A response to RT

The last image found in Matt Rourke’s camera before he was hauled off.

To R. T. Rybak:

Is this the best you can do after five days of your personal and official silence in the face of police repression perpetrated by personnel under your control?

You offer a defense of pre-emptive raids, of enthusiastic cooperation with the same federal authorities who are responsible for torture in Abu Graib, Guantánamo, and many other places we may not know about.

Ah, but you “reject tactics that have a chilling effect on free speech.” Name one such tactic that you have NOT employed.

Like the last time I wrote to you, to protest your refusal to support a City Council resolution against the pending (in 2003) U.S. war against Iraq, you resorted to legalistic arguments to defend things that aren't legal, like the Patriot Act itself, like the preventive raids and detentions, like the cross-jurisdictional actions and evasions of responsibility that now fall under the umbrella of the unconstitutional Patriot Act.

Legaloid arguments are the last refuge of bourgeois politicians. After, according to some reports, one million Iraqi civilian deaths in the last five and a half years, are you still proud of your role in opposing the anti-war movement? Will you still be proud, if and when you reflect on your career, of your current collusion with the forces of reaction? (Here I'm being too kind, suggesting that you are not part of the forces of reaction.)

When I speak of the forces of reaction I speak, of course, not only of law enforcement at all levels, but of your participation in facilitating that the Republican convention be held in the Twin Cities owing, apparently, to your belief that pandering to war criminals to garner their tourism revenue is worth any inconvenience to your constituents that the suppression of their rights may cause.

Your citing of Ramsey (yes, Ramsey, not Hennepin, where we live) County Sheriff Bob Fletcher's World War I-era redbating and hysteria to justify Minneapolis police participation in raids and detentions is beyond belief. This is no more intelligent, on your part, than if you were to cite the late F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover's similarly hysterical redbaiting to support surveillance of Martin Luther King or the Federal and local police assassination of Fred Hampton while he slept. You are concerned about “reports of” detentions of journalists. What? You're not sure if they were really detained? Just as in Chicago in 1968, the whole world is watching and has seen Amy Goodman not only detained but physically abused. But there's a further offense in this comment: if we know of the detention and maltreatment of journalists, at least one of whom is famous, what can we say, and where is your concern, for the treatment of hundreds of other arrestees and gassing victims?

John Hazard