Suburban Guerrilla

Glenn Greenwald on Julian Assange:

For several reasons, Assange has long feared that the US would be able to coerce Sweden into handing him over far more easily than if he were in Britain. For one, smaller countries such as Sweden are generally more susceptible to American pressure and bullying.

For another, that country has a disturbing history of lawlessly handing over suspects to the US. A 2006 UN ruling found Sweden in violation of the global ban on torture for helping the CIA render two suspected terrorists to Egypt, where they were brutally tortured (both individuals, asylum-seekers in Sweden, were ultimately found to be innocent of any connection to terrorism and received a monetary settlement from the Swedish government).

Perhaps most disturbingly of all, Swedish law permits extreme levels of secrecy in judicial proceedings and oppressive pre-trial conditions, enabling any Swedish-US transactions concerning Assange to be conducted beyond public scrutiny. Ironically, even the US State Department condemned Sweden’s “restrictive conditions for prisoners held in pretrial custody”, including severe restrictions on their communications with the outside world…

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How can these U.N. troublemakers not see the difference? In other countries, they’re protesting against unemployment, political corruption and control by an oligarchy, and their goverment is repressing them with military tactics. Here, they’re… just malcontents! Yeah, that’s it:

WASHINGTON — Federal officials have yet to respond to two United Nations human rights envoys who formally requested that the U.S. government protect Occupy protesters against excessive force by law enforcement officials.

In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the two envoys called on U.S. officials to “explain the behavior of police departments that violently disbanded some Occupy protests last fall” and expressed concern that excessive use of force “could have been related to [the protesters'] dissenting views, criticisms of economic policies, and their legitimate work in the defense of human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

The envoys also reminded the U.S. government of its international obligations to “take all necessary measures to guarantee that the rights and freedoms of all peaceful protesters be respected.”

The letter, from Frank La Rue, who serves as the U.N. special rapporteur for the protection of free expression, and Maina Kiai, the special rapporteur for freedom of peaceful assembly, was sent in December 2011.

It was publicly released last week in connection with the 20th annual U.N. Human Rights Council meeting, which started Monday and at which both rapporteurs — independent experts sent out to investigate human rights problems around the world — will make their annual reports.

The U.S. government has not answered the letter. A State Department spokeswoman told HuffPost that “the U.S. will be replying,” but she couldn’t say when or how. “We do not comment on the substance of diplomatic correspondence,” she said.

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It’s important that people stand up against these repressive tactics, because you have to fight them every step of the way. A federal judge in May ruled that there was “overwhelming evidence” that the practice led to thousands of illegal stops and granted class-action status to a legal challenge, so it looks like the policy’s days are numbered:

In a slow, somber procession, several thousand demonstrators conducted a silent march on Sunday down Fifth Avenue to protest the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policies, which the organizers say single out minority groups and create an atmosphere of martial law for the city’s black and Latino residents.

Two and a half hours after it began, the peaceful, disciplined march ended in mild disarray. As many marchers dispersed, police officers at 77th Street and Fifth Avenue began pushing a crowd that defied orders to leave the intersection, shoving some to the ground and forcing the protesters to a sidewalk, where they were corralled behind metal barricades. After protesters pushed back, the officers used an orange net to clear the sidewalk, and appeared to arrest at least three people.

The presence of several elected officials at the march, including the Democratic mayoral hopefuls Bill de Blasio, the public advocate; Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker; Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president; and William C. Thompson, the former city comptroller, seemed to signal a solidifying opposition to the policy, which has long been opposed by civil rights groups.

Wade Cummings, 46, a teacher, attended with his 19-year-old son, Tarik. Both said they had been stopped by police officers — once for the father, three times for the son.

“I’m concerned about him being stopped and it escalating,” the father said. “I like to believe I taught him not to escalate this situation, but you never know how it’s going to go down.”

Police officers stopped nearly 700,000 people last year, 87 percent of them black or Latino. Of those stopped, more than half were also frisked.

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Jonathan Turley with another heartbreaking Taser tale, this time in Baltimore. I keep saying this: Police departments will stop the indiscriminate use of tasers when citizens insist on it. Speak up in your town!

A disturbing lawsuit has been filed against the Baltimore County Police Department by Linda Johnson over the death of her husband, Architect Carl D. Johnson on May 27, 2010. Johnson was pepper sprayed, tasered, and beaten before his death on the way home from Bible study class.

Linda Johnson is suing the Maryland State Police, Baltimore County Police, individual commanders and six officers. Her lawsuit claims that her husband suffered a diabetic attack after calling a friend and crashing on I-795. First to the scene was State Trooper Davon Parker who pepper sprayed Johnson after he lowered his window of his car, which had crashed into the median. When Johnson got out of the car, Parker clubbed him on the knee and then allegedly another officer (Loss) clubbed him. When Baltimore County Police Officer Nicholas Wolferman arrived, he also allegedly beat Johnson. Three more officers arrived and one, Baltimore County Officer Andrew O’Neill tasered Johnson twice. Officer Loss then allegedly punched him in the face. Eight more officers then arrived — leaving one wondering if there were any officers left at headquarters. The complaint states that “there were approximately 52 individuals that responded to the scene.”

We have been following cases involving the use of tasers and excessive force by police. However, Baltimore has been cited as a standout jurisdiction in the use of tasers — leading to calls for investigation.

Johnson was only 48 and lives behind his wife of 27 years. Their son, Darren Johnson, predeceased his parents and Linda has now lost her husband.

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Throwing themselves in front of a police van, then forcing the driver to take off! Thank God we have a strong media to tell us the truth, right?

Witnesses at the scene, myself included, saw the van conspicuously speed up while nearing the east side of the bridge.

It had been moving slowly, then gained speed as some in the crowd began to let it pass. A handful of protesters, three of whom told the Occupied Chicago Tribune they were fearful for their friends and fellow demonstrators behind them, tried to slow the van down by pushing back on its hood. It was then that the driver accelerated in full, reaching a completely unacceptable speed while still in the midst of the crowd. One protester, James “Jack” Amico was struck, thrown to ground, and treated for a concussion at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

NBC 5 Chicago sparked the asinine rabble, which continues to claim that the hit protester was faking, by posting this video, which shows an uninjured protester skidding along the hood of the van. The cameraman was far east of the bridge, where the actual incident had occurred. The protester featured in NBC 5′s coverage is not Amico. At the time of that video, Amico was lying on the street, surrounded by his girlfriend Lauren DiGioia and a team of street medics assessing his condition.

A better, though still murky, video of a protester getting hit and going down can be seenhere (between the 18-21 second marks).

In short time, the 1% Chicago Tribune, along with other mainstream media, filed in lock-step behind CPD Superintendent Garry McCarthy’s story: that the protester faked his injury, that someone had punched the driver in the head, giving him a concussion, that protesters attacked the van, and that the videos, though unclear, seem to confirm this official narrative.

The story, like many of McCarthy’s this weekend (along the lines of “That wasn’t blood gushing out of a blunt-force head wound, it was red paint!”), smelled like the sweaty taint of a riot cop after Sunday’s 90-degree march. For one, I didn’t see a single police van driving around with its windows rolled down. Something of the spectacle of force is lost when a sergeant lets the breeze run through his hair. And certainly, if a cop driving through a sea of demonstrators doesn’t think to roll up his window, what appeared to be a concussion to McCarthy may be a simpler condition: That cop really is just that dumb.

But what’s missing from all the news reports is Amico’s story. Before leaving Chicago Monday night, he spoke with the OCT. His Northwestern Memorial Hospital bracelet was still on his wrist.

Amico approached the van when, he says, he saw his friend standing, unaware, with his back to it. Amico was hit in the chest and fell hard, slamming his head onto the pavement.

“It stomped on the gas the second I stepped in front. It was intentional,” he told OCT. “Mind you, they sped off after this. It was a hit and run.”

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Charlie Pierce pays a visit to campaign central:

The headquarters is on the third floor. To visit, guests have to surrender their driver’s licenses in exchange for a visitor’s tag at the front desk. The days of the storefront walk-in headquarters are as dead as the Whigs, and Steve was not even allowed to tell me how many local headquarters the campaign has around the country. Within the broad rooms is a very strange combination of a high-end frat house and a local Best Buy outlet. Over the field-organizing tables hang the state flags of the various regions of the country that the people beneath them are working. (The middle of the area has a very strong Big 10 feel.) Beneath the flags, young people — over 90 percent of whom are salaried to one extent or another — worked every possible mode of communication technology brought down from the mount by Messrs. Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg. LCD screens were hung every place somebody hadn’t hung a handmade sign cheering on the president, his wife, the country, or people who’d been aces at their jobs in one way or another the previous week. The room buzzed with a cacophony of beeps, bells, and amplified punditspeak. Actual human speech even was buried in there somewhere. It was like watching the Keebler elves working in a nuclear missile silo.

This is the way campaigns are these days. This is the way politics are these days. The Obama campaign pioneered many of the new techniques in 2008, when they were able to bring a one-term senator to the presidency all the way to the White House at least in part by using the new technologies to create new kinds of communities — real and virtual — that they could activate when they most needed them. There is something insulated about it, but it is not the kind of insulation whereby something is sealed away from the world. Instead, it is more like the insulation that you find on electric wires, the kind of thing that makes sure the current stays strong and properly directed, but which also makes sure that the electricity does not erupt in ways that cannot be controlled.
That’s the most conspicuous element of the president’s re-election headquarters: the overwhelming impression of a place that serves two primary functions — to marshal power and to control it tightly. This is not a place that either engenders improvisation or anger or emotion, or seeks in anyway to turn them loose. That’s for the streets outside. If that energy can be channelled in ways the campaign can employ to what it perceives to be its policy goals — in other words, if it’s time for Joe Biden to go give another speech somewhere — so much the better.

Everything is garrisoned today. Everything is insulated the way that electric wires are insulated so that the power doesn’t go anywhere it’s not supposed to go. The country’s political process is encased in technology so as to make it as safe and regular as it can be, so that the people within it can feel comfortable in what they’re doing. It is not a contrivance. If it were, practically anyone would do it, and the Republican presidential primary field — to say nothing of the candidate it produced — is proof enough that that’s not the case. It is, for lack of a better world, a kind of manufactured evolution, politics learning the techniques of distancing itself from the people politics purports to serve in the same way that those people have learned to distance themselves from each other, primarily through the insulating effect of new technology. We have grown accustomed to guns on the street, First Amendment zones, elections as televised design contests or exercises in competing virtual realities. The Obama headquarters is neither a symptom of this, nor is it the cause. It is simply a creature of the country it seeks once again to lead. We live garrisoned lives, so why should our politics be any different? Any energy that cannot be filtered through the buzz of the headquarters is left downstairs, on the outside, behind the toddler gate that stretches across the hallway or, better yet, out on the sidewalk, where walk the men with guns.

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No police state here!

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Live streaming from Tim Poole: Cops are putting on gas masks. Rumors are spreading that police are planning to use LRAD.

Live streaming by Ustream

Live Video app for Facebook by Ustream

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In Chicago:

Tracey Pollock, a credentialed photographer for The UpTake, is attacked by police in Chicago during an anti-NATO protest on Saturday. Before the attack, police were using their bicycles as weapons to force back the crowd which was staging a march without a permit.

Police had formed a barricade; as you can see from the video, there was some sort of incident along the barricade. Pollock tried to get closer to see what was happening when a police officer reached up, grabbed her lens and tried to rip her camera away. The officer then pushed her over some bicycles.

Pollock was wearing a large press badge and as you can hear from the audio, even bystanders could tell she was part of the press. Protesters behind the bicycles pulled her to safety.

Pollock was bruised in the incident but not seriously injured. She says she never crossed the police barricade.

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I used to laugh at people who spelled our country as “Amerika.” Here’s video of cops stopping a car full of video journalists in Chicago last night:

And in related news: At the time of this blog post, there are reports that the City of Chicago website has been DDOS’d. Over the weekend, there were reports of other such DDOSes.

Follow the Chicago protests today as they unfold, with the livestreamers the Chicago police and Homeland Security are following: Tim Pool’s web video stream, Luke Rudkowski’s web video stream. On Twitter: Geoffrey Giraffe (@jiraffa), Tim Pool (@timcast), Luke Rudkowski (@lukewearechange).

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