5 Days In Seattle that Shook The World

At that point we realized there were some puppeteers feeding misinformation at very high levels to the Seattle Police. I think it was probably the feds. We realized we better get to know the Seattle officers. We challenged them to bowling, said, Hey, let’s get to know one another before this all goes down. They refused our olive branch.

Their response was up to them. We try to be as public and open and honest about what we do as possible. We’re not conspirators. Sure, secrecy is important. But at the end of the day we wanted them to know we were people of conscience who didn’t deserve the kind of beating we got on November 30 and December 1.

Han Shan, our operations director, and I did have dinner with Jim Pugel and a lieutenant in Chinatown two or three days before it started. As Han and I were talking with them we started kicking ourselves under the table, because it became clear they had no idea about the number of people that would be there, the scale of the thing. It was hard for us to wrap our heads around the scale until we really saw it.

So we didn’t share everything we knew. We thought it was best to preserve the element of surprise it became clear we had.

LAURIE BROWN

Mayor’s Office

The week before the meeting, Paul had a famous press conference where he said, “I want everyone to be heard and no one to be hurt.” Han Shan from Ruckus came in, and Mike Dolan from the Direct Action Network. If you played those videotapes, you’d see—they said, “We are going to shut this down. The meetings are not going to happen.” It was like this bizarre polite society where no one paid attention. A whole array of people talked about how this thing was going to go—some city councilmembers, local business leaders, the host committee. Because I’d been at so many bargaining tables, I thought uh-oh, this is the kind of thing that happens in negotiations where people aren’t listening to each other because they don’t want to recognize that they have a conflict. And months later all hell breaks loose because they disagree about a contract interpretation.

SHERIFF DAVE REICHERT

King County

Earlier in the week, the mayor said, “Come on down to Seattle and watch people express their right to free speech, it will be peaceful.” I got on the same radio station and said, Please don’t come down, this is going to be nasty. Part of the problem was the sheriff’s office was able to gather some intelligence data the Seattle Police Department wasn’t because of their ordinance restricting what they could collect. There was a lack of sharing information in the beginning.

KATHY SCHWARTZ

Convention and Visitors Bureau

I think the WTO meeting would have failed even without the riots. The chemistry didn’t work from the beginning. Typically out-of-towners and locals become friendly collaborators with a common purpose. I learned later that our initial State Department contact held a grudge against Seattle going back to APEC; he thought it had not lived up to its commitments and had left the U.S. government on the hook. Later, State’s conference planner proved to be a difficult person—contentious and dismissive and frequently just plain rude.

State and the WTO had their own problems working together. To register, delegates sent their credentials and photos to Geneva months in advance. A WTO gatekeeper named Mario certified the applications, which were then bundled and mailed to State in Washington, DC, which in turn mailed them to a company in Phoenix hired to produce the necessary photo-ID badges. Delegates would pick them up in Seattle.

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Published: November 2009