The Chicago meeting of NATO is a legitimate venue for protesting the country’s war-making activities, but that apparently didn’t go down well with the local brass. Cops rousted two kids from Florida and one from New Hampshire out of their sleeping bags last night and charged with them terrorism for supposedly preparing to throw Molotov cocktails at Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s house. Please.
The owner of the raided apartment said he makes note incendiary devices but home-brewed beer, which explains the equipment seized. One report suggests that a police agent had been talking up some nutty scheme, which was used to bust the visitors for this ‘terror plot’. From all appearances, it won’t stand up long in court, but with today’s headlines on the arrests, cops can declare mission accomplished.
The guys’ lawyer denounced the arrests as ‘trumped-up’. Another Occupy spokesperson noted that the same detainees just had a run-in with cops, filmed them and had been threatened by them for doing so.
Luckily, the guys are not from Pakistan nor have Muslim names, in which case they could easily get railroaded by a properly terrified jury. But the whole thing stinks, and while the Justice Department isn’t directly involved in the case, it’s hard to imagine that the Feds are completely in the dark about the anti-Occupy tactics being deployed in this case. On the contrary: there is already evidence accumulating that the whole nationwide crackdown on Occupy was centrally coordinated.
I don’t see how an objective observer not fastened at the hip to the Democratic Party can deny that the Obama government is racking up a worse record on civil liberties than W’s. In any case, the counter-attack has followed the same script: bait Occupy’s mass response to abuse and taint it with accusations of violence while turning a blind eye to the wacko white guys carrying assault rifles to their Tea Party rallies.
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