From the moment he was arrested and hauled off in handcuffs with hundreds of others during the Republican National Convention in New York City last summer, Bruce Renwick suspected it had all been a setup. Now, after reading this week that amateur videos of the arrests have led to charges being dropped against more than 400 protestors, the 49-year-old Waunakee resident is convinced more than ever that his suspicions were right: That the mass arrests were part of an elaborate scheme concocted by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other high-ranking Republican officials to thwart demonstrators from upstaging the event.
"And I think there was a complete disregard for what was going to happen later in terms of someone slapping their wrists or saying, 'Oh, you guys didn't handle things right,' " says Renwick, who works as a psychiatric nurse at Mendota Mental Health Institute. "I think they developed a very clear strategy of how they were going to manage the protests and not let it become like the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968."
For Renwick, who spent nearly 12 hours in custody, the arrests were a jaw-dropping example of how citizens' constitutional rights are being trampled since the Patriot Act was passed. And it was all the more shocking in that Renwick - who'd driven to New York to drop off his daughter at college - wasn't even participating in the protests when he was arrested near the Port Authority Trans-Hudson railroad. As he told The Capital Times upon returning home, he had some time to kill that afternoon and had gone to the area strictly as an observer.
His biggest frustration, he says, is that no matter how many times he tells his story, people can't appreciate what a degrading spectacle it was. "And how normal, reasonable, every-day Americans who were out there saying we don't like the way things are going and exhibiting their constitutional right to protest actually got thrown in jail. I mean, no matter how you tell it, people don't understand how crazy that whole thing was." Which is why, Renwick says, the dozens of amateur videos that were taken that week are so crucial. "My biggest hope is that someone makes a documentary out of this, so that Americans can watch it on a big screen and go, 'What? How could they arrest those people - they weren't doing anything!'" Perhaps then, he says, "people will realize how scary it's gotten."
just some snips, rest of the article here
http://www.madison.com/tct/news//index.php?ntid=36211&ntpid=2
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