Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
It seems that my case will come down to the matter of whether or not I was taking pictures. Well, anyone can tell you that police officers make an excellent photographic element. So here are my some of my best photographs of police officers from the Republican National Convention. (click to enlarge)
The (lower) photo of the NYPD officer on the motorcycle is one of my all-time favorite photographs. On his forearm, his tattoo reads "All gave some / Some gave all / 9-11-01". It is so much more authentic than all the cheap rhetoric...
Well folks, tomorrow the City of St. Paul is going to try to assert that there was Probable Cause that I committed a crime on May 11, but never photographed any police officers. Let this little post indicate that I have had a great deal of success photographing police officers. Police officers are more likely to behave themselves when they are being recorded. It cannot be denied.
FBI agents monitored Web sites calling for protests against the 2004 political conventions in New York and Boston on behalf of the bureau's counterterrorism unit, according to FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The American Civil Liberties Union pointed to the documents as evidence that the Bush administration has reacted to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States by blurring the distinction between terrorism and political protest. FBI officials defended the involvement of counterterrorism agents in providing security for the Republican and Democratic conventions as an administrative convenience.
The documents were released by the FBI in response to a lawsuit filed by a coalition of civil rights, animal rights and environmental groups that say they have been subjected to scrutiny by task forces set up to combat terrorism. The FBI has denied targeting the groups because of their political views.
"It's increasingly clear that the government is involved in political surveillance of organizations that are involved in nothing more than lawful First Amendment activities," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU. "It raises very serious questions about whether the FBI is back to its old tricks."
A Sept. 4, 2003, document addressed to the FBI counterterrorism unit described plans by a group calling itself RNC Not Welcome to "disrupt" the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. It also described Internet postings from an umbrella organization known as United for Peace and Justice, which was coordinating worldwide protests against the convention.
"It's one thing to monitor protests and protest organizers, but quite another thing to refer them to your counterterrorism unit," said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice.
Another document, addressed to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which coordinates anti-terrorist activities by the FBI and local police forces, described threats to disrupt the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
Responding to the lawsuit filed in May in U.S. District Court in Washington, the FBI said it had identified 1,173 pages of records relating to the ACLU and 2,383 pages relating to Greenpeace. The content of the records, which were generated since 2001, is not known.
I feel safer already.
Blah, it is bad when you write a few paragraphs, cut them and forget to paste them, they're gone for good. Damn, that just happened. Dan Schwartz sent me a news item about how protesters arrested at the Republican National Convention last fall have been getting mostly let off charges, as video evidence has shown that the police exaggerated incidents and arrested people without justification. As someone who was there, I felt lucky that we managed to avoid getting arrested... I don't want to go through the details now...
US Draws Up List of Unstable Countries:
03/28/05 "Financial Times" - - US intelligence services are drawing up a secret watch-list of 25 countries in which instability might lead to US intervention, according to officials in charge of a new office set up to co-ordinate planning for nation-building and conflict prevention.
The list will be composed and revised every six months by the National Intelligence Council, which collates intelligence for strategic planning, according to Carlos Pascual, head of the newly formed office of reconstruction and stabilisation.
The new State Department office amounts to recognition by the Bush administration that it needs to get better at nation-building, a concept it once scorned as social work disguised as foreign policy, following its failures in Iraq.
Shocking! Bin Laden bribed Afghan militias in 2001 to let him escape, says the head of the German intelligence agency BND. What, you require cash for loyalty in Afghanistan? That's a historical lesson that brought down two Global Empires, yet the U.S. either doesn't quite get it. If we build permanent bases, we will fully, permanently embrace the heroin smugglers which dominate Afghanistan's economy.
"US Appears to Have Fought War for Oil and Lost It", amusing headline of piece in the Financial Times by Ian Rutledge. "US Has no Exit Strategy for Iraq, Rumsfeld Says" (we have a victory strategy, hurr hurr):
The U.S. has no exit strategy or timetable for withdrawing its forces from Iraq and a pull-out depends on the readiness of the Iraqi Security Forces, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said.
``We don't have an exit strategy, we have a victory strategy,'' Rumsfeld told soldiers during a surprise visit to Baghdad, according to a pooled broadcast report from the capital. ``The goal is to help the Iraqi Forces develop the skills and the capacity to provide their own security.''
[....]
The Defense Secretary, whose visit wasn't disclosed until his arrival for security reasons, praised the U.S. soldiers he addressed in Baghdad and told them that they'll earn their place in history for fighting ``a war where victory depends not only on military successes but on reconstruction and civil affairs.''
Some stuff by raimondo @ antiwar.com about the various ethnic fissures opening up in northern Iraq, and how that might sink what he terms the Iraqi potemkin village. He points out that Article 58 of Iraq's TAL (transition administrative law-the temporary basis for the interim government) has some rather explosive logic to it:
"Expeditiously to take measures to remedy the injustice caused by the previous regime's practices in altering the demographic character of certain regions, including Kirkuk, by deporting and expelling individuals from their places of residence, forcing migration in and out of the region, settling individuals alien to the region, depriving the inhabitants of work, and correcting nationality. …
"With regard to residents who were deported, expelled, or who emigrated; [the Iraqi Transitional Government] shall, in accordance with the statute of the Iraqi Property Claims Commission and other measures within the law, within a reasonable period of time, restore the residents to their homes and property, or, where this is unfeasible, shall provide just compensation."
This is going to cause some ethnic cleansing, then. One of those nice little time bombs that Saddam built into the tortured society of that country, which the Americans have now appointed themselves to untangle. But it probably won't work, and the preconditions for a stable Democracy probably won't gel.
This does not stop Michael Ledeen and some guy named Peter Ackerman, the chair of the "International Center for Nonviolent Conflict" from proclaiming the sweeping democratic revolution that will go on throughout the region. (is Ledeen really just working for Iran anyway? ha!)
Anyhow, they are dressing up the next stage that they want to see: using some exiles and smuggled weapons to start fighting more directly against the regime in Tehran. All the "democracy" talk is stapled on, and they are counting correctly on the Western media's ability to persuade their audiences that the chosen destabilization agents are Vanguards of the Democratic Revolution.
Ledeen has that element of Trotsky in him (one view) and you can always spot the repackaged Advanced Red Guard of Freedom type thing. It has great appeal, it's got all the buzzwords, but it has a certain Stalinist-utopian quality. Teaming with this International Center guy, the Creative Destruction/Utopian Terrorfighter ideology is getting a nice solid institutional engine:
In recent months, skepticism about the appeal of freedom has given way to a new belief: that democratic revolution is now possible, even inevitable, in places such as Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Kyrgyzstan. But "people power" is not an unstoppable tidal wave, and it would be wrong and naive to conclude that we need only step back and let it happen. The Western world has a lot at stake, and our support for democratic forces in the Middle East and beyond will be important, perhaps even decisive.
Freedom-loving people know what we want to see in Beirut, Damascus and Tehran: the central square bursting with citizens demanding an end to tyranny, massive strikes shutting down the national economy, the disintegration of security forces charged with maintaining order, and the consequent departure of the tyrants and the beginnings of a popularly elected government.
A successful people's revolution is the outcome of careful planning and mass discipline, but it requires political and economic support from outside the country — and maybe some from within.
There are three indispensable requirements: first, a unified opposition that can put aside internal disagreements over the details of what will follow the downfall of the tyrannical regime; second, a disciplined democratic movement that rigorously applies the rules of nonviolent conflict; and finally, careful preparation of the battlefield — which means that members of the armed forces must be persuaded to make individual decisions rather than act as part of a collective organization.
In Iran and Lebanon, and probably in Syria, the prerequisites for democratic revolution are in place. Opposition groups in Iran are united in their call for free elections, perhaps preceded by a national referendum that will either legitimize or reject the theocratic state. In Lebanon, 1 million people just demonstrated their support for the quick removal of the Syrian occupiers.
Now the West needs to help. The lessons learned in Georgia and Ukraine need to be passed along. Indeed, this information is so important that Western governments should provide funding so that it can be broadcast around the clock.
The activists will need to communicate with one another, and the West can provide them with suitable equipment — satellite phones, text messaging, laptops and servers — that they may not be able to get by themselves. Just as the West provided Solidarity and Soviet dissidents with fax machines during the Cold War, we should help contemporary dissidents get the best tools available.
Finally, outsiders seeking to aid democratic revolutions must remember this: Only indigenous forces can be the prime movers. There must be no replay of 1953 in Iran, when the United States and Britain stage-managed mass demonstrations against the government in order to restore the shah to his throne. We must trust the judgment of the people who are, in all cases, the foundation of lasting change.
If they want open support, they should get it. If they want it delivered discreetly, donors should respect their wishes.
Americans, Europeans and others who freely choose their own rulers cannot be indifferent about the success or failure of democratic revolution around the world, and we must not limit our support to rhetoric. There is every reason to believe that this latest surge of revolution will succeed, provided that the courage and passion of the people of the region receive suitable assistance from the democratic world.
So, then, the anti-Tehran MEK will be getting its weapons from us promptly. And there is even more to say about the connections between the MEK and John Bolton. Yes, surprise surprise, a paragon of soup-straining integrity like Mr. Bolton might be connected to listed foreign terrorists. What, the "Iran Policy Committee" wants the MEK delisted? (which sparked a reaction) Also can't forget this classic by Josh Marshall and others about "Iran-Contra II?" in the making.
There were previously reports that the recent vote in Iraq was fraudulently manipulated, and now former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, a somewhat odd character (of unknown trustworthiness) in the Iraq saga, says that Bush has already approved plans to attack Iran in July (story originally by United for Peace of Pierce County, WA):
Ritter made two shocking claims: George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and the U.S. manipulated the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
Scott Ritter, appearing with journalist Dahr Jamail yesterday in Washington State, dropped two shocking bombshells in a talk delivered to a packed house in Olympia's Capitol Theater. The ex-Marine turned UNSCOM weapons inspector said that George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and claimed the U.S. manipulated the results of the recent Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
[...]
The principal theme of Scott Ritter's talk was Americans' duty to protect the U.S. Constitution by taking action to bring an end to the illegal war in Iraq. But in passing, the former UNSCOM weapons inspector stunned his listeners with two pronouncements. Ritter said plans for a June attack on Iran have been submitted to President George W. Bush, and that the president has approved them. He also asserted that knowledgeable sources say U.S. officials "cooked" the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
On Iran, Ritter said that President George W. Bush has received and signed off on orders for an aerial attack on Iran planned for June 2005. Its purported goal is the destruction of Iran's alleged program to develop nuclear weapons, but Ritter said neoconservatives in the administration also expected that the attack would set in motion a chain of events leading to regime change in the oil-rich nation of 70 million -- a possibility Ritter regards with the greatest skepticism.
The former Marine also said that the Jan. 30 elections, which George W. Bush has called "a turning point in the history of Iraq, a milestone in the advance of freedom," were not so free after all. Ritter said that U.S. authorities in Iraq had manipulated the results in order to reduce the percentage of the vote received by the United Iraqi Alliance from 56% to 48%.
[....]
Scott Ritter said that although the peace movement failed to stop the war in Iraq, it had a chance to stop the expansion of the war to other nations like Iran and Syria. He held up the specter of a day when the Iraq war might be remembered as a relatively minor event that preceded an even greater conflagration.
Amazing photo galleries and dispatches from Iraq by Dahr Jamail who is going around with Ritter. Later, more about John Bolton & the fake war intelligence we know and love...
Here are some quick things.
Henry Earl: I heard about this guy before, but nowadays he really has more sense of purpose than anyone I know... Buy a t shirt. Best mugshot ever.
Data sets for emergency management scenarios in Minnesota - LOGIS - some sort of coordinated government IT system for MN municipalities. Weird.
I ran HongPong.com server log files through an analyzer for the first time since February and I found that there was a certain absurdity to the hits I get through Google. Site traffic is doing all right, although about 40% of it seems to be spam attempts.
As it is now, the old posts on this site have lots of comment spam, thousands of them, attached as dirty little digital barnacles to manipulate some sleaze merchant's search engine ranking. However, I let the practice go on for a while because it improved my own search ranking, and provided a certain surreal quality, a sort of natural accretion of Internet gunk.
In the long run this seems to lead some insane perverts (the "dark magician girl" searcher(s) were quite persistent) to my site, as well as some bizarre political and/or dirty searches such as:
More in a bit....
It is finally the end of 2004 and things look set for another strange year ahead of us. I have not had much time or impulse to write on the site for the last few days. I am doing some more web work for Andrew at Computer Zone Consulting. Andrew is himself Sri Lankan, and I saw him for the first time in a few weeks on Monday as the news rolled in from the tsunami disaster zone.
It's a hard thing to figure out the scale of this thing, to put it in a relative view that you can even comprehend. All those videos they've been playing on the cable news constantly—people washing and twirling away—is so incredibly unnerving and weird.
So anyhows, I'm trying not to get down about this whole mess, because the world is a messy place and we all end up muddling along no matter what. Of course, things are going weirdly in other places. By the end of January we'll have a sense of whether or not the situation in Iraq is going to screech off and out of control, or else fizzle down. Meanwhile in Washington they are getting hunkered down for another round of the Amazing Bush Administration and its Circus of Follies.
So it's a season of change for everyone now. I'm looking back at the things I have done and seen this year, and I think overall I did pretty well, but I still don't know what I ought to do when I graduate. It's kind of amazing that it's already time to get out of college. I have enjoyed the experience, but I do regret not studying abroad somewhere, as I think it would have given me a clean slate and fresh approach instead of those pointless months here... specifically the difficult experience of the Dupre Single days.
This year was a good one, though. I learned a lot of things about how the world worked, I talked with a lot of strange people. When I look back, I think that this was very much a breakthrough year in terms of just being willing to go out in the world and see what happens, for an often skittish person like myself.
January 2004 was pointless, so I guess we should skip to February. Back then, I advanced the story of the war, as I see it, in a worthwhile way, when I asked John Kerry during his visit to Macalester if the intelligence distortions (meaning the fake WMD and al Qaeda stories, mainly) should be considered a criminal matter akin to Iran-Contra. Kerry gave me one of those classic two-paragraph answers, but I would say, looking back almost a year on it, that he probably gave me the wrong answer.
My view of the matter is that Ahmed Chalabi and the neo-cons consciously knew they were providing bad information about Iraq, and hence deceived everyone in the government, and in particular our elected representatives in Congress. Kerry said that he had 'no evidence' that it was illegal, but he never really pursued the issue as a campaign matter, I suppose in particular because his campaign acted self-consciously 'tainted' by his position on the war early on.
But that's the key thing about it: Kerry could have weaseled out of responsibility for the war vote by saying that 'we wuz lied to!!' and provided the American public an entertaining tale about Chalabi and the rest of them, which would have drawn more attention to the malevolent incompetents running the Pentagon, forcing the frame of debate back to Bush's systematic deception and the war's managerial disasters. By the end of the campaign, Kerry was alleging that they were 'playing games' with intelligence, but that doesn't really mean anything to Joe Sixpack. They should have given us the spy story. It would have been cool.
Afterwards, in March I went to London for a week and stayed on the floor of Nick Petersen's flat. This came just a couple days after the Madrid bombings, and I thought that security would be escalated all over the place. It was my first trip to Europe and I made the most of it. I didn't obsess with seeing tourist attractions, and instead tried to wander all through town, a project assisted by Nick's encyclopedic knowledge of London architecture. On the first night, Victoria came back from her apparently horrible school in Wales. Vic's mom and siblings had also come to London for break, and they had a fabulous suite at the County Hall (Hotel?). The room had a little balcony high above the river Thames, and from there I could look right across the river at Parliament and the clock tower, as that huge Ferris wheel thing turned overhead. I saw the House of Commons meet, I went to the Prime Meridian and some museums...
Then I hopped the Eurostar (?) train to Paris, and wandered around there for a day, eating a Royale with Cheese on the banks of the Seine, and I even went in and saw the Mona Lisa and other places in the Louvre. Emi showed me all over town, and it was just a damn awesome place to be, like something out of a movie of someone else's life (this sense was helped along when I watched that recent Jack Nicholson movie, which ends in Paris, on the flight back to Chicago).
The summer was an interesting venture. I took an electronic art and journalism law classes at the University of Minnesota. Made some friends, picked up some useful information and put together a sweet DVD of many of my better photographs and videos.
After that stuff ended, I went to the site of the Republican National Convention with Dan Schned and Peter Gartrell. It was at times the most overwhelming experience I've ever had. When the police officer pulled his hat off to show us the photos of his friend who died at the WTC, or when the girl from Iowa showed us a video of anarchists setting the dragon on fire right next to her, or when we stood on a corner as AIPAC delegates to the convention streamed past, happily celebrating the renewal of the Likud-Republican political alliance that I so loathe. Or when we tracked down the bar where Dick Cheney was drinking, or when we chanted in the streets in an unlicensed march....
So, then, was it worth it? Was it worth the hassle, the arrests, the gasoline expended, just to go out there and watch people wave some signs around? You know, I think it was. I think that it helped me to ground some of the symbols that they manipulate in our minds—the WTC site, for one. These things become easier to understand once you see them, stripped of the media frames, the pretexts and moral arguments. Just to stand there and smoke a cigarette, then another cigarette, in the great important Negative Space in south Manhattan, helps to assert some control over the symbols they wield. It helped me settle the issue somehow.
After that we went down into the WTC subway stop. I walked over to one of the support beams and rubbed my finger on a bolt encrusted with sparkling reddish-brown dust. I rubbed the dust between my fingers and smelled it, a certain, dusty, burned smell, the torched synthetic substances from the offices, mixed with window and beam particles, had plunged down, and puffed into the tunnels under the city where no amount of cleaning could ever eradicate the traces.
I saw Bush himself a few days before the trip, as he made a campaign appearance in Hudson, Wisconsin. I saw him get off the bus and shake people's hands, and I could finally see what is so difficult to discern from home: that man is just the front face for a whole vast system of domination and control. It's a much larger problem than just that man. It's the administrative deception, the suppression of agencies like the EPA. We make the mistake of projecting perceived personality traits into understanding the political problems we have, without understanding how much of the issue is organizational.
School went pretty well this semester. I actually did something that I thought might not happen: I had a conversation with a really quite devious neoconservative that came to Macalester. For quite a while I wondered what might happened if I encountered Michael Ledeen at the Roundtable, but when I suddenly did, it was a surprise because he hadn't even given his speech yet. I ended up talking with the odd character over lunch, a bizarre twist. I gamely tried to suggest to him that the Iranians weren't determined to nuke Jerusalem the moment they developed the Bomb, but Ledeen would have none of it. A quixotic sort of notion to try convincing this guy that we shouldn't lose our cool about Iran, but of course he would never change his mind.
I learned a key thing about the people that run things from this encounter: They are very moody people. They are not well-adjusted low-key technocratic sorts of people. They are grim and weird. Ledeen himself admitted a manic depressive condition, and I think that whole kind of thing is what drives them to make their crazy decisions as much as any kind of Evil Agenda we might try to fathom from their actions.
And then the election. In some ways I barely want to hear about it, to hear about how such a vast section of the American public wholeheartedly embraced absurd lies about the situation, and how despite a sense that we were careening out of control, we were still destined to end up with these ridiculous cats for another four years.
I guess a sense of needing to refute that 'destiny' led me to place a shred of hope in the election-challenge folks, although of course it offends my sense of what it means to live in a democracy when I hear of a single vote damaged, lost, vanished or even potentially manipulated by our crappy system. At this point, we are hearing some interesting stuff out of Florida about Congressman Feeney and the usual Florida corruption, but it seems like we will never hear much of an articulation of how evil it was in Ohio when election supervisors implemented a strategy to direct voting machines away from heavily Democratic precincts into the suburbs. Is that really what we can accept as an element of a 'legitimate' election?
To round out this year end ramble, I would say that I am still much the same sort of person as when I began this year, but I think that I managed to advance my view of the world by talking straight to some of the important people, going into hazardous places like New York, and trying to express my own views of the world via this website, the campus paper, and just talking with people. I think I've tried to criss-cross some interesting slices of Americana this year and listen to what people have told me. As time has gone past, it seems more clear to me than ever that I still have a very long ways to go before things make sense to me.
The good thing is that right now I feel less like giving up than before. I don't have a sense that my energy is evaporating, but with the end of school coming around I have to try to pull together a new plan. Not easy for anyone... There is still a world of opportunities out there. I will have to spend a while poking around...
So here's to 2004. A year I got through by taking some chances and going new places. As for 2005, that's the year when things really better start clicking.
Plans have a funny way of twitching around. I planned to present a few 9/11-associated pictures from New York on Saturday night, but I was feeling moody with a lot of pent-up energy, so I decided to bike to some of the places I was on September 11, 2001. I went to the monument at the west end of Summit Ave., and then up the river to the University East Bank.
As I pulled up to the corner of Harvard St. and the East River Parkway, right at the Fairview-University Medical Center where I was born, a friend called my phone, feeling pissed off. Turns out her birthday is September 11, a fact I'd forgotten since last year. When "Happy Birthday" transitions into "pivotal national catastrophe," that has to bring you down. So we went to the bar.
I don't want to get into more details, but I got all lost in my thoughts and never made it around to post something up for the anniversary. So here are a few from NYC. The picture above (and below) is a flag at the protest rally on the day of Bush's coronation, in Union Square if I recall.
The most powerful image, for me, is one that I don't have a picture of. On Monday night, Dan Schned and I had been scooted away from an economic justice protest that the cops cut up with severe prejudice, and we found ourselves across from some delegates having dinner at Cipriati's, near Grand Central Station. I took one picture before my batteries died, of spotlights in the foreground and the interior behind:
As we stood, police escorted a protester from the sidewalk in front of Cipriati's. This spawned a whole confrontation between her, some impromptu advocates, random protesters, the police and legal observers in green hats from the National Lawyer's Guild. A stringer from Reuters named Dan and some other media people all came for a piece.
Dan Schned and I started talking with one Officer Mullin, a short (ok, relative to my standards) NYPD cop who was surprisingly receptive to the protests going on around the city. He even told us how he didn't like the cops when he was young.
I asked Mullin about the significance of the black bar next to his badge that read 'WTC' in gold letters. He said it meant that he was there.
I sort of silently nodded, and he suddenly pulled off his officer's hat. Fixed inside the hat were a few plastic ID cards bearing the photographs of other officers. He said they were officers he'd known that were killed that day. On top, a smiling guy with red hair.
He had grown up with that guy's wife, he said. Now she had two kids to raise.
The way that Mullin looked at me and Dan was so plain, so genuine, it was disconcerting. As if Mullin was an actor playing a police officer on this Manhattan stage we'd walked into. How many times had he pulled his hat off to tell this to visitors like us?
It was the kind of exchange that settles something permanently. Before, for me, there was just the mental picture of a dead cop's family and friends, but now it was real. It was a guy in front of me and a picture in his cap. If only life was always so direct.
Earlier that day, at the economic justice march, I was going along next to the line of motorcycle police separating us from the traffic when I spied a tattoo on a police officer's arm. It read
All Gave Some
Some Gave All
9-11-01
The look in his eyes tells you a lot, but you have to decide what it means for yourself:
September 1, 2004: A police helicopter circles the Brooklyn Bridge:
Later, in Chinatown. I am not sure what this man was trying to prove:
At a labor protest later that day, a man placed his evil Bush head against the ever-patient TV news anchor:
Obligatory end-of-the-world fanatic distributing literature:
There was a media protest at the headquarters of CBS and FOX that night:
This is in fact a large foam finger given unto the (Fox) News Corporation global headquarters.
We were there. Eat it, Hannity.
More to come, but god, I have to start class now!!
Here begins the picture collection. Some of my photos are still on Bill's computer, but the big batch of protest photos was still on the camera when we got back. This is a just a handful of pics but more are coming along. I have to go have dinner with my family now, so here it is.
Click on the pics to expand to full size.
These pics were from the march on Tuesday that started next to the United Nations building. The people in white PPEHRC shirts were acting as a layer of peacekeepers between the unpermitted march and the police.
It's fitting that a march shielded by peacekeepers started by the U.N.:
I can't find the words for this one:
Protest medics:
The police:
The end of this project was decided by no more than sixty seconds. A single stoplight or stopped car would have blown it apart for us. But we made it out of New York in time.
We bailed after I took pictures at the ANSWER protest during Bush's convention speech Thursday evening. We hopped a cab to Bill's house in Brooklyn, grabbed our bags and spun right back to the Penn Station/Madison Square Garden epicenter, hoping to catch the 10:35 train to Philly. It was nearly 10:30 when the cab dropped us several blocks from Penn. There were barricades and cops everywhere.
We ran north one block and asked an officer the quickest way into Penn Station. He said to take the red subway line one stop north. We pivoted down the stairs and missed the 1 line by about 20 seconds.
We waited endlessly. Finally the next train came and dropped us off in the bowels of Penn, filled with every sort of law enforcement official. In the huge station, we sprinted around people, swinging duffel bags wildly. The New York ticket desk directed me up to the New Jersey ticket desk, and I ran up to ask the attendant:
"Did we miss the 10:35 to Trenton?"
She said: "You boys got one minute."
No time to purchase tickets, so we sprinted, and I took a wrong turn for several feet. I wheeled around, skipped down escalator steps to the platform. The first car we saw was dark, and I yelled, "Conductor!!" We saw a couple guys looking out from farther ahead and ran towards them. "Can we get on?" I asked.
"Well, the door's open, isn't it?" one replied.
And that is how we squeaked out of Manhattan with not a minute to spare.
The drive took 22 hours back from Philly, and altogether, a whopping 2495 miles. Hooyah!
So much is unfolding around us. The whole place is filled with every stripe of people. Yesterday we went to Dag Hammserkold (sp?) Plaza across from the United Nations, where the protest for economic justice was building up to march into Manhattan without a license. Peter Gartrell took the train back to Philadelphia yesterday afternoon. The last I saw of him was in the avenue median in front of the UN, holding his camera. He called later and said that he'd run into Elizabeth Dole and Pat Buchanan on the way back to Penn Station.
Once the protest rolled out, peacekeeper groups marched with their arms locked around the first group of people, between the protesters and the police.
With hundreds of police officers around us we went down into the city as a line of NYPD motorcycles and bicycle cops separated the march from traffic. After a few hours we neared Madison Square Garden, and the whole thing ground to a halt at the barricades across the avenue.
I was around the front of it, and besides the helicopter, snipers and riot police behind barricades all around us, things seemed pretty calm, but about 2 blocks south, the police suddenly cut through the protest with barricades, throwing people out of the way and arresting several. Dan Schned saw much of what happened. A guy with dreadlocks said that "Tonight we saw the face of Babylon, people!"
I took pictures all along the way, but I can't put any up just yet for time and technical reasons.
Sunday evening was a hell of a time. A girl from Iowa showed us her video of the paper mache dragon that some anarchists famously lit on fire in near Madison Square Garden.
I was in the background on MSNBC Hardball, which had an outdoor stage going in a square on Broadway. I discovered that by jumping at precisely the right moment, I could jump above Chris Matthews' shoulder. Later, we were also chased away from the (Fox) News Corporation building.
Last night we found that there is an active movement to hassle Republican delegates as they go about town. There are IndyMedia and text messaging schemes set up, directing the groups of protesters running around. The intention seems peaceful: hollering on the street mainly. We came across an area near Union Square where people had thrown garbage and newspaper boxes all over the street, and then a whole bunch of cops came. Then we found out that Cheney was drinking nearby, and we saw the cops had blocked off the whole street.
So that's how things are going. Obviously it's not too easy to write because we are staying in Brooklyn and the party's in Manhattan.
Now that the heat is easing off, it's time for another round. We are staying safe as possible, but things are moving by their own pattern right now.
Dan Schned, Peter Gartrell and I just got to Bill Potter's apartment in Brooklyn. The trip thus far has gone pretty smoothly. We took the train down from Peter's grandmother Nona's house in Philadelphia to Manhattan's Penn Station, in the shadow of Madison Square Garden.
We staggered outside Penn. To my right was the Empire State Building and to my left, (hundreds of?) thousands of protesters were streaming down the street in front of Madison Square Garden. It was one hell of a sight. Apparently now they are going towards Central Park, or perhaps not, now that their permit got yanked. Ironically above all these protesters was an enormous FOX News billboard. So we went back down to the subway and took the L to Bill's place.
Right now things seem to be going pretty smoothly, not a great deal of disorder from what we could see. There are tons of police everywhere, but the Police State isn't here yet.
Now I think we are going to go back into Manhattan, to Union Square perhaps...
In other news, apparently I leave town for one day and suddenly there's all this crazy news about Douglas Feith and Likud spies in the Pentagon?!?? What can I say, what can I say. Nothing like an espionage investigation to burnish your convention's patriotic veneer... Fantastic, just fantastic.
Get your war on: "Is Operation Iraqi Freedom the most expensive botched thing ever?"
There was a glitch in my email program and anything sent to me in the last 24 hours disappeared, so please resend any messages ya might sent.
I'm going to leave in about an hour, after Dan Schned gets off working at First Ave. Then we are off.
If the last post seemed jumbled and anxious, well, I'm feeling a little jumbled and anxious right now.
The big goal is to get to Peter's grandmother's house by Saturday afternoon, then into New York Saturday night, if it can be done.
Once again, on this trip I can be reached at 651 338 7661 or dfedt01@sprintpcs.com , and by the email addresses at right, but not while I'm on the road.
I will try really hard to get something up here every day, but it will probably be impossible to do that. Wish me luck!
Right now it's about 22 hours from departure. Dan Schned and I are cruising to Philadelphia, leaving early Friday morning. Then we get on the train. Wednesday was filled with the last tasks.
Fortunately, I just got a new cell phone from Sprint. This will probably be essential among the concrete canyons of the delirious city. My new number is 651 338 7661. The phone also gets email @ dfedt01@sprintpcs.com . Why dfedt? They made a typo. So maybe I will get that fixed later.
So now comes the difficult part. How do I justify this trip? What do I expect?
I am not traveling to New York City to carry a sign. I have felt irresistibly drawn to the site ever since the Republicans made their disgusting announcement so many months ago. How could they dare to convene in this scarred landscape? What were they trying to prove?
The course of the trip will take me to Ground Zero. This will surely seem redundant, as anything you say about the place sounds worn, shitty, generally repackaged to sell something else. Where the curtain fell on the modern era. Where Sentiments Acquired Capital Letters and Histrionic Importance. This plot opened with the destruction of the symbols, and three years later, the government has answered by attacking, destroying and abetting the obliteration of a whole swath of important symbols in the Muslim world, up to this very hour.
The war on terror is all about symbols, obviously, but the tricky part is that every person assigns each symbol a different value. When the towers fell, the symbol of destruction was manipulated into a symbol of vengeance. But who ever thought that the wreckage would get us to hell so quickly? Who would have thought the symbols could call the bombs so easily? How did these symbols make all the violence look cathartic and redemptive to us?
What black magic performed there caused Abu Ghraib to happen?
I'll go with one goal in mind: to seize control of the deep sense of fear and dread that has chilled my soul for the last three years. There's no more useful way to say it. I have to attack my problem by driving straight to the core. Blitz the situation. Turn it back on itself. Find the symbols that finally unlock it for me. Come back better.
So, am I worried about a terrorist attack?
Yes, obviously. I have a tinge of mortal fear about me, but I'm trying to rationalize by pegging numbers to the imaginary horrors (and let it never be said that I have a lack of imagination) of attacks here. I feel there is a 5% chance of nuclear or radioactive material getting all over, 10% biological or chemical materials. Less than that for modern bombs. That is, the dirty bomb is a lot more likely than a nuclear weapon.
However, if the Air Force manages to level the holiest site in all of Shi'ism during the convention, or even cause a nice gaping hole in the wall, or better yet the dome, then these bets are off. And then the Israeli settlers or the Syrians will make their move...
These are some hypothetical situations... but with narrow odds. With regards to the DanMN team's ability to survive the situation without injury, we are not planning to charge into clouds of tear gas. But that doesn't mean we won't end up in proximity to madness. Oh, there will be madness.
I'm wondering what the tenor of the protesters will really be like. I think it will be different than Chicago '68 in the sense that most of the folks I've seen protesting the war in the twin cities, for example, were relatively mainstream-looking mom and pop types.
The networks say that the 'vast left wing of dissent' exists as some unexplained solid bloc, slowly drifting between San Francisco and Cincinnati, made of radicals, disgruntled Dean enthusiasts, people only worth quoting for fractions of a sentence. Yet the sober reality is that President Bush is easily the most unpopular national leader we have seen in a long time. The strains that will appear in New York will reflect the breadth of that fear and loathing from across the land, I'm sure.
I will say this, to the President's credit. I saw him with my own two eyes, not one week ago, in my hometown. His speech was at the landmark Hudson arch (by the old bridge that formerly went into Minnesota). So that symbol has been permanently perverted for me. And it made me angry.
But I saw the President. And I could see that he was just one man. I could see that a lone soul couldn't have caused all the mess, couldn't have been the one to level such destruction all around.
The buck stops at Bush's desk, it's true, but these days it's more clear to me than ever that the problem is so deep and complex that there's not a chance in hell he's figured out all the levers.
We are led to believe that his power is natural and complete, but in reality it is the opposite. The pity is that he doesn't seem to know it.
Will the hoopla around the convention be covered on this website? Yeah, when I get the chance, but I have no idea how often that will be. Bill Potter, i.e. Jiriki5 on AIM, will be our gracious host, and he might make some posts as things are going on. But at this point nothing is assured.
Packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been
A place that has to be believed to be seen - U2
