Originally Posted by Minnesota Public Radio

"This whole urine thing is a total and complete fabrication, total and complete" [National Lawyer's Guild local chapter president Bruce] Nestor said Saturday night, after being escorted out of a press conference held by Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher to discuss the raids. "You can look at the inventory. The officers didn't even claim it was urine at the time they seized it. And his press release claims three five gallon buckets of urine. These people, I went into their house. I saw it. They disconnect their kitchen sink from the sewer system and they drain it into a five gallon bucket and you call it grey water. You can't drink it, but its usable still. And then they haul it upstairs and they flush the toilet with it. And in their view, they're doing the responsible thing. They're using less water. They're paying less on their utility bill, they're not taxing the city sewer system, they're reducing runoff into our streams and rivers. That's what they were doing."

"It might be weird to you and I that like to turn on the faucet and have it go straight into the sewer system," Nestor said. "But its not criminal. It's not violent."

...

"The one bucket of urine they got was from some guy out in the back garage," Nestor said. "The guy's been living there eight or nine years. He's got nothing to do with the people in the house. It's a fabrication."

So what was going to happen? Was it a squatter's chamber pot or a would-be political statement?

Originally Posted by Salon.com

In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house.

Originally Posted by Salon.com

Nestor indicated that only 2 or 3 of the 50 individuals who were handcuffed this morning at the 2 houses were actually arrested and charged with a crime, and the crime they were charged with is "conspiracy to commit riot." Nestor, who has practiced law in Minnesota for many years, said that he had never before heard of that statute being used for anything, and that its parameters are so self-evidently vague, designed to allow pre-emeptive arrests of those who are peacefully protesting, that it is almost certainly unconstitutional, though because it had never been invoked (until now), its constitutionality had not been tested.

There is clearly an intent on the part of law enforcement authorities here to engage in extreme and highly intimidating raids against those who are planning to protest the Convention....Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state as can be imagined.

Originally Posted by Salon.com

As the [Democracy Now] producer explains, she was present at a meeting of a group called "I-Witness" -- which videotaped police behavior at the 2004 GOP Convention in New York and helped get charges dismissed against hundreds of protesters who were arrested. The police surrounded the St. Paul house where they were meeting even though they had no warrant, told them that anyone who exited the house would be arrested, and then -- even though they finally, after several hours, obtained a warrant only for the house next door -- basically broke into the house, pointed weapons at everyone inside, handcuffed them, searched the house, and then left. [note: this is the already mentioned bungled raid on Inglehart Ave.]

Originally Posted by Salon.com

After all, if you don't want the FBI spying on you, or the Police surrounding and then invading your home with rifles and seizing your computers, there's a very simple solution: don't protest the Government. Just sit quietly in your house and mind your own business. That way, the Government will have no reason to monitor what you say and feel the need to intimidate you by invading your home.

Originally Posted by Salon.com

Just review what happened yesterday and today. Homes of college-aid protesters were raided by rifle-wielding police forces. Journalists were forcibly detained at gun point. Lawyers on the scene to represent the detainees were handcuffed. Computers, laptops, journals, diaries, and political pamphlets were seized from people's homes. And all of this occurred against U.S. citizens, without a single act of violence having taken place, and nothing more serious than traffic blockage even alleged by authorities to have been planned.

Originally Posted by Salon.com

They were then planning to actually board up her house for unspecified "code violations", but apparently her neighbors were very vocal, and the police ended up agreeing not to do anything so long as the front door was fixed by 6pm (the front door they'd busted in).

Originally Posted by Salon.com

Any rational person planning to protest the GOP Convention would, in light of this Government spying and these police raids, think twice -- at least -- about whether to do so. That is the point of the raids -- to announce to citizens that they best stay in their homes and be good, quiet, meek, compliant people unless they want their homes to be invaded, their property seized, and have rifles pointed at them, too. The fact that this behavior is producing so little outcry only ensures, for obvious reasons, that it will continue in the future. We love our Surveillance State for keeping us safe and maintaining nice, quiet order.