[Dryerase] AGR Portland protest

[Shawn G]

Asheville Global Report
www.AGRNews.org

Bush gets money, protesters get pepper-spray

By Sean Marquis

Aug. 28 (AGR)—  Police in Portland, Oregon used teargas, pepper spray, 
rubber bullets, and batons to disperse a crowd of protesters outside a hotel 
where president George W. Bush was attending a Republican party fund raising 
event last week.
The demonstrators, numbering about 3,000 from various points around the 
Hilton hotel, were attempting to confront Bush and his donors and voice 
their opposition to many of his policies including his terror war, the 
invasion of Iraq, and Bush’s newly announced “Healthy Forests Initiative” -- 
a timber industry giveaway disguised as environmentalism.
The mainstream local and national corporate media went into full spin 
control over the Aug. 22 protest after some had initially reported 
“thousands” of protesters, they later changed the estimates to “a few 
hundred,” and also did not challenge many police statements about the firing 
of rubber bullets.
Bush’s Portland stop was aimed at raising money for the re-election of 
Oregon Senator Gordon Smith and the Republican Party in general.   
According to a report by the Portland Tribune, “About 600 contributors paid 
$1,000 for a fund-raising reception. Others paid $5,000 each for a more 
exclusive meeting and still others paid $25,000 per couple to have their 
picture taken with Bush. Party officials say the various events could add as 
much as $1 million to Republican campaign accounts.”
Thousands of protesters clogged the streets of Portland, blocking downtown 
traffic and bus services during rush hour chanting “Drop Bush, Not Bombs” 
and holding signs like “It’s the Economy, Stupid.”
By many accounts, the police outside the hotel seemed completely unprepared 
for the size of the crowd -- likely the reason they quickly resorted to the 
use of force to break up the crowd.

Pepper spraying lawyers and babies
The following day, Aug. 23, Alan Graf, the Chair of the Portland Chapter of 
the National Lawyers Guild, held a press conference on the steps of city 
hall where he stated that he had personally been pepper sprayed the day 
before and demanded Mayor Vera Katz fire Portland police Chief Mark Kroeker.
Graf said that when police attacked the crowd outside the Hilton it was an  
“aggressive and irresponsible” act and amounted to  “gestapo like conduct,” 
that showed “complete disregard for the health and safety of the citizens of 
Portland.”
He said the police declared a “state of emergency” and ordered the crowd 
away from the hotel.
“About twenty seconds after their announcement the police proceeded to move 
around the barricades to the other side where the protesters were stationed 
and started to push and beat people with their nightsticks while spraying 
pepper spray in the faces of the crowd.
“It was clear to me that the police could see that there were young children 
in strollers within the crowd, yet the police ignored that fact and 
continued to spray pepper spray indiscriminately so that the spray hit the 
children and their mothers,” said Graf.
Graf noted the crowd was, “loud, noisy, exercising their First Amendment 
freedoms -- but never threatening.”
He then pointed the finger at the police chain of command saying, “Whoever 
issued the orders yesterday is clearly out of touch with Portland, the 
fundamental principles of democracy, and their own humanity.”
Graf also said that,  “many of the officers involved in these actions did 
not wear name tags or I.D. numbers.”
In a press release, Donald Joughin, father of a 10-month-old baby who was 
pepper-sprayed by the police, thanked fellow protesters who aided him and 
his family.
Joughin said that when a police officer sprayed him and his family, other 
protesters “shielded us with their bodies…putting themselves in danger, to 
secure our safe passage through the cordon. Their actions stand in beautiful 
contrast to the savage inhumanity of the police.”
Joughin said that he and his wife brought their children to what was a 
peaceful protest, but the situation changed rapidly when, according to 
Joughin and many other eyewitness accounts, the police began spraying and 
clubbing the crowd. He said he and his wife approached a police barricade 
and asked to be let through, “because we had three small children. He [the 
police officer] looked at me, and drew out his can from his hip and sprayed 
directly at me.
“I was at an angle to him and the spray hit my right eye and our three 
year-old who I was holding in my right arm. In the same motion he turned the 
can on my wife who was holding our 10-month-old baby and doused both of 
their heads entirely from a distance of less than 3 feet. My six-year-old 
daughter was holding my left hand and was not hit directly.”
He said that eventually one officer did let the family through the cordon 
and then, “I immediately called 911…I explained that a baby had been 
directly pepper sprayed and that I needed an ambulance. They informed me 
that they would not send one and that all protesters were to report to a 
first aid tent on the other side of the police lines.”
According to Joughin, medical volunteers from the Black Cross, a 
street-medic organization, treated the family, and two staffers from a local 
radio station drove them to Emmanuel Emergency Room where, “The children 
were examined for respiratory problems and chemical burns. The pediatrician 
kept us a little longer so that she could call poison control to check for 
other recommended procedures as she had never in her career seen an infant 
pepper spray victim,” Joughin said.
Of the Portland protest and the police reaction to it, William Rivers Pitt, 
a reporter for Truthout wrote, “Bush is protested wherever he goes these 
days…The streets of Portland were filled on Aug. 22 by average American 
citizens seeking to inform the President of their disfavor regarding the 
manner in which he is governing their country.
“If America needed one more example of the cancer that has been chewing 
through the guts of our most basic freedoms since Mr. Bush assumed office, 
they can look to Portland. The right to freely assemble and petition the 
government for a redress of grievances has been rescinded at the point of a 
gun,” Pitt wrote.

‘Healthy Forests’ = No trees
Many people attending the anti-bush protest were angry over Bush’s “Healthy 
Forest” Initiative, formally announced that morning.
Bush made his announcement at a photo-op after touring swaths of recently 
burned Oregon forests. More than half of his speech focused on his terror 
war as he tried to make a link between timber industry jobs, an improved 
economy and fighting his terror war.
The crux of his “Healthy Forests” initiative is to aggressively increase 
logging to thin out forests to prevent them from burning and to decrease the 
ability of citizens and environmental groups to use lawsuits to prevent 
destructive logging practices.
According to Marty Bergoffen of the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity 
Project, Bush’s “Healthy Forest” plan is “nothing but a gift to Bush’s 
timber cronies, who gave millions to his election campaign and will reap 
billions in profits.” The plan will allow logging unregulated by public 
input or court oversight, in violation of the Constitution and democratic 
ideals.
     The most advanced scientific research available indicates that 
commercial logging will not prevent fires, but will, in fact, make them 
worse by removing large trees and leaving small diameter brush which easily 
desiccates and burns, Bergoffen said.
In a press statement, the Cascadia Forest Alliance (CFA) said that, “Forest 
and fire ecology provide evidence that years of commercial logging of 
healthy older forests and aggressive fire suppression and drought are the 
key sources of insect, disease and wildfire outbreaks.”
“Bush’s latest proposals to ‘streamline’ environmental laws such as the 
National Environmental Policy Act and to subsidize fuel reduction projects 
with logging mature and old forests will only increase fire risks while 
providing taxpayer subsidized logs to the timber industry,” added CFA 
volunteer Carrie Taylor.
Bush reiterated his new forest policy two days later on Aug. 24 saying, 
“Forest policies have not focused on thinning, the clearing of the forest 
floor of built-up brush and densely packed trees that create the fuel for 
extremely large fires like those experienced this year.”
“We need a different approach,” Bush said. “I have directed Secretary of 
Agriculture Ann Veneman and Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton to reduce 
bureaucracy and speed up the process of thinning on public lands.”
According to a report by the Environmental News Service, “There is general 
agreement that decades of fire suppression in our forests have resulted in 
an unnatural buildup of dead wood that provides an ample fuel source for 
wildfires. Forests are designed to withstand regular fires that clear the 
ground and keep the impact of subsequent fires to a minimum…There is a 
difference between clearing small trees and underbrush to reduce fuels and 
the logging of large trees under the guise of fuels reduction.”
Mike Dombeck, Retired US Forest Service Chief  wrote in Fire Management 
Today, Winter 2001, that “Some argue that more commercial timber harvest is 
needed to remove small-diameter trees and brush that are fueling our worst 
wildland fires in the interior West,” but he said that commercial logging of 
taller, older trees led to a proliferation of smaller trees and underbrush, 
“precisely the small diameter materials that are causing our worst fire 
problems.”
“In fact,” Dombeck added, “many large fires in 2000 burned in previously 
logged areas laced with roads. It seems unlikely that commercial timber 
harvest can solve our forest health problems.”

Media spin
Much of the corporate media reporting on the police attack outside the 
Hilton did say that police used batons and pepper spray to disperse the 
crowd, the same media for the most part gave the police-initiated violence 
little attention, such as CNN stating simply that “the protest turned 
violent with the arrival of police in riot gear.”
The media focused instead on protesters banging on and “attacking” police 
cars, which prompted the police to fire rubber bullets and “Sage” baton guns 
at the protesters to back them off of the police cars.
According to the police department, and corporate media accounts, the police 
were compelled to use those weapons to perform an “officer rescue” because 
the officers in the vehicles were “endangered” by the crowd.
This account is only partly true.
Eyewitness testimony, photographs, and video footage all posted to the 
Portland Independent Media Center’s web site showed another part of the 
story.
The police cars were surrounded by protesters, but only because those 
vehicles became mired in the crowd when they attempted to drive through it, 
thus actually running into people and creating the situation they found 
themselves in.
This is also backed up, in part, by a report in the Oregonian: “Things grew 
more tense when three police cars with reserve groups of officers tried to 
move through the crowd and inside the barricades to safeguard the cars from 
potential vandalism, [Assistant Chief Greg] Clark said.
“But as they drove into the crowd -- which police recognize might not have 
been the smartest move -- some demonstrators leaped on top of one car and 
banged on its windows. And that’s when police started shooting,” according 
to the Oregonian.




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