BETWEEN THE LINES: Police Infiltrated Activist Groups

According to recently unsealed court documents, four Pennsylvania State Troopers were among the dozens of activists building puppets, floats and props to be used in demonstrations at this summer's Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. The officers, posing as union carpenters, volunteered their services at a warehouse that was later raided by police on Aug. 1st, the same day thousands of protesters engaged in non-violent civil disobedience to block traffic on city streets.

More than 400 demonstrators were arrested during the actions in Philadelphia, including 75 who were picked up in the puppet warehouse raid. The police infiltrators had stated that protesters in the warehouse were constructing devices to block traffic, an allegation denied by the activists who say they were only making puppets and art for Republican National Convention demonstrations. Court documents also state that police believed that funding for the protests came from "Communist and leftist parties," some allied with groups connected to the former Soviet Union. Police set unprecedented amounts of bail for many of those arrested on misdemeanor charges. Some identified as leaders were held on as much as $1 million bond until court-ordered reductions. Additionally, law enforcement was engaged in monitoring telephones and e-mail communication.

Between The Lines' Scott Harris spoke with Bradley Bridge, an attorney with Philadelphia's Public Defenders office representing some of those arrested, who condemns the use of police infiltrators and Cold War era propaganda to disrupt and discredit the activities of social justice activists.

Bradley Bridge: The police had obtained a search warrant and the basis for their search warrant alleged that the warehouse was being used for the production of puppets, but also for lock boxes, which are plastic devices made out of PCV pipe, chain and chicken wire that immobilize people's arms if they were placed in them so that they could lie down in an intersection and make it difficult for police to remove them. That was the reason for their pre-emptive raid at the warehouse.

They arrested people in several trucks (parked nearby) allegedly for possession of the same items. The interesting thing is they didn't find anything like that in the warehouse. They supposedly had a number of troopers that had infiltrated it -- I think the number I heard is four -- and they didn't find any of those devices in the warehouse. They found puppets. I know that's what they found because I was in the warehouse at the time of the raid.

Between The Lines: As an attorney, how do you look at this case in terms of the veracity and the legal grounds under which this raid was conducted?

Bradley Bridge: Let me examine each of those two questions separately. If you talk about veracity, there's a lot of questions about the truthfulness of the allegations made in the search warrant. Certain things were alleged there that from what I've been able to determine so far were incorrect or maybe outright false. So veracity is called into question.

But if you talk about the legality of it, there's not a real strong basis even if you accepted all the allegations as being true in the search warrant -- to go in pre-emptively and arrest 75 people sitting in a warehouse for doing nothing but making puppets.

Between The Lines: What do you make of Pennsylvania authorities -- both in the city of Philadelphia and the governor's comments -- that these pre-emptive strikes were necessary to protect the people of the state of Pennsylvania?

Bradley Bridge: I guess the simple thing is (the governor) obviously doesn't know anything about the facts, because that's not what happened. There were not modest, passive steps, but aggressive, immodest steps. If he's worried about saying that there's a right to protest, and a right for lawful protest, then the people who wanted to make a message and send it out to the community should have been allowed to do so. The people were producing puppets; they weren't actually doing anything else other than producing puppets, and when the police raided the warehouse, that's all they found.