Paul Berg asked “Did Amy have press credentials for the RNC?”

All the arrested Democracy Now crew had valid RNC press credentials, Amy is said to have had a convention floor pass - the most privileged and difficult to obtain. And yes - getting press credentials for these spectacles is a nearly impossible task - especially for someone like Amy who was booted from White house press corp access in the past for asking too many difficult questions.

But one has to wonder (OK - maybe not) where the mainstream press is during these conventions (though an AP photographer was also arrested yesterday). They’re certainly not in the streets with the ordinary people and the hundreds of protesting Iraqi vets. Obviously there is an approved script for the convention coverage and the mainstream press is staying well within the agreed upon boundaries. It’s much like the moment early in the Bush administration when the White House told the press corp that this administration was creating it’s own reality and they could either get on-board or be cut off. Virtually all drank the kool-aid and stayed on to ride the terror bus.

Sadly, the days of Murrow, Cronkite and even Rather are long past and irretrievable. The fourth estate under rule of a corporate state has two very demanding masters and neither are the public. Compliant anchors (who are no longer trained as journalists) are now manufactured in schools around the country can be replaced as easily as their dentures. The late Herb Schiller’s characterization of this as the consciousness industry is truer and more chilling today than when he wrote it some 30 years ago.

Mike and those at St. Paul Neighborhood Network - sorry to hear your windows got smashed. Hope you had a surveillance system. if so, there’s probably a 50/50 chance it was an uncover cop masked in black block garb (and yes - that would be rather impossible to ascertain). But this has been the pattern since the WTO protests of Seattle in 1999 and has been well documented (and unreported) in various globalization protests around the world. One of the flaws of anonymous affinity groups as an organizing tactic is that police provocateurs and saboteurs can easily pose as masked activists and provoke or engage in the requisite violence and property damage when it’s deemed necessary. Police have already admitted to infiltrating convention organizing groups prior to the conventions - this is relatively small step beyond that bit of intelligence gathering groundwork.

I know that sounds overly conspiratorial and you’re thinking “wow - Michael’s gone whack again”, but these abuses have been documented on video by independent media activists and the evidence and eyewitness accounts are quite compelling. That’s probably one of the reasons a group like iWitness Video who do counter-surveillance on the police were targeted early on in St Paul - and probably why their local NYC colleagues, The Glass Bead Collective, had all their gear seized in Denver. Fifteen years ago, showing up at a protest with a camera could be an effective deterrent against police misconduct, a form of self-defense - today it only makes you a potential target.

Four years later, the civil suits over the mass arrests in NYC during the RNC four years ago are still running their course through the courts. It’s very likely the courts will decide in the favor of those unlawfully arrested and award substantial damages (since nearly all the charges were thrown out as unwarranted - particular in light of the IMC and iWitness video documentation). This happened recently for nearly 60 who were illegally arrested in a legal protest outside the Carlye Group in 2003 (2 million dollars in damages were awarded). We have numerous instances of a security state and legal system that collude to willingly and systematically violate the law through illegal arrests and detentions to manage short-term ‘image and publicity crisis’ - knowing full well that large sums of money will have to paid later in civil suits. This is the new cost of managing dissent in this country. The problem is, it’s the taxpayers who are getting billed for being bound and gagged by their own government.

Hmm - the ‘world as we know it’ actually already ended, it just hasn’t been reported as reality yet.

- Posted by Michael Eisenmenger