Interesting, I didn't realize they set the dragon on fire. It looks rather unsafe.

They didn't reroute the march as far as I could tell from C-SPAN. It looked like they did a nice job putting the fire out and cleaned up the road and let the march go on as planned. It also looks like they took the opportunity to let a bunch of what looked like limos and police taxis cross the march route.

www.gettyimages.com

#file_1# #file_2# #file_3#

#file_4# #file_5# #file_6#

#file_7# #file_8# #file_9#

yeah i dunno. most people who are gonna set shit on fire have got the idea running around in black isnt gonna help you. feds do tend to be behind the times abit.

Ummm, fires don't happen on *accident*. They are planned (which would imply strategic thinking). So this fire was indeed planned by the cops. Just like in Miami there are indeed many undercover cops around. And FYI there are indeed USCG Helicopters overhead with snipers inside. Peace Matthew.

..

I've seen that dragon at protest in DC before. I doubt it was set on fire intentionally by its owners, its too nice for that and they put a lot of work into it. Usually, they make it "smoke" out of its nostrils, I wonder if something went wrong?

it wasnt hot enough so some jackass had to start a fire...

.#file_1# #file_2#

#file_3# #file_4#

#file_5#

watch the CSPAN footage of the float (sorry if this is posted twice)

Hold on - you notified the cops? Nice solidarity . . .

Lighting something on fire at a protest is *symbolic* violence - It doesn't even compare to the violence of the US government.

The fires eher were probably set by protesters - the fires in Miami wern't set by "agents", they we set by angry activists.

Don't tell the cops on fellow protesters!

PS - I can't wait till Kerry wins and the liberal are back on the other side of the line where they belong. Then we'll see who REALLY is willing to fight for causes and not just use them as a front for candidates.

undercovers lit it up after filtering in with a group of anarchists.
blaming anarchists for this is just playing up to cointelpro.

How do we know Judith is not under cover?

Actually, I'm not a cop, rather a social worker and teacher . Yes I alerted a cop because I was concerned for the safety of the protesters including myself and my family. Solidarity? What about the cowards who hid their faces and lit a fire in the midst of a peaceful, yet crowded protest?

What cowards? You mean the plainclothes cops who did it?

Of course they LOOKED like anarchists. They dressed the part and apparently, fooled plenty of people, even the other anarchists there.

hey you know what really plays into it?

Getting wrapped up in an unsolveable argument with anonymous strangers, and spiriling into minutiae while spending our energies giving each other suspicious looks and willingly jumping into it's-a-conspiracy/there-is-no-conspiracy roles.

I'm a social worker, i'm a teacher, i'm an anarchist, i'm the director of the CI flipping A, you don't know and i can't prove it but i'll say it real sincere and sensible-like.

You won't know until you get back out there and see for yourself. And geez, it should take a lot more than one burning dragon to derail us all so easily, shouldn't it? Yes, some of us posting here are liars, plain and simple.

So what?

There's work to be done. Ignore them and counter verified lies with verified facts. Beyond that, let them be irrelevant. They only have power if you give it to them.

Newsday is reporting that this was an accident set off by a smoke bomb. Didn't even appear on the evening news on public access stations.

Hold on - you notified the cops? Nice solidarity . . .

I was marching not far behind them, and the whole march got stopped and got cut off for 45 minutes.

These guys also produced EXACTLY the media image the Republicans want -- a bunch of crazy anarchists that middle america can easily dismiss. It makes it orders of magnitude easier for the media to tell the story the republicans want.

These self-righteous pricks did major damage to the impact of the protest, in addition to breaking the whole march in half, and endangering other protesters.

I would have told the cops on them in a second if I had seen them doing that shit.

Here's what an actual, effective protest image looks like:
 http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/040829/480/nycz12408292235&e=18&ncid=

Join Fuck Puff The Dragon campaign, for people who don´t give a shit what happened to the dragon, and are quite glad it self-immolated.

I was there with several other people watching the whole thing happen birds eye view from the second floor of the pizza place next door. Before we entered the pizza place, a friend in our group overheard a cop ask another cop "Are you going to wear your gas mask now?"

While we were eating the dragon caught everybody's attention and so we looked out the window. And then we saw what looked like more than 20 people dressed in black, with masked faces and carrying black and red umbrellas. They were an unusually large group for how a Black Bloc usually works.

We noticed the group huddling together and one of them rushed over to the dragon and threw something in that obviously lit the thing. It went ablaze very quickly, it had to have been a gasoline fire. Even the glass window of the pizza place was getting hot.

The cops didn't seem to do what they otherwise do to "ensure that protestors don't get out of hand." There were no arrests, or even serious chases or attempts to catch these people as far as we observed.

And the most intersting part is that this happened right next to madison square garden, right in front of the big ass Fox News sign, right in the center of all the corporate news videocameras.

I don't believe "those young kids" that we call anarchists would willfully set fire on a "Register to Vote" float carried by fellow protestors.

2 words: PROVOCATEUR and COINTELPRO.

If you were on the streets today in solidarity with each other, don't allow them to pit us against each other so easily. "Those young kids," and "stupid anarchists" is exactly what the Fox News version will be. Atleast let it not be our story...

I was not there, just to be up front about it, believe what you will, but I spoke over the phone with a friend who was there. One of my other friends is in a picture being arrested.

For the record, the ones arrested were not the ones who set the puppet on fire, but they had been standing nearby when it happened.

As my friend explained, no one there knew them and suspected they were undercover officers with some kind of color-coded wrist band police use to identify their own so they won't arrest them.

More generally, I don't think anarchists would set fire to someone's puppet: police are the ones with puppetphobia. Remember the Haverford Puppet Space in Philly at the RNC in 2000? Police raided it and trashed all the artwork, arresting everyone inside. It's like police are set off by the smell of wood glue or something.

No, this seems to suit them too well. For weeks now, police have been howling about the "anarchist mayhem" set to come and now, faced with hundreds of thousands of people who ignored their fear-mongering and showed up any way, they are trying to split us and portray us as random lunatics.

Someone posted "thanks for nothing, anarchists" on one of these threads. Don't you know that feeds right into what police want us to say? How about all the lies they spread about threats to the DNC, none of which materialized?

I don't want to hear anymore lies. I want facts. Believe what you want, but don't play into the psychological warfare of the police.

Too bad you didn't have a camera from your overhead view. That's what's convinced people in the past. When you can show the pictures of the people in black starting behind police lines, being let through the barricades by police, doing their provacatuer bit, then being let back through the police lines, then finally standing around talking with the cops still dressed in black.

Very interesting that none of the people who did this got arrested. Given that the cops are obviously jumping all over anyone who looks like a protester who illegally even spits on the sidewalk, and given that normally the cops target and follow and film everything done by any protestor wearing black, and especially since this happened right where the police concentration had to be highest right next to the convention center, it seems rather amazing that the cops didn't arrest any of the group who did this, and didn't even make much of an effort.

One of those "what's wrong with this picture" moments when compared to what's going on in the rest of NYC today.

there's no way they would burn such a precious puppet that took so much work and was transported all the way from dc. and anarchists burning puppets? please, what about smashing corporate targets?

the police have to have video of what happened for sure, is police video public record? can we get access to it? maybe it'll have the scenes you're talking about of the people doing it being let through or let away.

and the people who were running that puppet were not dressed in black at all. why would someone else burn their puppet?

Not to beat a dead horse, but those of you who actually witnessed the events leading up to the fire, and the fire itself, please contact the National Lawyers' Guild at 212-679-6018, or feel free to email me directly.

regardless, i think the fire is a nice accoutrement to a day of 200 arrests.
stop bickering about who set it and go do some friggin jail support.
ill be there super early in the morning.

What is with the "Photo: Dragon Burning..." up the newswire?
When accessed it says, "Article deleted with code: Other."

What does that mean? Why was it deleted?

Okay, period person ( . ) --

You spoke to someone in the "black block?"

Where? At their secret Headquarters?
Did you talk to their "leader?" I hear it's Eric Laursen this week, or maybe Jaggi Singh, Starhawk, or some guy from the 1970's, depending on what the tabloids say. Give it up.

There is a picture of someone wearing a green plastic wrist bracelet in another picture, the same ones undercover cops were wearing today. That's no coincidence. Maybe you talked to him.

for those who attacked whoever may have 'alerted' the police to the fire:

what does it matter who set the fire in the first place? it's still a f'ing big blaze in the middle of an f'ing big crowd. the cops would have responded whether or not cov-op pigs set it up- and the media would have responded likewise.

"i spoke with someone from black block. they set it on fire. not the police. they set it on fire on purpose and ran like hell. "

by far the funniest shit ive read. now i really do hate when people call other people rats online, but this come on. "black bloc" who the hell even says that anymore. whats more is who the hell even does that anymore.

I'm italian.
The black bloc which made thr mess in Genoa 2001 were from Police. There are dozens of photos where you can see them going in and out from police stations.
This is done to spoil the march in front of the public opinion: don't believe in such BS.

The page that was deleted, "Photo: Dragon Burning..." was originally posted by Eric Wagner of San Francisco. I don't know why it was taken down, but you can see his burning dragon photos on his RNC protest webpage here: ny-says-no-to-bush or find out more about him on his homepage: liberal bias

I was standing abou 20 feet from the dragon when it initially burst into flames. The guys that were around the dragon started putting bandanas over their faces. I remember thinking to myself, "What's going on? Uh oh, something is about to go down."

Then the guys with the bandanas started running in all directions from the dragon and it went up in flames.

The cops initially didn't know what to do, but as the heat from the flames increased an officer opened up a barracade and let us empty onto the sidewalk.

I was there, it was not cops or republicans (as many of the dems marching were saying it was). The cops did use gas cannisters, I don't know what kind, but there were two of them.....they fired them at the media though, and I didn't see any protesters near where they landed. A few soda cans were thrown at the cops, but nothing big. I was shoved by a female officer, and was hit by a flying camerawoman (she was literally in the air after being nailed by a cop).

I know the people who built the dragon, coordinated that piece of the march, etc. I was actually just in front of the dragon, up until what must've been just minutes before it went up (I heard about it by phone, a half hour later). Just to dispel a few things:

1) It was most certainly NOT a "register to vote" dragon. It was part of the Don't Just Vote campaign. BIG difference.

2) There was no "black bloc" that I saw in that section of the march, ever. So, anyone who says that the black bloc lit this thing up is talking out of their ass. Period.

3) People most certainly were arrested. From what I can tell, not the people who set the fire.

4) While I don't have any knowledge of green wristbands or other such things, after talking with people directly involved with the dragon, my sense is that it was deliberately lit up by activists - not cops. When I asked one centrally involved dragon-folk face to face last night, he said "It was someone's action". As in, there were people in the dragon contingent who knew this was going to go down.

5) You don't have to be a cop to do a cop's work.

6) There was at least one person still holding up their part of the dragon when it went up, and who bailed when told that it was buring. This illustrates a variety of things, not least of which that there were definitely people close to the dragon (indeed, inside it) who had no idea this was planned.

7)From what I understand there wasn't even a space in DC to house this puppet following the march. So, the argument that people wanted to hold onto this thing is kinda moot.

8) What is instructive about this is really not how the media is going to spin this. From what I can tell, it hasn't created all that much of a scandal, and the media isn't really running with it. What is worth discussing is what this action says about commitment to directly democratic organizing models, and respect for the people you organize with. There were literally people within the physical proximity of this puppet, who were not aware that they might be put in danger. No matter how you slice it, that's just unacceptable. Furthermore, there were probably a few hundred to (possibly) a thousand people marching in that particular section of the march -- all with Don't Just Vote banners, etc. Had the cops decided this was their cue to take the gloves off, it would've made anyone loosely associated with the campaign a target for police violence, etc. It's worth noting that, if this were in fact a police action -- it's curious that their arrests were so untargetted. As the evening wore on, I personally saw a number of (as police would have it) "high profile" DC anarchists milling about the lower east side, etc. If this was a police action, aimed at targetting "high profile anarchist leaders" or whatever, it failed miserably.

Bottom line -- this was likely a planned action, on the part of activists who felt little obligation to solicit the consent of the people around them, despite the seriousness of the act. It doesn't strike me as particularly anarchist, in that light. It strikes me as rather Rambo-esque, actually. The image of flames waving about in front of Madison Square Garden as probably half a million people swarmed past it is, no question, a powerful image. It definitely had the potential to send the message that the bets are off, etc. However, that doesn't absolve those involved of the responsibility to take into consideration the safety and desires of the people they were (in many cases) working very closely with.

If this action draws out anything, it's the need for re-examining our organizing ethics, and our priorities. For all intents and purposes, this action could've just as easily been inspired by Nike or something. And "Just Do it" does not exactly sum up the world I want to live in.

I was right behind the back right of the dragon when it started burning, and as I was walking by it to get past before it really starting getting going, a pool of gas to its right ignited, close enough that we could feel its heat as it ignited. If it was cops that did it, it was fucking stupid, as the gas was really from having poured under people's feet before it ignited.

That should have ended saying that the gas was very nearly made it under people's feet before it flashed.

maybe it was an undercover pig supposedly with the dragon dont just vote folks. cointelpro? who knows, and maybe we wont ever know. i guess the folks involved can think about it and figure out for themselves if they have an agent in their midst. the important thing to realize is that provacatuers do exist, fake black bloc do exist, and although we shouldnt get too paranoid, we cant jump to conclusions that it was genuine protesters who did it.

>

Not true at all. The dragon was to be stored for future actions. Adam E is running for Office in DC, he would never put the money into building a puppet to destroy it after one use. ( http://www.adam4shadow.com/)

We had big plans for that dragon and instead someone nearly killed those of us in the dragon and our friends. Stop making assumptions about things you don't know about.

continue radical action against neo-conservatism(see fascism), capitalism, imperialism and racism!!! From Quebec, we support you during the convention!!!

See how they run like pigs from a gun...

It is my understanding that the police set the dragon on fire...

whoever it was, it should not be blamed on anarchists. anarchists wouldnt do something so stupid. no matter who did it, it was blamed on anarchists and made anarchists look bad.

this was a planned action by protestors
the cops, the feds, the govt, the corporations are exponentially & prejudicially more violent on a daily basis than any mainstream media-played up action has ever been
the more divisive we are toward each other, the less we get done
the more you settled for what is, the more powerful the "what is" becomes...reducing your accessibility to bringing the increasingly fascist, oppressive beast down

jeez louise,
i sure hope someone does solve this incredible caper!! i mean a puppet was set on fire!! this is serious business here. people's lives were at stake...oh, nevermind, it's just a stupid fucking puppet and a bunch of whiny liberals.
really do y'all care this much? why does there need to be a conspiracy surrounding the soon to be legendary 'puppet fire of rnc 2004'. i know, i know, it stopped the march that could've saved the world...oops.
but if y'all are talking about ratting on anarchists, torching your puppet is the least we could do...
unleash the evidence, stop the presses, oh, and does someone mind telling the iraqis that there's some serious repression going on in nyc! i mean, burning puppets...my how the stakes have raised. we're half why to the my lai of sesame street.

seriously, if you're going to create a cause, at least make it an interesting one!

Sure, burning puppets are trivial; we know that. What isn't trivial is the war on Iraq and the fact that the government would infiltrate any counter-movement. The puppet is just fall-out...focus on the real problem and that includes cops who post as well. You never know.

People(liberals) that think that puppets change something are fucking stupid. I wish the black bloc from wto99 would be in nyc, because now the black bloc looks so liberal that it makes me sick.

Article on the Dragon Fire debate, quoting from the IndyMedia Debate:

Black Bloc or Provocateurs?
 http://www.shobak.org/new_comments.php?id=190_0_26_0_C

Feel free to post comments under that article as well.

anyone that believes that another globalist pig (kerry) will change any of the problems with the federal government has another thing coming.

We had big plans for that dragon and instead someone nearly killed those of us in the dragon and our friends. Not to mention some masked comrade decided to go insane when he/she saw me (also wearing a mask) trying to take a photo of Madison Square Garden and runs over and starts shoving me and screaming "STOP MOTHERFUCKING TAKING FUCKING PICTURES!" and eventually punching me, a fellow comrade in the mouth with NO provacation.

One officer last night was assaulted as the NYPD
attempted to break up one anti-RNC rally.
I predict the NYPD is very angry about this, and
there is a good possibility that they will mete
out brute extrajudicial force on thousands of anti-RNC protestors to make their point known.

Who would gain more from burning puppets. facist police or freedomfighting bb's..
You shuld worry more about comments like :
"I can't wait till Kerry wins and the liberal are back on the other side of the line where they belong. Then we'll see who REALLY is willing to fight for causes and not just use them as a front for candidates."
Some people just dont get it..
greetings from denmark..
Keep resisting..

Here's what an actual, effective protest looks like:

 http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no9/we_are_winning.jpg

Who cares about the dragon! It was probably a bitch to transport anyway.

Nobody got hurt?

Good - keep up the good work.

Peace,

Libby

What a dreadful shame. But the protest dragon will live on in our hearts!

burn mother f**er burn....
at least i didnt see caleb in these pictures getting arrested.

thank god!!! wait did he say god??? yes lefties love him also...

I was very close to the dragon. There was no "black bloc", but definitely many anarchists. Some people masked up shortly before stopping the dragon in front of MSG. Wether it was anarchists or cops we'll never know. But the fire was no accident. We all masked and split because we knew we were in some kind of "crime scene". A lot of people around me masked-up only AFTER they saw the thing on fire to protect their own identity and to not isolate others that wanted to do so as well. But we did not start running until cops came running towards our general area. I did not see who torched the dragon. None of the people I was with knew anything about plans to burn the dragon in front of MSG. that's my story...

I "heard" "news" say anarchists set the fire... I also "heard" the anarchists were wearing "color wristbands" and "nikes"... I "heard" that "under covers" were wearing "color wristbands"... I also "heard" that no self respecting anarchist would wear establishment "nikes"...

the pengiun did it.... thats right the evil doer known from batman comics emerged from the sewer with one of his gadget umbrellas.... with the sound of wa wa wa wa and a pufff of his cigarette he shot flames from the umbrella igniting the dragon... his goal was to draw suspected anarchists into a conflict with gotham city paramiltary vigilante batman... who by the way may wear a mask sop long as he is only with robin or 1 other superhero so batman robin legal batman robin green latern noooo mask law takes effect.... later in the day batman was severely beaten by a group of protesters when he confronted them ,.... there only comment .... it was the penguin dumbass.... so kids shut the fuck up because it was the penguin dumbasses

hey I really am interested in the photos what was this rally about? Did the fire department come when there was a fire?
write back
g2g
your friend Allison

I honestly don't know if this was cops, or anarchists, whatever... But I don't think anarchists are going to achieve our goals without violence such as this. Just waving signs around is not going to cut it. The revolution is bound to happen; we are engaged in a class war, and conflict is inevitable in such a war. Do you think the rich, conservative Republicans are just going to GIVE up their power? Do you think voting Kerry in will achieve shit? It won't. Stop voting, it only encourages them. Next time you are at a riot and cops try to arrest you or beat you, beat back. Organize a black bloc, and don't take the abuse pigs will gladly lay down.