tip of iceberg

I happen to use footage of riots in miami (early 80's) at the end of my
first film "Embryo Without Tears". It seems little has changed in the
spirit of the man there

In Miami, police unleashed unprecedented fury on
demonstrators -- most of them seniors and union members. Is this how
Bush's war on terror will be
fought at home?

By Michelle Goldberg

Dec. 16, 2003 (Salon) On Saturday, Nov. 22, a few dozen
police on bicycles rode by the warehouse that activists protesting
Miami's Free Trade of
the Americas summit were using as a welcome center. The big
protest had taken place on Thursday, Nov. 20, and most demonstrators had
already
dispersed. Some were in jail, others were nursing their
injuries. But the cops wanted to deliver a final message to those still
around. "Bye! Don't come
back here!" shouted one. A pudgy officer gave the finger to
an activist with a video camera. "Put that on your Web site," he said.
"Fuck you."

It was the end of two days of what many observers called
unprecedented police vindictiveness and violence toward activists.
Certainly, complaints
about the police have become a standard ritual after each
major globalization protest. But what happened in Miami, say protesters,
lawyers, journalists
and union leaders, was anything but routine.

Armed with millions of dollars of new equipment and inflamed
by weeks of warnings about anarchists out to destroy their city, police
in Miami
donned riot gear, assembled by the thousand, put the city on
lockdown and unleashed an arsenal of crowd control weaponry on
overwhelmingly
peaceful gatherings.

Videos taken at the scene show protesters being beaten with
wooden clubs, shocked with Taser guns, shot in the back with rubber
bullets and
beanbags, and pepper-sprayed in the face. Retirees were held
handcuffed and refused water for hours. Medics and legal observers,
arrested in large
numbers, say they were targeted. A female journalist,
arrested during a mass roundup, was made to strip in front of a male
policeman. A woman's
entire breast turned purple-black after she was shot there,
point-blank, with a rubber bullet.

Afterward, many observers said the same thing: "This is not
America." Civil libertarians, though, worry that -- in an era when
legitimate homeland
security fears have begun to edge over into hysterical
paranoia about "anarchists" -- it might offer a glimpse of where
America's response to protest is
headed.

"There is a pattern developing cross-country with regards to
the interaction between police and protesters," says Lida
Rodriguez-Taseff, president of
the Miami chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU). "That pattern sadly involves the police viewing protesters as
terrorists and treating
protest situations as crisis situations akin to war or
combat."

Protesters descended on Miami because they object to plans
to create a free trade zone stretching from Alaska to Argentina, which
they say will hurt
poor workers, put downward pressure on wages and weaken
environmental regulations. Police in Miami were determined not to permit
a repeat of the
chaos that has marked other trade summits worldwide. They
were bolstered by an $8.5 million appropriation that President Bush
tacked onto the $87
billion Iraq reconstruction bill to pay for FTAA security.

As a result, they fielded about 2,500 battle-ready police to
face off against around 10,000 demonstrators, most of them union members
and retirees.
City officials have since congratulated themselves on the
small amount of property damage in Miami. But protesters say that in
making sure no
Starbucks windows were shattered, police trampled their
constitutional rights.

The scale of civil liberties abuses in Miami is just
starting to reverberate outside the city and the activist community that
flocked there. On Tuesday,
Dec. 16, the AFL-CIO and the Florida Alliance for Retired
Americans are holding a public hearing in Miami on "police repression of
FTAA
protesters." The ACLU has received 134 reports of protester
injuries, including 19 confirmed head injuries, and plans to file at
least three and possibly
as many as 12 lawsuits against the city.

The United Steelworkers of America is calling for a
congressional investigation into how police turned Miami into "a massive
police state." Amnesty
International and the Sierra Club are also demanding
government probes. The Sierra Club issued an open letter to President
Bush saying, "The
fundamental constitutional rights of all Americans are in
jeopardy if the intimidating tactics used by the Miami police become the
model for dealing
with future public demonstrations."

And they could become exactly that. Miami Mayor Manny Diaz
called the cops' performance "a model for homeland security." Officials
from across
the country, including members of the Department of Homeland
Security and the FBI, showed up to observe how Miami handled the
demonstrators.

According to Lt. Bill Schwartz, spokesman for the Miami
Police Department, law enforcement officials traveled to Miami from
Georgia and New
York to learn tactics to deal with upcoming protests in
their cities. In June, President Bush will host the G-8 summit -- which
brings together the
leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan
and Russia -- on Georgia's Sea Island. Then, on Aug. 30, the Republican
convention begins
in New York, bringing tens of thousands of protesters and
"the highest levels of security this city has ever seen," as a New York
police spokesman told
the Village Voice.

Upon his return from Miami on Thursday, Nov. 20, Bill
Hitchens, director of Georgia's Department of Homeland Security, told
the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution: "I certainly think this is a precursor
for what we could see" at the G-8 summit. Speaking of the Miami police,
he said, "We need
to do much the same as they did."

Meanwhile, John Timoney, the Miami police chief known for
calling demonstrators "punks" and "knuckleheads," is handling security
for the
Democratic National Convention in Boston. Timoney is already
infamous among activists for his handling of the 2000 Republican
convention in
Philadelphia, where protesters complained of indiscriminate
arrests and police violence.

How did such a small demonstration became such a bloody
melee? And how did so many law-abiding people suddenly find themselves
in a place that
didn't look anything like the America they thought they
knew?

"I no longer consider Dade county to be part of the United
States," says Bentley Killmon, a 71-year-old retiree who was held
handcuffed for 11 hours
after he was swept up by the police as he wandered around
downtown looking for his bus home.

The tensions in Miami began well before the first protester
arrived. Unlike other American cities that have hosted large protests,
Miami had a clear
stake in the demonstration's central issue: It is competing
with Panama City, Cancun and other cities to become home to the FTAA's
secretariat. Thus,
when Western Hemisphere trade ministers gathered at Miami's
Intercontinental for the November trade talks, police had to show they
could handle the
kind of anti-globalization activists who have often trashed
cities hosting economic summits.

On Sept. 5, Lida Rodriguez-Taseff of the ACLU attended a
briefing that the police held for local business leaders at the
Intercontinental Hotel.
Rodriguez-Taseff was shocked that Asst. Police Chief Frank
Fernandez's PowerPoint presentation openly endorsed the controversial
trade agreement,
telling the audience that it would bring 89,000 new jobs to
the area and add $13.5 billion annually to Florida's Gross State
Product.

"In situations where the police don't like the protesters'
message, they definitely treat protesters as the enemy," says
Rodriguez-Taseff.

"Essentially what happened," she adds, "is that the police
went from being the neutral protector of liberty and property and
safety, which is what their
job is supposed to be, to being the enforcer of a political
goal of the political and business communities."

The week of the protests, John Timoney, the Miami chief of
police, socialized with the trade ministers and publicly taunted
demonstrators. On
Wednesday, Nov. 19, the day before the main protest march,
Miami Herald reporter Oscar Corral followed Timoney onto a boat taking
ministers to
Miami's Vizcaya park. After the ride, Timoney said, "If they
[anarchists] don't do anything by tomorrow night, pardon the expression,
but they look
like pussies." (Or, "p-----," as the Herald reported it.)

Taking a page from the Iraq war's media strategists, Timoney
had reporters covering the demonstrations "embed" with the police.
Reporting for the
Guardian newspaper, journalist and "No Logo" author Naomi
Klein wrote, "As in Iraq, most reporters embraced their role as pseudo
soldiers with
zeal, suiting up in combat helmets and flak jackets."
Several reporters who didn't embed were hauled off to jail in mass
roundups during the protests.

Anger and fear about anarchists had been building up in the
city all autumn. Al Crespo, a 61-year-old Miami photojournalist who
specializes in
covering demonstrations -- he recently published a book of
photographs called "Protest in the Land of Plenty" -- says he first
realized something was
awry when his 87-year-old mother called him in hysterics
weeks before activists began arriving in Miami.

"I'm Cuban, and my mother listens to a lot of these Cuban
radio stations," he says. "She knows what I do, and she called me up one
day in a real
panic, with the belief that I was going to be killed on the
streets of Miami. She was hearing that it was communists coming, and
these people were
going to blow up the city."

Meanwhile, the police were preparing to face off against a
violent enemy. Asst. Chief Fernandez's PowerPoint presentation listed
three groups of
protesters headed to Miami: "The Green Group (non violent,
union based)"; "The Yellow Group (mostly non violent, fringe elements)"
and "The Red
Group (anti-government, anti-establishment)." The slides
also identified the lime-green baseball caps donned by the legal
observers who accompany
most major protests. According to Rodriguez-Taseff, when the
slide appeared, Fernandez said, "These are their lawyers. They're there
to antagonize
police."

Marc Steier, a New Jersey lawyer who works for the National
Lawyers Guild -- a kind of radical ACLU -- arrived in Miami in
mid-November to
open a temporary office for Miami Activist Defense, a legal
collective formed to represent demonstrators. He and a colleague were
setting up their
computers on Nov. 15 when they got their first phone call:
Police, a woman activist reported, were hassling a kid walking down the
street.

Just then, Steier says, a volunteer named Henry whom he knew
from previous protests arrived, and Steier dispatched him to the scene
with a camera, a
tape recorder and a lime green hat. When Henry arrived, cops
on bicycles were questioning a kid dressed all in black. He turned out
to be a local goth
who knew nothing of the FTAA.

Then the police crossed the street to where three men, part
of a pagan group in town for the demonstrations, were watching. They
were friends of the
woman who called Steier's office, and one of them was
holding her backpack while she used the phone down the street.

"There was nothing about them that would give a casual
observer any indication that they were anything but tourists," says
Steier, who later
interviewed all of them after they were released from jail.

The police asked one man for I.D., which he gave them, and
then demanded to search the backpack he was holding. He refused to
consent, because it
didn't belong to him. At that point, a police vehicle pulled
up. According to Steier, the uncooperative pagan was arrested and put in
the patrol car, and
his backpack was dumped out on the police car's hood.

"The second male sees what's going down, and he starts to be
a little more compliant," says Steier. The cops, Steier said, asked for
"your name, where
you're from, how you got down to Miami, whether you're an
anarchist, whether you're here to cause trouble and break things."
Finally, the second
pagan asked if he was free to go. "'Actually, you're under
arrest,' said the police."

The police proceeded to arrest the third man and the woman
when she returned from the phone. All were charged with obstructing a
sidewalk.

Throughout it all, Henry had been on his cellphone with
Steier. Suddenly, he lost contact: Henry had been arrested, too --
charged with obstruction of
justice.

Between the 15th and the 20th, the day of the major protest,
Miami Activist Defense received dozens of reports of people being
arbitrarily detained,
searched, photographed and questioned about their
backgrounds and their connections to anarchism.

The most authoritative first-person story about such random
seizures came from Celeste Fraser Delgado, a reporter for Miami New
Times, who was
arrested Thursday evening on Miami Avenue as she walked
toward the protest's welcome center with a group of protesters she was
profiling.

"Throughout the day I'd witnessed police provoke
protesters," she wrote. "I'd seen young people cuffed and lined up along
the street, but I thought
they must have done something bad to be detained. Surely the
police would see that we were doing nothing wrong and let us go. Surely
they would
recognize my role as a working member of the press."

Instead, Delgado's hands were cuffed behind her back. Her
pleas to the police to check her credentials were ignored, though they
took her black
leather backpack with her press pass and notebook inside.
She was told they would be returned to her. Instead, they were dumped
out and left on the
street.

She knows that because John de Leon, an ACLU lawyer,
happened to be in the area after her arrest. He was on the phone with
Rodriguez-Taseff when
he noticed that the street was littered with backpacks,
cellphones and wallets. He was collecting the protesters' things when he
found Delgado's press
credentials.

Delgado was released Friday afternoon, after the charges
against her were dropped. Of the more than 90 arrests made at the
protests on Thursday, the
Miami prosecutors threw out 20 due to lack of evidence.
Rodriguez-Taseff says it's "unheard of" for so many cases to be
dismissed as groundless.

The total number of arrests in Miami wasn't particularly
large -- according to Lt. Schwartz, 231 people were taken in on
FTAA-related charges the
week of the summit, compared to 631 arrested at the Seattle
anti-globalization protests in 1999. Then again, there were nearly five
times as many
protesters in Seattle as there were in Miami. There was also
rampant vandalism during the 1999 demonstrations, and almost none during
the FTAA.
Indeed, since the protests, Miami officials have crowed
about the lack of damage done to their city. That leaves the arrests
looking like some sort of
extralegal "preventive" or "preemptive" action.

It was Thursday afternoon that madness broke loose in Miami.
There had been a scuffle that morning between demonstrators and police
near the fence
police had erected around the Intercontinental Hotel, and
the city had been locked down since around 10 a.m. But things didn't get
really bad until
about 4 p.m., when a few hundred people left the officially
sanctioned union march to confront the police lined up along Biscayne
Boulevard.

It's not clear what made the police charge forward,
rhythmically beating their big wooden clubs against their shields.
Predictably, many protesters say
there was no provocation, but Lt. Schwartz maintains that
the police were pelted with "rocks, feces in plastic bags and bottles of
urine." Three officers
were admitted to a nearby hospital for injuries sustained
during the protests, and the Miami Police Department reports that a
total of 18 were injured.

Al Crespo, the photojournalist, admits that some protesters
"acted out," but says that, in covering over 100 protests over the last
six years, he's never
seen a police reaction as ferocious and disproportionate as
what he saw in Miami.

"There's a real parallel between these kind of events and
the events in major American cities after championship football and
basketball games," he
says. "A large number of people come out in the streets, and
there's always young people who, for whatever reason, just have a need
to get in a cop's
face. Whether you're rooting for the Chicago Bulls or you're
in Miami supposedly protesting against free trade, these kind of events
always attract
people who have a real need to act out some internal
psychodrama, and oftentimes that's what sets something off."

Once the police were set off, though, it's hard to justify
what they did based on protester provocation. Several hundred policemen,
armed with the
latest crowd-control weaponry, were arrayed against a sparse
lot of scraggly kids on the broad boulevard. Instead of batons, the
police carried wooden
sticks the length of baseball bats, and as they marched
forward, they swung them at whoever couldn't get out of the way in time.
Video taken at the
scene shows a boy in shorts being knocked down, and when his
friends try to pick him up, they're beaten back with the wooden sticks.

At one point, a young man kneels down a few feet in front of
the phalanx, his hands in prayer position. Five or six police charge him
with their
shields, then shoot rubber bullets at him as he runs away.

That, says Crespo, is what was most unusual: the police
firing on people as they retreated.

Before Miami, one of the more violent protests Crespo had
seen was at the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles. "What
happened in Los
Angeles, which had not happened in any other city up until
then, is that the police came out, took a position and just opened up
fire. It looked like
reenactment of a Civil War battle," he says.

"In Miami they did that, but then they proceeded to march
down the street and chase these people, chase them for blocks," he said.
"These were
people trying to get away, and they kept marching and
shooting."

Witnesses say that all protesters were targeted, not just
those that were causing trouble.

When the violence started and the air grew thick with tear
gas, Stewart Acuff, the AFL-CIO's organizing director, organized a line
of union
peacekeepers to take everyone who wanted to avoid a
confrontation with police up a hill toward the amphitheater where the
march had begun.

"We had hundreds of people we were trying to move up near
the amphitheater. There were seniors, unions members, young people,
environmentalists.
Every one of them made a conscious decision not to be in the
stuff happening in the street." But the police followed them. "The cops
came up the hill,
tear-gassed us and shot people with rubber bullets. They
pepper-sprayed a senior citizen in his 70s who was sitting in a chair
completely away from
any kind of problem, without provocation."

It was, says Acuff, "a police riot."

"They had trained for six months and they were prepared for
a fight and they wanted a fight," he says. "They were hopped up and
wanted to go."

The ACLU is still working to tabulate all the injuries
caused on Thursday and on Friday morning, when violence again broke out
at a jail solidarity
rally for those arrested on Thursday. (At that event, Crespo
photographed a family being forced onto their bellies by a riot cop as
they exited a nearby
cancer center.)

Thirteen protesters were admitted to a local hospital, but
many more sought treatment from the medics working at the protest. In an
e-mail, Dr. Ron
Rosen, a veteran street medic, reports, "On Nov. 20, I
treated numerous patients including several with head wounds caused by
pepper balls and
rubber bullets, and several with wounds to the areas over
the spleen, liver and kidneys also caused by rubber bullets and baton
blows."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Seventy-one-year-old Bentley Killmon was unaware that Miami
was becoming a war zone when he boarded a bus Thursday morning.
Killmon's father
was a police officer, and he didn't bear any grudge against
cops. "I respected the badge until that morning," he says.

A former flight navigator and engineer for Pan Am who
retired after 36 years on the job, Killmon opposes the FTAA because he
believes
globalization creates a "race to the bottom" as industries
move to find cheap labor, decimating the livelihoods of workers left
behind. "I was protesting
what has happened to the middle class and to the poor," he
says.

Killmon, who lives about 100 miles north of Miami, was on
one of 24 buses chartered by the Florida Alliance of Retired Americans.
The group's state
organizer, 34-year-old Larry Winawer, was responsible for
getting Killmon and another 1,100 or so retirees to the protest and home
again, and he'd
arrived in Miami Wednesday night.

Right away, it felt wrong. "As you're heading down Biscayne
Boulevard" -- the street where the union march took place on Thursday,
and where
police faced off with protesters -- "you see swarms of
police in riot gear," Winawer says. "There were armored personnel
vehicles, helicopters
hovering at very low altitude with searchlights sweeping the
area. Right away it felt like you were not in America but in some type
of occupied city."

Winawer didn't sleep much that night, and was up on Thursday
at 4 a.m. to make sure that all ran smoothly with the seniors he was
responsible for.

The day's official activities were centered around the
Bayfront amphitheater. From 10 to 11:30 a.m., there was a seniors
breakfast and rally scheduled,
with speakers talking about the effects of the FTAA on
American retirees and families. The official union rally and march began
at noon, also at the
amphitheater.

Winawer had negotiated with police beforehand to allow his
buses to drop the seniors off near the escalators leading to the
auditorium. Two early
buses got through, but by 10 a.m., chaos had begun to engulf
downtown Miami, and the area around the amphitheater had been shut down.
Thus the
buses had to drop their passengers off as much as a mile
away. A few buses didn't make it into the city at all -- the police told
them to turn around and
go home.

A mile "may not seem like much," says Winawer, "but we had
people who were 85, 90 years old." Then, he says, as they made their way
to their
rally, lines of police officers would detain them without
telling them why.

Of the 1,100 seniors on his buses, Winawer says about 600
made it to their event.

When the rally was over, Winawer had to see the seniors back
to their vehicles, which were all parked far away. Killmon was in the
last group of
people he escorted, but when they arrived, his bus had
already left. So they headed toward the Holiday Inn, where Winawer was
staying.

Winawer was wearing a bright orange vest and an Alliance for
Retired Americans T-shirt, and had staff credentials around his neck.
Yet several times,
he and Killmon were turned back by police lines, and finally
told to walk west along downtown Miami's railroad tracks. There were
about 10 other
people going the same way.

"All of a sudden, heading east is a line of police in riot
gear," says Winawer. "There were at least 50 -- they had guns drawn and
were yelling at
people to get down."

He still sounds incredulous as he recalls it. "He's a
71-year-old man and I'm wearing my orange vest and credentials. I said,
'He's a retiree and I'm
trying to help him get to his bus.' We each had three or
four guns on us telling us to get down, facedown in the dirt. Ben didn't
get down fast enough
and he got a knee in his back."

Hands cuffed behind them, they were put on a bus and left
for three hours, then driven to a parking garage where FTAA prisoners
were being held in
wire pens. "I've worked with livestock before, and these
were like stock pens," said Killmon.

In the pen with him, says Killmon, was a steelworker named
Rick who had a bad shoulder, the result of an injury he'd sustained
falling off a roof.
"His hands being handcuffed behind his back was extremely
painful," Killmon says. "He kept asking to be released so he could bring
his hands around
in front of him, and they would not do it. The pain got to
the point that he lost control of his bowels and urinary tract."

"He'd asked at least two dozen different officers for help,"
says Winawer.

After another three hours, they were taken to Miami's TGK
jail, where they were processed and put in holding cells. It was after 3
a.m. before either
was allowed to make phone calls. Killmon says he went at
least seven hours without a sip of water.

On Friday, the charges against Killmon were dropped. Winawer
was charged with disobeying a police officer. They weren't released
until early
evening.

Both were in handcuffs for between 11 and 12 hours. Three
weeks later, Winawer's hands were still bruised and partly numb. Killmon
says he's fine
as long as he doesn't try to lift his left arm higher than
his shoulder.

"I believe in social justice issues, but I'm not a screaming
radical," says Winawer. Since Miami, he says, "some people have asked,
'How do you feel
about law enforcement?' I feel fine about law enforcement.
What happened to us was not anything resembling law enforcement. I
respect the job that
police have to do, but I have no respect for the job that
they did."

Both Winawer and Killmon are planning to join civil suits
against the city.

"Ben and I are living proof that civil rights are being
erased in this country," Winawer says, still sounding astonished.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

While Winawer and Killmon were in prison, another
confrontation was unfolding outside.

Crespo, expecting it, was there with his camera. "Just like
there's a morning and an afternoon, there's always a jail solidarity, so
we went to the jail,"
he says. With him was a local public television crew who
were doing a segment on him and his work.

"The protesters had gathered at the parking lot of the state
attorney's office," he says, two blocks from the jail. "They're just
kids. There was nothing
mean-spirited about them. Their friends are locked up and
they wanted to show solidarity."

There were between 150 and 200 people there, and Brenna
Bell, a 28-year-old attorney from Oregon, acted as a go-between with the
police. At first,
she said, the commander seemed reasonable, but within 20
minutes, he told her that everyone had to disperse.

"At that time, most everyone started leaving the area," says
Bell. "I stayed behind watching to make sure that everyone left OK. I
never heard the
police give the order to disperse that they threatened to
give, but people started walking."

Yet as people left, she says, a huge line of riot police --
as many as 300 -- followed them. Then, about three blocks from the
protest, seven or eight
people sat down and announced they weren't going anywhere.
They were arrested, and 50 or 60 people stopped to watch. Then she and
others started
walking east, flanked on two sides by police.

At that point, the police finally issued an order to
disperse, but at the same time, they started closing in. Video from the
scene shows people chanting,
"We are dispersing. We are dispersing." But the police
wouldn't let them. "That's when I knew it was going to be bad," says
Bell. The police rushed
in, shooting pepper spray and rubber bullets. "It was utter
chaos," she says. She was sprayed and shot in the back of the leg, and
sent off to jail. She
wasn't released until 2 a.m. on Sunday.

Still, it could have been worse: "I talked to a couple of
women who were strip-searched by male officers," she says. "It's such a
powerless situation."

One of those women was Ana Nogueira, a producer for the
radio show "Democracy Now!" Nogueira was rounded up at the same protest
as Bell. Like
Celeste Fraser Delgado, she kept telling the arresting
officers that she was a journalist.

One cop was hesitant, she says, but then another told him,
"She's not with us." He meant she wasn't embedded.

At the jail, "When I got out of the patrol wagon, I repeated
that I was a journalist and that I was wrongly arrested. I asked, 'What
do I do?' The
officer told me to shut the fuck up."

Her clothes reeked of pepper spray, so the police made her
stand under a huge cold-water outdoor shower.

Then she was taken into a tent with one female officer and
one male officer. The back of the tent was open, and other male officers
could see in.
"They told me to take off all my clothes and put them in a
trash can, and that I was not going to get them back." She asked the
male officer to leave
first, but all he would do was turn around. Then, when she
was naked, he turned back to face her.

"Then they put me in prison garb, and that's when I was
taken and processed," she says. "I was one of the lucky ones. I know
other independent
videographers who didn't get their cameras back."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

While stories about the FTAA protests proliferate, the Miami
police are showing no signs of remorse. In their view, even peaceful
protesters had it
coming for cavorting with anarchists.

"Peaceful protesters in some cases made friends with the
devil, knowing full well they were anarchists," says Lt. Schwartz. "If
someone says, 'I came
down to protest peacefully but yes, I'm aware there are
anarchists in my group and I welcomed them in,' they're certainly
putting themselves in an
awkward position. If anarchists are starting to cause
problems and throw things at cops, just because I'm a peaceful
protester, but I'm standing right
next to this anarchist, that I couldn't be subject to police
enforcement, I think that's naive.

"You'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see what was
going on in the street, the confrontation between anarchists and
police," he says. "If you
chose to stay in the midst of that and then felt your First
Amendment right was hurt, you're not being honest with yourself."

Schwartz's comments just compound Winawer's outrage. "All
his statements begin with 'if,'" he says. "And I might agree with him if
those things
happened. But there are no ifs here. There's reality. And
the reality is that I and Ben Killmon were nowhere near any other
individual, period. We
were arrested for doing nothing except walking where the
police told us to walk in an effort to find his bus.

"I've never been in trouble with the law before, and I have
no ax to grind with the police, but this was just wrong," Winawer says.
"And the bombast,
it adds insult to injury. It's one thing to have done it.
It's another thing to put your head in the sand and deny that it ever
happened."

About the writer: Michelle Goldberg is a staff writer for
Salon based in New York.

Copyright 2003 Salon.com

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/12/16/miami_police/print.html
-- -Kraig Grady
North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island
http://www.anaphoria.com
The Wandering Medicine Show
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