Naomi Wolf: how I was arrested at Occupy Wall Street

[cory777]

Source: Guardian

Last night I was arrested in my home town, outside an event to which I had been invited, for standing lawfully on the sidewalk in an evening gown.

Let me explain; my partner and I were attending an event for the Huffington Post, for which I often write: Game Changers 2011, in a venue space on Hudson Street. As we entered the space, we saw that about 200 Occupy Wall Street protesters were peacefully assembled and were chanting. They wanted to address Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was going to be arriving at the event. They were using a technique that has become known as "the human mic" – by which the crowd laboriously repeats every word the speaker says – since they had been told that using real megaphones was illegal.

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He gave me a look of pure hate. "Are you going to back down?" he shouted. I stood, immobilised, for a moment. "Are you getting out of my way?" I did not even make a conscious decision not to "fall back" – I simply couldn't even will myself to do so, because I knew that he was not giving a lawful order and that if I stepped aside it would be not because of the law, which I was following, but as a capitulation to sheer force. In that moment's hesitation, he said, "OK," gestured, and my partner and I were surrounded by about 20 officers who pulled our hands behind our backs and cuffed us with plastic handcuffs.

We were taken in a van to the seventh precinct – the scary part about that is that the protesters and lawyers marched to the first precinct, which handles Hudson Street, but in the van the police got the message to avoid them by rerouting me. I understood later that the protesters were lied to about our whereabouts, which seemed to me to be a trickle-down of the Bush-era detention practice of unaccountable detentions.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/19/naomi-wolf-arrest-occupy-wall-street?newsfeed=true

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Breaking Activist News - http://activistnews.blogspot.com/

[ZombieHorde]

1. Recommended. nt

[Demeter]

2. Despicable

Land of the Unfree and Home of the Bully

[HCE SuiGeneris]

5. Land of the Unfree.

Potent. True.

Let's continue to band together and initiate change.

[inna]

8. Land of the Brainwashed/Propagandized into Complicity, the way I clearly see it now

[defendandprotect]

3. kr

[snappyturtle]

4. Thank you for posting this article. I am always interested in Naomi Wolf's

opinions. She HAS been warning us of what has come to be.

[bdamomma]

13. yeah, for real she's been warning us now for a while.

[FirstLight]

6. ...

yikes :scared:

[Ellipsis]

7. oops....

another intervenant pregnant moment by the NYPD

God bless ya sister.

[PotatoChip]

9. The entire article is well worth the read.

Gotta love Naomi Wolf. We are lucky to have her advocacy. I hope she challenges this arrest.

My thanks to the OP for the article. K&R

As a sidenote: Does anyone know if many mainstream US newspapers have published this story? I personally have not seen much about this anywhere but on DU.

[lunatica]

10. They arrested the wrong person

And it makes me wonder what might have happened if she wasn't a well known person.

[Capitalocracy]

11. Police lying about the location of a detained person

is straight out of the fascist playbook. It's what they did to the families of disappeared people who were tortured and murdered in Argentina during the military dictatorship.

[RainDog]

12. k&r n/t

[The Doctor.]

14. Damn.

This is how to expose the drift towards fascism.