December 2014

On the 11th of December, I found roads in Rock Creek Park barricaded in preparation for "Deer Removal" or the shooting of deer by USDA "wildlife Services" at about 6:30PM. By 10:30 PM, after a flury of phone calls in an effort to organize a hasty street protest, all the barricades were gone and the killers nowhere to be found.

On the 10th of December, the mothers of a number of young men slain by police spoke to a large crowd outside the Department of Justice. One was from nearby PG county. I heard speech after speech about police responding to attempts to surrender or otherwise non-threatening young men with a fusillade of gunshots. The words of the mothers of the fallen were folllowed by a march through the streets to the White House, shutting down traffic for blocks.

Stirring 1 min 20 sec video

Same video on Liveleak due to outage at Archive.org caused by Pacific storm

On the 10th of December, the Washington Post ran a front-page story about the Congressional CIA torture report. Unfortunately, this sort of journalism is the exception, not the rule there. Also on Dec 10th, protesters outside the Washington Post charged the newspaper with being the State Department's mouthpiece in covering up decades of CIA cooperation with torture by right-wing regimes in Central America, and involvement on both sides of the "war on drugs." Particular attention was given to the alleged 2004 "suicide" of former Iran-Contra reporter Gary Webb, found with TWO gunshot wounds to the head.

Late night on Dec 9, the National Park Service began shooting deer for the second night in a row. This time they had some unwelcome attention from nearby residents and animal rights activists furious with the slaughter. The Park Service vehicles appeared to retreat from the protesters, and several roadblocks that existed prior to the protest were removed during it. It appears that one or two areas in which deer were to be shot were abandoned due to the protests.

Short video of the protest