Protesting Bush Outlawed At APEC
Protesting Bush Outlawed At APEC
Authorities turn Sydney into a prison camp and refuse "permission" for main organizations to march, characterizing protest as "an unlawful act" Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
[align=left]Authorities have effectively outlawed protest at the APEC summit in Sydney Australia by refusing to grant "permission" for groups to march anywhere in the city, while quarantining part of the central business district within a 3-mile wide security fence.
Around 100 protesters were able to stage a demonstration outside Sydney's main railway station today, but they were heavily outnumbered by police and media.
New South Wales (NSW) state Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione characterized the protests as "an unlawful act" during a press conference and urged others not to get involved.
The Stop Bush Coalition, which promises to bring around 20,000 protesters to the summit, have repeatedly been rebuffed by the authorities in their attempts to get "permission" to stage a march on their planned route, which is still several city blocks away from where the summit leaders will be meeting. [/align]
This is what happens when laws are changed that mandate government "permission" to be able to protest the government, which is mirrored in Britain under the Serious Organized Crimes Act, the very inalienable right to free speech and protest itself is effectively outlawed or sidelined into obscurity by means of "free speech zones".
[align=left] "Police took court action on Tuesday to stop the march. The court adjourned the case until Wednesday, saying protesters had insufficient time to prepare for the case,"
reports Reuters.
"We cannot sit on the sidelines while a warmonger like George Bush comes to our country," protest organiser Alex Bainbridge told the "Stop Bush 2007" rally.
â??We have put several route options to the police for the march and they have rejected all of them.â?
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[align=left]"We are not going to be intimidated, we cannot stop defending our democratic rights, defending our civil liberties," Bainbridge said.[/align]
Police enter a security fenced off area at the Darling harbor Convention Center, venue of the 2007 APEC conference in Sydney, Australia.
Protesters and the public have been cautioned to stay away as Prime Minister John Howard took the unprecedented step of warning demonstrators against violence via You Tube video, while loyalists from the Murdoch-controlled Aussie media empire referred to protesters as "urban terrorists".
However, it seems the only people gearing up for a fight are the police themselves.
Over 5,000 have been drafted in to patrol the city, including military troops as well as secret service personnel. Accredited photo journalists have been threatened for simply taking pictures of the security fence and residents are being harassed and asked to show their ID at checkpoints throughout the city. Armed jet fighter and helicopter gun ship patrols are whizzing around the skies as Australians get a chance to experience the kind of hellish measures that the would-be dictators attending APEC would like to impose on a permanent basis.[/align]
[align=left] "Naturally, the Australian media, virtually across the spectrum, have repeatedly stated Howard's hallucinatory claim that the presence of President Bush is not the reason why Sydneysiders and tourists are being asked for their ID, searched, detained for questioning, forced to move through the city via security checkpoints and have a massive 'steel wall' dividing their city in half,"
reports the Orstrahyun blog.
No, don't blame Bush, says Howard, on a daily basis, blame instead the threat posed by "violent protesters."
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Howard doesn't seem to understand that the vast majority of the public know he is speaking absolute twaddle, and are all too aware that he is actively participating in a massive anti-protest psychological operation. A psy-op aimed solely at scaring away the tens of thousands of people who wish to publicly march in Sydney's streets against the corpse-strewn foreign policies, and soon to be Australia-centric policies, of President George W. Bush.
Police revealed a most wanted list of just 25 names that they warned to stay away from Sydney, hardly an army of violent anarchists hell-bent on destruction.
Though if there is to be any trouble, we would be loathe to forget that the "black bloc" anarchist group has been completely infiltrated by the authorities and is routinely used as a front within which agent provocateurs instigate violence to give riot police the excuse to crackdown on peaceful protesters.
Last month, police in Canada were outed as they posed as violent anarchists during the SPP summit in Montebello. A You Tube video caught the undercover cops disguised as masked protesters wielding rocks and authorities were later forced to admit that they had infiltrated agents as a means of gathering intelligence on the protest groups.
