occupant of which had nothing to do with the protest group. And again, when was the other stuff made illegal?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The horrible number of casualties were the result of
A) First and foremost, failure to adapt fast enough to new weaponry and tactics. E.g., took an awfully long time to sink in that a rifled gun shoots accurately to IIRC 300m, while against muskets it was reasonably safe to march to 100m and stand tall. (Oh, you could get hit by musket fire too, but, as an officer in the age of muskets put it, only if it was aimed at someone else;) There were years of horrible massacres, where thousands of soldiers were marched in formation to 100m, and then they shot essentially point blank at each other, standing tall and taking the volley.
B) Incompetent charges that ignored the officers' advice and marched some soldiers to slaughter. E.g., Picket's Charge.
C) Essentially, the first attempt in history at having a broad front war. Previously war had been historically a set-piece affair, where two armies would meet, fight, and that was it. E.g., when the Gauls invaded Rome, or Rome smacked Carthage, or whatever other historical war, don't think that they had a front across Italy. It was basically the army of one side vs the army of the other in _one_ point, and that decided the fate of the war. They might leave a detachment behind to besiege some city or whatever, but there was no coordinated effort by multiple armies. The American Civil War was arguably the first where that was even attempted, and it resulted in hideous casualties as essentially there were more battles all over the place and more generals trying to win some glory by breaking the opposite line in some God-forsaken place.
D) Railroads. Unlike previous times in history, it was now trivial to keep reinforcing and resupplying a lot of army. Where previously you'd admit defeat or fortify and wait for reinforcements for a year (see Hannibal), here it became a case where it was possible to throw more soldiers at anything. And they did. With the logical results.
E) Lack of modern medical care. Wars had always been a crappy affair in that aspect. The Minnie ball caused horrible wounds, and there were no antibiotics or even anesthetics.
Additionally:
1. Focusing on _US_ casualties in WW1 and WW2 is rather misleading. The USA took only a minor part in the trench battles of WW1, for example. The finance and industry of the USA played a bigger role in both world wars, than the actual soldiers in the trenches.
For the countries which actually held the line in those wars, the casualties were a lot more horrible. The USSR in WW2, for example, lost ten _million_ soldier and some thirteen _million_ civillians in WW2. Let that sink in a bit, next time the "we won WW2" willy-waving contest comes by. China lost some 4 million soldiers and 16 million civillians, and their contribution to the attrition and over-extending lines of the Japanese should not be overlooked in the Pacific War. On the Axis side, Germany lost 5.5 million soldiers, and almost two million civilians. You don't think you were that good that you fought Germany single-handedly and caused 10 times more casualties than you took, do you? But at any rate, that's what WW2 was really like, for those in the middle of it. There's an estimated 72 million people who died in that war.
In WW1, the Brits took almost 60,000 casualites just in the first day of the Battle of Somme. Almost half of what you took in the whole war. And while I'm too lazy to look up numbers, France almost depleted their manpower to the point where they were out of conscripts for many years after the war. There's a reason for the pacifism and (in the USA isolationism) after the war. Humanity had never seen such carnage before, and was thoroughly shocked.
So writing only the USA casualties for both wars is IMHO highly misleading.
2. Again, the fact that something has happened before, doesn't excuse the present.
The general history of humanity started from ritualized mass-murder and slavery, and we had a long way to gradually become more... civilized. And I don't mean just having TV and Sla
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Gun - Legal (and quite normal) if you have the papers
Knife - Legal (in a private residence)
Bow and arrows - Legal
Flammable liquids - Legal
Paint - Legal
Slingshots - Legal
Rocks - legal
Buckets of Urine - Legal (odd, but Legal)
So they had this stuff in a private residence, all of it legal, and ....
Puteulanus fenestra mortis