Media Threatened Over Pictures of Police Assulting
Olympic Torch Protesters
by Earth First! Melbourne
Twenty minutes before the Olympic Torch arrived, plain
clothes Police harrassed two people with a track
record of anti-nuclear protesting. After the woman
tried to alert nearby media, she was thrown to the
ground. Media were told if they printed pictures of
this police violence, they would risk having their
Olympic accrediation removed.
'''''''''''''''''''''''''''
>From an article about the Torch relay in the
Melbourne Edition of The Australian, Monday 31/7/2000,
p6:
"Two of the protesters were earlier confronted by
police, who recognised them from other anti-nuclear
rallies and wrestled the female of the pair to the
ground. Nearby media photographing the incident were
threatened with having their Olympic accreditation
revoked if they published the pictures."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No pictures of this event appeared in The Australian,
or any other newspaper.
The incident described by "The Australian" resulted
from an attempt by a plain clothes police officer to
search Earth First!er Marcus Brumer's bag. As Melainie
Neofitou, the woman mentioned in the article, tried
to alert the media, a unidentified man blocked her
path, grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her back.
As
Melanie made effots to free herself, the man said she
was under arrest and threw her on the ground and
placed his knee in her back. He did not release her
until her cries for help alerted members of the media.
Here we have:
- police singling out people for harassment 20
minutes before a protest begins
- police searching someone's bag on the flimsiest
of grounds. "We reckon you have a knife".
- a police officer grabbing someone without first
identifying himself
- orders to the media: don't show this or you'll
be kicked out of the Olympics
This happened in Victoria, where there are laws
against Police doing some of these things. What will
it be
like in Sydney, where Police and non-Police have been
given legal authority to do much of the above?
----------
For those wondering why EF! Melb was protesting:
Twenty minutes later, protesters from Earth First!
Melbourne blocked the path of torch-carrier Sir Gustav
Nossal with a banner: "Nuclear Industry, a Flaming
Disgrace". Gustav Nossal has received money from
Pangea to promote a nuclear waste dump in Australia.
=====
"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon? And how
could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have
been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be
explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life... Philosophical
problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas from life,
we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the
application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig Wittgenstein
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