Thought I should update you all per Liz’s condition. Received this email this morning from the Phoenix CODEPINK Coordinator.
Yesterday, Liz was released from jail after 30 hours, despite the vice-chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee calling the Capitol Police several times to request her release. While she was in quite a bit of pain, she was never actually hospitalized because she wanted to stay with the other people who had been arrested. She was charged with resisting arrest although, as you can see from the videos, it would have been difficult for her to willfully resist arrest. Her glasses were broken, she has at least one black eye and cuts on her face, and she feels generally battered, but she’s well and back at the Code Pink house.
You can see a series of video clips on http://www.codepinkalert.org/codepinkarrests .
From my take on what happened, and you can see that she wasn’t doing anything and was sitting when the attack began – she was also being exceptionally quiet as as she’d been informed that if she so much as burped in the hearing that she would be arrested. The cops grabbed her from either side, were in fact, pulling her in two directions and slamming her face into the chairs in the row in front of where she was seated. This was an unprovoked attack on her that resulted in serious bodily injury. She was at no time in any condition to even attempt to resist arrest. The charge is totally bogus. Furthermore the refusal of the Capitol Hill police to release the CODEPINK five after direct instructions from the Committee heads — who are supposed to be entirely in charge of what is happening in their hearings is outrageous. None of the seated CODEPINKers showed disrespect to Congress or even the War Criminal Rice; it was the police who expressed their contempt of Congress.
A friend reports, “Captain Mark Sullivan, perhaps on a signal from the Secret Service, brutally yanked Liz out of her seat and dragged her down the row. At one point, one officer had her feet and another had her arms and they were pulling her in opposite directions, banging her face on a chair leg.”
We Arizonans need to contact Gabrielle Giffords and Jeff Flake, both members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee,non-Arizonans can contact other members of the Committee, and urge them to issue a statement of apology to the seated CODEPINKers who were brutalized by these police captains and to request formal reprimand of officers Captains Gerber and Sullivan.