I’d met Rowley in 2006, at her campaign fundraiser at my parents’ house. At the time, she seemed fierce and friendly, with a somewhat prim persona akin to her plaid-skirted appearance on the cover of TIME four years before. Now, a comfortably rumpled Rowley sidled into a courtroom seat with the more relaxed bearing of a street-level activist and occasional blogger. She had a stack of “Defend the RNC8!” postcards to pass out, and a lot to say.

Rowley recently submitted data requests about law enforcement during the 2008 Republican National Convention to the FBI (via the Freedom of Information Act) and to the Ramsey County Sheriff’s and St. Paul Police departments (through the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act). She expects to learn whether the surveillance and policing of 60 to 70 political organizations in St. Paul last September to protest the Republican National Convention (RNC)– as well as the surveillance of another 80 or so legal aids, independent media and artistic performance groups — was overly broad.

If it wasn’t, Rowley said that news will come as a relief to people like those she knows in CODEPINK who say they were pulled over repeatedly around the time of the RNC. But if the wide net she’s cast does snare examples of extra-constitutional overreaching, they’ll go into a book she’s working on with author William John Cox.

Rowley regaled me and Minnesota Public Radio’s Laura Yuen, who sat nearby, with stories about her early days as an FBI agent in the early 1980s. Hoover had died almost a decade (and several reform efforts) earlier, but his ghost still hovered over the Bureau. It was Rowley’s job to respond to the very sort of data requests she now has pending about the RNC. As we watched the defense attorneys from the National Lawyers Guild kibitz at the front of the courtroom, Rowley recalled that as an FBI agent she sat among stacks of files on the Guild’s members — a throwback to Hoover’s conviction that the Guild was a communist organization.

Back then, every new lead meant a new file, Rowley said. If folksinger Burl Ives threw a party, the next day everyone in attendance had an FBI file. She suspects that won’t be the case with the 150 groups about whom she’s requested records.

Rowley said she was always proud that the FBI fought public corruption as its top priority (it’s now the agency’s fourth priority, according to an FBI spokesman I talked to separately). I asked her about reports that the FBI is looking into allegations that businessman Nasser Kazeminy funneled money to U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman through a business he controls in Texas and Coleman’s wife’s employer in Minnesota. Does the FBI really open different levels of cases with some (like the Coleman cash question, reportedly) termed mere inquiries while others are full-fledged investigations? Rowley, who retired in 2004, said that in her day two levels of investigations did exist but the lesser was rarely used, and in any case the difference between them was nominal at best — you either had a case worth pursuing or you didn’t.

Rowley spoke in an elevated whisper — this being a courtroom, although the judge never appeared — that later put me in mind of the lower, hoarser whisper that actor Hal Holbrooke used in the “All the President’s Men” film to portray of Mark “Deep Throat” Felt, who had been Hoover’s second-in-command at the FBI. Felt died Thursday, having revealed himself as Deep Throat but taking with him any key to the internal contradictions of a man who helped engineer both the illegal surveillance on dissidents and the downfall of a president who put such dirty tricks to his own political ends. Next time I see her, I’ll ask how Rowley — who put her own livelihood at risk to root out wrongdoing within the FBI — how she felt about Felt.

The postcard Rowley was handing out this week.

Though thousands marched through the streets of St. Paul today without incident, it was difficult to ignore a roving group of protesters who were sometimes marching and sometimes dashing their way through a parade route they reinvented by the minute.

The police gave chase from the beginning, even as less ambitious protesters gathered on the State Capitol lawn for the sanctioned march. Cell phones were abuzz with word of law enforcement officers in riot gear gathering at multiple intersections. There were early reports of pepper spray.

I left the State Capitol before the marchers did, alternately shadowing riot police and the roving protesters. For hours the game was the same: mostly black-clad protesters would round a corner chanting and dancing. The black-clad riot police would form columns. There would be a tense standoff and then, as quickly as they came, the protesters would disappear around another corner. It went on and on like this and eventually I gave up and went for water.

Then I received a Twitter message on my phone from user RNCo8announce:

We are now at the reconvergence time 3:15. There is confirmed activity of a group marching north on wabasha from 4th

Rushing to the spot, I passed this:

It was a Minneapolis Police Department squad being hauled away on a flatbed. The game had changed. Throughout downtown a handful of the day’s protesters had become much more aggressive, even violent. By the time I found the “reconvergence” it was at Kellogg Boulevard, where its participants were dragging newspaper boxes and trash receptacles into the street to block traffic — delegates or otherwise. Riot police looked on, but made no move. A few of the inconvenienced drivers left their cars to clear the roadblock themselves.

The mood among the protesters was still somewhat festive at this point. The Dead Kennedys were blaring from a stereo strapped to a wagon.

The protesters moved up the road until they were in front of the Crowne Plaza Hotel — RNC home to Texas delegates. Smooth-jazz-infused pop music was playing from speakers mounted in the hotel’s awning.

Nearby, a wall of National Guard troops with shields and batons stood two deep behind a row of police in riot gear. An officer with a bullhorn announced “This is your final chance!” — the crowd control chemicals were next. The police began marching forward, their rhythmic chanting (“Move! Move! Move!”) hushed by their gas masks.

They stopped to give the protesters one more chance to move along, which the energetic mob had done reliably all day. The riot police made a hole and horse-mounted police — horses and police wearing gas masks — approached the protesters and brushed up against them:

The protesters stayed where they were. The riot police advanced again and stopped. A woman confronted them, yelling: “I hope your parents see you on YouTube!”

An Associated Press photographer stood ready — very ready:

As most people — protesters, reporters and curious onlookers — watched from the sidewalks and green space along Kellogg, one protester pleaded from the street in a hoarse voice: “Get off the sidewalks and into the streets! These are our streets!”

In the distance, a lone drummer beat a snare drum at a heartbeat’s pace.

With voices made nasal and hushed behind their gas masks, the riot police yelled:

“Hold up!”

“Watch your line!”

“You guys tighten this up in here! Hold the line!”

Soon there was another advance, this one a bit faster. An officer took the red pepper spray canister from its thigh-holster and sprayed — sweeping from the protester in front of him to the reporters, myself included, at his side (all of us wore our press passes in plain view). We were just 20 minutes into the “reconvergence.”

In a fleeting moment of complicated levity a protester matched that initial burst of pepper spray with his own burst of Silly String, yelling: “You’ve been shot!”

Public Enemy’s “911 is a Joke” played from the wagon.

Now they were spraying in earnest, entangled as they were in Silly String. The cans were routinely misfiring and being tossed to the ground. There were sirens.

An observer for the National Lawyers Guild, clearly marked, was sprayed extensively from a roughly two foot distance just after this photo was taken:

Next it was a blue smoke canister. The AP reporter with the mask can be seen running from the street at the right:

After that, it was the “impact rounds” — fired from a 40mm rifle. Riot police fired these repeatedly during the Kellogg Boulevard incident and at other points during the day.

At one point a young male, one of the protesters, charged the line of riot police. He was tackled and struggled a bit against the force of four fully-uniformed riot police.

Finally, there were the exploding tear gas canisters. A few seconds after they are tossed by law enforcement they explode, creating a fog of tear gas and sometimes a torch-like flame.

At one point, an officer looked in my direction (there were others behind me) and tossed a canister that landed at my feet. I jumped as it exploded and ran back to snap this picture:

This guy, a photojournalist with official RNC press credentials, was soaked with pepper spray and collapsed at the feet of protester-medics once the chaos had ended.

I witnessed only two arrests when it was all over, which meant the roving protesters were roving again. The riot police stayed in formation — a line covering the entire width of Kellogg, its sidewalks, and its green space. One officer left the line to clear out yet another roadblock, assembled from, among other things, this:

With the air clear but the riot police still in formation, a bus lumbered up next to where the soaked photojournalist had collapsed just a few minutes earlier. It was a bus chartered by the Humphrey Institute. Two riders exited and paid no mind to the grimacing reporters and onlookers all around them.

From the bridge behind the bus, you could see — and hear — this:

The tear gas below was quick to waft up to onlookers on the bridge, with children among them. It was another brutal burn and a first taste for people who had simply wandered onto the scene. This riverside game of cat and mouse ended with the largest number of arrests of the day — bringing the total to at least 284 by late evening.

All photos by Jeff Severns Guntzel, who can be reached at jsguntzel at gmail.com

]]> http://minnesotaindependent.com/6740/day-one-diary-all-roads-lead-to-kellogg-boulevard/feed 10 http://minnesotaindependent.com/6394/the-anatomy-of-a-march-veterans-for-peace-event-ends-in-arrests http://minnesotaindependent.com/6394/the-anatomy-of-a-march-veterans-for-peace-event-ends-in-arrests#comments Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:41:40 +0000 Jeff Severns Guntzel http://www.minnesotaindependent.com/?p=6394 When Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin took the stage at the Veterans for Peace rally in front of the State Capitol building today, where hundreds of activists gathered…]]>

When Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin took the stage at the Veterans for Peace rally in front of the State Capitol building today, where hundreds of activists gathered before marching towards the Xcel Energy Center, she started with the string of weekend raids on her mind: “This is not the Midwestern welcome we expected!”

Her audience cheered — among them a vet hoisting a desert-camo anti-war flag:

A cadre of protesters were clad in orange jumpsuits meant to evoke those worn by prisoners at the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison. The held black hoods in their hands and stuck signs to their backs — on each sign was printed the name, age and story of a living, breathing Guantanamo detainee:

While the protesters gathered in a line, a dozen or so police on bikes gathered by the portable bathrooms for a huddle and two St. Paul police officers on a John Deere Gator XUV waited to serve as a sort of pace car for the portion of the march that was sanctioned:

The sun was brutal. “Hey!” yelled a man holding a corner of a Veterans for Peace banner at the front of the march to a friend, “You wouldn’t want to lend an Irish Polack a hat, would you?”

With most of the marchers ready to go, the Guantanamo protesters — a separate contingent — were still gathering themselves. Most were fumbling with their black hoods. “Yeah, you can see out of them,” said one prisoner to a concerned onlooker. “Lift your hood and unzip your suit when you need to!” yelled the group’s ringleader, who also cautioned the group: “At the end of the march, there will be a turning point. If you go left, you will be going in the direction of the civil disobedience group. It’s going to be confusing. Make a choice based on your own conscience — and treat everybody with respect, including the police.”

The orange-suited, black-hooded group lined up (“Three across! Head high!”) behind their banner, which read: TORTURE DESTROYS US ALL.

Once underway, the march was solemn with marchers carrying paper tombstones with the names of Iraqi and American victims of the war in Iraq. A man with a bullhorn read the names from a list. Another followed each recited name by shouting: “We will remember you!” Soon the marchers joined.

The march followed the John Deere police vehicle from the Capitol building to the “turning point” where bike-mounted police could be heard yelling to one another: “Remember: tactically spaced!” and marchers were addressed by a Veterans for Peace organizer with a bullhorn. “If you follow the Vets for Peace flag we will continue on with the march and you will not be arrested — or you will not be doing something that is supposed to get you arrested. If you go to the left, you will be committing civil disobedience.”

That announcement was followed by a brief negotiation with a St. Paul police officer. It was agreed: to the right; no problems. To the left; no guarantees.

The marchers who went to the left towards the Landmark Center at the intersection of 6th Street and Washington numbered two dozen, maybe more. A handful got ahead of the pack and headed for what looked like a holding pen: a meandering wall of cage material blocking access to the Xcel Energy Center. At first the marchers — now looking to be arrested — stopped and were a bit stumped. Then a man got on the ground and pushed himself through a foot-high gap between cage-wall and pavement. Mary Vaughn, a woman of fragile appearance with decades of line-crossing and jail-sitting behind her, was next.

It was a maneuver fraught with no small drama — at one point Vaughn seemed stuck. A moment later, she was up, placard in hand:

Dan Pearson of Chicago, who had just participated in a peace march from Chicago to St. Paul, followed Vaughn under the gate. “Thank you!” shouted one supporter. “One of you should climb over!” shouted another.

Vaughn, Pearson, and the others headed for another breach in the cage — where an entire panel of the wall was missing. Had they passed, they would have successfully marched their way into the innermost ring of the Xcel security zone. It wasn’t to be.

Police rushing to put the missing panel in place used it as a sort of shield — pushing the protesters back with grunts and grimaces. “Gentle!” yelled an onlooker. The protesters relented even as police came in from behind them.

While all of that commotion was going on, two women, one of them a nun with the Sisters of St. Joseph, walked through yet another overlooked gap in the barrier. Police still securing their riot gear ran to stop them but were too late. That looked like this:

The banter from the crowd was constant: “Hey officer, why don’t you ask these nice ladies where they stashed their buckets of urine?” came one remark — then a reply from another corner of the crowd: “C’mon guys, don’t antagonize the cops, they’re on overtime.”

A man in a neon yellow “Minnesota Peace Team” vest handed out apple slices to protesters and media — photo, video and print journalists crammed together and leaned over one another for footage and quotes.

All told there were nine arrests — then there was something of a low-intensity standoff. Those who had not squeezed under the fence had technically still elected to be arrested. But nobody was making a move. The police weren’t budging either.

Ten minutes passed before the police made a move, urging everybody away from the barrier under threat of arrest. What had been just a couple dozen cops were now at least 75 — now with helmets on and visors down — with an additional 15-plus State Troopers and a couple of Secret Service agents.

By this point law enforcement — some officers practicing cold stares, some joking, and others looking the slightest bit anxious — far outnumbered the 30 or so protesters remaining.

The cops won the staring contest. It wasn’t long before the few remaining protesters turned and walked back towards the Capitol building. The arrestees were being processed and on their way to Ramsey County Jail. There was silence for a while then a shout from a St. Paul police officer:

“FORMATION!”

“COLUMNS!”

“MOVE!”

Some marched away and some swaggered. One officer — a young woman — did a little dance. It was mostly tourists now and a thin man with bushy hair, a dress shirt, and a too-short necktie posed for a picture in front of what few cops were left, fist in the air and with a giggle.

All photos by Jeff Severns Guntzel.

]]> http://minnesotaindependent.com/6394/the-anatomy-of-a-march-veterans-for-peace-event-ends-in-arrests/feed 8 http://minnesotaindependent.com/6191/video-st-paul-police-raid-convergence-space http://minnesotaindependent.com/6191/video-st-paul-police-raid-convergence-space#comments Sat, 30 Aug 2008 15:42:00 +0000 Tom Elko http://www.minnesotaindependent.com/?p=6191 Friday night’s raid on the RNC Welcoming Committee’s “convergence site,” describe how they went from watching a movie to lying face down, handcuffed, with guns pointed at them. ]]> In a video report from Submedia.tv, individuals caught in Friday night’s raid on the RNC Welcoming Committee’s “convergence site,” describe how they went from watching a movie to lying face down, handcuffed, with guns pointed at them.