Eye Witnesses Name Provocateurs Who Torched Cop Cars and Threw Molotov Cocktails

District War Chief Jason Augustine faces down the barrels of 20 pistols.

Miles Howe, who has been camping at the current blockade along highway 134 since the inception of the encampment and filing almost daily reports for the Media Coop since June. Today he published his eye witness account of yesterday's confrontation that has spawned protests that are again today sweeping Canada following Thursday's assault by paramilitary-style police on members of indigenous Elsipogtog Mi’kmaq First Nation and local residents as they blockaded a New Brunswick fracking exploration site.

Miles reports that "in the pre-dawn dark, about seven molotov cocktails flew out of the woods opposite the police line stationed in the ditch, throwers unknown. Two camouflaged officers then pumped three rounds of rubber bullet shotgun blasts into the woods in response. Shortly after, three so-called warriors, who claim to have arrived two nights ago from Manitoba with a journalist in tow, ran down the road towards the far end of the police blockade and that last night no one at the blockade had ever seen these individuals before.

This all occurred long before images of bandana-ed Indigenous people, whose veracity as true grassroots activists and not provocateurs is now being closely examined, ever set fire to a single RCMP squad car in Rexton. As the video below just released by members of the Elsipogtog Mi’kmaq First Nation makes clear they already know who the 'snake' provocateurs are - two of them have been identified as Harrisen Freison and 'Eagle Claw'. So these two, who ran back behind police lines after the incident, torched the 5 the police cars, and threw the Molotov Cocktails.

These two undercover cops in New Brunswick followed a long tradition of dirty cop tricks. In a recent example, according to a report issued by the commission for public complaints against the RCMP, at the 2010 G20 summit held in Toronto, at least two plainclothes police officers posing as protesters were among those arrested, suggesting that the tactic has been employed on more than one occasion in Canada. The warrior in the video names a few others that are closer to his home.

It's impossible to understand why protests are sweeping Canada and parts of the US today from mainstream media reports about Thursday's assault by police [but they sure love the burning cop car footage]. As Miles says, the blockade and the much larger issues of fracking and aboriginal title have been ongoing for awhile. The Elsipogtog Mi’kmaq First Nation has many allies on both fronts. The police know this, but they are tasked with enforcing the rulings and ravings of corporate courts. So the New Brunswick RCMP awkwardly opted for the old provocateur gambit and, as often happens, got caught.

Un-co-incidentally IMO, lost in all this flaming footage is the story of growing widespread resistance to fracking.