For those not willing to sit through a long propaganda flick...
It starts with showing and listening to the police target specific activists with the camera and arresting some guy apparently doing nothing at all. He was previously identified as a “leader” figure, and right after the cop with the camera drives past him, he gets jumped by bike cops. Then it shows video of the police very calmly discussing their tactical move to push protestors out of the area (Portland, 2002) with zero crowd incitement or actual rioting in progress. The media consistently reported that the protesters were moved because of a single bottle thrown from the protesters, however the police-shot video seems to show that there was no precipitous action at the time the move was being planned and put into action.
The video is obviously propaganda, and throughout they try to draw parallels between the police actions and Hitler. Although I think we’re a long way from Nazi Germany, it is extremely disturbing seeing the police gather intelligence on protesters and then calmly plan a street-clearing that was widely reported as if the cops cleared the street to stop a riot. I distinctly remember watching the news about this incident and thinking that rioting protesters get what they deserve, but the police video clearly shows that there was no riot.
I encourage you to watch it all the way through, even though the obvious propaganda slant is over the top and the narrator sounds like she’s stoned. It drags on as all really good sophomoric propaganda videos do, but the stuff at the end is fairly interesting as it is a stark contrast to what was reported in the popular media about the incident.
Interestingly, it brings up a question.
What should people do when the government targets people who you think are nuts, but who are otherwise harmless? It does make me wonder if we are in the same position as someone in Germany before the govt started rounding up Jews, but after they started taking their names…
Thank god for the Posse Comitatus act… However the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 slightly re-writes the insurrection act (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_Act) to more easily allow the use of the military for police functions. Wikipedia (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act) links to the text of the bill, pg 322-323 here:
http://www.govtrack.us/data/us/bills.text/109/h/h5122.pdf.
