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Nanette Echols, a resident of St. Paul who had been extending hospitality to the visiting protesters, insisted they had done nothing wrong. "In the place they raided on Friday night they were showing documentary movies to twenty-somethings in a clean, alcohol-free zone after dinner," she said.
Caving In to the Feds
The St. Paul City Council? Only one member had the courage to speak out—Councilman Dave Thune, who was particularly enraged that Sheriff Fletcher took action within St. Paul city limits:
"This is not the way to start things off…I’m really ticked off…the city is perfectly capable of taking care of such things…This is all about free speech. It’s what my father fought for in the war. To me this smacks of preemptive strike against free speech."
Thune objected in particular to Fletcher’s deputies using battering rams to knock down doors, then entering with guns drawn, and forcing people to the ground, as they did on Friday night.
This was the unsettling backdrop as I flew into St. Paul on Saturday evening, to speak at the Masses at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church on Sunday morning.
On Monday, I joined some 10,000 on a peaceful march from the Capitol to the Berlin wall of fences and the "organs of public safety" arrayed before the RNC convention hall. On the fringes there was some property damage and further arrests. What violence there was bore the earmarks of provocation by the likes of Sheriff Fletcher and his Homeland Security, FBI, and, according to one well-sourced report, Blackwater buddies.
That’s right. Agent provocateurs.
Primary targets of the repression were the alternative media, including any and all those who might have a camera to record the brutality—as was successfully done at the RNC in New York four years ago. The manner in which Amy Goodman and the two producers of "Democracy Now!" were deliberately mistreated was clearly aimed to serve as a warning that the rules had indeed gone up in smoke—the First Amendment be damned.
Tuesday evening, after speaking at the "Free Speech Zone," a fenced-off area surrounded by the organs of public safety, I joined the Poor People’s march up to the fences before the RNC. I observed no violence at all; yet, the police/FBI/national guard/and who-knows-who-else decided they needed to clear the streets. My friends and I narrowly escaped being tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, or worse. It was an overwhelming show of force—not to protect, but to intimidate.
Palin Significance
After speaking at a conference at Concordia University in St. Paul on Wednesday, I was more eager to watch the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, deliver her acceptance speech than to risk the tear gas and pepper spray.
The way she dissed community organizers was hard to take. But that would pale in significance, so to speak, compared to the way the governor of Alaska proceeded to ridicule the notion of reading people their rights. I had thought that despite the distance between Alaska and Washington, the reach of the U.S. Constitution and statutes extended that far.
Friends tell me I should not have been surprised. But, really! After the widespread kidnapping, torture, indefinite imprisonment, and our cowardly Congress’ empowerment of the president to imprison sine die anyone he might designate an "enemy combatant"—after all that...well, it seems to me that reading a person his/her rights takes on more, not less, importance.
Not to mention the massive repression then under way right outside the convention hall.
It was, it is, a scary juxtaposition. The following day Col. Ann Wright, other members of Code Pink, and I went to the jail to offer support to the young people who had been brutalized and then released. They had not been read their rights. Many were camped out on the sidewalk, refusing to leave until their friends still inside were also released.
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