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Between Hurricane Gustav's slamming into Louisiana, John McCain's rather inexplicable Vice President choice, and Obama's thunderous speech last Thursday night, it's understandable if other smaller stories fall through the cracks and don't get the attention they deserve. I just always thought that "gross violation of freedom of speech & privacy" perpetrated by the police in seemingly random raids across the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area would rise above being a simple "smaller story".
Apparently not.
At first glance, the report sounds sinister and dangerous-sounding enough:
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.
Follow up:
Let's just parse those first two paragraphs for a moment...
Informants? I personally wonder how it feels to be a tool of a psuedo-police state, if only by limited examples. If not that dramatic, then just being a part of squelching freedom of speech is enough to set my stomach turning.
What exactly is an "anarchist" plan to disrupt the RNC? The security around the convention site is air tight. Unless these "anarchists" are showing up with armored personnel carriers and tanks, they aren't breaking through any sort of lines to get to within a stone's throw of the site, much less inside.
What on Earth are "tools of civil disobedience", and since when is "civil disobedience" a bad thing? Was it not civil disobedience that helped bring an end to official segregation against an entire section of our populace? Was it not civil disobedience that helped bring an end to the deadliest military mistake in this nation's history? Hell, was it not civil disobedience that helped inspire the culture and music of the generation of people who seem somewhat obsessed to keep today's participants of much-scaled-back civil disobedience confined to the smallest places possible with the most limited free speech possible?
"Tools of civil disobedience" could mean "sign with BUCK FUSH" painted on it.
On Saturday afternoon, [Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher] displayed a number of the confiscated items: a gun, throwing knives, a bow and arrows, flammable liquids, paint, slingshots, rocks and buckets of urine.
For catching "scores" of people, that sure seems like a light loot to have to show for it. Still, I'll give it attention anyhow.
If you bring a gun to a peaceful protest rally and wave it at a policeman, you probably deserve to be shot. Not going to say anything there in support of riots. The same goes for throwing knives and other deadly weapons. Bow and arrows, though? How exactly was that going to be brought into position? Were the protesters planning on wearing tarps? How are you going to shoot an arrow through a crowd without hitting the crowd well before the police? Even trying to fire the arrow over the crowd could end deadly for people who aren't law enforcement - and if you go to the front of the line and draw back an arrow, then you're back to the first sentence of this paragraph - you get what you deserve.
"Flammable liquids" is wonderfully-vague, to the point that I'm fairly sure every house in America contains flammable liquids - probably crude bomb-making materials as well! Paint... were people really going to lob buckets of paint at policemen? Also much like flammable liquids - many homes in America probably have a bucket or two of paint lying around. Slingshots, rocks, and buckets of urine all come in toward the bottom of what can be used against police, especially when they are being fired back at with tear gas & tasers.
Now we get to the creepy part:
The raids began Friday night when Ramsey County sheriff's deputies, guns drawn, used a battering ram to get through a door and into the former Smith Theater on St. Paul's West Side that was being used as a gathering space by a protest group. About 60 people were inside 627 Smith Av. S. watching a movie and eating when the raid began. No one was arrested, but everyone inside was handcuffed and interviewed.
So to recap, the paragraph starts out claiming a theater is being used as a staging ground for violent protests (because why would you do this to peaceful protesters) and yet when nothing was found - better yet when people were found inside of the theater watching a movie... in the theater! they were STILL treated like criminals in their own country, STILL handcuffed like a common crook and STILL interviewed like they had done something wrong.
I'm rather glad neither party held their convention in Detroit this year, as I would hate to go to the show and wind up "not arrested" yet being dragged through the song and dance as if I was.
The description of other terrorist items being sought after is even more hilarious - or unnerving:
The search warrants, signed Friday by a judge, sought multiple items, including electronics and MP3 players, rags, jars, Molotov cocktails, communication between RNC Welcoming Committee members, urine and feces, said Bruce Nestor, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild, a group that represents the demonstrators.
Overlooking the unsettling obsession with bodily waste here... raids were conducted on politically-minded (if not active) homes of people mainly in their 20's and 30's, and the items being looked for included... electronics and MP3 players, rags, and jars. Under those constraints, you could have probably cuffed and booked a vast majority of the young population of the entire Twin Cities metro area, let alone anyone older and younger than that.
Did you hear? That mp3 player of yours can now be used to blow up Freedom.
"Communication between RNC Welcoming Committee members" could be as simple as an e-mail or phone call asking where the protest zone is being set up. Molotov cocktails aren't so until actually put together, so every jar and rag within 20 miles of downtown St. Paul is now a suspect terrorist tool and will be until Thursday apparently.
Usually we have to wait until conventions actually go on to hear about lots of protesting, maybe even arrests and police brutality - how things used to be in the good old days. Erosion of freedom - or perhaps people not speaking up to the gross violation of freedom - now allows the brutality to come right to your own living room, whether or not you're going to have anything to do with violence-inducing acts!
"Why should that be inviting trouble?" [owner of one of the raided sites] Whalen said when asked why he had rented space to the journalists. "They're here to support freedom of speech. Last I looked, that was still in the Bill of Rights."
The ten million dollar question. To answer it may make you an enemy combatant in the eyes of our Great Nation though, so be wary of the effects.
The more I hear and pay attention to stories like this, the more I see my personal incident is merely another story of what is an apparently steadily increasing trend. It's fear inducing, at the very least. One can only hope we are seeing the darkest parts of this chapter as we live day to day now, and better - more free - days greet us in the years to come.
On the other hand, those who assume power have throughout history not taken too kindly to giving it up.
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