He still sounds incredulous as he recalls it. "He's a 71-year-old man and I'm wearing my orange vest and credentials. I said, 'He's a retiree and I'm trying to help him get to his bus.' We each had three or four guns on us telling us to get down, facedown in the dirt. Ben didn't get down fast enough and he got a knee in his back."

Hands cuffed behind them, they were put on a bus and left for three hours, then driven to a parking garage where FTAA prisoners were being held in wire pens. "I've worked with livestock before, and these were like stock pens," said Killmon.

In the pen with him, says Killmon, was a steelworker named Rick who had a bad shoulder, the result of an injury he'd sustained falling off a roof. "His hands being handcuffed behind his back was extremely painful," Killmon says. "He kept asking to be released so he could bring his hands around in front of him, and they would not do it. The pain got to the point that he lost control of his bowels and urinary tract."

"He'd asked at least two dozen different officers for help," says Winawer.

After another three hours, they were taken to Miami's TGK jail, where they were processed and put in holding cells. It was after 3 a.m. before either was allowed to make phone calls. Killmon says he went at least seven hours without a sip of water.

On Friday, the charges against Killmon were dropped. Winawer was charged with disobeying a police officer. They weren't released until early evening.

Both were in handcuffs for between 11 and 12 hours. Three weeks later, Winawer's hands were still bruised and partly numb. Killmon says he's fine as long as he doesn't try to lift his left arm higher than his shoulder.

"I believe in social justice issues, but I'm not a screaming radical," says Winawer. Since Miami, he says, "some people have asked, 'How do you feel about law enforcement?' I feel fine about law enforcement. What happened to us was not anything resembling law enforcement. I respect the job that police have to do, but I have no respect for the job that they did."

Both Winawer and Killmon are planning to join civil suits against the city.

"Ben and I are living proof that civil rights are being erased in this country," Winawer says, still sounding astonished.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

While Winawer and Killmon were in prison, another confrontation was unfolding outside.

Crespo, expecting it, was there with his camera. "Just like there's a morning and an afternoon, there's always a jail solidarity, so we went to the jail," he says. With him was a local public television crew who were doing a segment on him and his work.

"The protesters had gathered at the parking lot of the state attorney's office," he says, two blocks from the jail. "They're just kids. There was nothing mean-spirited about them. Their friends are locked up and they wanted to show solidarity."

There were between 150 and 200 people there, and Brenna Bell, a 28-year-old attorney from Oregon, acted as a go-between with the police. At first, she said, the commander seemed reasonable, but within 20 minutes, he told her that everyone had to disperse.

"At that time, most everyone started leaving the area," says Bell. "I stayed behind watching to make sure that everyone left OK. I never heard the police give the order to disperse that they threatened to give, but people started walking."

Yet as people left, she says, a huge line of riot police -- as many as 300 -- followed them. Then, about three blocks from the protest, seven or eight people sat down and announced they weren't going anywhere. They were arrested, and 50 or 60 people stopped to watch. Then she and others started walking east, flanked on two sides by police.

At that point, the police finally issued an order to disperse, but at the same time, they started closing in. Video from the scene shows people chanting, "We are dispersing. We are dispersing." But the police wouldn't let them. "That's when I knew it was going to be bad," says Bell. The police rushed in, shooting pepper spray and rubber bullets. "It was utter chaos," she says. She was sprayed and shot in the back of the leg, and sent off to jail. She wasn't released until 2 a.m. on Sunday.

Still, it could have been worse: "I talked to a couple of women who were strip-searched by male officers," she says. "It's such a powerless situation."

One of those women was Ana Nogueira, a producer for the radio show "Democracy Now!" Nogueira was rounded up at the same protest as Bell. Like Celeste Fraser Delgado, she kept telling the arresting officers that she was a journalist.

One cop was hesitant, she says, but then another told him, "She's not with us." He meant she wasn't embedded.

At the jail, "When I got out of the patrol wagon, I repeated that I was a journalist and that I was wrongly arrested. I asked, 'What do I do?' The officer told me to shut the fuck up."

Her clothes reeked of pepper spray, so the police made her stand under a huge cold-water outdoor shower.

Then she was taken into a tent with one female officer and one male officer. The back of the tent was open, and other male officers could see in. "They told me to take off all my clothes and put them in a trash can, and that I was not going to get them back." She asked the male officer to leave first, but all he would do was turn around. Then, when she was naked, he turned back to face her.

"Then they put me in prison garb, and that's when I was taken and processed," she says. "I was one of the lucky ones. I know other independent videographers who didn't get their cameras back."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

While stories about the FTAA protests proliferate, the Miami police are showing no signs of remorse. In their view, even peaceful protesters had it coming for cavorting with anarchists.

"Peaceful protesters in some cases made friends with the devil, knowing full well they were anarchists," says Lt. Schwartz. "If someone says, 'I came down to protest peacefully but yes, I'm aware there are anarchists in my group and I welcomed them in,' they're certainly putting themselves in an awkward position. If anarchists are starting to cause problems and throw things at cops, just because I'm a peaceful protester, but I'm standing right next to this anarchist, that I couldn't be subject to police enforcement, I think that's naive.

"You'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see what was going on in the street, the confrontation between anarchists and police," he says. "If you chose to stay in the midst of that and then felt your First Amendment right was hurt, you're not being honest with yourself."

Schwartz's comments just compound Winawer's outrage. "All his statements begin with 'if,'" he says. "And I might agree with him if those things happened. But there are no ifs here. There's reality. And the reality is that I and Ben Killmon were nowhere near any other individual, period. We were arrested for doing nothing except walking where the police told us to walk in an effort to find his bus.

"I've never been in trouble with the law before, and I have no ax to grind with the police, but this was just wrong," Winawer says. "And the bombast, it adds insult to injury. It's one thing to have done it. It's another thing to put your head in the sand and deny that it ever happened."

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