EarthWINS Daily 6.3
November 25, 2003

Table of Contents

November 25, 2002
Seattle Times
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/editorialsopinion/2001799997_energyed25.html 

The senators who stalled a vote Friday on sweeping changes to U.S. energy policy did the nation a favor.

If their votes against ending a filibuster on the measure hold, senators can take the holiday recess to rethink the bill, which is a cynical boost to the fossil fuel and nuclear industries and doesn't do enough to meet the stated goal of making the United States more independent from foreign oil sources.

Congress can do better. The bill passed the U.S. House easily last week, but Senate supporters fell three votes short of the 60 needed to force a vote. U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., led the fight to stop the bill.

The measure would give huge subsidies to oil, coal, gas and nuclear industries while short-changing renewable energy sources. Only about 20 percent of the bill's $23 billion in tax credits goes to renewable energy or conservation.

Supporters say the measure would help make the nation less dependent on Middle Eastern oil, yet it does little to increase automobile efficiency. Underscoring that the U.S. can do better, China announced last week it was imposing fuel-efficiency standards higher than those for American vehicles.

The bill is flawed policy in general but it's an especially bad fit for the Northwest. The region still deals with the effects of the 2001 energy crisis, which was exacerbated by predatory market manipulation by Enron and others. Despite that fiasco's lessons, the bill bans only one type of market manipulation and is silent on others used to bilk utilities and ratepayers.

The bill's endorsement of regional transmission organizations doesn't sit well with many utility officials in the Northwest, either. They're concerned the benefits of the region's hydropower system with its cost-based rates would take a back seat to higher bidders.

Public utilities, which serve much of Washington, would not be eligible for the same incentives as for-profit companies to invest in renewable energy.

Among some troubling environmental-protection rollbacks, coastal states, like Washington, would lose some rights to manage their coasts. A bill provision would let the Department of Interior authorize energy projects on the Outer Continental Shelf.

Now is a good time to update U.S. energy policy. The U.S. war on terrorism, the energy crisis and the huge blackout in the East recently all provide good reasons for responsible and balanced reforms. But this bill, with its obsession with the fossil-fuel industry and indifference to environmental protections, is a disappointing attempt that should be abandoned.

Congress can — and should — do better.

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2. Ashcroft's Cointelpro
Neutralizing Dissent in America

By David Lindorff

November 25, 2003
CounterPunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/

Disclosure of a confidential memorandum sent by the FBI to local police disclosing a massive program of infiltration and surveillance of lawful anti-war and anti-WTO protest movements confirms what most progressives and leftists in the U.S. knew already--that the Bush Administration and the Ashcroft "Justice" Department have ushered in a full-fledged return to the Nixon-era practice of employing police-state tactics against opposition movements.

The disclosure also led to a remarkably light-weight and historically shallow and inaccurate report on those Nixon years by the New York Times.

The Times, in an article on Sunday by Eric Licktblau, quite appropriately draws a parallel between the current surveillance efforts of the FBI and the abuses of the national security establishment during the 1960s and '70s, but it minimizes the abuses of that earlier era, and further implies that the abuses ended in 1971.

In fact, Cointelpro, a campaign designed, in the FBI's own words, to "neutralize" and "disrupt" such target organizations as the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Black Panther Party, etc., and the individuals within them, began officially in 1956, and never really ended. Indeed, the FBI's campaign of surveillance, disruption, character assassination and outright murder were expanded well beyond the agency's own actions to include local police "red squads," the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and the National Security Agency, as well as other government agencies.

The Times article describes Cointelpro as a program designed "to harass and discredit Hoover's political enemies." This hardly does justice to the scope and scale of the program.

Hoover did, reportedly, attempt to monitor and undermine his personal enemies, who included a number of politicians in Washington, and he seemed to have a personal vendetta going against Martin Luther King and some other civil rights leaders. But Cointelpro was much more than a device to deal with Hoover's personal foes. It was a broad campaign against organizations that threatened the interests of the state, of presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and it bred countless other extra-legal operations, including Nixon's notorious legion of White House Plumbers.

The scale of the Cointelpro campaign and its less publicized offspring of later years (most of Cointelpro's nefarious activities, exposed during Senate hearings in the early '70s, were made legal by executive orders issued by President Reagan in 1981 during his first year in office), was mind-boggling. I discovered, for example, when I obtained my own FBI file, that in 1969, when I was still 19, I was the subject of an FBI Cointelpro investigation that made use of an agency informant in my school administration at Wesleyan University, simply because of my membership in SDS and the Resistance, an organization that was providing information about resistance to the draft. I also discovered that the Justice Department in Washington was directing the US Attorneys Office in Hartford, CT to have me arrested and jailed for public burning of my draft card in 1969. And I wasn't a leader of anything--just a footsoldier in the antiwar movement.

The sorry and frightening truth is that Cointelpro was a massive, and probably hugely successful, campaign by the state to use secret police tactics to destroy a popular movement and its leaders, and to intimidate the public from exercising their constitutionally protected right to protest and organize in opposition to the government and its policies. Furthermore, while as a program with a name, Cointelpro ended in 1971, that campaign of disruption and surveillance has continued uninterrupted through to the present.

It is, for example, well known and documented that the FBI, during the Reagan years, was infiltrating and disrupting CISPES, one of the main organizations opposing U.S. intervention in Central America. Similarly, local police red squads, such as the Public Disorder Intelligence Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, with close ties to the FBI, was massively infiltrating and spying on as many as 200 organizations, ranging from the Peace & Freedom Party to the National Organization for Women and the Los Angeles Democratic Party as late as 1979, with much of the information collected being turned over to the FBI or a national data base operated by a shady firm with national security links called Western Goals, Inc. That LAPD spy unit wasn't disbanded in the '80s; it just changed its name, and many other local police red squads continued to operate at least into the 1990s. Indeed there is reason to believe that the FBI, barred for many years from infiltrating legal opposition organizations in the domestic U.S., deliberately made use of local police departments to gather information on such organizations.

While the Times report on the FBI's latest domestic spying activities against anti-war and anti-globalization activists is reasonably good, the self-described newspaper of record does a disservice to history and to it s readers by minimizing the nature and reach of Cointelpro and its successor programs.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. A collection of Lindorff's stories can be found here: http://www.nwuphilly.org/dave.html

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3. Media Silence on 9/11

By Danny Schechter and Colleen Kelly,

November 25, 2003
AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17254 

A subpoena can work like truth serum. Drag waffling officials and dissembling politicians before a serious investigatory body and suddenly secrets start to spill and disclosures mount. Dots are connected. Confessions emerge, and sometimes, indictments follow.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were criminal acts, but with political causes and tragic consequences. Two years later, there is much that we don't know about all that happened on September 11th or its aftermath. That's why we now have a National Commission investigating the attacks.

Lest we forget, the commission was only set up because of pressure from 9/11 victim families, and over the stonewalling objections of the current administration. They didn't want an independent investigation at all, and when one was forced on them, this same administration ironically chose Henry Kissinger to head it.

The creation of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 commission) was announced just before Thanksgiving a year ago. President Bush appeared to welcome it saying that the "investigation should carefully examine all the evidence and follow all the facts, wherever they lead (sic)..... It's our most solemn duty."

A year later, what has happened with the implementation of that "solemn duty?"

Conspiracy theories about these events flourish because independently verified information has yet to see the light of day. More importantly no one has been held accountable for any lapses or misjudgments that left our country undefended.

We live in a county where crime scene investigation TV shows are all the rage. Yet, in one of the most serious crimes in this century, there has been no official rush to get all the facts.

If a person was shot in front of the World Trade Center, there would be more of an urgent inquiry into that killing than was accorded the murder of thousands of people in broad daylight. There would be a trial, witnesses giving sworn testimony, evidence presented in public for anyone interested to review and discern.

None of this has yet to happen with regard to 9/11. Is it any wonder that skepticism and suspicion flourish?

Many of us remember spending the summer of 1973 glued to the television, watching Sam Erwin's Watergate hearings. It was public, unrehearsed and very effective. It spotlighted a conspiracy orchestrated by the Oval Office. It helped the public see what was going on in the shadows. Will we ever see such a robust, no-holds-barred inquiry into 9/11?

We encourage the Kean Commission to set an even higher standard. But the latest compromise deal it struck with the White House to limit its own access to documents undercuts its stated mission of a "full and unfettered" investigation.

Commissioner Max Cleland, the former Senator from Georgia said, "If this decision stands, I, as a member of the commission, cannot look any American in the eye, especially family members of victims, and say the commission had full access. This investigation is now compromised." This recent compromise has also been denounced by many family members of 9/11 victims.

The media has also compromised its role as an independent watchdog. Until recently, there has been minimal media coverage of the 9/11 commission. This apparent media indifference leads us to ask the media and our fellow Americans the following question: Which event has greater historical importance, a paranoid Nixon White House attempting to insure political victory, or the death of nearly 3000 people, unparalleled change in U.S. foreign policy, and a war on terror likely to change American life for generations? It leads us to wonder about why there is so much ho-hum follow-up.

What happened to a media that went into wall-to-wall patriotically-correct flag-waving mode after 9/11? Virtually all mainstream outlets have downplayed the issue, across the spectrum from right to left. We are not sure why.

Neither is Eric Alterman of the Nation who did some analysis of the numbers of stories airing on the Fox News Channel, which has built its reputation by stridently covering 9/11 and terrorism.

He concludes: "Fox has treated viewers to a virtual news blackout on commission-related news. And if this has been an accident, it has to be one of the most amazing news-gathering coincidences in cable history." His research on program content led him to conclude that the coverage overall was "closer to zero"

Alterman did credit the AP, the Dallas Morning News and the Newark Star-Ledger for breaking through the silence that surrounds the commission's work. But few television networks are picking up their lead or sending investigative reporters out to critically examine the administration's own case for an al Qaeda conspiracy.

The networks seem too busy refuting the Kennedy Assassination critics to look into the likelihood of White House incompetence and even complicity in the events of 9/11. We owe the victims the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Isn't it time for our media to wake up and do its job if the government won't do the same?

Colleen Kelly lost her brother Bill Kelly Jr. at the World Trade Center. She is a founder of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Danny Schechter, editor of Mediachannel.org, is making a film about the unanswered questions of 9/11. He is the author of "Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception: How the Media failed to cover the war on Iraq." (Prometheus Books, 2003)

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4. The Fiction Of Free Trade

By Jeff Milchen

November 25, 2003
TomPaine.com
http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9490 

Jeff Milchen is the founder of ReclaimDemocracy.org , a non-profit organization dedicated to restoring democratic authority over corporations.

The corporate executives promoting the “Free Trade Agreement of the Americas” (FTAA) and the protesters that marched in the streets of Miami share a common habit: using the term “free trade.” For the former this isn’t surprising; for the latter it’s inexplicable.

Americans like anything that’s free—both literally and rhetorically—and FTAA boosters naturally embrace the term. Yet, opponents of FTAA hurt their cause by conceding to boosters the terms of debate, as they argue they want "fair trade, not free trade."

In most realms of commerce, nothing even approaching free trade is being practiced by the United States, and by allowing so-called free trade supporters to go unchallenged, FTAA opponents help maintain the fiction of an unregulated, open marketplace. Trade treaties erect barriers to trade as often as they remove such barriers. As Wayne Andreas, CEO of Archer Daniels Midland said in 1995: “There is not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in the free market. Not one. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.” As someone well-acquainted with both illegal price fixing and the legal exertion of political power to extract taxpayer subsidies, Andreas knows of what he speaks.

Not only do treaties like FTAA outlaw forms of protectionism that serve the public interest—such as safeguards for healthy air, drinkable water and a safe workplace—they preclude or destroy competition in many business realms. FTAA proposals would strengthen some of the most expensive and anti-competitive forms of protectionism—patents, copyrights and other monopolies commonly grouped under the rubric “intellectual property rights.”

Many of these rights are essential to ensure that writers, researchers, musicians and others receive just compensation for their work. More often, though, these monopolies are giveaways of research and assets paid for by our tax dollars.

Take the prescription drug market, for instance, a subject of much recent debate. Eleven of the 14 most medically significant drugs developed in the United States between 1970 and 1995 originated with government research. Developed using $32 million in taxpayer dollars, the cancer drug Taxol became the property of Bristol-Myers Squibb after the government gifted the exclusive patent for the drug to the pharmaceutical giant. Squibb generates close to $2 billion in Taxol sales annually and has charged about 2,000 percent over production cost thanks to a government-created monopoly.

We constantly hear Canadian price controls blamed for the cheaper price of Canadian drugs, when actually price controls imposed by the U.S. government are the primary reason for the obscenely high prices. Why is the U.S. government imposing price controls? To increase corporate profits. The driving force behind the corporate trade agreements is to expand such lucrative forms of protectionism across international borders. And while tariffs rarely increase the price of a product by more than 25 percent, patent-protected monopolies can gouge us with prices 20 times the cost we'd see in a truly "free" -- or competitive -- market.

Not only do many of the proposed "property rights" undermine the notion that these trade agreements are about meaningful competition, they are unconscionable to any decent society because they effectively mandate suffering and death to bolster corporate profits. For example, poor countries that import generic AIDS drugs that save thousands of lives have been sued to halt the practice as a violation of trade treaties.

While corporate and government officials eagerly pit many relatively prosperous North American workers against poverty-wage workers overseas and allow migrant workers to further depress pay at low-wage jobs, they simultaneously erect barriers to prevent foreign professionals like doctors and lawyers from practicing in the United States, thus lowering medical and legal bills. The added costs to Americans of protectionism in these politically influential professions dwarf those caused by more controversial protections like U.S. tariffs on steel imports. In our society, political power determines where markets will or will not be free.

Such market distortions also occur in many retail markets. In October, the Consumers Union issued a lengthy report showing that independent pharmacies beat chain competitors on price, service and overall satisfaction. So why have chain drug stores displaced more than one thousand independent shops in the past decade?

Government discrimination is a significant factor. For example, Pennsylvania’s health plan for state workers mandates that they fill prescriptions at Rite Aid or via online vendors. Where are those Republicans who so vocally object to “limiting choice” when it’s small businesses that are disadvantaged? Independent pharmacies also suffer under federal bias such as Congress’ prohibition on Internet sales tax, which forbid states from treating local business and mail order or Internet vendors equally. As a result, local businesses must compete against an effective federal subsidy of 4 to 6 percent in most states.

While the core reason for citizens to reject the FTAA is the ongoing attempt to rewrite international commerce rules in ways that trump democracy, citizens should not concede the premise of its title. We should shift debate to democratic terms and reject language that stacks the deck against us. Too bad “we want democracy, not corporate rule” doesn’t make much of a chant.

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5. FBI Surveillance Plans Spur Opposition

By Jim Lobe

Tuesday, November 25, 2003
www.OneWorld.net
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1125-07.htm

WASHINGTON -- A classified FBI intelligence memorandum, leaked to the New York Times last weekend, has raised concern among some civil-rights groups and lawmakers who worry that it reflects a growing tendency on the part of the Bush administration to promote security measures at the expense of key freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism.

Among other things the Oct. 15 memorandum calls for local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activities at protests to its counter-terrorism squads. The Times described it as "the first corroboration of a coordinated, nationwide effort to collect intelligence regarding demonstrations."

"Attorney General (John) Ashcroft has dismissed critics of the Justice Department's tactics as 'hysterical' and has even said that such criticism aids the terrorists," said Anthony Romero, executive director off the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

"But this bulletin confirms that the federal government is targeting innocent Americans engaged in nothing more than lawful protest and dissent," he said, adding that citizens "deserve an explanation for what is clearly a return to the days of (former FBI director) J. Edgar Hoover's spying tactics."

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) raised similar questions and also called for an investigation of what the FBI and other intelligence agencies were planning. CCR is calling on Attorney General John Ashcroft to resign.

"Routine spying on dissidents is a sign of a police state, and unless we stop this administration's cavalier attitude towards fundamental rights we face a serious threat to our democracy," said Michael Ratner, president of CCR.

According to a front-page story in Sunday's Times, the memorandum was circulated last month to local law enforcement agencies across the country in advance of anticipated anti-war rallies in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.

Its disclosure comes amid increasing controversy about measures the government is taking to prosecute the war on terrorism at home, as well as abroad.

Last week Congress passed a new intelligence authorization bill that included a provision tacked on at the last moment that would expand the FBI's ability to demand that certain kinds of businesses turn over documents about their clients without any prior judicial review. Ashcroft has also indicated that he hopes to broaden the coverage of the 2002 USA PATRIOT Act to make it easier for the FBI to obtain information about suspected terrorists.

Nor is it only the expanded powers of the FBI that are causing concern. Writing in the Los Angeles Times Sunday, national-security analyst William Arkin warned that the military and intelligence communities are implementing far-reaching changes designed to break down long-established barriers to military action and surveillance in the U.S.

With the creation of the new U.S. Northern Command, he wrote, the military has begun to focus on waging the war on terror at home, as well as abroad. He quotes Command chief Gen. Ralph E. (Ed) Eberhart, as saying, " 'We must start thinking differently.' Before 9/11, the military and intelligence systems were focused on 'the away game' and not properly focused on 'the home game.' "

"[I]t doesn't seem far-fetched to imagine that those charged with assembling 'actionable intelligence' will slowly start combining data bases of known terrorists with seemingly innocuous lists of contributors to charities or causes, that membership lists for activist organizations will be folded in, that names and personal data of anti-globalization protesters will be run through the 'data mine,' " warned Arkin.

Meanwhile, another military expert, ret. Gen. Tommy Franks, who ran the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, told Cigar Aficionado magazine of his concern that another major terrorist attack on the order of 9/11 could cause citizens to "question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid another mass casualty-producing event."

The memo, according to the Times, described how protesters have sometimes used "training camps" to rehearse "tactics and counter-strategies for dealing with the police and to resolve any logistical issues." It also noted their use of the Internet to raise money and "coordinate their activities prior to demonstrations" --all perfectly legal activities.

It said protestors use "innovative strategies," like videotaping arrests as a means of "intimidation" against local police, and that protesters may raise money to help pay for lawyers for those who arrested.

"This reminds me of the old Nixon times and the enemies list," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who noted that that the administration has gone to "extraordinary lengths" in attacking lawmakers who question Bush's policy on Iraq. "How could we be fighting abroad to defend our freedoms and diminishing those freedoms here at home?" he asked.

FBI and Justice Department officials stressed that the memorandum offered normal intelligence guidelines targeted exclusively against terrorist activity and based on the assumption that terrorists or "anarchists" may infiltrate peaceful demonstrations to pursue their ends. They noted that black-clad anarchists had caused widespread property damage in attacks on businesses in Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization ministerial meeting there and in subsequent, smaller protests elsewhere in the U.S.

But American University law professor Herman Schwartz told the Times that the memorandum and the operations behind would very likely exercise a "serious chilling effect on peaceful demonstration. If you go around telling people, 'We're going to ferret out information on demonstrations,' that deters people. People don't want their names and pictures in FBI files," he said.

The ACLU's Romero was particularly disturbed by the warning about demonstration's videotapying arrests. "Most mainstream demonstrators often use videotape during protests to document law enforcement activity and, more importantly, deter police from acting outside the law."

While saying that the FBI possesses no information about any planned unlawful activity, the memorandum goes on to urge local law enforcement "to be alert to these possible indicators of protest activity and report any potentially illegal acts" to federal authorities.

Justin Raimondo, a liberterian commentator for the website antiwar.com, was especially struck by the FBI's concern about training camps, suggesting that the Bureau may be misinterpreting what is taught there. "Visions of wild-eyed anarchists learning how to make Molotov cocktails dance in the head, but the reality is much more prosaic: it's just a bunch of hippies playing touchy-feely games with each other and training in techniques designed to MINIMIZE violence," he noted.

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6. Arresting The Future

By Tom Hayden

November 21, 2003
AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17246

Editor's Note: Tom Hayden is reporting for AlterNet from the Free Trade Area of the Americas conference in Miami.

MIAMI, Friday 8:21pm EST – The police force continued operating with the brains and appetite of a carnivorous shark today as city officials kept demonstrating "the Miami model" of suppression even as protestors and trade ministers were leaving the city in droves.

At a Friday afternoon press conference, Thea Lee, the chief international economist of the AFL-CIO, spoke of feeling terrified Thursday as police fired pepper gas and plastic bullets at peaceful marchers. Other labor leaders, including AFL-CIO president John Sweeney expressed "outrage" over the police blocking of a permitted gathering, and cited specific abuses such as a union retiree being denied necessary medication after an arbitrary arrest.

Global Exchange co-founder Medea Benjamin and others were pulled over Thursday night by a dozen officers who pointed guns at them. The Sierra Club's Washington D.C. advocate, Dan Seligman, also described officers holding a weapon to his head and that of another colleague. Mark Rand, coordinator of a group of foundation funders, displayed a large bluish bruise on the back of his leg from a rubber bullet.

When 100 protestors ventured to the Dade County jail today to speak out against yesterday's arrests and detentions of some 145 people, a third on felonies, the same cycle of avoidable suppression they were describing unfolded yet again.

David Solnit, one of the founders of the Seattle movement, attributed the harsh police measures to Miami's character as a center of "vulgar capitalism." Unlike other cities, where authorities may appear to assimilate dissent for political reasons, he said, Miami has attempted to sweep it away as a foreign curse. AFL-CIO leader Ron Judd speculated that the police suppression deflected public attention from working-class trade issues, while Medea Benjamin accused authorities of "trying to get the people of this city and county used to this militaristic model" instead of the relatively benign model of policing used at Cancun only two months ago.

I came to Miami with eight students from Harvard University, where I have been teaching a study group on social movements this semester. They carried with them questionnaires to sample the opinions of this new generation of protestors, and received a first-hand education in police suppression today. After the press conference outside the county jail, about 200 young people marched 100 yards, stopping in a parking lot across a street from several hundred heavily equipped police officers.

Negotiations between a police commander and activist lawyers produced peaceful coexistence for an hour late in the afternoon. There were high spirits, even humor, among the protestors who invented chants like "There ain't no riot here, take off that stupid gear" and songs like "We all live in a failed democracy."

The protest could easily have been contained by a handful of officers, or might have simply faded as the day ended. Instead, at approximately 5:00 p.m. the commanding officer summoned the activist lawyers to announce that those milling, waiting or sitting in the parking lot had become an "unlawful assembly" with three minutes to disperse. In addition, he said with a straight face, there was "intelligence" that some in the crowd had rocks. There was no evidence shared with regard to this secret intelligence and no rocks were seen in the events that followed.

Instead of resisting, the crowd began dispersing along 14th Street, the only egress route available. With the Harvard students, I was among the last to leave, along with camerawoman Ana Nogueria and reporter Jeremy Scahill from Democracy Now! Crossing a driveway I met David Solnit again, who had decided not to take it any more.

"Come on, Tom, here's your historical moment," he said. "We need civil disobedience to say no to all this."

I replied with words to the effect that I was writing about this, not leading it, feeling slight pangs of nostalgia and guilt. But there was no more time for talk. The police were advancing only a few feet behind us. I stayed with my Harvard students, having warned them earlier that they might be caught up or hurt in the unpredictable police sweep.

Solnit and six others sat down suddenly on the sidewalk, holding their hands up in V-signs. A phalanx of 25 police closed in on them as we took photographs and notes from a few feet away. In moments the seven on the sidewalk were handcuffed and led away. More police were swarming everywhere now, overwhelming the remaining protestors by ten to one.

One block away, the dispersing crowd was walking backwards as more police marched on them with helmet visors down and guns and clubs drawn. By now five of my students had joined this retreating witness, all holding their hands over their heads and chanting "We are dispersing" again and again.

How could the police not notice how young they were, how utterly unthreatening, how innocent?

I moved alongside the advancing and retreating lines to take a photograph when I noticed that a policeman was aiming a shotgun straight at my chest. Fear leaped in me, then he pointed the weapon down. But a moment later he was looking down the barrel at me again. I was holding a camera, notebook and pen. Suddenly I found myself asking him, "Are you really pointing that fucking gun at me?"

Nothing happened, and I turned back to look for the students. They were on the public sidewalk, but by now more police had arrived to prevent them from walking any further.

The last I saw of them – Anne Beckett, Maddy Elfenbein, Jordan Bar Am, Rachel Bloomekatz and Toussaint Losier, all undergraduates – their hands were still up as they were swallowed up by the black-and-brown uniformed horde. When they were on the ground, one officer added a final squirt of pepper spray. How brave they look, I added to myself.

Two of my other students avoided arrest by happening to turn in another direction and, minutes later, Touissant, a tall African American with dreds and a video camera, magically walked free because the police were too busy with their already downed dissidents. A minute later, I learned that Democracy Now's Ana Nogueira – and her camera – had been enveloped and arrested too. It was another experiment in the "Miami model." What I remembered of this imperial aggressiveness at the ballot box from November 2000 now seemed to be repeating itself on the streets.

Police subsequently informed the larger world that a mob of menacing protestors had disobeyed orders to dissolve an unlawful assembly and were treated accordingly.

In truth the police may have radicalized a new generation of America's future leaders.

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