right to peaceably assemble?

Discussion in 'Freedom and Liberty' started by Tango3, Aug 31, 2008.


  1. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

  2. Seacowboys

    Seacowboys Senior Member Founding Member

    There's the "Catch-22" with your darling "Patriot Act". They don't have to show a warrant or probable cause, just send in the storm-troops and let loose the dogs of war. The right to free assembly? What a small price to pay to keep us all safe and free. The right to free speech? Peanuts, who needs it? Some people act like this is the United States of America that we live in....oh...it is?
     
  3. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

    S'not my darling patriot act: I must've missed the part where they(congress) convened a "constitutional convention" and did away with the supreme law of the land!
    .
    the uptake.org page of all the videos captured in st paul.

    http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?p=r&user=UpTakeVideo&page=1

    Some folks replying on you tube seem to think its perfectly okay for the cops to "bash the leftist hippies"..They are all Americans, and have as many rights as any other citizen...
    Hell of a day; "they" are really showing their cards today...

    Week hasn't even started yet...This could get "interesting" (real fast)...
    I noticed Darkhelmet and president scroob ( ALL HAIL SCROOB!!)aren't going to make an appearance in st paul.(something about foul weather)( a sheisse storm perhaps?)
     
  4. Blackjack

    Blackjack Monkey+++

    How 'bout a bit more info/synopsis for those of us on dialup?

    Please?
     
  5. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

    Sorry man,"Gun waving" stpaul /minneapolis/fed cops raided at least 3 private homes housing demonstrators, folks got put on the ground zip cuffed,Some waited outside until paper warrants were issued then homes were searched for bottles rags, household chemicals,urine/feces; computers were seized, papers were rifled through, then most were released.
    A few "hippie buses" with suspected demonstrators were stopped on the highways, cuffed, searched.believe most folks have been released, there are reports of folks getting detained for over40 hours in the make shift detention centers, of course no lawyers, minimal food medical care and sleep. But seems the rnc is all but cancelled because of "gustav".
     
  6. Blackjack

    Blackjack Monkey+++

    Thanks.
     
  7. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

    http://coldsnaplegal.wordpress.com/2008/08/30/houses-spaces-raided-throughout-the-twin-cities/

    Follow coldsnaplegal on Twitter for updates!

    Houses, spaces raided throughout the Twin Cities

    Five-year-old child handcuffed and terrorized; activists allege program of intimidation

    MINNEAPOLIS — In an outrageous series of state-sanctioned actions, police raided an activist “Convergence Space” and several homes in the past 24 hours, detaining multiple people on extraordinarily flimsy pretences, arresting several, confiscating computers and laptops, and even handcuffing a small child.
    Beginning at 9:17 p.m. last night, with the raid on the St. Paul Convergence Space, and continuing throughout the day today, police harassment and brutality towards the local community has proceeded at an alarming pace. At least five separate raids have been reported throughout the Twin Cities, with the primary focus appearing to be the confiscation of computers and personal affects.
    “These actions are clearly intended to have a chilling effect on dissent prior to the launch of the Republican National Convention,” said Natalia, a local activist and mother of two, who asked that her surname be withheld. “The message being conveyed is: ‘If need be, we will terrorize your children to dissuade you from voicing your opinion.’”
    Here are the facts as we know them:
    • Last night, police raided an activist meeting location. All occupants, including a five year old child, were detained, handcuffed, and photographed. Computers were removed from the space, and some personal property (like notebooks) were seized;
    • A private residence on 17th St. was raided this morning and had its door kicked in. The same five year old child was again terrorized by armed law enforcement. The police continue to threaten to board up the house unless minor code violations (like a broken door) are remedied;
    • A private residence in St. Paul, occupied by local residents and out-of-town journalists, was raided on the basis of an identical search warrant to the one presented last night at the Convergence Space (it specified “bomb-making materials,” though nothing of the sort was apparently seized);
    • A private residence on Harriet Ave. was raided and has been threatened with being boarding up.
    Other, similar actions are being reported, but fuller details are not yet available.
    Coldsnap Legal Collective and other groups stand opposed to this program of intimidation and terror. It is evident from all reports that there was no real concern about “bomb-making materials” or anything similar. On the contrary, these actions were taken to suppress dissent and detain activists. We call on all residents to contact their local elected officials, express their deep concern, and be prepared for the apparently draconian tactics the police seem to currently favor in their efforts to silence the voice the people in the run-up to the RNC.
     
  8. Seacowboys

    Seacowboys Senior Member Founding Member

    What scares me more than the police, is the acceptance of those that think the "leftest hippies" got what they deserve, like this could never happen to me, I'm a republist. God damned brown-shirts. every one of them.
     
  9. FalconDance

    FalconDance Neighborhood Witch

    *snortle* Locally I'm considered an "activist" (or worse) because I am very vocal about our City Board needing to start following the law rather than whatever tickles their fancy.

    Silly me, I thought the police had to have some sort of probably cause for raids, not just "them folks looked funny at me". taser1
     
  10. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

    warrants?Nah, hippies always get their a$$ thumped, I think its a documented occupational hazard...
    I like the one above where the warrant was for the right sideof the duplex, "hippies" were in the left unit, cops busted the right half went into the attic and gained entry to the left half.

    That's illegal right there
    I don't care who you are.

    Guess we'll see(or not) the lawsuits for harassment.
    Surely somebody here thinks I'm being paranoid and this is okay? (Why they're just protecting Dark Helmet and president scroob?" ALL HAIL SCROOB!!")???
     
  11. Seacowboys

    Seacowboys Senior Member Founding Member

    My paranoia gowned by apathy a while back but apathy is fast being beaten by down right anger. I dn't like hippies or republicrats either, for that matter, but I would die fighting for their right to be here, to be heard, to express their opinion, to demonstrate and protest what they feel that strongly about, with no interference from the goon-squads. The only opinion thatI do not beleive has the right to be heard is from the vocal minority that shout it's OK to treat some people like that because we don't like them or what they stand for. These facist bastards need to be sent to Siberia.
     
  12. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

    I Just want to sit across a table from these thugs, teamleaders and police captains and ask "what the hell are you guys thinking"??? Makes me mad too...
     
  13. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

  14. RouteClearance

    RouteClearance Monkey+++

     
  15. RouteClearance

    RouteClearance Monkey+++

    The same question was asked of the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg. They all said that "they belived that what they were doing was right".
     
  16. TNZ71

    TNZ71 PEACE THRU FIREPOWER

    Those Skinny White Bastid wearing bandanas breaking shit looked real peaceful last week. F-Um all, let anarcy rule, them what?

    Damned if you do, Damned if you don't.
     
  17. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

    That aint the point. if they break property there's a crime and a charge. I shouldn't be so foolish as to monday morning quarter back when I wasn't there..
     
  18. Minuteman

    Minuteman Chaplain Moderator Founding Member

    Glenn Greenwald
    Sunday Aug. 31, 2008 11:46 EDT
    Federal government involved in raids on protesters


    As the police attacks on protesters in Minnesota continue -- see this video of the police swarming a bus transporting members of <STRIKE>Earth Justice</STRIKE> an environmental activist group, seizing the bus and leaving the group members stranded on the side of the highway -- it appears increasingly clear that it is the Federal Government that is directing this intimidation campaign. Minnesota Public Radio reported yesterday that "the searches were led by the Ramsey County Sheriff's office. Deputies coordinated searches with the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments and the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

    Today's Star Tribune added that the raids were specifically "aided by informants planted in protest groups." Back in May, Marcy Wheeler presciently noted that the Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force -- an inter-agency group of federal, state and local law enforcement led by the FBI -- was actively recruiting Minneapolis residents to serve as plants, to infiltrate "vegan groups" and other left-wing activist groups and report back to the Task Force about what they were doing. There seems to be little doubt that it was this domestic spying by the Federal Government that led to the excessive and truly despicable home assaults by the police yesterday.

    So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone. And it's not difficult to see why. As the recent "overhaul" of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated -- preceded by the endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on Drugs and then the War on Terror -- we've essentially decided that we want our Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media class and, therefore, from the citizenry.

    Beyond that, there is a widespread sense that the targets of these raids deserve what they get, even if nothing they've done is remotely illegal. We love to proclaim how much we cherish our "freedoms" in the abstract, but we despise those who actually exercise them. The Constitution, right in the very First Amendment, protects free speech and free assembly precisely because those liberties are central to a healthy republic -- but we've decided that anyone who would actually express truly dissident views or do anything other than sit meekly and quietly in their homes are dirty trouble-makers up to no good, and it's therefore probably for the best if our Government keeps them in check, spies on them, even gets a little rough with them.

    After all, if you don't want the FBI spying on you, or the Police surrounding and then invading your home with rifles and seizing your computers, there's a very simple solution: don't protest the Government. Just sit quietly in your house and mind your own business. That way, the Government will have no reason to monitor what you say and feel the need to intimidate you by invading your home. Anyone who decides to protest -- especially with something as unruly and disrespectful as an unauthorized street march -- gets what they deserve.

    Isn't it that mentality which very clearly is the cause of virtually everyone turning away as these police raids escalate against citizens -- including lawyers, journalists and activists -- who have broken no laws and whose only crime is that they intend vocally to protest what the Government is doing? Add to that the fact that many good establishment liberals are embarrassed by leftist protesters of this sort and wish that they would remain invisible, and there arises a widespread consensus that these Government attacks are perfectly tolerable if not desirable.

    During the Olympics just weeks ago, there was endless hand-wringing over the efforts by the Chinese Government to squelch dissent and incarcerate protesters. On August 21, The Washington Post fretted:
    <DIR>Six Americans detained by police this week could be held for 10 days, according to Chinese authorities, who appear to be intensifying their efforts to shut down any public demonstrations during the final days of the Olympic Games. . . .
    Chinese Olympic officials announced last month that Beijing would set up zones where people could protest during the Games, as long as they had received permission. None of the 77 applications submitted was approved, however, and several other would-be protesters were stopped from even applying.
    </DIR>On August 2, The Post gravely warned:
    <DIR>Behind the gray walls and barbed wire of the prison here, eight Chinese farmers with a grievance against the government have been consigned to Olympic limbo.
    Their indefinite detainment, relatives and neighbors said, is the price they are paying for stirring up trouble as China prepares to host the Beijing Games. Trouble, the Communist Party has made clear, will not be permitted.
    </DIR>Would The Washington Post ever use such dark and accusatory tones to describe what the U.S. Government does? Of course it wouldn't. Yet how is our own Government's behavior in Minnesota any different than what the Chinese did to its protesters during the Olympics (other than the fact that we actually have a Constitution that prohibits such behavior)? And where are all the self-righteous Freedom Crusaders in our nation's establishment organs who were so flamboyantly criticizing the actions of a Government on the other side of the globe as our own Government engages in the same tyrannical, protest-squelching conduct with exactly the same motives?

    A man whose sister was one of those arrested at one of the raided houses in Minneapolis yesterday emailed me a photograph of her and her friend who was also arrested -- Monica Bicking (r.) and Eryn Trimme -- and he wrote this:
    <DIR>They are still in custody. I've been told that the police have 36 hours to charge her, and that 36 hours starts after the labor day holiday, so they only have to charge her sometime Wednesday. It seems unlikely that they'd do anything to expedite her or Eryn's release.
    They were then planning to actually board up her house for unspecified "code violations", but apparently her neighbors were very vocal, and the police ended up agreeing not to do anything so long as the front door was fixed by 6pm (the front door they'd busted in).
    </DIR>Heres is the extraordinary blog item I linked to yesterday from Eileen Clancy, one of the founders of I-Witness Video -- a NYC-based video collective which is in St. Paul to document the policing of the protests around this week's Republican National Convention, just as they did at the 2004 GOP Convention in New York. Clancy wrote this as a plea for help, as the Police surrounded her house and (before they had a search warrant) told everyone inside that they'd be arrested if they exited the home:
    <DIR>This is Eileen Clancy . . . The house where I-Witness Video is staying in St. Paul has been surrounded by police. We have locked all the doors. We have been told that if we leave we will be detained. One of our people who was caught outside is being detained in handcuffs in front of the house. The police say that they are waiting to get a search warrant. More than a dozen police are wielding firearms, including one St. Paul officer with a long gun, which someone told me is an M-16.
    We are suffering a preemptive video arrest. For those that don't know, I-Witness Video was remarkably successful in exposing police misconduct and outright perjury by police during the 2004 RNC. Out of 1800 arrests, at least 400 were overturned based solely on video evidence which contradicted sworn statements which were fabricated by police officers. It seems that the house arrest we are now under and the possible threat of the seizure of our computers and video cameras is a result of the 2004 success.
    We are asking the public to contact the office of St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman at 651-266-8510 to stop this house arrest, this gross intimidation by police officers, and the detention of media activists and reporters.
    </DIR>That sounds like what it was: a cry for help from a hostage. Hours later, the Police finally obtained a search warrant -- for the wrong house, one adjacent to the house where they were being detained -- and nonetheless broke in, pointing guns, forced them to lay on the floor and handcuffed everyone inside (and handcuffed a National Lawyers Guild attorney outside). They searched the house, arrested nobody, and then left.

    Any rational person planning to protest the GOP Convention would, in light of this Government spying and these police raids, think twice -- at least -- about whether to do so. That is the point of the raids -- to announce to citizens that they best stay in their homes and be good, quiet, meek, compliant people unless they want their homes to be invaded, their property seized, and have rifles pointed at them, too.

    The fact that this behavior is producing so little outcry only ensures, for obvious reasons, that it will continue in the future. We love our Surveillance State for keeping us safe and maintaining nice, quiet order.









     
  19. Minuteman

    Minuteman Chaplain Moderator Founding Member

    Anything that illicits an emotional response should always be questioned.
    This may not be the case here, but, it should be examined before deciding ones position.
    What emotion is being fostered in me and is it deliberate? Am I being manipulated to believe something?
    Question everything, accept nothing on face value, prove all things.

    IMHO, a Berean attitude is the only rational approach to examining anything that others present to us. Whether it be religon, politics, or our nightly news.MM


    Canadian Police Caught Attempting To Stage Riots
    Authorities admit rock-wielding "black bloc anarchists" were really police infiltrators
    Prison Planet | August 24, 2007
    Paul Joseph Watson

    Quebec provincial authorities have admitted that three rock-wielding mask-wearing "anarchists" were in fact police infiltators used to gather information on protesters at this week's SPP summit, but authorities are still ludicrously denying the fact that the provocateurs were intent on causing a riot in order to justify a heavy-handed response.

    Yesterday, debunkers attempted to claim that identical yellow marks on the boots of the "anarchists" and the police were simply Canadian Safety Industry seals and dismissed allegations that the three "anarchists" were undercover cops. Those same trolls and apologists for the authorities have egg on their face today after the police were forced to admit their role in using disguised cops to infiltrate the protesters before staging their arrests when they were exposed as agent provocateurs.
    <DIR>"Police came under fire Tuesday, when a video surfaced on YouTube that appeared to show three plainclothes police officers at the protest with bandanas across their faces. One of the men was carrying a rock," reports CBC .

    "In the video, protest organizers in suits order the men to put the rock down, call them police instigators and try unsuccessfully to unmask them."

    "Quebec provincial police admitted Thursday that three of their officers disguised themselves as demonstrators during the protest at the North American leaders summit in Montebello, Que. However, the police force denied allegations its undercover officers were there on Monday to provoke the crowd and instigate violence."

    </DIR>
    The so-called "black bloc" anarchists are completely infiltrated and controlled by the security services and are routinely employed at major protest events to cause riots and demonize legitimate peaceful protesters.



    In Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organisation meeting, the authorities declared a state of emergency, imposed curfews and resorted to nothing short of police state tactics in response to a small minority of hostile black bloc hooligans. The police allowed the black bloc to run riot in downtown Seattle while they concentrated on preventing the movement of peaceful protestors. The film presents clear evidence that the left-wing anarchist groups are actually controlled by the state and used to demonize peaceful protesters.



    At the WTO protests in Genoa 2001 a protestor was killed after being shot in the head and run over twice by a police vehicle. The Italian Carabinere also later beat on peaceful protestors as they slept, and even tortured some, at the Diaz School. It later emerged that the police fabricated evidence against the protesters, claiming they were anarchist rioters, to justify their actions. Some Carabiniere officials have since come forward to say they knew of infiltration of the so called black bloc anarchists, and that fellow officers acted as agent provocateurs.



    At the Free Trade Area of Americas protests in Miami in late November 2003, more provocateuring was evident. The United Steelworkers of America calling for a congressional investigation, stated that the police intentionally caused violence and arrested and charged hundreds of peaceful protestors. The USWA suggested that billions of dollars supposedly slated for Iraq reconstruction funds are actually being used to subsidize "homeland repression" in America.

    The leadership of the black bloc has been completely usurped by the authorities and anyone who still professes to be a member of the group is either supremely naive or completely stupid. To dress up like terrorists, all in black with ski masks and bandanas (like the police) immediately sends out a negative message to the watching public and demonizes legitimate protesters.
     
  20. Tango3

    Tango3 Aimless wanderer

    background:
    Wow "berean attitude":
    http://www.zianet.com/maxey/reflx163.htm

    There's plenty of google video documenting police"encouragement" of the "black block anarchists"or at least holding fast and looking the other way until the next day when a "state of emergency" was declared by the city council and they were turned loose on everybody.

    You can take your video either with or without the "Alex Jones/prison planet" brand. for those sensitive to such commercialism.
    Google Videos Error
    http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=battleof+seattle&hl=en&emb=0&aq=f#q=wto%20protest&hl=en&emb=0&start=10

    http://video.google.com/videosearch...emb=0&aq=f#q=wto protest&hl=en&emb=0&start=20
     
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