PHILADELPHIA — The following report on events around the Republic Party convention in Philadelphia by a member of the US socialist group Solidarity was posted on the internet on August 10. It is slightly abridged.
What's going on in Philadelphia right now is a civil rights catastrophe the magnitude of which is difficult to express in words.
As I'm writing this, two well-known activists are being held on $1 million bail [the amount was later lowered]. Both were picked up while walking down the street during the recent protests against the Republican National Convention. Most of the 341 protesters still incarcerated, whose charges range from obstructing a highway to disorderly conduct, have bails set in excess of $10,000 dollars.
These are the highest bails on record in the US for these charges. Needless to say, most cannot afford them and are practising jail solidarity (refusing to give their names in order to get fair treatment). In a country that prides itself on freedom of expression and assembly, they are political prisoners.
Reports of intimidation, abuse and torture continue to pour in from the jails. Prisoners in custody for 80 or more hours before being allowed a phone call or access to a lawyer. Prisoners being denied food and water, kept in sweltering buses until they went into heat stroke. Prisoners denied medication (including for HIV, asthma and epilepsy). Prisoners with broken wrists or hands, torn ears, chipped teeth, abused genitals.
This is a list of testimonies I've heard personally, from the mouths of those it happened to, or their friends. People red-faced, stunned, grieving. This is happening right now.
The police have isolated people they see as "leaders" for interrogation and exorbitant bails. A friend, a puppeteer from Austin, was detained by police before the protests began. This occurred outside the Haverford puppet space during the raid that mdestroyed nearly all the signs and props people had been building to communicate their messages during the demonstration. The puppets have been put through an industrial shredder.
In addition to going after the puppets, police systematically picked off and arrested those with cell phones or radios on the day of the action. Other "organisers" were weeded out of milling crowds, police having identified them by previously taken photos.
The state and federal governments are attempting to break the back of this movement and it has what seems to be unlimited resources to do so. For months before the protests, police presence near activist spaces and surveillance of activists has been extreme. They tapped phones, photographed the house I was staying in, sent operatives into deep cover to befriend us, and utilised a nationwide network of intelligence information to acquire knowledge about our movements.
Ironically, the day most of the 455 protesters were taken in was themed "The Criminal In-Justice System", with actions planned to call attention to the growing private prison system and the disproportionate number of poor people and people of colour in the jails and on death row.
The messages are simple, yet members of the mainstream press claimed they didn't understand, while thousands of police with batons and plastic cuffs stood in stony formation at city intersections. Demands for an end to police brutality became more and more clear as police violence broke out towards the end of the day.
I saw on the local news that police did "nothing more than yell at protesters" and were "a model of restraint". But I also saw a girl go down after taking a baton in the leg. And I saw my friend's broken thumb, bent back by other hands simply because no-one was there to record it.
I remember marching from the jail on Wednesday night [August 9] in the rain. The media had almost all left. Hundreds of cops cordoned off the 150 members of the vigil, one at the front with a rifle out, its muzzle pointed caddy corner to our thighs.
I was walking with a reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer, telling her what I'd seen, that people were being hurt. She said, "I know. But if we can't verify it, we can't print it."
At the rallies outside the jail, people chanted, "The whole world is watching". But it often felt like no-one was. While isolated members of the press have worked hard to provide objective coverage, for the most part, the media has been biassed against us to the point of criminal negligence. The world is not watching, and it needs to be.
The convention is over but the abuse it still happening. More than 300 people are in jail tonight in Philadelphia as part of what can only be described as a coordinated act of political repression. Thousands of demonstrators have been portrayed as dangerous criminals for continuing a tradition of civil disobedience passed on to us from Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
This is a crucial moment for anyone who considers him or herself free. As a friend put it yesterday (after we were followed and photographed yet again by a plainclothes policeman), "This is the first page in a very big book".
BY AMMI