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Interview With Pro-Bono Civil Rights Defense Attorney Paul Hetznecker
By Rob Kall (about the author) Page 1 of 4 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Rob Kall - Writer
Rob Kall: Good evening. It's been a busy day today. I spent the
morning down in Philadelphia in a court room with OpEdNews.com
reporter, Cheryl Biren-Wright and the AEC 6 - the six protesters who
were arrested at the Army Experience Center a few weeks ago on
September 12. It was an interesting morning.
We have tonight, coming on in a few minutes, Paul Hetznecker. Paul
Hetznecker is a defense attorney who does a lot of work, pro bono, with
people who have been involved in protests of different sorts who are
engaged in fighting for civil rights.
He is working to defend Cheryl Biren-Wright and the six protesters
and I had a chance to meet him today and he is, as I described in the
diary announcing this radio show, he's a lion. He is an awesome guy who
is about protecting our rights, protecting our constitutional rights in
particular.
Here, I have Paul Hetznecker and I described you as a lion of a man
in my newsletter that I sent out announcing this radio show. After
seeing you in action today I was very impressed Paul.
Paul: Well, I appreciate those comments. It's very kind of you Rob.
Rob: To start off with you're defending pro bono the six
protesters who were arrested at the Army Experience Center and Cheryl
Biren-Wright, the reporter who was arrested while taking photographs
there.
Paul: That's correct.
Rob: There was a
hearing today and I'm not sure just what to make out of that and what
we can say and it would be great if you could give a little bit of a
summary about how things look for them and where they're going.
Paul: Let me start out by saying that we have not received
police reports yet so I do not have their official version of what
they're claiming what the protesters actually did to prompt the
criminal charges that were brought.
But, I will say this, there has been a longstanding policy of the
Philadelphia Police Department to have their Civil Affairs Division
monitor, surveil, and conduct intelligence gathering with respect to
protesters in the city.
And, this goes way back and it is not unique to Philadelphia.
Police departments throughout the country during the 60s and 70s
established what they called Red Squads back then which were
intelligence gathering units that would show up at protests essentially
to monitor the protest, to make sure that the protest didn't become
violent and that was ostensibly their official mission.
But, their unofficial but more significant mission was really to
gather political intelligence on the protesters and there is a
longstanding tradition in many police departments of gathering this
information and then sharing it with federal authorities and other
intelligence agencies in order to essentially create a catalogue of
protesters, a kind of intelligence gathering process that goes way back
and has continued and has actually intensified over the last ten years
since the protest in Seattle ten years ago.
And so there is this longstanding tradition of what has been
phrased, and I think properly coined, a "war on dissent" in this
country and that war has been intensified not only under President
Bush, but it continues so even to this day.
Rob: Under Attorney General Holder would you say?
Paul:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Certainly, Holder is a breath of fresh air
compared to the previous administration, but the infrastructure of the
surveillance and the intelligence gathering that exists within the
federal government and coordinates with local police departments
existed as I said even before Bush came into office. Certainly, it got
much more insidious and much more, I think dangerous, in the efforts
that were made post 9/11 and use of the Patriot Act and other efforts
that have been well-documented with surveillance by the NSA and by the
Pentagon and other agencies which were barred by law from conducting
domestic surveillance. What we have seen is this has carried out
throughout the course of the last ten years with a variety of tactics.
So, I make that comment only because I think it's important that
when defending individuals in a protest situation not only are the
examination of the charges and the sufficiency or lack thereof of the
evidence an important part of any defense, it's also important to know
what the underlying strategic plan of the police department has been
with respect to protests and in conjunction with that the efforts to
identify, catalogue or what has been phrased "political profiling" of
those people they believe to be the center of whatever particular
political demonstration is being conducted.
Rob: I was there and what I saw were police somewhere
between 50 and 80 uniformed and non-uniformed police seriously
attempting to intimidate and actually threatening the media with arrest
if they stayed to cover arrests.
Rob Kall is executive editor, publisher and site architect of OpEdNews.com, Host of the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show (WNJC 1360 AM), President of Futurehealth, Inc, (more...)
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
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