Truth Alliance: ReCreate 68 Starting to Look Like a Threat to Peaceful Activist Groups

ReCreate 68 has been handing out the image above on cards around Denver.  The left image is the front and the right image is the back. On the website for the group, they identify with disobedience by claiming people should "join them in the streets of Denver as they resist a two-party system that allows imperialism and racism to continue unrestrained."  On their website, they have called the police pigs and are educating people on the $50 million the city spent on security for the DNC. A link states "Weapons Used by the Pigs to Take Your Rights Away!"  See the website here:  http://www.recreate68.org/

Denver area hospitals and law enforcement have been receiving emails and faxes to prepare for terrorism and mass riots in Denver for the DNC similar to the one below.  In the memo, a security alert has been issued including, in some cases, the naming of one activist group, ReCreate 68, as a potential threat.

Mark and Barb Cohen, two of the coordinators of ReCreate 68 are planning massive, potentially violent protests around the DNC, have not uttered a word that they might have been wrong about their past association with a Stan and Delilah, 2 names that will ring a bell for those who look into the Kohl's incident from 2000.  Their last names will not be mentioned for privacy.

The rhetoric heard from the Recreate 68,  the attraction of the young people to the charisma of Glen Spagnuolo, the focus on doing battle with the police and the confronting attitude--while losing sight of the issues, the revolutionary fervor, the attitude that groups like Code Pink, etc. just aren't radical enough,  the peer pressure to be more radical, the disinclination to disavow violence with the pretext that they want to be "inclusive," --all this is deja vu.  It happened in 2000 with DAN.  It is happening again stroke for stroke, word for word.

The DNC will be held in Denver, Colorado from August 24th through the 28th.  Denver immediately started passing all kinds of unconstitutional laws demanded by the DNC Hosting Committee.

These laws included a security perimeter around the convention with gates and fences to keep people far away as well as a "Free Speech Zone" which the DNC Hosting Committee will be announcing in mid-June. One law in particular went unnoticed by the corporate media. Permission must now be granted to protest with a permit from the city, but the DNC Hosting Committee suggested that it be a lottery.  Those who wanted to protest had to register for the lottery, to which the winners were then only allowed to fill out applications and even then, the application could still be denied.  The protests were still designated in free speech zones only and permits must be required in Denver for protests of any group with 50 or more people.  Many activist groups have been very verbal about their opposition to these laws, but only one group seems to be getting the spotlight.

Even though 911 Truth has been around for a long time and has a massive network base, ReCreate 68 has been adamant about having anyone attend under their group name and they will not let any 911 truth speaker present, even when asked by We Are Change Colorado on Sunday, April 13th's community meeting.  How is it that a group that pops up out of no where gets so much press and 911 truth, Colorado 9/11 Visibility, We Are Change Colorado and many others have worked so hard to get attention from local media?

Re-Create 68 has announced it will force police to intervene at Civic Center park on Sunday, August 24th before the start of the 2008 Democratic National Convention, because the city just awarded a permit for the park on that day to be used by the city's convention host committee. The blind lottery awarded the permit for Civic Center on Aug. 24 to Jenny Anderson. The problem with this blind lottery is that Jenny Anderson is the Event Director for the DNC Hosting Committee.  What a coincidence that she gets it even thought the hosting committee has spent tons of money renting the Six Flags Elitch Gardens right next door to the Pepsi Center for a kick off party already.

See for yourself:

http://www.denverconvention2008.com/index.cfm?page=contactus

ReCreate 68 has a massive anti war protest planned for the DNC on the 24th, to which they were never issued a permit for.  Sparking the press to cover the story, Glenn Spagnuolo, the organizer of the group, threatened the City of Denver and all who visit the Democratic National Convention with potential violence, making a direct threat regarding his un-permited plan to occupy the Civic Center, "If the cops try to stop us, we'll see what happens."  The threat estimates there will be 50,000 anti-war demonstrators who will overwhelm law enforcement. Re-create 68 is now on a collision course with law enforcement to re-create the violence of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Read more...

Michelle Malkin, the neo-conservative mouth piece, issued her warning about the group almost immediately.  Read her response here.

Denver could face a “dangerous situation” on the first day of the Democratic National Convention, war protesters said Thursday, after losing a coveted permit for Civic Center to the convention host committee.“When things blow up because the police have to enforce a permit that the Democrats got, don’t blame us for that,” said Glenn Spagnuolo.“Blame the Democrats for trying to silence dissent in the city of Denver.”The lottery for permits to protest, pray or hold other events in city parks during the DNC Aug. 24 through 28 resumed Thursday after the city bungled the drawing Tuesday by accidentally leaving out some of the applicants’ names.But when Jenny Anderson, event planner for the Denver 2008 Convention Host Committee, won the permit for Civic Center for a kick-off Aug. 24, Spagnuolo accused the committee of creating a “very serious, dangerous situation . . . for everybody.”

Re-create 68 - which has promised demonstrations that will rival those at the bloody 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago - will be at Civic Center on Aug. 24, with or without a permit, he said.

Via Wolf, more coverage from the Denver Post:

War protesters promised a massive conflict at Civic Center on the eve of the 2008 Democratic National Convention, after losing in a lottery process Thursday that awarded a permit for the park to the party planner for Denver’s host committee.

“We’re having our protest at Civic Center,” said a livid Glenn Spagnuolo, a lead organizer for the group Re-create 68. “We’re not going to give up Civic Center park to the Democrats. . . . They are creating a very dangerous situation.”

Re-create 68 and its affiliates packed the random lottery with applications to better its chances, but the single entry by Jenny Anderson for the host committee won for Sunday, Aug. 24. The convention will be held Aug. 25-28 at the Pepsi Center.
Extras

Spagnuolo has been meeting monthly with city officials for a year, hoping to win the right to use Civic Center throughout the convention. He says 50,000 war protesters are coming for a march from Civic Center to the Pepsi Center on Aug. 24.

He said Thursday that he would not respect the host committee’s permit and would occupy the park, even if it forced police to intervene.

Referring to the $50 million in federal security money slated for the convention, Spagnuolo said Denver police would need “$25 million to protect the Pepsi Center and $25 million to protect Civic Center.”

The 1968 riots outside the Democratic Convention were bloody and included police beating people and arresting them  This is the goal of ReCreate 68.

ReCreate 68 is an umbrella network that was organized by Glenn Spagnuolo, Barb Cohen and Mark Cohen.  Recently, these 3 have been gaining publicity in Colorado for their plan to turn the Denver city into a massive ground zero for protests surrounding the war, immigration, currency control, freedom campaigns for death row inmates, clinic programs for the public, homeless sheltering, globalization, and many more.  One group in particular was handing out DVDs out one of their meetings.  The group calls themselves, RAMID, or Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement - Denver.  The DVDs have images of Native American genocide, slavery and preaches hatred for "White Americans." They spell America with 3 "K"s so it looks like "Amerikkka."

After speaking with RAIMD, We Are Change Colorado became aware that they intend to throw bags of urine and blood on cops at the DNC protests, all under the name of the umbrella organization ReCreate 68. See their website here:  http://raimd.wordpress.com/

ReCreate 68 has massive organized effort and finances coming from donations across the country.  Glenn Spagnuolo, the coordinator for the group, has ben traveling around the United States speaking with every activist group you can think of to coordinate them under his group. Code Pink, Food Not Bombs, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Green Peace, Scholars for Peace and Justice, and many famous immigration groups, unions, and anti-globalist activist networks are all working under ReCreate 68 with the thought that this group is just a peaceful festival of celebration.  This is untrue.  Every activist group coming into Denver will be greeted by a person representing ReCreate 68 at hotels and so fourth and given an itinerary of demonstrations to attend.

By attending, these groups do not yet realize they will be giving up their message and name for the ReCreate 68 name which is permitted to protest.  The problem with this is that ReCreate 68 has been inviting more radical groups and violent anarchist groups as well.  To add to this, ReCreate 68 has not told other activist groups the extent of which these demonstrations will endanger the safety or security of any peaceful demonstration.

ReCreate 68 has organized the "Days of Resistance" gathering where they will be setting up a tent city for those who have no place to stay.  They have a community feeding program to give out meals twice a day, which suggests their shear size and organization since they claim to be busing in over 10,000 immigrants, anti-war protesters and activists from around the country.  They have setup a community clinic that will give people street medical attention, even though the hospitals are on call for the DNC and are prepared for massive riots. This community clinic will be giving shots to anyone who wants one.

The first of the major protests organized by ReCreate 68 will be the "End the Occupations March and Rally" on Sunday, August 24th at 11:00am.  This is a massive anti-war protest that will attempt to get the citizens to "lock arms" and approach the Pepsi Events Center (where the convention will be) even though there will be a security perimeter around the building.  The security perimeter will be a fence with gates that only open to vehicles with passes for attendees and press.

The next demonstration will be the "Freedom March" which will take place on Monday, August 25th at 12:00pm in which protesters will be organized to surround the Federal Court House downtown and demand that death row inmates be released and so fourth.

This day will be very disturbing for peaceful protesters because it is followed by a demonstration called "Shake Your Money Maker!" at 5:00pm that will attempt to organize all the protesters around the Denver Coin Mint and "levitate" the building.  Glenn Spagnuolo has stated that he will be handing out bags with money symbols on them and asking people to approach the fencing around the mint. Signs at the the Mint grant legal authority to shoot anyone who try's to climb over the fence or shakes the fence surrounding the Coin Mint, which is across the street from the Denver Police Station.

On Tuesday, August 26th, the "Immigration Rights Rally" will take place that Glenn says he will be inviting all illegal immigrants down to the DNC to protest their "right" to be here.  This day will be very dangerous to protesters because the activist group RAIMD has been handing out dvds and inciting physical violence towards "White Americans" for stealing land from Mexico and killing millions of natives and using slavery as their exploit to achieve dominance in the past.  The RAIMD activist group has asked people to prepare for throwing bags of blood and urine on cops and they have discussed how to build molotov cocktails.

What the public does not know yet is that this ReCreate 68 group is the leftovers from the Denver Action Network from 2000. After the WTO protest at Seattle in 1999 and the IMF and World Bank protest in D.C. in April, 2000, Direct Action Network (DAN) groups formed across the U.S.  A chapter was formed in Denver in May, 2000. DAN groups were formed to overcome corporate globalization and other forms of oppression.   DAN in Denver was a coalition of several peace and justice and environmental groups with the goal of educating others and convincing world leaders that neo-liberal policies were destructive and oppressive to the majority of people in third world countries. Elites benefited in these countries from these policies, but the masses became more and more disenfranchised.

After these successful protests, there was a revolutionary fervor in the air as activists felt they were "winning" this battle.  In Denver, at the meetings to establish ground rules for this coalition, there was talk of  "property damage" not being "violence."   This started setting the tone.  Barb and Mark Cohen were very much leaders in the establishment of the DAN.  The advantage of this coalition is that when one group held an action, the other groups would be informed so that the action would have more participants.

A couple (Stan and Delilah)  with a 10 year old daughter arrived in Denver and started attending DAN meetings.  They were charismatic, very conflicted emotionally, and revolutionary in their speech.  No one could be radical enough for them.  Soon many of the "anarchist" young people were gathering around them.  Stan and Delilah lived in the same coop house with many of these young people.  Barb and Mark Cohen supported them.  More and more revolutionary fervor filled the conversations at DAN.  Then at one meeting, a young man (new to DAN) arrived and threw on the table a poster of a brick being thrown through a glass window of Starbucks.  The name of his organization was on the bottom of the poster.

He wanted his group to join DAN.  One group within the coalition dissented.  Eventually, with much turmoil and drama, the DAN voted to allow this new group into the DAN.  The dissenting group left DAN, predicting that this new group which openly avowed property damage would bring legal problems to the whole coalition. 

In three months after this inclusion of this new group,  several young people committed property damage which landed them in jail and landed the Denver Justice and Peace Committee in the courts for a year or more. 

It happened like this:

It was Christmas 2000.  The Denver Justice and Peace Committee (not a part of DAN) was holding a peaceful protest outside Kohl's department store in Golden, handing out fliers which told shoppers that the goods they were buying were made with sweatshop labor.  A group of people arrived wearing Santa Claus outfits and began to hand out fliers acting like they were part of  the DJPC.  These "Santas" as a group then suddenly entered Kohl's and spray painted thousands of dollars of clothing. 

The license plate of the get-away car was recorded, the owner found and jailed.  The Director of the Denver Justice and Peace Committee, however, was also jailed.  A Grand Jury was convened.  Soon the get-away car owner who was in jail revealed the names of the other young folks involved and they all did some jail time.  By the way, the charismatic couple were not Santas.  They were not jailed, and soon left Denver.

The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Colorado (ACLU) filed suit against Golden and Denver law enforcement officers alleging that they violated the rights of the Denver Justice and Peace Committee when they searched its office and illegally confiscated membership lists, pamphlets, and other materials that are protected by the First Amendment.

On December 14, 2000, Golden police officers, assisted by Denver officers, appeared at the DJPC office with a search warrant.

"After videotaping and photographing the entire premises, the officers spent three and a half hours rummaging through closets, desk drawers, cupboards, file cabinets, and file folders," said Lino Lipinsky, of McKenna & Cuneo, who filed the lawsuit as a volunteer cooperating attorney for the ACLU. "They illegally confiscated membership lists, mailing lists, phone tree lists, leaflets, pamphlets, posters, newsletters, articles, and other advocacy materials."

Police were investigating vandalism that had occurred several days earlier at Kohl's Department Store in Golden. the Denver Justice and Peace Committee had sponsored a rally at the store in support of striking workers in Nicaragua who produce some of Kohl's clothing. While the rally was in progress, four unidentified individuals dressed as Santa Claus arrived on the scene, entered the store, and spray-painted merchandise.

Although the Denver Justice and Peace Committee had no connection to the vandalism, which it publicly condemned, Golden police sought and obtained a warrant to search the DJPC's office, confiscate its membership list, and seize any "pamphlets, papers, and flyers that are protest-related"; "Posters that are protest related"; and any "Videotape and still photographs of persons protesting any organization or business."

"Any police officer should have known that such a broadly-worded warrant violates the First Amendment right of political association and expression and the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizures," said Mark Silverstein, ACLU Legal Director. "Membership lists, pamphlets, papers and flyers are not evidence of crime. They are evidence
that DJPC engages in lawful advocacy and political association that is protected by the Constitution."

According to the ACLU, the search also violated the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, which Congress passed as an added layer of legal protection for newspapers, advocacy organizations, and others who disseminate information to the public. When police officers seek evidence from such organizations, Lipinsky explained, the statute requires them to rely first on a subpoena
before resorting to a search warrant. "A subpoena can be challenged in court if it is overbroad," Lipinsky explained. "And when the subpoena is appropriate, the organization itself can find the requested materials in its files. Congress enacted the Privacy Protection Act to ensure that police officers could not barge into the offices of an organization engaged in First Amendment activities and start rifling desk drawers and file cabinets. What happened in this case is exactly what Congress was trying to prevent."

"In addition to confiscating DJPC's membership list, which spanned 60 pages and listed over 800 individuals, police confiscated membership lists and mailing lists of other organizations, as well as numerous additional documents that were not included or specified in the already-overbroad warrant," Lipinsky said. According to the lawsuit, police confiscated hand-written notes taken at DJPC board meetings; paste-up versions of the organization's newsletter, and handwritten notes about articles to be included in future newsletters. Police also seized an envelope addressed to Kohl's management which contained about 20 individually-signed letters from Kohl's shoppers expressing their support for the union workers in Nicaragua. According to the lawsuit, police confiscated the only copies of these communications, thus preventing them from reaching their intended recipient.

After obtaining the names of over 800 members of DJPC, the lawsuit says, Golden police officers divided up the list and called every tenth individual to question them about the vandalism at Kohl's. They also contacted each DJPC board member, as well as members of other groups whose names appeared on phone lists and mailing lists found at the DJPC office.

"Golden police inappropriately conducted this investigation as though evidence of political views and political association itself were evidence of crime," Silverstein said. "They contacted and questioned 100 individuals solely on the basis of their political opinions, associations, and
activities. Such an investigative tactic is not only calculated to intimidate and to chill the exercise of First Amendment rights, it is bad police work. Golden police did not obtain one useful piece of information in any of the one hundred interviews they conducted with individuals whose names they obtained illegally from the search of the DJPC office."

The lawsuit also alleges a Denver police officer engaged in racial profiling by singling out Luis Espinosa-Organista, DJPC's Hispanic office manager, for a pat-down search without cause. No one else on the scene was subjected to a frisk.

The lawsuit was filed in federal district court in Denver. In addition to the City of Golden and the City and County of Denver, defendants include Golden police officers Jeff Kreutzer, Kirsten J. Puttkammer, John Evans, and Becky J. Ryder; Denver police officer David Pontarelli; Jefferson County District Attorney David J. Thomas, as well as an unnamed employee in the Jefferson County District Attorney's Office and an as-yet-unknown Denver police officer.

Now back to these provocatuers.  Months later, an email was sent around that revealed that Stan and Delilah had been to several cities in the west of the country.  In each of these cities the DAN chapter was torn asunder due to their interactions with the members. 

Stan and Delilah had felony convictions against them.  Several of the orginal members of the Denver Justice and Peace Committee that have talked with Truth Alliance hypothesized that being disruptive to the anti-globalization groups was a way for them to avoid jail and to be able to stay with their daughter.  Who knows?   It is interesting that they were such emotionally conflicted people, yet plenty smart enough to know how to manipulate others--especially angry, emotionally conflicted young people who had a need to do battle with authority figures (especially the police).  The police often became the focus for a lot of rebellion and hatred.  The issues seemed to take a back seat.

Never have Mark or Barb Cohen uttered a word that they might have been wrong about this association with Stan and Delilah.  The rhetoric heard from the Recreate 68 people,  the attraction of the young people to the charisma of Glen Spagnuolo, the focus on doing battle with the police and the confronting attitude--while losing sight of the issues, the revolutionary fervor, the attitude that groups like Code Pink, etc. just aren't radical enough,  the peer pressure to be more radical, the disinclination to disavow violence with the pretext that they want to be "inclusive," --all this is deja vu.  It happened in 2000 with DAN. It is happening again stroke for stroke, word for word. 

Only this time, because of the scale of the DNC protests,  there is the potential for massive chaos, massive arrests, detentions, serious injuries of idealistic but naive young people, and loss of legitimate messages from all groups.   

By the way, this is completely different from the organizational attitude of the WTO protests in Seattle.  At this protest, there was a well-organized effort to keep the civil disobedience very peaceful. For example, there was a provocateur at one intersection that a Denver citizen who attended was helping to block; this provocateur was inciting people to throw rocks at the police, but all recognized him as a provocateur and ignored him with a chant of  "Be Nice!  The organizational planning for this event was phenomenal.  As members of the WTO tried to get into the meetings and citizens blocked them, it was a gentle blocking with respectful conversations with these people to educate them about the WTO.  They were sometimes frustrated, sometimes interested,  but they were not afraid of the blockers--and these blockers felt no hatred for them; in fact, many of them felt a compassion for them and sometimes had very good connections with them.

Then when the police started spraying tear gas  directly in the eyes of those doing the civil disobedience, there was a contingent of young folks who went nuts.  They were obviously ready for this.  Then the breaking of windows and the confrontation with the police is what the nation saw on TV, not the days of creativity and peaceful protest, nor the message for which both big labor and P and J groups had historically joined.

By the way, what happened to the huge and very successful anti-globalization movement?  September 11, 2001.

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