I have always enjoyed DCP so much because readers and contributers have such an appreciation and gift for music, dance, painting, writing and other creative arts as well as being informed, compassionate and dedicated about domestic politics and foreign policy of our world. So today I am posting something that I hope is a break from war talk and the distraction of an increasingly ugly domestic political season.

The Seattle-Tehran Poster Show Remix showed at Bumbershoot in Seattle over Labor Day weekend and selections will hang this fall at Verite Coffee Seattle locations. I visited it and photographed some pieces and context.

The websites are SeattleTehran or Design Commission and also Verite Coffee. This show is very close to my heart because I have had such wonderful Iranian friends and always wanted to visit there until things got all messed up. People talk about "nuking Iran" (even a Presidential candidate jokes about it) but probably don't know that we helped overthrow their democratically-elected leader. We then installed the Shah, who was overthrown because he was intolerably cruel, and in the anarchy which followed, fundamentalism was allowed to rise. We shouldn't be so smug as we seem to be a stone's throw away from the same fate ourselves.

About the Seattle-Tehran Poster Show:

It is a selection of fifty posters from each city in a variety of mediums sharing cultural themes such as music, fillm, theater and contemporary art. Artists ranged from Tehran University Professors to younger talents born since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, both male and female. The Iranian designs are paired with Seattle designs and the exhibition is premiering at Bumbershoot as the first exhibition of contemporary Iranian posters hosted in this country. In 2009, the exhibit will travel to Iran and the designers will meet each other.

Here is another website:

Fellowship for Reconciliation - The Conscience of the Peace Community - founded in 1914, following World War II. It is an international interfaith movement with chapters in 43 countries and there are 100 local groups in the US. The Fellowship opposes war and seeks those who will respond to conflict nonviolently. Delegations of peacemakers are sent to conflicted regions and to nations regarded as "enemies" and there they reach out on a people-to-people basis. In 2005, delegations started to go to Iran. American delegations have also gone to Vietnam, the former Soviet Union, Iraq, Nicaragua, Colomobia, Israel/Palestine, Philippines, much of Eastern Europe.

I have been out all day at a music festival - a peaceful gathering where I have not followed any news. I came home and checked my email and found a convergence of disturbing information. The old intimidating "catch and release" is happening in the Twin Cities, just prior to the RNC Convention.

First of all, Kayakbiker lives in Minneapolis so he has published first-hand accounts at his blog and will be adding more. The first two are these:

Pre-emptive arrests, with Kayakbiker's videos and eyewitness accounts.

Lawyer's opinion on legality of arrests

I also got a copy of this letter from a friend in CA and it has also been posted at DailyKos:

They weren't even marching. This was a case of the cops breaking into the places where they were staying, or meeting, before any actions had even taken place. The author of this piece is a well-known environmental and peace activist who continually preaches nonviolence.

************************************

Raid on the Convergence Center

By Starhawk

It¹s Friday night. Our Pagan Cluster is sitting on the bluff of the
Mississippi having our first real meeting, when Lisa gets a call. The
cops are raiding the Convergence Center, where we¹re organizing meetings
and trainings for the protests against the Republican National
Convention. It's not a role play, the caller says. It¹s real.

Instantly, we jump up and hurry back the six or eight blocks to the old
theater we are using for meetings, trainings and social gatherings. I've
spent the last two days doing magical activism trainings, teaching
people how to stay calm and grounded in emergency situations and when
things get chaotic. Now it's time to put the training into practice.
Aaron, a tall, red-headed young man who could be one of my nephews
strides along beside me. "Are you grounded?", I ask him. He nods, and
runs ahead.

Nobody can keep up with Lisa, who speeds ahead like an arrow, walking,
not running, but still covering the ground quickly. Andy and I trail behind.

We're often street buddies, because we¹re both big, slow, and supremely
calm and stubborn, willing to wade into almost any situation and become
the immovable object.

We're stopped by a line of cops just before we reach the building. They
refuse to let us through, or to move their van which is blocking
Scarecrow's car. There¹s an investigation underway, they say, and won¹t
say more.

Brush, our dear friend, is inside, having gone to a jail solidarity
meeting, ironically enough. So are two very young people who had just
joined our cluster that night. I try calling Brush's cell phone, but get
no reply.

We wait. That¹s what you do when the cops have guns trained on kids
inside a building. You wait, and witness, and make phone calls, and try
to think of useful things to do.

We call lawyers. We call politicians. We try to call media. We call
friends who might know politicians and media.

Through the kitchen door, we can see young kids sitting on the floor,
handcuffed. We walk across the street, back, made more phone calls. An
ambulance is parked in front, and the paramedics head into the building,
leaving a gurney ready. Susu, from her car around the corner, reports
that the cops have been grabbing pedestrians from the street, forcing
them down to the ground, handcuffing them.

Song, one of the local organizers, calls her City Council member. She
wants to call the Mayor, Chris Coleman, who has promised that St. Paul
will be as welcoming to protestors as to delegates, but no one has his
home number.

What I have forgotten to tell people at the training is how much of an
action is just this: tense, boring waiting, with a knot of anxiety in
your stomach and your feet starting to hurt. Song talks to a helpful
neighbor, who's come over to find out what¹s happening. He knows where
the mayor lives, says it's just a few blocks away, and draws us a map.

We decide to go and call on the Mayor, who could call off the cops.
About five of us troop down there, through the soft night and a
neighborhood of comfortable homes and wide lawns on the bluffs above the
Mississippi. The Mayor's house is a comfortable Dutch Colonial, and
lights were on inside.

We decide that just a few of us will go to the door, so as not to look
intimidating. Song is a round, soft-bodied middle-aged woman with a
sweet face. Ellen is a tiny brunette with a gap-toothed smile, and Lisa,
formidable organizer though she is, looks slight and unthreatening. The
rest of us hang back. Someone opens the door. Our friends have a
conversation with the mayor's wife, who is not pleased to be visited by
constituents late at night, and who tells us we should call the office.
The Mayor, she says, is asleep, and she will not wake him up.

We think a mayor who was doing his job would get up and go see what¹s
going on. Nonetheless, we head back to the convergence space.

A protestor has been released from the building. A small crowd has
gathered across the street, and Fox News has arrived. They interview
Song, who does her first ever Fox media spot. She tells them the truth
-- that people were in there watching movies -- a documentary about
Meridel Le Seuer. Meridel would be proud, and I¹m glad she is with us in
some form.

One by one, protestors trickle out. Now we get more pieces of the story.
The cops burst in, with no warning. They drew their guns on
everyone, including a five year old child who was there with his mother,
forced everyone down on the floor. It was terrifying.

They had a warrant, apparently, from the county, not the city, to search
for "bomb making materials." They were searching everyone in the
building, then one by one releasing them as they found nothing.

They continue to find nothing, as we wait through long hours. Meanwhile,
more and more media arrives. These cops are not as creative as the DC
cops during our first mobilization there against the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Those cops confiscated the lunchtime
soup, which included onions and chili powder, claiming they were
materials for home made pepper spray.

We wait until the last person gets out. He¹s a twenty year old who the
cops have accused of stealing his own backpack, but apparently they
relented.

And now it's morning. I wake up to the news that cops have been raiding
houses where activists are staying, bursting in with the same bogus
warrant and arresting people, including a four year old child. They¹ve
arrested people at the Food Not Bombs house, a group dedicated to
feeding protestors and the homeless. They¹ve arrested others, presumably
just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Poor Peoples' Campaign, which had set up camp at Harriet Island, a
park in the middle of the Mississippi, has also been harassed, its
participants ordered to disperse and its organizers arrested.

Let me be perfectly clear here: all of us here are planning nonviolent
protests against an administration which is responsible for immense
violence, bombs that have destroyed whole countries, and hundreds of
thousands of deaths.

This is the America that eight years of the Bush administration have
brought us, a place where dissent is no longer tolerated, where
pre-emptive strikes have become the strategy of choice for those who
hold power, where any group can be accused of "bombmaking" or
"terrorism" on no evidence whatsoever, in order to deter dissent.

Please stand with us. Because it could be your home they are raiding, next.

Call the Mayors of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Tell them you are outraged
by these attacks on dissent. Urge them to let Poor People encamp and to
let dissent be heard.

FLOOD THE MAYORS' OFFICES ASAP

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman

651-266-8510

Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak

(612) 673-2100

(612) 673-3000 outside Minneapolis