Update: Infowars Reporter Rob Dew Now Released After Being Arrested
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Police and military units savagely attacked peaceful protesters in a Pittsburgh park last night, cracking heads with billy clubs, deploying LRAD sound cannons and shooting rubber bullets at close range, according to Infowars’ Jason Bermas. Fellow Infowars reporter Rob Dew was arrested during the melee.
Bermas called Alex Jones last night as the attack unfolded. Around 200 to 300 peaceful protesters had converged at Schenley Park for a demonstration but they were soon under assault from busloads of riot cops and military units who quickly descended on the scene.
According to Bermas, police were aggressively charging protesters and cracking them on the head with billy clubs and also shooting rubber bullets at close range, which in numerous past cases has proven deadly.
Police also deployed LRAD sound cannons once again in an attempt to disperse the protesters. Pittsburgh marks the first time that such weapons have been used against American citizens in public as before they were only used against insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bermas described the scene as like something out of a movie as police attempted to block off the whole park and catch every single protester and were prepared to use violence to do so, saying that they would run up to people and crack them on the head as hard as possible.
“Everyone was just sort of standing around spectating. No one was really having an adamant protest. It was just a bunch of college kids,” witness Ben Balik told The Pittsburgh Channel.
By the end of the confrontation, around half of the entire crowd of protesters had been arrested, including Infowars producer Rob Dew and most likely We Are Change leader Luke Rudkowski.
“Varun Viswanathan, a Pitt sophomore, said he saw a police officer hitting one individual, reports Pitt News.
“I think they completely use unnecessary force on us,” he said. “They have no right to do that.”
“Pitt senior Ken Egler called the police action “one of the crazier things” he’d seen during last night’s protests, especially since he didn’t see many demonstrators in Oakland.”
“I really think it’s ridiculous,” Egler said. “We should be allowed to protest. This is needed, and they’re just basically trying to scare us.”
It is important to emphasize that the obscene behavior of cops in Pittsburgh suggests that police in America will now follow any orders, no matter how barbaric. No one can plausibly deny that the majority of cops would willingly line up American citizens and blow their heads off if they were ordered to.
Police behavior at the G20 has been widely condemned as unwarranted and the violence metered out not to provide security but to provoke demonstrators.
“The deployment of police seems to be more geared toward suppressing lawful demonstrations than actually preventing crime,” Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, told the Associated Press.
“Legal observers at the gathering saw police surrounding, chasing and arresting students who weren’t involved in the protest, said Paige Cram, spokeswoman for the National Lawyers Guild, a liberal legal-aid group. She called the show of force “an ominous spectacle,” adds the AP report, referring to a similar protest on Friday night.
“A video posted Friday on YouTube shows a group of Pitt students briefly trapped on the outdoor stairwell of a campus building, evidently exposed to gaseous pepper spray and unable to move because riot police were blocking the bottom and top of the stairs. The students had been standing on a second-floor balcony, observing the clash between police and protesters on the street below.”
As of Saturday morning, we were unable to trace the exact whereabouts of Infowars reporter Rob Dew after he was arrested last night.
“After a long night of calls to Allegheny County Jail and the Pennsylvania Corrections Department, they keep referring us to one another saying they have no information, but that “protesters” are treated differently,” writes Jason Bermas.
We can now report that Rob Dew has been released and the Infowars crew are attempting to catch their flights back to Austin.
Comment
Raw Story
Saturday, September 26, 2009
G20 security officials took responsibility Friday afternoon for a video that seemed to depict US troops ‘kidnapping’ a protester.
The military was not involved in the incident, but G20 security did acknowledge that “law enforcement officers from a multi-agency tactical response team” had detained a protester they said was believed to be vandalizing a store.
Video posted at YouTube shows onlookers calling out “what the fuck” and “what the fuck is wrong with you?” as people in camo uniforms haul a protester along by his collar, shove him into the back seat of a car, and rapidly drive off.
Officials with G20 security released the following statement to Raw Story and other media outlets:
“Military members supporting the G20 Summit work with local law enforcement authorities but do not have the authority to make arrests. The individuals involved in the 9/24/09 arrest which has appeared online are law enforcement officers from a multi-agency tactical response team assigned to the security operations for the G20. It is not unusual for tactical team members to wear camouflaged fatigues. The type of fatigues the officers wear designates their unit affiliation.
Prior to the arrest, the officers observed this subject vandalizing a local business. Due to the hostile nature of the crowd, officer safety and the safety of the person under arrest, the subject was immediately removed from the area.”
The video was featured this morning at the Drudge Report under the heading, “SEE U.S. MILITARY SNATCH PROTESTER… .”
At the liberal website Democratic Underground, one commenter asserted, “This is staged” and then claimed, “Those were not the uniforms National Guard/military were wearing yesterday. Neither was that the vehicles they were driving. This was just a bunch of idiots trying to make some point.”
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
According to news reports, “U.S. authorities assembled a security force of nearly 5,000 people to safeguard the event, including 2,500 National Guard troops, 1,200 state troopers, 875 Pittsburgh city police and small groups of officers from other agencies.”
Police and National Guard troops headed off an unauthorized march by some 1000 protesters on Thursday and eventually forced the crowd to scatter.
The police reaction to the protests has been marked by what antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan calls “profound overkill.”
“I have been to dozens of protests, large and small, since my son was killed in Iraq, but I have never seen anything like today,” Sheehan writes. “There were easily two cops/soldiers for every one of us protesters or maybe even 3 to 1.”
Sheehan also witnessed the National Guard troops working with the local police and comments, “Seeing the National Guard troops, fresh from Iraq, broke my heart the hardest. I also talked to dozens of them, none had ever heard of posse commitatus, and asked them if my son, their brother, died in Iraq so they could steal the rights of his mother. Most of them wouldn’t even look at me.”
These videos are from YouTube, posted September 25, 2009.
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