The following is an eye witness account of the Seattle protest. The source is www.emperors-clothes.com/analysis/collater.htm. Here is exists in a complete form. My only reason for condensing it is that we are all short on time. The tragedy of email. How to filter all the information! Regards - Kerry Spencer-Salt B.E. LL.B. (Hons) ===================================== Collateral Damage in Seattle by Jim Desyllas (posted 12-2-99) The author is a student in Portland Oregon.... I just spent 4 days in Seattle.... This...peaceful demonstration...was attacked repeatedly by the police with the express purpose of provoking a violent response to provide photo opportunities for the Western media. I know because I watched it happening. I'll tell you how they did it.... So the government instigated a "riot" to discredit the movement against the WTO because they couldn't dilute it. I am not guessing about this. I was there. I saw it happening. And I will tell you I am frankly shocked to see, close up, just how little our leaders care what happens to ordinary people.... Sunday and Monday, there was no violence. None. The people were aggressively non-violent; they were self-policing.... At this point, a new group of police - tactical police - moved in and started gassing people and shooting rubber bullets. Is it any surprise that people got mad?... They were trained to attack people. A small group, maybe 100 people total, struck back. Then these cops herded that group around the city, making sure there were plenty of photo ops of "violent protesters." A number of times they had these 100 or so protesters caught between buildings and walls of police. They could easily have arrested and detained this small number of people and gotten it over with. Instead they would gas them and let them go. Then trap them again, gas them again, and again let them go. The cops made no arrests that I know of until late Tuesday night though the skirmishing was going on from three till 9:30... Tuesday night the police gassed all of downtown. This was going on from 3 PM, till 6 PM.. Gas everywhere....It was staged. I believe also the police had their own people in there [could this be the protestors in the ski masks ??], encouraging people to break stuff - if people think I may be exaggerating, I saw supposed protesters - they were screaming and so on - and then later, when everything was over, the same people tackled other protestors and put handcuffs on them. At 6pm they issued a State of Emergency....If you were alive, the police gassed you... was a Texaco gas station - they threw tear gas at gas pumps, believe it or not - they were like vandals. They gassed a bus. I saw it with my own eyes. A bus. The driver, the riders, the people just abandoned it . Anyway, because they were gassing everybody, the local people got mad too and they joined the 100 who had been herded out of the city. So soon there were 500 including the neighborhood people and all very angry.... The thing that drove Clinton crazy was that on Tuesday the protesters had succeeded in making nonviolent human chains and had therefore stopped everyone from going into the World Trade Center.... At one point the Seattle Mayor said his boys were not using rubber bullets. Miraculously, by then I had ten in my pocket. I could open a little market, sell the things. They are everywhere.... I want to emphasize, these protesters were NOT violent people. They were the most non-violent people I have ever seen. ... So now I have made personal acquaintance with the people who run this country, and they are quite simply scum. There were people at work, people with babies, they were all getting gassed because the government would not allow an assembly of people speaking their minds. ... ---------------------------------------------------------------- This is the Neither public email list, open for the public and general discussion. To unsubscribe click here Mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Subject=unsubscribe To subscribe click here Mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Subject=subscribe For information on [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.neither.org/lists/public-list.htm For archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
