DRM
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from Democracy Now! at
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/24/1455248
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JEREMY SCAHILL:
There were several things that happened that I think need to be noted. One is, as Ana [Nogueira, show producer] mentioned, a photographer for the "Miami Herald," who was embedded with the -- it's hard to call them police -- I would say soldiers that were in the streets of Miami. And in fact, a lot of the budget for Miami came from this $8.5 million that was allocated to Miami from the $87 billion Iraq spending bill. But a "Miami Herald" photographer got separated from his unit in the Miami police department and ended up on the dangerous side of the lines with the unarmed protesters and he did not like the fact that kids in the protest had locked arms and were essentially trying to hold the line outside of the inner continental hotel where the FTAA ministerial talks were happening. Protesters were right near there and he was furious that he had gotten separated, was trying to get back through and the kids just wouldn't move out of the way. The kids said, no, these are our streets and we're staying here and the "Miami Herald" photographer just starts hitting a kid in the back of his head, like punching him. You know, we were filming. I was there with John Hamilton from the “Worker's Independent News Service” and we were filming this and the kid kind of turns around and pushes the guy and says, back off. And the guy had to be restrained by his colleagues because he was going to go ballistic on demonstrators that he was supposed to be covering. The other thing is while the reporters were being embedded with the Miami military, you also had the Miami military embedding people with the protesters. Not many journalists were embedded with the protesters, but they have had undercover police officers, agent provocateurs with the protesters and the reason we know this is because of one particular incident that many people witnessed and that was a scuffle broke out and appeared to be a scuffle between protesters and there was about four or five people involved. One of the --what looked like a protester was hitting another and so people moved in and tried to pull them off at which point this person who appeared to be a protester pulled out a taser gun and started tasering the other protesters. Then he was liberated by the police and brought to the other side of police lines. Now, some of these people even had backpacks on with sayings that said, "no way FTAA," and "FTAA sucks." So these are the kinds of tactics that were being used in Miami.
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full transcript at link above
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