Maine Owl

Elizabeth Press describes a raid in St. Paul; cops had a bad warrant, crawled through attic


Lawyer in handcuffs had demanded warrant

There's more in Greenwald's updates, HERE.

Police state intimidation


Standard for suspicion: "political awareness"

Glenn Greenwald has an astonishing pre-Rebublican-convention story w/video (see above) from my home state of Minnesota:

Massive police raids on suspected protestors in Minneapolis

GREEENWALD: Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with sub-machine guns drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. ...

There is clearly an intent on the part of law enforcement authorities here to engage in extreme and highly intimidating raids against those who are planning to protest the Convention. The DNC in Denver was the site of several quite ugly incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether. Targeting people with machine-gun-carrying SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state as can be imagined.

My question is, At what point do American citizens who are slumbering through this stuff or even quietly approving it wake up and figure out just how un-American it is? I suppose there is plenty of history -- union busting, Palmer raids, COINTELPRO. But are not the proportions of what is going on here very extreme? The students harassed by gun-wielding functionaries with hilarious warrants (seeking "bottles," for example) is an expression of the worst kind of know-nothingism and wingnuttia-sourced hate.

By failing to oppose these assaults on civil liberties while engaging in intimidation tactics of their own, the Democrats have placed their stamp of approval on this. They evidently see the right of people to oppose the actions of their own government while being free of unlawful search and seizure to be "bad politics."

Furthermore, Democratic acquiescence to the Bush crimes and failure to conduct proper impeachment hearings reflects their dereliction of duty while the voices of principled dissent are crushed. It's goddamn shameful.