(Trump demands retractions) - Let's Be Clear: Park Police Hit DC Protestors With Tear Gas

[Eugene]

Source: Mother Jones

June 2, 2020

Let’s Be Clear: Park Police Hit DC Protestors With Tear Gas

If this was a war, it would be a war crime.

DANIEL MOATTAR
Research Editor

The Trump administration has issued threatening e-mails to journalists across the country demanding retractions and corrections on Washington’s biggest headline last night: that police working for the National Park Service tear-gassed hundreds of peaceful civilians, not for disturbing anything or anyone, but to clear some room for a (very un-) presidential photo op.

Here’s what happened, from my colleague Becca Andrews:

Police fired tear gas to clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, on Monday evening, just before President Trump delivered an address in which he threatened to deploy “thousands and thousands of heavily armed military personnel and law enforcement officers” to curb protests and enforce curfews. Trump then proceeded to walk across the park to nearby St. John’s Episcopal Church, the site of a fire Sunday night, for a photo op in which he posed with a Bible.

You’ll be happy to hear the Trump campaign has contacted us in a snit. They say the Park Police did not use tear gas—they simply used “smoke canisters and pepper balls.”

Here are the facts: Park Police used tear gas to clear out peaceful protestors so that Donald Trump could fumble a Bible in a lame photo op that disgusted everyone, including the actual clergy of St. John’s—and Pat Robertson. The lying press reported what they saw: that the tear-causing gas was, in fact, tear gas.

“Tear gas,” an umbrella term for about a half-dozen so-called “riot-control agents” or “less lethal” chemical weapons, most often refers to CS gas, a powerful irritant devised by two Middlebury College researchers in the 1920s.

But it can also refer to OC, or oleoresin capsicum, an ultra-concentrated form of the compound in hot peppers mixed with carriers that make it stick to your skin and lungs more easily. Both cause tears, and both, in quantity, do a permanent number on lungs and nerves.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/06/trump-dc-protest-tear-gas-park-police/

[msongs]

1. using smoke bombs instead is really not much an improvement in police behavior nt

[agingdem]

3. it was tear gas

if you've ever been tear gassed the feel, taste, smell, near blindness and struggle to breathe stays with you forever... Trump wants a retraction because smoke bombs are what..more humane?

[Bob Munck]

2. A Hint of Truth in the Lies

"Tear gas" is generally not a gas at all, but very fine solid particles or liquid droplets. The "pepper balls" they're talking about may well consist of the same active elements and format as OC tear gas but in a differently shaped container and different labels. Heck, the "smoke canisters" could well have been tear gas in yet another form of transportation.

Of course, no one in the White House may know enough about science or logic to understand that they're lying.