USA: The Crime of Peaceful Protest By Chris Hedges

Click for Source Article by Chris Hedges on TruthDig

Occupy Wall Street:  Cecily McMillan, 25, wearing a red dress and high heels, her dark, shoulder-length hair stylishly curled = Spent part of her childhood living in a trailer park in rural Texas and who now is a graduate student at The New School for Social Research in New York = During her arrest bruises were photographed and later displayed on “Democracy Now!” A plainclothes NYPD policeman WHO DID NOT IDENTIFY AS AN OFFICER came up behind and grabbed McMillan’s breast—a perverse form of assault. Mc Millan’s elbow made contact with his face = a reaction to the grope. By the end of the confrontation she was lying on the ground bruised, beaten and convulsing and was taken to a hospital emergency room, where police handcuffed her to a bed.

Mc Millan trial should have been about her beating and about her receiving restitution from NYPD for police abuse.

BUT in this upside down world she is charged with felony assault in the second degree and facing up to seven years in prison. She is expected to take the witness stand soon.

MC Millan sat behind a table with her two lawyers Friday morning facing AN ANGRY BIASED JUDGE with an AGENDA.

Judge Ronald A. Zweibel at the Manhattan Criminal Court = Jumps from boredom to rage during the trial = Repeatedly throwing caustic barbs Mc Millan’s lawyers + shutting down their avenues of defense. = Curtly dismissed a request by defense lawyers for a motion to dismiss the case attempting to argue that testimony from the officer who arrested McMillan violated Fifth Amendment restrictions. Judge issued an unusual gag order that bars McMillan’s lawyers from speaking to the press = Visibly snapping, “This debate is going to end.” Judge heavily censored videos taken during the arrest = “cutting the heart out of my ability to refute” the prosecution’s charge that McMillan faked a medical seizure in an attempt to avoid being arrested. ZWEIBEL “totally handicapped” THE DEFENSE.

HOMELAND SECURITY’s NATIONWIDE coordinated POLICE eradication of Occupy encampments = OUTRAGEOUS = END RIGHT TO PEACEFUL PROTEST!

NOW Relentlessly the courts are harassing and neutralizing Occupy activists = OUTRAGEOUS

NOW handing out long probation terms that come with activists’ forced acceptance of felony charges. = OUTRAGEOUS = Hard to find employment + long probation terms effectively prohibit further activism.

Occupy Wall Street movement = Battling against a corporate oligarchy that has sabotaged our democracy and made war on the poor and the working class. = OUTRAGEOUS

HOMRELAND-POLICE across America used to short-circuit OUR RIGHTS.

NYPD AND HOMELAND = Message of STATE: Do not dissent = ZWEIBEL is END of process.

Yanked people from sidewalks and arrested them
Routinely shoving protesters and beating them with batons
Heavily shielded Police storm into gatherings in fast-moving lines
Police shoved, hit, knocked protesters to the ground.
Slammed against police cars
Herded like sheep + confined within police barricades
Mass arrests
Handcuffed and then thrown violently onto the sidewalk
Blasted with pepper spray in their faces = temporarily blinding their victims
Violence against nonviolent protesters
Outlawing of protests
Banning of demonstrators from public spaces
Heavy police infiltration and SPYING on the movement
Press often assaulted for taking photographs or videos

Mc Millan and several hundred activists at Zuccotti Park March 2012 = Marking 6-month anniversary of the start of Occupy Wall Street. = NYC in fear deployed large numbers of police officers to clear the park just before midnight of that March 17. = After the violence, numerous activists would call the police aggression perhaps the worst experienced by the Occupy movement.

Mc Millan’s journey is an incredible success story = From a rural Texas backwater to a Graduate degree in NYC. Raised by a divorced mother from Mexico with little money with painful stretches of unemployment. For periods, McMillan, her brother and her mother survived on welfare, and they moved often; she attended 13 schools, including five high schools. Her father worked at a Domino’s Pizza shop, striving in vain to become a manager.