Ralph Lopez has written a great diary today about three NATO protestors charged with a terror plot after videoing police harassment.
Well they were not alone. Other occupy journalists were also arrested, handcuffed and interrogated at gunpoint by the police.
This seems to be a widespread phenomenon by the police to shut down dissenting voices and voices, which expose the failures of the status quo. That is very dangerous for a democracy, where truth should prevail over politics and not the other way around.
From Firedoglake:
Under cover of the night around twelve police cars stopped five journalists when they were heading back to where they are staying in Chicago during the NATO summit. All five have been covering protests against the NATO summit for the past few days.
The five journalists included Luke Rudkowksi, who streams as @Lukewearechange, Tim Pool, who streams as @Timcast, Jeoff Shively (@Giraffa), Dustin & Jess. They are known for their work livestreaming and tweeting out regular coverage of Occupy protests.
Rudkowski of We Are Change managed to record the Chicago police approaching the journalists in the car. The police have their guns drawn. They shout, “Hands! Hands! Get your hands up!” And then, “Fuckin’ hands!” Then Pool’s voice can be heard saying, “We’re being raided. For folks who are watching, we are being raided by the CPD right now as we speak.”
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/...
During the stop, search and interrogation, Chicago PD took the journalists’ hard drives and slammed themagainst “running boards four or five times.” They took Pool’s alternate batteries and slammed them too. Content recorded by the journalists was deleted from Ustream.
Here is another video with audio from a journalist describing the interrogation
It seems the police were not done with the journalists after this interrogation and wanted to raid the building they were staying in.
The stop happened about midnight or just after. And, according to Pool’s Twitter stream, the police were still following them on the police scanner around 2 am. They allegedly wanted the targeted journalists to announce where they were staying for the night so they could raid where the journalists were staying
Here is NBC news coverage of the incident. (H/T: Sean X).
View more videos at: http://nbcchicago.com.