Miami Vice

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

MIAMI – Protestors seemed to skirmish with heavily armored Miami police outside the Riande Hotel Thursday morning, but nothing is at it seems this week. These "anarchists" were undercover police officers whose mission was to provoke a confrontation.

The crowd predictably panicked, television cameras moved in, the police lines parted, and I watched through a nearby hotel window as two undercover officers disguised as "anarchists," thinking they were invisible, hugged each other. They excitedly pulled tasers and other weapons out of their camouflage cargo pants, and slipped away in an unmarked police van.

On the other side of the impenetrable police barricade, a young woman with a video camera was bent over, vomiting from pepper spray. The nonviolent revolutionary Starhawk stood blinded for 10 minutes as friends washed her eyes. Others knelt paralyzed on the street.

A few hours later, hundreds of peaceful protestors – and a few shocked reporters – sitting quietly in Bayfront Park on Biscayne Boulevard were sprayed like unwanted pests by officers who described themselves as Robo-Cops.

(much more...great article...)
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17234

Here

With $8.5 million provided from the taxpayer funds meant for Iraq, the Miami police have splurged on "non-lethal" weapons, including CS-gas sprays. Gleaming new desert-colored armored personnel carriers and bright green water-cannon trucks backed the police presence on the streets.

Newscasters embedded Iraq-style among the police provided a complementary narrative rationalizing the show of force. For example, when a young white woman holding her fingers in a V-sign was shot point blank with a rubber bullet, the local ABC commentator said without the slightest evidence, "She took a rubber bullet in the stomach, she must have done something. You wanna play, you gotta pay."

And

Miami Mayor Manny Diaz called the police presence "a model for homeland defense." Two weeks ago, Miami chief John Timoney was quoted as saying his strategy would be "a failure" if tear gas was used. Tonight he actually claimed on CBS that the demonstrators and not the police used the tear gas. Anyway, he continued, it was not tear gas but "pepper spray with a capsule formula."

As to protests scheduled for Friday, "if they engage in lawful activity, we're gonna arrest them." He didn't notice the misstatement – if indeed it was a misstatement.

NOTE: It appears that the rest of the FTAA conference was cancelled this evening. Aw. Poor Jeb.

More on this in LBN.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=231842

Now I get it!

When * was in town fundraising. A few blocks away from the hotel where he was to appear, about 2 hours before it all began, a police car dropped off two men - skinheads w/bandanas over the top, boots, t-shirts, in their mid-20s I'd guess - who checked the newspaper racks for bombs, then promptly got back into the cruiser. Much later I saw them mingling in the crowd.

Had this great editorial several weeks ago:

<clips>
Evidence Of Things Unseen: The Rise of a New Movement

...The evidence of things unseen. There is rising a new movement in the world. It is bigger than the movement of the 1960s. Yet it is barely seen by the experts and analysts. They look only at the behavior of institutions and politicians, not the underlying forces that eventually burst into visibility.

The first strand of this new movement is the global opposition to the war in Iraq and to an American empire.

One year ago this month, when over 100,000 demonstrators hit the streets in Washington DC, the New York Times reported that surprisingly few attended the anti-war march, perhaps out of fear of the sniper. National Public Radio repeated the story. How could they not see the 100,000? Apparently because such protests were not supposed to happen anymore. Both the Times and NPR were forced to apologize a few days later and report the huge turnout. Then, in another correction, the Times announced in February that there was a "second superpower" in the world in addition to the White House, which was world public opinion. By then 10 million people were demonstrating globally; two million in Rome, one million in London, 200,000 in Montreal in 20-degrees-below weather – even a brave few in McMurdo Station in Antarctica.

The second strand is the global justice movement, which began with the Zapatistas on the day NAFTA took effect, then surfaced in Seattle in 1999. Those were called isolated events. Then came Genoa, Quebec City, Quito, Cancun, the world social forums in Porto Allegre. Far from isolated events, these were the historic battlegrounds of a new history being born.

http://alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17000

...

(snip) Protesters say the proposed free trade zone will siphon thousands of jobs to other countries, reduce workers' rights by exploiting cheap labor and harm the environment.

About 140 demonstrators were arrested, and 20 people were taken to the hospital for treatment, including three police officers.

"As the level of confrontation escalated, so did the level of presence by our police officers," police spokesman Jorge Pino said.

After the march ended, several dozen protesters returned to the streets to clash with officers, challenging police lines and throwing water bottles, colored flares and rocks at officers.

Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at the demonstrators after they set trash fires and launched projectiles from slingshots.
(snip/...)

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/business/7316973.htm