OSCE critical of American police arrests of journalists

Columbus police get deserved international rebuke! America’s brutal policing with little regard for protest and press freedom has now caught the attention of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). These arrests were also condemned by the press freedom organization, Reporters Without Borders, which calls on the police department to drop the charges – NOW!It seems that two Russia Today reporters, along with other journalists covering a protest outside of the Fort Benning were outright arrested for doing their jobs as journalists. The protests the journalists were covering is an annual protest held outside of the army base in Columbus, Georgia by human rights activists against the School of the Americas training program. The statement from the OSCE’s Representative on Freedom of the Media, Dunja Mijatovic in a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about these arrests :

The fact that local police officers would detain, handcuff and arrest members of the press as they engaged in their duty to report on a public event is disturbing.While it is clear that police play a crucial role in maintaining order during public demonstrations, the indiscriminate rounding up of media and bringing charges against them goes well beyond what is necessary to keep the peace.

Arresting journalists doing their jobs now American policing practice? This incident follows an apparent “arrest first ask questions later” mentality against journalists now held by American police when approaching political protests. It now is apparently an American police practice to round up arrest journalists (and protesters) without probable cause and failing to obey unknown orders, and then haul them into court. The video above is an example of a growing police pattern in the United States of intimidation of journalists, as well as arrests of protesters and people with video cameras in the United States. We also see in the first video what is called in police practice as a “high risk traffic stop,” where the subjects are suspected to be armed and dangerous (guns trained, walking backwards). For comparison, the video to the right is about Chinese police arrest of journalists covering a plane crash. Please note the similarities in arrests, detention, lack of explanations and custody contexts of the journalists in all videos.This flows also from the blanket and brutal arrests of protesters and journalists at the 2008 Republican Convention in Minneapolis – which the American government itself was involved in. Journalists Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! was arrested,  along with her crew and other journalists, even though they carried press credentials. Amy Goodman describes her and her crew’s arrests when they tried to cover the protests outside the Republican Convention:

So I race from the convention floor – you know, my credentials are dangling from my neck – with our cameramen, and we’re racing to Seventh and Jackson in St. Paul. And as I get there, the riot police are all lined up. It’s a fully contained area, at this point.So I just come up to them and I immediately say, hey, I’m a credentialed journalist, and can I speak to your commanding officer? Two of our producers, who are also credentialed, are inside, and I want them released.And, I mean, within seconds they’d ripped me through the line. They were twisting my arms behind my back. They slapped those rigid plastic handcuffs on that dig into your wrists. They put me up against the wall and they pushed me on the ground.And I was continuing to say, you can see I’m a credentialed reporter. I need to see my producers, ‘cause I had heard they were hurt. I mean, I’ve got the highest security credentials. I can be next to presidents, vice-presidents, on the convention floor, senators, Congress members, whereupon the Secret Service came over and ripped the credentials from around my neck.

In Minnesota in 2008,  some of the police actions included raids on the homes of those planning protests with heavy armor and military weapons, like that of a drug raid. The repugnant arrests of GOP protesters in Minnesota in 2008 drew little international reactions from OSCE, the European Union or the United Nations.  The RT reporters are from non-American new agency, and, as usual, the human rights of Americans don’t matter to OSCE, EU or the UN.

Human rights violations like this OK in the United States against Americans for EU? American police now appear to have an “arrest first” practice of outright arresting and brutalizing journalists, along with peaceful protesters. This practice on the part of American police would place them on the same level  with Iran, which has about the same types of police practices with regard to protesters and journalists.The rest of the world, especially the European Union, needs to stop exempting the United States from being held to the same press freedoms and human rights standards of the rest of the world. When journalists were brutalized and arrested for doing their jobs and covering protest events - it shows a further sign of America becoming a dangerous tyrannical country. No free nation arrests journalists or others just for “being there.”  Human rights abuses should not be tolerated whether they are out of Burma, Iran or the United States.Now – let’s hear the explanations and excuses out of the European Union and its Member States why these types of human rights violations – in the United States -  are never brought up at US-EU summits – as they are at summits with Russia, China.