Yesterday, I arrived at the National Lawyers Guild nerve center at around 8:30. The NLG is one of the groups that sent out volunteer legal observers to the WTO protests. LO’s are not lawyers necessarily, they’re just people who were watching to ensure that there were objective witnesses should anything go wrong. The nerve center was set up to take phone calls from observers about arrests and other incidents, and to help coordiate the placement of observers with the different protests going on. The nerve center is located in a building on 4^th Avenue and Union Street.

We knew Tuesday was going to be a busy day, because the largest scheduled march was going to be starting at 12:30, and because it was the opening day of the official WTO sessions. We expected a large number of arrests, because the city had set up a special system for processing large numbers of arrestees, but we didn’t expect there to be many violent confrontations between the police and the protestors, since the vast majority of the groups espoused a nonviolent viewpoint.

Around 9:15, we began to receive phone calls from our LO’s telling us that police in riot gear were arriving at the protests around the Sheraton Hotel, bringing with them tear gas, peppery spray and armored personal carriers (or APC’s, which the police and the media would later euphamistically call "peacekeepers"). It wasn’t until around 9:45 that we began to get frantic phone calls from our LO’s saying the police were throwing tear gas canisters at the crowd and then spraying them with pepper spray. At least one of our LO’s told us that they heard no warning from the police before the gassing began.

After the first use of tear gas, the police seemed to believe that it was appropriate to use tear gas on all protestors, whether they were peaceful or not. The building we were in was locked down around 10:00 because of the chaos outside, meaning we needed to vouch for any of our observers who needed to go in our out. We received reports all morning from LO’s asking for more observers to be sent to their locations because they were being sprayed with pepper spray and tear gas. One of our observers came in carrying a rubber bullet he had picked up off the street after the police shot rubber bullets at him and the protestors he was observing.

It was about this time that we began talking to one of the local newspapers, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. We were on the phone with one of their editors when the observer came in with the rubber bullet, and the editor told us that the Seattle Police were denying using rubber bullets. We told her that we had one in our office. The bullet was about ¾ of an inch across and made of hard rubber that felt like plastic; I held it in my hand and felt it. It also had white scrape marks on it, from bouncing off the street. Later in the day, LO’s brought in more rubber bullets, some of them much smaller. The smaller ones, they reported, were used in shotgun-type shells and sprayed out at the crowd more than the larger ones.

Around 11:45, a few of us went across the hall from the office were in to another office because we heard the police were amassing a strike force in the intersection just below us. We were on the 9^th floor and had an unobstructed view of the intersection. We could also see down 4^th Avenue about a block, and up Union about two blocks. The police had union blocked off between 4^th and 6^th; there was an APC parked in the intersection of 6^th and Union, and there were mounted police at 5^th and Union. In addition, there was a line of police (all the police I saw all day were in riot gear, including gas masks, helmets, bullet-proof vests, face guards, and sometimes shields) standing at the intersection of 4^th and Union blocking protestors from moving up Union toward the Sheraton. There were about 200 protestors in the intersection, playing drums and chanting something we couldn’t understand. A few of the protestors brought dumpsters over to the intersection and knocked them over, creating a partial baracade in the street.

Around 11:50, we saw more police heading towards the intersection, marching. It was clear to us that they were the reinforcements, and that the police had decided to clear the intersection. The protestors must have realized this too, because about a third of them decided to sit down. There was nothing thrown at the police, nor did any of the protestors try to come up to the police and confront them. The only act which the police could have seen as threatening was the semi-baracade, and only a handful of the protestors had built it.

At noon, a police officer came out and said something to the crowd through a megaphone. Later, an observer who was on the street at that point told me that the officer had said the protestors were violating state law, and had 2 minutes to leave the area, and then would be subject to arrest. About fifteen to thirty seconds after the police made their announcement, we saw tear gas canisters flying at the crowd. Then the line of police began to advance, walking around the overturned dumpsters and spraying the still-seated protestors with pepper spray. The protestors began to flee. Some of the protestors threw tear gas canisters back at the police, but since the police were wearing gas masks, they simply ignored the canisters. Once all the protestors had run away, the police set up lines on both sides of the intersection, leaving Union Street entirely empty of protestors from 6^th avenue through 3^rd.

The afternoon brought more of the same: the police threw tear gas at any protestors who were beligerant, were breaking windows or damaging property, or were in a location where the police didn’t want them. Very few people were arrested, despite the elaborate system of processing arrestees that the city had developed; in the morning, we only heard about 3 arrests, and by about 5:00, we had only heard of 19 total arrests.

The scheduled AFL-CIO march had to change its route, because the police had blocked off the streets. Any protestors who didn’t want to comply with the change in route were pepper sprayed or tear gassed. By then, it was clear to us that the city had literally descended into complete chaos.

The NLG attorneys drafted a letter to the mayor, which was also sent to the city council and any news organization we could think of, demanding that the tear gassing of peaceful protestors be stopped. The letter was faxed out at about 2:30. It received some attention from the press; a few news agencies called us to follow up on it, but the mayor obviously ignored the letter entirely.

About 4:30, we heard that the mayor was probably going to impose a curfew on downtown. When the curfew was announced, we realized that we couldn’t keep the nerve center open that evening as we had planned. Instead, we started to close up and go home. The phone wasn’t ringing anymore, since most of the protestors had been chased out of town both by the curfew and by the tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets.

An NLG attorney and I left the building at about 5:10. Since the buses weren’t running because of the street closures, the attorney had offered to give me a ride home if we could get to his car, which was parked at the north end of downtown near the Paramount Theater, where the opening sessions were to have taken place. Since we couldn’t cross Union Street (which was to the north of us), we walked down 4^th one block to University Street, then over to 3^rd Avenue. On the corner of 3^rd Avenue and University is an entrance to the bus tunnel which runs underneath downtown. We asked the police officers stationed there if the tunnel was open. They told us that buses were running through the tunnel, but that only certain stops were open, and the stop nearest the car was closed. So taking the bus wouldn’t help us.

Next, we walked about two blocks up Third before we came to an intersection where there were police. We could see that further up 3^rd, there was tear gas. We asked one of the police who wasn’t wearing a gas mask which street we could go up to get to the north end of downtown. He told us to take 2^nd Avenue, so we walked over to 2^nd, but there was a large tear gas cloud visible up the street. So we headed over for 1^st Avenue.

We managed to go about a half a block up 1^st before we started to smell tear gas. We tried to walk a little further, hoping the gas would dissipate, but it only got stronger. We turned around and headed back to the street we’d been on before, and followed it towards the waterfront, which is two blocks west of 1^st Avenue. We knew that the breeze off the ocean would help dissipate any tear gas, and we figured that there wouldn’t be any protestors on the waterfront, since it’s somewhat seperated from the rest of downtown by staircases and cliffs. As we headed towards the waterfront, we took some lost out-of-town protestors with us, most of them very young and clearly shaken by their experience.

The attorney with me decided to head back into downtown to try to get to his car, and I decided to keep walking up the waterfront to try to get to a bus. I ended up having to walk halfway around the city to find a bus headed towards my house. I got home around 7:00.

It was clear to me from my experiences yesterday that the rioting that ensued last night didn’t have to happen. Tear gas didn’t need to be used on peaceful protestors who posed no threat to the police or to WTO delegates. The police chose to gas and spray protestors instead of arresting them and removing them from the scene. The protests would have been much easier to manage had the police followed normal procedures and arrested protestors. Instead, they ended spending most of the day chasing the same people around downtown with tear gas, peppery spray and rubber bullets. The people who rioted all last night could have been arrested in the morning and held away from downtown, and much of the property damage and, more important, the injuries would have been prevented.

I urge all of you to follow the coverage of these events by the Seattle Independent Media Center. Their website is www.indymedia.org and their reports are far more accurate than the ones the major networks are producing. The CNN reporters don’t even know where the bus tunnel goes, let alone what actually went on in the crowds yesterday. There were no major networks covering the clearing of 4^th and Union that I witnessed, but there were independent media cameras there. And the independent media aren’t owned by large corporations which have a vested interest in the WTO.

Pepper spray "works" because it causes intense pain. This is a form of torture, and they know it. It’s got nothing to do with "a few police officers feeling scared." It is policy! They are going to torture you to keep you from expressing your opinions publicly, and the news media will villify you making it look like it was all your fault, and there are probably agents added to the crowd to break a few windows for the cameras so they can make a peaceful protest look like a wild riot on TV.