Posted by [EMAIL PROTECTED] : Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1999 12:51:50 -0800 (PST) From: Davis Oldham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This is going to the various addresses indicated in the forwarded report from Jim Desyllas called "Collateral Damage in Seattle." It was forwarded to a list I'm on here in Seattle. It is simply false to say, as the report does, that "Up until Tuesday at 4pm there was one window broken in the whole city - a McDonalds window." The claim that the police provoked all of the vandalism is also unsupportable. When I saw kids posing on disabled cop cars and tearing down Niketown's sign, there were no cops nearby and any momentary anger from getting gassed had obviously worn off, if it was there to begin with. People came dressed for street fighting, it's part of a long tradition in certain circles, and they were quite up front about their intentions and their motives, which had little to do with the response to cop aggression. I saw all this, and plenty of broken glass, before I went to lunch: well before 4PM. I don't dispute much of what Desyllas says, but frankly, patently false statements in a document like this give readers little reason to trust the veracity of the rest of it. People need to be careful about their rhetoric, and about what they *don't* know as well as what they do. I can't comment, for instance, on the accuracy of the story about the 70-year-old woman getting gassed, because I wasn't there. Seeing plainly untrue statements elsewhere doesn't give me a lot of confidence, however, in what he has to say about this or what the delegates said or anything else. Being an eyewitness doesn't mean you saw everything that went on. The media are not the only ones who have a vested interest in hyping the violence. Davis Oldham [EMAIL PROTECTED]
