http://www.alternet.org/rights/19779/First They Came for the Protesters
By Rachel Neumann, AlterNet. Posted September 3, 2004.
The demonstrations in New York offer lessons on future strategies to get protesters' messages across to the public
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Tourists, old ladies and gentlemen, a building superintendent who was taking out the garbage, teenagers on their first date to a play, ministers, students, bicycle messengers and a good number of bruised and dirty yet singing and chanting protesters. It's the kind of diversity that New York City is famous for, and during this past week, the best place to find it was in the makeshift jail at Pier 57. The biggest underreported story of the Republican National Convention was not Laura Bush's Botox or conservative women making fools of themselves for California's manly governor. It was this: how could 1,800 people be arrested when they had done nothing wrong with the exception of crowding the sidewalks or block traffic? These events happen a thousand times every second in New York City. If these are crimes, all of New York should be arrested every single day.
In a country that engages in preemptive war against a small nation that had neither the intention nor the ability to attack us, preemptive suppression of dissent is the next logical step. But the word "preemptive" is misleading here, because it implies that a crime was about to be committed. It implies that Barbara Gates, 78, whose plans were as nefarious as walking at a slow pace to somewhere near the Convention and lying down, is a criminal and a threat to society. It implies that Julia Gross, 24, arrested while walking away from a "kiss-in," is a potential terrorist. These arrests, the lack of media attention concerning them, and the simultaneous pageantry within the convention imply that there is a legitimacy, in these "unsafe" times, for arresting anyone who has the audacity to even think about speaking up for dissent, even before they do so. After all, the Boy's Choir of Harlem is about to sing and the show must go on.
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At the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, 420 people were arrested – more than 75 of whom were locked up for sleeping in a large space used for making puppets. It wasn't until April 2004, almost four years later, that the final arrestees stood trial and were acquitted on all charges. The arrests and protesters' subsequent treatment in jail brought heavy criticism from the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, the National Lawyers Guild, Amnesty International and other civil rights organizations, but so far there hasn't been either acknowledgement or compensation to people who experienced the excessive arrests.
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