(note about the video: I could not film the most important parts of at
least two of the confrontations because it takes two hands to defend
yourself! As a participant in the defense I had a dual role and could
not film and fight at the same time) Bullshit there were two other people streaming to Ustream with 1 hand.



On the 4th of February, US Park Police did the bidding of GOP

Congressman Darrel Issa (R-CA) acting through a cowed Secretary of the

Interior Ken Salazar. Park Police assaulted Occupy DC's McPherson Square

camp with horses, billy clubs,another Taser incident, and seemingly

miles of waist-high black fencing.



The fighting began at around 6 AM, but there are reports that the mainstream media arrived an hour or two ahead of the police.



I arrived at Occupy a little after noon, to find streets blocked off by

police at a 1 block radius around Occupy DC, and the southern part of

McPherson Square fenced off and crawling with cops.



Shortly after I arrived, the police began their attack on the NE

quadrant of the park, the third one to be assaulted. Their first target

was a walkway separating the NE quadrant from the SE quadrant.



The general tactic used by the police was to use riot cops and shield to

push town the paved walkway of the park, while other cops and the

bio-hazard-suited park workers laid pens on both sides of the walkway to

seal it off. This was a classic "cordon and search" operation that

reminded me of similar "search and cordon" attacks on villages during

the Vietnam War by US troops. Come to think of it, since the first

settlers landed on American shores, destroying other people's villages

has been what the United States is all about.



Each isolated section, with the "insurgents" pushed back, was then

searched tent-to-tent, and the Park Service rules about anything in

tents enforced with utmost ruthlessness. Any tent deemed "not in

compliance" was selected for total destruction down the the pallets set

underneath for mud protection. In addition, some but not all of the

empty tents (as of 4:30PM) were destroyed by police, in explicit

violation of their own "rules" concerning what was "in compliance" and

what "was not."



This again reminded me of US troops destroying homes in Iraq,

Afghanistan, Vietnam, you name it. The searches and destruction were

carried out by National Park Service workers in full body bio-hazard

suits.



At the Defense of the NE Quadrant I found myself helping push back and

hold the line against shield-bearing riot cops with one arm while

shooting video with the other. It was not enough to film this, not

enough to see people resisting aggression with my own eyes and camera,

the right thing to do was to see it with my own hands when I found

myself in position to do do.



While protesters resisted police aggression only by pushing back with

the hands and occasional sit-in lines, police were not above using billy

clubs to get their way when they found that they were outweighed in a

simple "pressure line" advance. At one point horse cops rode through the

crowd late in the fight for the NE Quadrant.



The NW Quadrant was the last portion standing, and a decision was made

to defend the library. When the police assaulted the NW quadrant, an

agreement was struck to declare the library tent to be "in compliance"

as it was clearly a library and not a sleeping or food service area.



When police pushed through the NW quadrant, riot police again pushed

into the crowd with shields and horses were again ridden through the

crowd, at serious risk that one or more horses would stumble and get a

broken leg. Such a stumble would bring about the death of the horse and

could seriously injure anyone fallen on, plus the rider. In the NW

Quadrant attack, police did not hesitate to push people stumbling over

the people behind them.



In the final analysis, this attack cannot remove Occupy DC from the city

without fencing off and leaving a permanent police garrison in every

park in the city. Even a single place where people are permitted to

exist is enough, given DC's legal restrictions on mass arrests, to

re-establish Occupy DC's continuous "vigil." It is probable that if the

Park Police are serious about trying to fight Occupy DC they will have

to re-stage this violent raid again and again, possibly on multiple

locations. Again this is like Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, where just

because US troops had just burned people out of their homes in a village

yesterday didn't mean it wasn't crawling with insurgents today.







One final note: Ever since the Supreme Court action there have been

issues with police instigators, who try to start fights when they won't

work and (in my experience) scream for nonviolence when the police are

at a disadvantage. I am wondering if police instigators aren't being

used both the generate excuses AND to try and discredit anarchists and

other who resist the police for real. I saw a lot of very pissed-off

people going after the cops, and I wonder if the role of instigators

wasn't simply to generate a situation where anyone going after the cops

or taking the lead in resistance risks being also labelled an

instigator.

The last part of the video he ripped it off of one of two guys that were streaming to Ustream.

For your commenting pleasure....

Copied from the original lame ass delusional source....

Spell check used again....

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