NATO Game Over protest in Brussels

Laura is from Finland and has lived in the house with me for a week when she decided to hitch to Belgium for an anti-NATO protest and I joined her. The trip north went well, except for an unplanned 14 hour layover somewhere between Lyon and Dijon. We arrived at the action center in Brussels mid action, people were already going over the fence and at least 50 had been arrested. I thought it would be a bad idea to get arrested since I had some questions about my ambiguous legal status here in Europe. So I didn't rush in all gun-ho. I deciding instead to join a walk to NATO headquarters through some farms. It was as peaceful as 60 completly nonviolent poets and artists walking through a farm could be, but that did not stop a couple of paddy wagons full of police from chasing us down and at least a dozen cops of horses herding us away from the NATO compound. Here in the picture, two cops had Laura and I zip cuffed and were walking us back to there vehicles. Due, I think, to a 'lack of interconnectivity of police intelligence', the horse cops were pushing the rest of the protesters where we were being led. When I had a chance, I broke away from the cops and ran into the crowd. Some media people started interviewing Laura and there were lots of ridiculous pictures taken of us getting arrested on a farm, with nothing but grass and grass. These showed up all over northern European and especially Scandinavian newspapers, as a bit of a joke. I think the mustached reflective sunglasses wearing leader of the Anti-Farmwalk-NATO-Protest police didn't want all of this media attention, so the two cops who had cuffed us sort of slowly wandered away from Laura. We didn't have a problem getting the zip cuffs off. All the pieces in the mainstream media about the NATO Game Over protest talked about the excessive police violence toward the protesters that tried to enter the NATO compound over the fence (50 succeeded!) and the comically exaggerated police presence confronting us in the fields barely within eyesight of NATO headquarters. There were maybe 30 cops on foot, most in riot gear, at least 12 cops on horses, a helicopter over our heads, and more police cars that couldn't drive through all themud circling around the farms. There was not a lot of newsworthy stuff happening the day of and the day after the protest, so in terms of the media attention attracted it was a huge success. It was a bit discouraging that almost every report underestimated the number of people attending the action, the number of people arrested, and that a NATO press release claiming that nobody entered the NATO compound was included in most of the news pieces. I have not attended very many protests, but I think this sort of thing happens a lot. There were lots of good people there, and a two day antiwar conference in the days following. Laura and I were planning to hitch right back to Barcelona, but were convinced instead to stay with some new friends in Gent. More on that later.