(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)

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 police attack began at around 6 AM, but there are reports that the mainstream media arrived an hour or two ahead of the police. The Russia Today cameraman who filmed the RT video may have been one of the photographers who was injured today. My own camera barely escaped destruction by grabby, punchy police hands.

It is interesting that this raid cited sanitation as a concern. Unlike Occupiers who used a trio of porta-potties, police horses were shitting all over McPherson Square and there were no attempts by police or sanitation workers to remove these dung piles.

The biohazard suits worn by Park Service workers reminded a number of Occupy defenders, myself included, of the decision by the Park Police to wear rubber gloves while arresting Act/Up AIDS protesters in front of the White House during the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton years.

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 an 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, then the "pie slice" immediately north of it.

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 biohazard-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 ruthlesses. 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 biohazard 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. Unfortunately continuing to film when it got hot was impossible, as self-defense and recovery from being knocked over obstacles are both two-handed work! Several journalists were wounded today, unable to defend themselves while still doing their job.

While protesters resisted police aggression primarily 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 atack, 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.