UNCONVENTIONAL REPUBLIC

The new Homeland Security State

On the third night the Republican Convention was in town, I attended a modest demonstration against the imperial broadcast media.
The 'march,' which you might want to imagine as a serpentine creature heading south on New York's Sixth Avenue, had actually been chopped into a series of one-block long segments by the New York Police Department. Each small segment was penned on its sides by moveable wooden barricades and on either end by the wheel-to-wheel bikes of a seemingly endless supply of mounted policemen backed up by all manner of police vehicles. Though the photographing of protestors is an old practice, it once had a somewhat surreptitious quality to it. Not here (or anywhere else in the city that week) -- police in uniform were openly videoing the crowd. To 'march,' that is, actually meant to step from pen to pen, hemmed in everywhere, your protest at the mercy of the timing, tactics, and desires of the police. It was one of many sobering moments that week.

No Patriot Act victims? Tell that to Ms Starr: The RNC's 'Little Guantanamo'

My 21-year old daughter disappeared from NYC last Tuesday afternoon when walking with friends through a park where no protest was being held -- and was held prisoner -- without being charged -- by the NYPD for three days.
The first day and night she spent in an unsafe and inhumane facility at Pier 57 ("Little Guantanamo") provided by the Republican Party. Yes, it was managed by the Republican National Committe. It was leased by the RNC to hold political dissenters who disagreed with the Bush administration. The second two days, my daughter was in a city jail in Manhattan, where her treatment improved.
The notorious Pier 57 (owned by the HudsonRiver Trust--a city/state consortium) was dubbed "Little Guantanamo" by reporters who also got caught up in police sweeps and who said it looked like the Guantanamo Bay prison built by the USA to hold the Al Qaeda terrorist political prisoners in Cuba.
[Maui news article.]