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Recent
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April
7, 2003
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April 8,
2003
"The
Cops Had No Reason to Open Up on Them"
Report from the Oakland Docks
By BEN TERRALL
Arriving at 7AM at the Oakland docks on the morning
of April 7, I scanned a lively circle of several hundred protestors,
including many Palestine solidarity activists, marching in a
circular picket and demanding an end to the U.S. invasion and
occupation of Iraq. The corporate targets for the day's protests
(organized by Direct
Action to Stop the War) of the Bush imperial war machine
were APL (formerly American President Lines), a cargo carrier
that has contracts with the Defense Department to ship military
cargo to Baghdad, and the Stevedoring Services of America (SSA),
which was recently awarded a $4.8 million contract to manage
the Umm Qasr seaport in Iraq. As I heard what I took to be tear
gas canisters explode further down the docks near another entrance
targeted by activists, I grew concerned that my housemates might
be trapped in a dicey situation and felt like a cad for showing
up an hour later than they had. I harbored no illusions that
I could actually do much in response to any Oakland police overreaction
aside from blurting out an ineffectual "easy!" or,
as I'd done to a cop the week before at the Federal Building
in San Francisco who trained a teargas gun at my head while his
colleagues put two of my roommates into pain holds, making the
sign of the cross as if I was in a vampire flick.
But given that I was joining hundreds
of Bay Area activists to act in solidarity with Iraqis under
siege by my country's war machine, an advance into potentially
teargas-laden airspace seemed the least I could do.
As I began walking down the train tracks
that border the road alongside targeted dock entrances, the police
approached me and a handful of other peaceniks and told us not
to get behind them, then moved around us in what I can only describe
as a paramilitary trot and forced us into the mass of protestors
they were driving away from dock entrances. At least now I was
not faced with getting arrested in isolation, I thought to myself
as my pal June yelled from inside a paddywagon to call her job
and tell them she'd be missing work that day.
Soon a line of cops was advancing and
making some noises I couldn't decipher, then firing what looked
to be concussion, or flash, grenades not that far above our heads.
They also fired bean bags (innocuous looking when recovered later,
they obviously stung like hell from the looks on faces they made
contact with) and wooden plugs (or blocks, as a friend who works
with prisoners who have been fired upon by similar ordnance calls
them) big enough to take out an eye. It was the first time I'd
made plans with friends for future anti-war projects in an atmosphere
that somewhat resembled what people in Jakarta describe going
through on a fairly regular basis (admittedly, without a sense
of possible torture or random execution). I can't say it was
a treat exactly, especially when I saw a woman who had been hit
point blank by either a grenade or one of the wooden projectiles,
which had raised a tennis ball-sized bloody lump on her jaw.
I quickly grabbed a bunch of well groomed professional types
with fancy cameras and dragged them to where she was being comforted
by a friend ; a caption that later appeared with her photo said
she refused to give her name, but the young woman, called Sre,
told me that none of the shutterbugs photographing her wounded
face had bothered to ask for it. Sre described bending down in
front of a truck to avoid the police onslaught, where a cop ordered
her to get up. When she did she was trapped between two cops
on motorcycles, who drove her to the gravel bed of train train
tracks that I had just been on, then the next thing she knew
she was shot. Given that she works with a pacifist affinity group
devoted to yoga as a corollary to peaceful protest, it's a bit
difficult to see what threat she posed to the cops.
The official explanation for the extreme
police actions is that random ruffians made the mistake of provoking
security forces by, according to Deputy Police Chief Patrick
Haw, throwing "rocks and big iron bolts at officers."
But Joel Tena, the constituent liason for Oakland Vice Mayor
Nancy Nadel, said "I was there from 5a.m. on, and the only
violence that I saw was from the police."
Jeff Grubler, main conspirator behind
the notorious insanereagan.com website and its associated series
of outrageous political actions, was also on the scene by 5a.m.
"I was at the gate where the police first opened fire and
no protestor threw anything at any of the cops before they advanced,
gave a cursory dispersal order, and opened fire without giving
the assembled demonstrators enough time to leave. They continued
firing concussion grenades and other projectiles directly at
us as we walked or ran away. In fact hundreds of us were forced
onto the railroad bed, which is loaded with small stones perfect
for throwing back at someone firing on you, but no one responded
by doing so, they just kept screaming 'stop shooting.' There
may have been one kid who eventually did respond by chucking
back a stone , but if that did happen it was only after three
cycles of police advancing and then firing on us for no apparent
reason that anyone could discern."
Even if there had been a hothead or agent
provocateur throwing something, it's had to imagine such an isolated
action justifying opening fire on hundreds of protestors. As
Oakland officer Danielle Ashford told the San Jose Mercury News,
"There were a few agitators in the crowd. The majority of
them were peaceful''; in the same breath Ashford blandly recounted
that the cops nonetheless "fired non-lethal munitions."
The question of how to maintain a respectful
yet militant picket without alienating longshoremen not yet won
over to the anti-war position was largely solved by the outrageous
behavior of the police. Trent Willis, a business agent for the
International Longshore and Warehouse Union, responded to cops
opening fire on his fellow longshore workers by declaring that
they would walk off the job.
"They shot my guys. We're not going
to work today," Willis said. "The cops had no reason
to open up on them." Seven longshore workers went to the
hospital for wounds from police fire.
San Francisco activist Don Paul spent
the morning talking to longshore workers and said he encountered
100% support for anti-war protestors. "One guy told me,
'the fucking Oakland police are out of control they should have
known better than to piss off longshoremen.' They're clearly
mad enough to stand up to the war profiteers."
Repeatedly firing on retreating demonstrators
(most activists were hit on their backs or the backs of their
legs) was also probably not the most brilliant way to dissuade
activists from protesting in Oakland. As a Richmond resident
named Scott said of his wounds (shot three times in the back
and once in the leg), "this was clearly meant to keep me
from coming back to Oakland. But if my country's military continues
to slaughter Iraqi civilians, as it appears it will, I'll be
back. This crap has only strengthened my resolve to stand up
and say no to this insane war."
As Jeff Grubler rightly points out, "the
story the media puts out shouldn't be about demonstrators being
shot at, it should be about why we're out here being subjected
to this nonsense: to stand up for people that are being slaughtered
in our names. What we went through with these concussion grenades
is nothing compared to what Iraqi civilians have been subjected
to we're not dealing with cluster bombs that send shrapnel slicing
through people at hundreds of miles an hour. We did an action
last week where we told print, TV and radio journalists that
we'd be smashing windows in downtown San Francisco. When they
arrived and finally figured out, after we subjected them to plenty
of carefully worked out anti-war satire describing the civilian
casualties in Iraq that they're normally so bored by, that we
were actually going to smash Windows software, which we happily
did, they weren't all that thrilled. But they filmed, photographed
and wrote about it anyway and we got our message out. That's
the kind of thing we have to keep on doing, locally, nationally
and internationally, until we turn this thing around and help
save the Iraqi people from liberation by mass murder."
Ben Terrall
lives in Oakland. He can be reached at: bterrall@igc.org
Yesterday's
Features
Anthony
Gancarski
Colin Powell's Shame
John
Chuckman
Was Einstein Right About Israel?
David
Krieger
The Meaning of Victory
Tom
Gorman
The Mantra of the Troops: Support
or Treason?
Adam
Federman
The Absence of War
Vijay
Prashad
There Are No More Arguments
Tom
Stephens
The End of the Innocence
Mickey
Z.
Makes Me Sic (Sic): Copy Editing
Bush Speak
Pierre
Tristam
War Coverage: a Dishonest Reality
Show
Hammond
Guthrie
The Deadly Mihrab
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/04
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