Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Shinnam]

http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2008/9/1

St. Paul Police Conduct Mass Preemptive Raids Ahead of Republican Convention.The raids and detentions have targeted activists.as well as journalists and videographers documenting police actions at protests. Items seized include common household items such as kitchen knifes, lawn mower fuel and rags as evidence of internal terrorist activities.
Part of the U.S. Bill of Rights guarantees the right to protest. This is an infringement of rights.
Armed groups of police in the Twin Cities have raided more than a half-a-dozen locations since Friday night in a series of preemptive raids before the Republican convention. The coordinated searches were led by Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher but conducted in coordination with federal agencies.

Five Minnesotan activists are still detained on probable cause holds, which means they can be held for thirty-six hours without charge, excluding weekends and public holidays. According to this timeline, they won�t be released before Wednesday. The sheriff called them "criminal anarchists who are intent on committing criminal acts before and during the Republican National Convention.�

The raids and detentions have targeted activists planning to protest the Republican National Convention, as well as journalists and videographers documenting police actions at protests. Groups directly affected by the raids include Food Not Bombs, the RNC Welcoming Committee, I-Witness Video and Communities United Against Police Brutality.

Democracy Now! spoke to Michelle Gross from Communities United Against Police Brutality on Sunday. She was at the activist convergence space Friday night when it was raided.

MICHELLE GROSS: I was sitting there waiting for a meeting to happen with other legal people. We were working with a kind of a collective of legal people, and we were waiting to have a meeting. And I was literally just sitting there drinking some water and relaxing, when, you know, these Ramsey County Sheriff�s Department people came blazing in, screaming �Get on the floor! Get on the floor!� and waving guns at everybody in their faces.

And they basically�at the time, I quickly thought and opened up my video camera and hit my record button and started recording the scene. Then, because they were, you know, waving guns in my face, of course, I had to hit the floor, but I kept my camera recording the whole time.

AMY GOODMAN: Gross was held for forty-five minutes, then released. But when she returned home, she found her home and car had been broken into and all her documents thoroughly searched.

Democracy Now!�s Elizabeth Press and I-Witness Video founder Eileen Clancy were among those detained in one of the raids in St. Paul Saturday afternoon. We arrived on the scene soon afterward. Eileen Clancy spoke to us and other reporters from the backyard of the house where she was being held. She was handcuffed with her colleagues.

EILEEN CLANCY: They�ve been detaining people for days around here. And they photographed us. They look through our materials. They copy our materials and don�t return them to you. And then you�re merely detained, so you don�t have the same situation where you have police officers swearing out affidavits, which we could prove was false. This seems to be a new technique.

AMY GOODMAN: Eileen Clancy was sitting with her hands behind her back, handcuffed, surrounded by St. Paul police, along with her colleagues who had been inside the house. She was shouting to us across the yard. The police had said we had to stay in the front, across the street. But her next�but the next-door neighbor of the house where the activists, the I-Witness videographers, were inside, told us to go through her house, the next-door neighbor, and we could stand in the backyard to speak and witness what was taking place, as the I-Witness videographers were brought into that backyard and were handcuffed.

The National Lawyers Guild and Communities United Against Police Brutality filed an emergency motion Sunday asking Judge Mark Wernick to grant "injunctive relief to prevent police from seizing video equipment and cellular phones used to document their conduct.� The groups sought a temporary restraining order on police to stop them from illegally detaining journalists and confiscating equipment.

[Ya-ta Boy]

Maybe you should re-post this on the Amy Goodman thread just below here.

http://forums.eslcafe.com/korea/viewtopic.php?t=132805

[bacasper]

And people deride me for characterizing them as fascist thugs???

What will it take for you to wake up?

[Jandar]

Why does Democracy Now need gasoline and rags?

[ReeseDog]

Moonbats.

Where's Spliff in all of this?

Come on, man! Weigh in on this!

[catman]

OMG not rags!

[Jandar]

Urine, Feces, Paint, and old tires. Those are some of the things police confiscated on Saturday August 30th when they raided the Minneapolis Monica lived in. She had told her father, Dave Bicking that the evening before police vehicles with blacked out windows had been driving by slowly and taking pictures. She had considered this police intimidation since she is an organizer for the RNC Welcoming Committee, but did not think she was in danger of arrest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIwVeuuy5ks&feature=related

[bacasper]

`Unconstitutional` Preemptive Strikes Against Protest at Republican National Convention

Preventive detention violates the Fourth Amendment, which requires that warrants be supported by probable cause. Protestors were charged with ``conspiracy to commit riot,`` a rarely-used statute that is so vague it is probably unconstitutional - ``basically criminalizes political advocacy.`

by Marjorie Cohn
(Mrzine Monthly Review)

In the months leading up to the Republican National Convention, the FBI-led Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force actively recruited people to infiltrate vegan groups and other leftist organizations and report back about their activities. On May 21, the Minneapolis City Pages ran a recruiting story called "Moles Wanted." Law enforcement sought to preempt lawful protest against the policies of the Bush administration during the convention.

Since Friday, local police and sheriffs, working with the FBI, conducted preemptive searches, seizures, and arrests. Glenn Greenwald described the targeting of protestors by "teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets." Journalists were detained at gunpoint and lawyers representing detainees were handcuffed at the scene.

"I was personally present and saw officers with riot gear and assault rifles, pump action shotguns," said Bruce Nestor, the President of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, who is representing several of the protestors. "The neighbor of one of the houses had a gun pointed in her face when she walked out on her back porch to see what was going on. There were children in all of these houses, and children were held at gunpoint."

The raids targeted members of "Food Not Bombs," an anti-war, anti-authoritarian protest group that provides free vegetarian meals every week in hundreds of cities all over the world. They served meals to rescue workers at the World Trade Center after 9/11 and to nearly 20 communities in the Gulf region following Hurricane Katrina.

Also targeted were members of I-Witness Video, a media watchdog group that monitors the police to protect civil liberties. The group worked with the National Lawyers Guild to gain the dismissal of charges or acquittals of about 400 of the 1,800 who were arrested during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. Preemptive policing was used at that time as well. Police infiltrated protest groups in advance of the convention.

Nestor said that no violence or illegality has taken place to justify the arrests. "Seizing boxes of political literature shows the motive of these raids was political," he said.

Further evidence of the political nature of the police action was the boarding up of the Convergence Center, where protestors had gathered, for unspecified code violations. St. Paul City Council member David Thune said, "Normally we only board up buildings that are vacant and ramshackle." Thune and fellow City Council member Elizabeth Glidden decried "actions that appear excessive and create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation for those who wish to exercise their first amendment rights."

"So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protestors who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do," Greenwald wrote on Salon.

Preventive detention violates the Fourth Amendment, which requires that warrants be supported by probable cause. Protestors were charged with "conspiracy to commit riot," a rarely-used statute that is so vague it is probably unconstitutional. Nestor said it "basically criminalizes political advocacy."

On Sunday, the National Lawyers Guild and Communities United Against Police Brutality filed an emergency motion requesting an injunction to prevent police from seizing video equipment and cellular phones used to document their conduct.

During Monday's demonstration, law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades, and excessive force. At least 284 people were arrested, including Amy Goodman, the prominent host of Democracy Now!, as well as the show's producers, Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. "St. Paul was the most militarized I have ever seen an American city to be," Greenwald wrote, "with troops of federal, state and local law enforcement agents marching around with riot gear, machine guns, and tear gas cannisters, shouting military chants and marching in military formations."

more at link

[ontheway]

An attempt at a total fascist-socialist takover of America is now underway.

If you support any of the right wing or left wing socialist agenda from military action in Iraq, the Federal Reserve and the war on drugs to Social Security, the income tax and national health care, then you are to blame. You are the reason why.

[Czarjorge]

I can't wait until these activists get to sue the hell out of their respective cities and those police forces. The ACLU must be slavering over this one.

[yawarakaijin]

Amazing. I'm not going to jump in and say that I have never heard of anything like this happening before, perhaps it is because this administration has caused quite a few more people to become more politically aware, but I simply don't recall reading accounts of things like this before the Bush administration came into power.

Infiltration of certain groups deemed to be dangerous when in fact they were not...I believe has happened before, but confiscation of political pamphlets, holding journalists and children at gun point? I'm almost hoping the story has been exaggerated.

[spliff]

[caniff]

[pkang0202]

If you are going to assemble and protest then why the hell would you need anything other than a bull horn, posterboard, and markers?

[ontheway]