A Day in the Park Amid Rumors of War (Life in America under Bush)

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday October 03, 2002 14:25 by joe

A Day in the Park Amid Rumors of War

A Day in the Park Amid Rumors of War
by Joe 9:06am Thu Oct 3 '02
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This my 69 year old father's account of being arrested in Pershing Park, September 27, 2002. Make sure to read the end where he compares the preemptive arrests to our war policy of preemptive attacks, and decribes the real threat to national security: 6,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert pointed right at us.

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America is the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world. Our capitol’s name now resonates among vast populations as a metaphor for achievement and grandeur surpassing the standard set by Rome and unequaled for more than two thousand years.

But our capitol and our nation are gripped by an unreasoning fear that is attacking our founding principles and driving our national priorities in directions perilous to our security and our hope for stability in the world.

This fear is manifesting itself in many ways and places and with impacts large and small.

On Friday, September 27, 2002, in Washington D.C., one of the small impacts stunned my sense of my own place in our society. It shook my confidence that our Constitution and my adherence to that rule of law made me safe and secure on the streets of our capitol.

This is how it happened. At 9:15am by prearrangement, I met my 28 year old daughter, Alexis, in front of the Marriott Hotel on 14th Street. Alexis has devoted her young life to working for what she views as social justice and to adding beauty to the world through dance.

She was planning to attend what we thought was a permitted demonstration scheduled at 9:00am in Freedom Plaza, opposing the Bush administration’s policies regarding Iraq. I believe that those policies pose grave dangers to our country and to the world, and I wanted to join Alexis and show my support. In pursuing her causes in the past, Alexis had been arrested. As her father, this grieved me and instilled a fear related to her actives. I support all of Alexis’s motives and most of her causes, but my parental vision is for Alexis to use her training to practice law to achieve her goals and not to be arrested. Joining her on Friday thus gave me the opportunity to personally apply my advice to her to stay out of jail, which I thought was largely a matter of choice on the part of the demonstrators.

We crossed the street to Freedom Plaza and found it surrounded by police who refused to allow any demonstrators to enter. We then crossed 14th Street to Pershing Park, which was also surrounded, but where the police were allowing demonstrators to enter the park. We stopped on the sidewalk and held up a banner expressing opposition to war in Iraq. We stood at the edge of the park with the banner facing 14th Street but out of the way of anyone using the sidewalk.

We had displayed the banner for about ten minutes when the line of police moved across the sidewalk from the street curb to the edge of the park. They ordered us to move into the park. This order, which prevented us from standing on the sidewalk and displaying our banner to 14th Street traffic, did not seem legal to us. Nevertheless we obeyed it, as did every demonstrator in our view. We now held up our banner several feet inside the perimeter of the park, which was the new line of the reinforced police cordon. After about five minutes in the park, Alexis, who was coordinating legal support for some of the demonstrators, received a call on her cell phone to report to another location downtown where arrests of demonstrators were taking place. We folded the banner and attempted to leave the park. The police quickly closed ranks and physically blocked our attempt. We asked if we were under arrest and the police replied by telling us to get back into the park. We obeyed.

I was convinced that the police confronting us were mistaken in interpreting the orders they had received. We walked back into the park toward 15th Street and again tried to pass through the police line. We were again physically blocked from leaving and forced back into the park. Demonstrators arriving at the park during this time were permitted to continue entering. Some later said that they were ordered or encouraged by the police to enter the park.

Although confining the demonstrators in the park was an illegal use of police force, I was still confident that nothing worse was about to occur unless the demonstrators attempted to resist their detention. I was reassured that trouble would be avoided when the first tightening of the police cordon suddenly occured. Without warning, the riot-equipped police began a shoulder to shoulder advance into the park, physically forcing the demonstrators back. None of the demonstrators offered any resistance.

We were now confined to a small part of the park sheltered by trees and largely unseen from the streets. There was still enough space for drumming, dancing and chanting by the demonstrators and a few benches where Alexis and I sat and talked. I was still convinced that the goal of the police was limited to immobilizing the demonstrators in the park, out of sight, and that the peaceful conduct of the demonstrators would protect us.

Alexis disagreed, and within a few minutes her forebodings were confirmed by another charge by the police. Demonstrators were forced through the trees and over benches to avoid the police line and batons. The charge did not stop until the confinement of space forced everyone to stand packed together and surrounded by hostile police in the armored suits of Star Wars villains. After several minutes, without warning the police began seizing the unresisting would-be demonstrators and pinning their arms behind their backs with plastic cuffs. This eliminated all arm movement and frequently inflicted pain.

The handcuffed demonstrators were then placed in buses and transported to the Police Academy near Blue Plains. The bus experience, despite the short distance traveled, was to last 14 hours except for a few breaks outside and trips to portable toilets. The ride itself proved the difficulty of sitting in a seat with your hands tightly bound behind your back. During the ride several people pleaded with the police to loosen their painful handcuffs. They were ignored and a pattern was set which was to last until our release. The police had made a command decision to treat us as criminals if not actual terrorists. This was true even though the police described our violation (“failure to obey”) as the equivalent of a traffic ticket, which of course involves no arrest or processing. In contrast, we were fully processed to include conditions normally associated only with incarceration such as the temporary confiscation of all personal belongings to include belts and shoelaces, fingerprinting and a mug shot photo. From the police standpoint this had the not unwelcome bonus effect of locking people up for over 24 hours for an offense they insisted was “like a traffic ticket.”

Alexis and I were processed at 12:30am into the Police Academy. The building contained a large gymnasium where we were held. Three lines of gym mats were spread on the floor of the gym. Demonstrators were assigned to a specific spot on specific mat and shackled at all times. The shackle connected one wrist to the opposite ankle, and had the effect of making it impossible to stand erect. Standing was forbidden in any event, along with kneeling or moving from your assigned spot.

Our stay in the gym lasted another fourteen hours while the required paperwork was accomplished. I would like to think that a good faith effort was made by the police to shorten our confinement. Based on everything else that happened, I find it difficult to give them the benefit of any doubt. They knew the processing was going to take a long time and they were not disappointed. This, of course, reflects the command attitude. The rank and file police were very vocal in their complaints to us over their long hours and their lack of sleep. Compared with the demonstrators, who for the most part complained only about their loss of freedom and their civil rights, many of the police sought our sympathy for their hard working conditions.

The police also refused to allow demonstrators any access to legal assistance. This was a serious handicap and was compounded by the misinformation about legal rights given repeatedly and insistently by the police. The police said that the violation was minor “like a traffic ticket,” and that agreeing to pay the fine of $50 would result in speedy processing and early release. (They were still making that argument on Saturday afternoon.) The police threatened that anyone who refused to pay the fine and insisted upon a court hearing would be held in jail until Monday. The police failed to explain that local residents with identification were entitled to release on a “citation” without any payment by agreeing to appear at a future scheduled court proceeding. By refusing to explain the citation process and by insisting that only those who paid fines would be released before Monday, the police improperly coerced admissions of guilt from scores of defendants.

All of this is an appalling, but not unusual, example of government abuse of power. But there is another lesson here, a cautionary story that we ignore at our peril.
Chief Ramsey and the DC Police Department executed a preemptive strike against American citizens in Pershing Park who committed no criminal acts. All of the actions in Pershing Park by the demonstrators were legal, peaceful and protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Chief Ramsey does not attempt to justify the mass arrest in the park by events that actually occurred. He justifies them by saying that if not arrested in advance, the demonstrators would have broken the law. Ramsey does not identify these future crimes or offer any evidence to support his claims. He ignores the rule of law.

The similarity of the DC Police preemptive action to the war policy it was used to defend is striking.
Our government’s war policy asserts that Iraq is a “mortal threat” to America and that the mortal threat is “imminent.” The government offers no convincing evidence and as one assertion supporting war is discredited another is concocted. Nevertheless the National Security Strategy of the United States says we may strike sovereign nations preemptively if we think they pose a threat. The President says that the decision to strike preemptively is his and that, although he may ask for Congressional and United Nations support, such support is not essential.

This is a war policy based on fear that drives us to attack peaceful demonstrators and weak countries like Iraq.
The National Security Strategy of the US boasts that we are so overwhelmingly superior militarily to all the nations of the world that we will not even allow another power to attempt to challenge us. As the document puts it, we will use our hyper-power to “dissuade” any challenge to the US and if that doesn’t work we will preemptively destroy such challengers, with allies if possible, but alone if necessary.

Such a strategy, if valid, would at least offer the comfort of security. But the strategy is not valid; it is a vast misrepresentation.

Iraq is neither a “mortal” nor an “imminent” threat to the U.S. But such a threat does exist. It exists not in the “axis of evil” or terrorism. It comes from a country the President calls “our friend,” and it is a country with which a preemptive war would threaten the end of civilization.

Our government is engaged in a massive attempt to avert its eyes and the attention of the people from the actual existence of 6,000 nuclear weapons on intercontinental missiles ready to be launched against the United States within minutes. That is a mortal threat and it is imminent, and it is in Russia.

As far as we know, Russia has not taken a single weapon out of service or off alert in response to Bush’s claim that they are our friends. More important to Russia is the fact that we have abolished arms control and substituted a treaty that promises to reduce weapons but requires absolutely nothing and expires the day after the promises are supposed to be fulfilled.

Preemption in this nuclear sphere is called “first strike.” It means massively attacking without warning to destroy the nuclear weapons of the target country or reduce them to a level that can be destroyed by a ballistic missile defense if the target country attempts to retaliate.
Several U.S. military commanders have advocated a nuclear first strike. Every president up to the current one has rejected it as madness.

What if we should find that Russia was no longer our “friend?” If the President were to follow this new strategy and preemptively attack Russia in order to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction before they could be used against us, what might happen? Suppose that we were spectacularly successful and destroyed 90% of the Russian nuclear weapons on the ground. Then suppose that our ABM’s had a phenomenally good performance and destroyed 50% of the retaliatory strike. There would still be 300 nuclear explosions on American targets: explosions that would make the explosions of 9/11 look like popping soap bubbles. That is what is at stake in a preemptive war against Iraq. It would grant to the President the power to conduct unlimited war. Russia opposes our war threats against Iraq. If we strike Iraq preemptively without Russian support we risk a nuclear confrontation in which both sides would claim the right to strike first.

This administration is attempting to prevent criticism of preemptive military strikes abroad by preemptively arresting protesters at home. They violate the principles of the Bill of Rights in order to freely violate the rule of international law. Surely such behavior exposes the weakness of the Administration’s case for a preemptive war. Why do they fear debate? Why do they fear of the voice of the people? A terrible thing happened to the demonstrators and to the Constitution in Pershing Park. But if seeing fellow citizens falsely accused and falsely imprisoned will encourage more Americans to speak out for peace and freedom, then Alexis and I will be happy to have paid the price.