Urgent..Prayers needed!! Please help my friend, Govt. arrested peaceful protesters, refusing med. attn.

I have a dear dear friend who has been participating in peaceful demonstrations in the Twin Cities at the Republican Convention, and nearly all the members of the peaceful pagan group she is a part of have been handcuffed, arrested, their homes searched, small children were present at one of the peaceful meetings they were having, all from the govt.

I am posting here articles which are about these events..but most importantly is the first message I will post. One of their friends was arrested, and tasered bad, and is being refused medical attention. Please send prayers, and love to them...and any healers or pagans out there please send healing energies to Jason & Ryanna.

Thank you so very much, truly these are peaceful and loving people just trying to walk their talk.

Sheila

-----------------------------------------

Please remember this goes for all who are tasered and pepper hosed and tear gassed and shot and beaten.

Send healing in all forms and to all involved.
Please!

URGENT MAGICAL SUPPORT IMMEDIATELY

Beloveds,
we need your help urgently. JASON (SCARECROW) has been extensively tasered & is being denied medical attention. Jason & Ryanna were both snatched from the pagan cluster at the beginning of the Poor People’s March. PLEASE immediately try to connect with Jason — for tasers, we need to ground out that electricity and move it away — electricity is a form of energy, and we CAN ground this down into the core & move it out of him. Please, you witches know what to do; now let’s connect with Jason and help him move this energy. Riyanna needs your loving magic too, and we’re working on getting them both out NOW. Starhawk is in the streets with the Pagan Cluster, and we are safely back at the space.

deborah, elizabeth, & Megan Coyote
forward widely

here are some numbers you can start with.

St. Paul Mayor, Chris Coleman: 651.266.
8510
Ramsey County Sherriff, Bob Fletcher: 651.266.
8500

Complaint Number for the jail: 651-266-8989

--------------------------------------------

Last night the police raided the Convergence center in St. Paul , a meeting place for activists to network, get medical aid , training and meals. They confiscated computers, x boxes and other suspicious items and barriered the door to further access, even tho the place is leased and paid for and there was nothing to provoke the incident. Many were handcuffed, even a young woman while her 5 yr old watched.

The police also broke down the doors of 2 houses in Mpls, one was a bicycle co-op. 4 people were arrested.

Yesterday I sat in ritual circle with pagans at the last remaining spring in the county and we were overseen by 4 motorcycle Homeland Security agents, 2 which came very close to the circle purusing our peaceful gathering.
(we looked like we were having outdoor church, not even singing or dancing!)
Tonite we pagans gathered again (both were permitted gatherings) high on a bluff overlooking St. Paul at some ancient Indian burial mounds. While we were singing and dancing in circle and listening to Starhawk we were buzzed overhead quite closely and for probably over a half hour by a govt. helicopter. It was very obvious that they were targeting us, as there were other gatherings of people in this same park, but they only circled us. After an extended time they widened their surveilance and probably left finally as dusk approached and our circle disbanded. We also heard that Starhawk's Permaculture bus was stopped by police and have not yet heard if there were arrests made or not.

These were all peaceful, permitted gatherings, unprovoked activities and it is obvious to all here that the activists are being watched and targeted. We continue to hear about altercations by the police with the independant media.

So this is news you are unlikely to hear on the mainstream media and this is the truth of what is going on in our country and the erosion of our constitutional freedoms. Please take action for justice, peace and liberty however you can.

fanona
--------------------------------------------

(((source http://www. globalresearch. ca/index. php?context=va&aid=10034 )))

In the months leading up to the Republican National Convention, the FBI-led Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force actively recruited people to infiltrate vegan groups and other leftist organizations and report back about their activities. On May 21, the Minneapolis City Pages ran a recruiting story called "Moles Wanted." Law enforcement sought to preempt lawful protest against the policies of the Bush administration during the convention.

Since Friday, local police and sheriffs, working with the FBI, conducted preemptive searches, seizures and arrests. Glenn Greenwald described the targeting of protestors by "teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets." Journalists were detained at gunpoint and lawyers representing detainees were handcuffed at the scene.

"I was personally present and saw officers with riot gear and assault rifles, pump action shotguns," said Bruce Nestor, the President of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, who is representing several of the protestors. "The neighbor of one of the houses had a gun pointed in her face when she walked out on her back porch to see what was going on. There were children in all of these houses, and children were held at gunpoint.
"

The raids targeted members of "Food Not Bombs," an anti-war, anti-authoritarian protest group that provides free vegetarian meals every week in hundreds of cities all over the world. They served meals to rescue workers at the World Trade Center after 9/11 and to nearly 20 communities in the Gulf region following Hurricane Katrina.

Also targeted were members of I-Witness Video, a media watchdog group that monitors the police to protect civil liberties. The group worked with the National Lawyers Guild to gain the dismissal of charges or acquittals of about 400 of the 1,800 who were arrested during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York . Preemptive policing was used at that time as well. Police infiltrated protest groups in advance of the convention.

Nestor said that no violence or illegality has taken place to justify the arrests. "Seizing boxes of political literature shows the motive of these raids was political," he said.

Further evidence the political nature of the police action was the boarding up of the Convergence Center , where protestors had gathered, for unspecified code violations. St. Paul City Council member David Thune said, "Normally we only board up buildings that are vacant and ramshackle." Thune and fellow City Council member Elizabeth Glidden decried "actions that appear excessive and create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation for those who wish to exercise their first amendment rights.
"

"So here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protestors who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do," Greenwald wrote on Salon.

Preventive detention violates the Fourth Amendment, which requires that warrants be supported by probable cause. Protestors were charged with "conspiracy to commit riot," a rarely-used statute that is so vague, it is probably unconstitutional. Nestor said it "basically criminalizes political advocacy.
"

On Sunday, the National Lawyers Guild and Communities United Against Police Brutality filed an emergency motion requesting an injunction to prevent police from seizing video equipment and cellular phones used to document their conduct.

During Monday's demonstration, law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and excessive force. At least 50 people were arrested, including Amy Goodman, the prominent host of Democracy Now!, as well as the show's producers, Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar. "St. Paul was the most militarized I have ever seen an American city to be," Greenwald wrote, "with troops of federal, state and local law enforcement agents marching around with riot gear, machine guns, and tear gas cannisters, shouting military chants and marching in military formations.
"

Six activists remain detained after Ramsey County Judge Joanne Smith found probable cause to continue the detentions. Defense counsel have not seen any of the alleged evidence, reviewed the affidavits for the search warrants, or been able to contest the evidence presented to Judge Smith.

Bruce Nestor said the timing of the arrests was intended to stop protest activity, "to make people fearful of the protests, but also to discourage people from protesting," he told Amy Goodman. Nevertheless, thousands of people, many opposed to the Iraq war, turned out to demonstrate on Monday. A legal team from the National Lawyers Guild has been working diligently to protect the constitutional rights of protestors.

Marjorie Cohn is president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. She is the author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law and co-author of Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent (with Kathleen Gilberd), which will be published this winter by PoliPointPress.
Her articles are archived at www. marjoriecohn. com.

---------------------------------------------

RNC2—Raid on the Convergence Center

By Starhawk

It’s Friday night.
Our Pagan Cluster is sitting on the bluff of the
Mississippi having our first real meeting, when Lisa gets a call.
The cops are raiding the Convergence Center, where we’re organizing meetings and trainings for the protests against the Republican National Convention.
It’s not a role play, the caller says. It’s real.

Instantly, we jump up and hurry back the six or eight blocks to the old theater we are using for meetings, trainings and social gatherings.
I ‘ve spent the last two days doing magical activism trainings, teaching people how to stay calm and grounded in emergency situations and when things get chaotic. Now it’s time to put the training into practice. Aaron, a tall, red-headed young man who could be one of my nephews strides along beside me.

“Are you grounded?” I ask him. He nods, and runs ahead.

Nobody can keep up with Lisa, who speeds ahead like an arrow, walking, not running, but still covering the ground quickly. Andy and I trail behind.

We’re often street buddies, because we’re both big, slow, and supremely calm and stubborn, willing to wade into almost any situation and become the
immovable object.

We’re stopped by a line of cops just before we reach the building. They refuse to let us through, or to move their van which is blocking Scarecrow’s
car. There’s an investigation underway, they say, and won’t say more.

Brush, our dear friend, is inside, having gone to a jail solidarity meeting, ironically enough.
So are two very young people who had just joined our
cluster that night. I try calling Brush’s cell phone, but get no reply.

We wait. That’s what you do when the cops have guns trained on kids inside a building.
You wait, and witness, and make phone calls, and try to think of useful things to do.

We call lawyers. We call politicians. We try to call media. We call friends who might know politicians and media.

Through the kitchen door, we cansee young kids sitting on the floor, handcuffed. We walk across the street, back, made more phone calls. An
ambulance is parked in front, and the paramedics head into the building, leaving a gurney ready.
Susu, from her car around the corner, reports that
the cops have been grabbing pedestrians from the street, forcing them down to the ground, handcuffing them.

Song, one of the local organizers, calls her City Council member. She wants to call the Mayor, Chris Coleman, who has promised that St. Paul will be as
welcoming to protestors as to delegates, but no one has his home number.

What I have forgotten to tell people at the training is how much of an action is just this: tense, boring waiting, with a knot of anxiety in your stomach and your feet starting to hurt.
Song talks to a helpful neighbor, who’s come over to find out what’s happening. He knows where the mayor lives, says it’s just a few blocks away, and draws us a map.

We decide to go and call on the Mayor, who could call off the cops. About five of us troop down there, through the soft night and a neighborhood of
comfortable homes and wide lawns on the bluffs above the Mississippi. The Mayor’s house is a comfortable Dutch Colonial, and lights were on inside.

We decide that just a few of us will go to the door, so as not to look intimidating. Song is a round, soft-bodied middle-aged woman with a sweet
face. Ellen is a tiny brunette with a gap-toothed smile, and Lisa, formidable organizer though she is, looks slight and unthreatening. The
rest of us hang back. Someone opens the door.
Our friends have a conversation with the mayors’ wife, who is not pleased to be visited by
constituents late at night, and who tells us we should call the office.

The Mayor, she says, is asleep, and she will not wake him up.

We think a mayor who was doing his job would get up and go see what’s going on. Nonetheless, we head back to the convergence space.

A protestor has been released from the building.
A small crowd has gathered across the street, and Fox News has arrived. They interview Song, who does
her first ever Fox media spot. She tells them the truth—that people were in there watching movies—a documentary about Meridel Le Seuer. Meridel would
be proud, and I’m glad she is with us in some form.

One by one, protestor’s trickle out. Now we get more pieces of the story.

The cops burst in, with no warning. They pulled drew their guns on everyone—including a five year old child who was there with his mother, forced everyone down on the floor. It was terrifying.

They had a warrant, apparently, from the county, not the city, to search for ‘bomb making materials.
’ They were searching everyone in the building, then
one by one releasing them as they found nothing.

They continue to find nothing, as we wait through long hours. Meanwhile, more and more media arrives.
These cops are not as creative as the DC cops
during our first mobilization there against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Those cops confiscated the lunchtime soup—which
included onions and chili powder, claiming they were materials for home made
pepper spray.

We wait until the last person gets out. He’s a twenty year old who the cops have accused of stealing his own backpack—but apparently they relented.

And now it’s morning.
I wake up to the news that cops have been raiding
houses where activists are staying, bursting in with the same bogus warrant
and arresting people, including a four year old child. They’ve arrested people at the Food Not Bombs house—a group dedicated to feeding protestors
and the homeless. They’ve arrested others, presumably just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Poor Peoples’ Campaign, which had set up camp at Harriet Island, a park in the middle of the Mississippi, has also been harassed, its participants ordered to disperse and its organizers arrested.

Let me be perfectly clear here—all of us here are planning nonviolent protests against an administration which is responsible for immense
violence, bombs that have destroyed whole countries, and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

This is the America that eight years of the Bush administration have brought us, a place where dissent is no longer tolerated, where pre-emptive strikes have become the strategy of choice for those who hold power, where any group can be accused of ‘bombmaking’ or ‘terrorism’ on no evidence whatsoever in order to deter dissent.

Please stand with us. Because it could be your home they are raiding, next.

Call the Mayors of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
Tell them you are outraged by these attacks on dissent. Urge them to let Poor People encamp and to let dissent be heard.

FLOOD THE MAYORS' OFFICES ASAP

St.
Paul Mayor Chris Coleman

651-266-8510

Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak

(612) 673-2100

(612) 673-3000 outside Minneapolis

-----------------------------------------

ADDITION:

Video about the protests..70 yr. old women being arrested for protesting too.

------------------------------------------------

Today is Sept. 3rd..and I am posting an update to the above information. These people are there fighting for each of our rights, and trying to assist all. Can't you please just add a few minutes of your day to help by sending love and light? Sheila

UPDATES:

Emergency Note: Yesterday, Tuesday, two of our cluster were arrested before the start of the March for Our Lives organized by the Poor People’s Movement. Riyanna and Jason were standing at the edge of the park where the rally was happening when they were attacked by police.

Witnesses reported to us that Jason was tasered while he was lying on the ground, not resisting, and was refused medical aid. Somehow, later, he managed to get a call through to us on his cell phone, to report that the two taser barbs were still in his hip and the police were refusing to take them out. His phone remained on while we could hear what sounds like the cops beating him up.

In a later call, he reported that he has a black eye and multiple
abrasions on his head and torso, but is basically okay, and that the taser barbs have been removed. We also heard from Riyanna who is also okay. I just talked to her, and she sounds fine and strong and worried about other prisoners who are being denied needed medication.

Arraignments and release are now going very slowly, and she could be held as long as 36 hours, or more. . A good person to call today would be the St. Paul mayor, Chris Coleman, 651-266-8510 demand that he end the targeting of protestors, the
abuse of prisoners, and the confiscation of property.

Our PermiBus has been officially ‘released’, but its owners are being told there are 23 violations against it and they are not being allowed to drive it away. They have not received copies of any of the violations except for one: ‘no proof of insurance’. In reality, Stan Wilson has proof of insurance on the bus but was never allowed to produce it.

The authorities claim that all searches and seizures over the last week have been done legally, with warrants and judicial review. But the bus was seized illegally with no charges and searched illegally, without a warrant and without the presence of the owners.

This is a violation of the Bill of Rights. For the PermiBus, call the Mayor Rybek of Minneapolis, (612) 673-2100 (His office)