“The Denver police union is selling T-shirts that poke fun at protesters at last month’s Democratic National Convention, but the main target isn’t laughing.”

Ha ha.

(Hat tip: Rad Geek.)

Eight members of the RNC Welcoming Committee, a group formed to protest the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN, have been charged with “conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism.” Because in 21st-century America, terrorism and civil disobedience are one and the same.

“These charges are an effort to equate publicly stated plans to blockade traffic and disrupt the RNC as being the same as acts of terrorism. This both trivializes real violence and attempts to place the stated political views of the Defendants on trial,” said Bruce Nestor, President of the Minnesota Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. […]

The criminal complaints filed by the Ramsey County Attorney do not allege that any of the defendants personally have engaged in any act of violence or damage to property. The complaints list all of alleged violations of law during the last few days of the RNC — other than violations of human rights carried out by law enforcement — and seeks to hold the 8 defendants responsible for acts committed by other individuals. None of the defendants have any prior criminal history involving acts of violence.

Several members of the RNC Welcoming Committee held a press conference to tell their side of the story. If you feel like hearing what they have to say, clips are available from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, Democracy Now! (here and here), and The Uptake. (”It’s interesting that … the questions are about violence on the protesters’ side…. Did any of the protesters shoot rubber bullets at the police? Did any of the protesters fire concussion grenades?”)

The charges are only a small part of a pattern of intimidation, abuse, and civil rights violations by the authorities:

Several police agencies, ramrodded by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s department, staged massive pre-emptive raids against houses where activists were staying and against the RNC Welcoming Committee’s convergence space. Many of the imprisoned protesters continue to be held without charges. Many have been abused by their jailers, including a woman being knocked to the ground and dragged by her hair, several protesters being denied prescription or over-the-counter medications for serious medical conditions, and a 19-year-old activist named Elliot Hughes, who was beaten and tortured for over an hour because, according to the Ramsey County Sheriff’s department, he was being verbally disruptive.

And that’s not even mentioning the hundreds of other, non-RNCWC activists intimidated, assaulted, arrested, and held without charge during the protests; the dozens of journalists treated the same way, including Amy Goodman and two other folks from Democracy Now!; or the relentless series of lies issued by the cops and swallowed whole by the mainstream press, when they bothered to cover the protests at all.

The same thing happened at the RNC in New York in 2004. The same thing happened in Miami in 2006. Heck, the same thing happened during the APEC protests in 1997 (pepper spray, snipers on the rooftops, activists’ rights routinely violated by the RCMP, an ineffectual government inquiry that held almost no one to account). No doubt the same thing will happen in Vancouver during the 2010 Olympics. As far as I can tell, that’s just how the big protests work these days.