Amy Goodman, DemocracyNow! staff arrested, released (Greenwald, Rowley interview update)

Amy Goodman is the 61-year old host of DemocracyNow! She has survived a near-lethal encounter with Indonesian troops on East Timor, during which her colleague Alan Nairn was beaten unconscious.

For the crime of inquiring about the illegal detention of her co-workers, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, she was manhandled and arrested by the Minneapolis police (via Avedon, posting at Atrios). The police inflicted injuries on Kouddous and Salazar. Film of the arrest, available here, makes it clear that the Minneapolis police did all of this with no justification.

Where did Minnesota get the reputation as being a friendly, neighborly, reasonable place?

I hope she sues the city into insolvency.
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Glenn Greenwald, Salon:

Beginning last night, St. Paul was the most militarized I have ever seen an American city be, even more so than Manhattan in the week of 9/11 — 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. Humvees and law enforcement officers with rifles were posted on various buildings and balconies. Numerous protesters and observers were tear gassed and injured.

Update (Interview with Coleen Rowley):

AMY GOODMAN: Coleen Rowley, you’re a former FBI agent. As I talked to Elizabeth, our producer, here in St. Paul, one of the people who was arrested or detained at I-Witness, it seems that they were careful not to arrest at least this group but detain them for hours. They’re handcuffed. One of the protesters, his arms were red for hours afterwards. But she said that before the police came in, the FBI was there. What is the role of the FBI in this? Who is doing this?

COLEEN ROWLEY: Well, I can tell you what it’s supposed to be. And then I retired in 2004, and so these fusion centers have grown, of course, since that time, and who knows what it actually now amounts to? What it actually is supposed to be is in a major event, such as the RNC, the FBI is really to take the lead on the counterintelligence aspect, which, of course, if there was a true threat—let’s say there was a domestic terrorism group, which is—this is what we’re talking about. We’re talking about at the very most nonviolent civil disobedience. So the confusion with true intelligence for a terrorist threat is quite enormous. There’s a big range there. But in a real case, obviously, if you really did have, let’s say, the Aryan Brotherhood or something like that, a group bent on terrorism, the FBI is supposed to take the lead on that and coordinate the intelligence gathering.

AMY GOODMAN: What is your experience with preemptive raids?

COLEEN ROWLEY: Well, the word “preemptive,” of course, is— should send a red flag up, because that word came into play right before the Iraq war. And, of course, we all know that it’s very, very difficult to determine ahead of time what is a true threat. And so, when you start this word “preemptive,” and now, unfortunately, it seems to have migrated to domestic law enforcement. You cannot determine—we always talk about intent and capability, and if you really know that a group is going to pull off a bank robbery, you really have to make sure that an overt act is committed in furtherance of that. It’s not enough to know, for instance, that somebody’s talking about a bank robbery. So that’s a problem here, and certainly when you get into satire and, you know, taunts and this type of thing, it seems to be a terribly misguided and an overreaction on the part of police.

And it has terrible consequences, actually, for policing, too, which I can talk about later. People put this—they try to say, well, security, we must sacrifice civil liberties. They think of it as a tradeoff. And it is absolutely not true. Our security does depend on good police work. And so, when police do this, and they go against their own community policing model, they actually so distrust, so that if they do want to ask a question of someone next time, let’s say, there is a true threat, somebody may say, “I don’t want to talk to you. I know what happened last week when you handcuffed people incorrectly.” This is just sending a very bad signal to police work. And I’m sure there are many police officers who are just as disappointed with this, because it’s going to make their job in the future much more difficult.

AMY GOODMAN: As the police were surrounding I-Witness Video and Elizabeth Press, I asked the police officer if it was true that one of them came in earlier with an AR-15, with an automatic weapon, and he said yes.

COLEEN ROWLEY: Yeah, it’s—you know, again, with the escalation of force, and you get to the point where imminent—the word always is “imminent” threat, where you actually are allowed to use deadly force. FBI agents, for instance, train on this standard. All law enforcement trains on this standard. And to see this now erased a little bit is very wrong, and it needs to be corrected.

AMY GOODMAN: Coleen Rowley, you mentioned fusion centers. Explain what they are?

COLEEN ROWLEY: Well, you know, fusion centers are where law enforcement can combine forces. It has a good aspect, obviously, because you don’t want these jurisdictional restraints sometimes to prevent sharing of information. So there’s a good side to that.

There’s a bad side, potentially a bad side, which is that the separate jurisdictions exist for a reason. So, for instance, Ramsey County, seems like much of this is emanating from Sheriff Fletcher in Ramsey County. He seems to be the one that is into this preemptive show. I would think that St. Paul, the community policing model, is maybe not. But now, when you combine forces, you know, you see that problem of that—they all have the same equal law enforcement, maybe, authority in some of these cases. And Minnesota actually is quite a state that has always looked at separate jurisdictions. So the fusion center could have that problem.

AMY GOODMAN: Are there infiltrators? Is there surveillance that you know about going on in peaceful protests?

COLEEN ROWLEY: Well, here’s what—you know, our group, we have been at peace vigils now for five, going on six, years, and, you know, we’ve never had this problem that in this last week—our peace vigils in suburbs have been approached by police.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean “approached”?

COLEEN ROWLEY: We’ve had police officers come up to both of our really—we stand at a corner holding a sign, for one place, for over three years. And now we have police checking on intelligence and talking to us about violence. And, of course, we think of this as very intimidating. I have numerous peace folks who have marched for five years, who are now actually worried about not only Monday, but the whole week. Many of our artistic—my group is having a picnic, for instance, on Harriet Island. Now, you can’t imagine something more peaceful than a peace island picnic, and yet people are worried that that could be disrupted by this—a show of force and also by—you know, people are worried and may stay away. So this is very wrong.

It not only hurts civil liberties and the exercise of First Amendment rights, but it actually also hurts security. That’s something to keep in mind. This does not help security. It takes the police away from true threats, and then it also causes later problems for them trying to talk to people and get cooperation from the public.