AR-News: (US) Quarantining Dissent

[Camille]

Quarantining dissent
How the Secret Service protects Bush from free speech

James Bovard         Sunday, January 4, 2004

When President Bush travels around the United States, the Secret Service 
visits the location ahead of time and orders local police to set up 
"free speech zones" or "protest zones," where people opposed to Bush 
policies (and sometimes sign-carrying supporters) are quarantined. These 
zones routinely succeed in keeping protesters out of presidential sight 
and outside the view of media covering the event.

When Bush went to the Pittsburgh area on Labor Day 2002, 65-year-old 
retired steel worker Bill Neel was there to greet him with a sign 
proclaiming, "The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so 
many of us."

The local police, at the Secret Service's behest, set up a "designated 
free-speech zone" on a baseball field surrounded by a chain-link fence a 
third of a mile from the location of Bush's speech.

The police cleared the path of the motorcade of all critical signs, but 
folks with pro-Bush signs were permitted to line the president's path. 
Neel refused to go to the designated area and was arrested for 
disorderly conduct; the police also confiscated his sign.

Neel later commented, "As far as I'm concerned, the whole country is a 
free-speech zone. If the Bush administration has its way, anyone who 
criticizes them will be out of sight and out of mind."

At Neel's trial, police Detective John Ianachione testified that the 
Secret Service told local police to confine "people that were there 
making a statement pretty much against the president and his views" in a 
so-called free- speech area.

Paul Wolf, one of the top officials in the Allegheny County Police 
Department, told Salon that the Secret Service "come in and do a site 
survey, and say, 'Here's a place where the people can be, and we'd like 
to have any protesters put in a place that is able to be secured.' "

Pennsylvania District Judge Shirley Rowe Trkula threw out the disorderly 
conduct charge against Neel, declaring, "I believe this is America. 
Whatever happened to 'I don't agree with you, but I'll defend to the 
death your right to say it'?"

Similar suppressions have occurred during Bush visits to Florida. A 
recent St. Petersburg Times editorial noted, "At a Bush rally at Legends 
Field in 2001, three demonstrators -- two of whom were grandmothers -- 
were arrested for holding up small handwritten protest signs outside the 
designated zone. And last year, seven protesters were arrested when Bush 
came to a rally at the USF Sun Dome. They had refused to be cordoned off 
into a protest zone hundreds of yards from the entrance to the Dome."

One of the arrested protesters was a 62-year-old man holding up a sign, 
"War is good business. Invest your sons." The seven were charged with 
trespassing, "obstructing without violence and disorderly conduct."

Police have repressed protesters during several Bush visits to the St. 
Louis area as well. When Bush visited on Jan. 22, 150 people carrying 
signs were shunted far away from the main action and effectively 
quarantined.

Denise Lieberman of the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern 
Missouri commented, "No one could see them from the street. In addition, 
the media were not allowed to talk to them. The police would not allow 
any media inside the protest area and wouldn't allow any of the 
protesters out of the protest zone to talk to the media."

When Bush stopped by a Boeing plant to talk to workers, Christine Mains 
and her 5-year-old daughter disobeyed orders to move to a small protest 
area far from the action. Police arrested Mains and took her and her 
crying daughter away in separate squad cars.

The Justice Department is now prosecuting Brett Bursey, who was arrested 
for holding a "No War for Oil" sign at a Bush visit to Columbia, S.C. 
Local police, acting under Secret Service orders, established a 
"free-speech zone" half a mile from where Bush would speak. Bursey was 
standing amid hundreds of people carrying signs praising the president. 
Police told Bursey to remove himself to the "free-speech zone."

Bursey refused and was arrested. Bursey said that he asked the police 
officer if "it was the content of my sign, and he said, 'Yes, sir, it's 
the content of your sign that's the problem.' " Bursey stated that he 
had already moved 200 yards from where Bush was supposed to speak. 
Bursey later complained, "The problem was, the restricted area kept 
moving. It was wherever I happened to be standing."

Bursey was charged with trespassing. Five months later, the charge was 
dropped because South Carolina law prohibits arresting people for 
trespassing on public property. But the Justice Department -- in the 
person of U.S. Attorney Strom Thurmond Jr. -- quickly jumped in, 
charging Bursey with violating a rarely enforced federal law regarding 
"entering a restricted area around the president of the United States."

If convicted, Bursey faces a six-month trip up the river and a $5,000 
fine. Federal Magistrate Bristow Marchant denied Bursey's request for a 
jury trial because his violation is categorized as a petty offense. Some 
observers believe that the feds are seeking to set a precedent in a 
conservative state such as South Carolina that could then be used 
against protesters nationwide.

Bursey's trial took place on Nov. 12 and 13. His lawyers sought the 
Secret Service documents they believed would lay out the official 
policies on restricting critical speech at presidential visits. The Bush 
administration sought to block all access to the documents, but Marchant 
ruled that the lawyers could have limited access.

Bursey sought to subpoena Attorney General John Ashcroft and 
presidential adviser Karl Rove to testify. Bursey lawyer Lewis Pitts 
declared, "We intend to find out from Mr. Ashcroft why and how the 
decision to prosecute Mr. Bursey was reached." The magistrate refused, 
however, to enforce the subpoenas. Secret Service agent Holly Abel 
testified at the trial that Bursey was told to move to the "free-speech 
zone" but refused to cooperate.

The feds have offered some bizarre rationales for hog-tying protesters. 
Secret Service agent Brian Marr explained to National Public Radio, 
"These individuals may be so involved with trying to shout their support 
or nonsupport that inadvertently they may walk out into the motorcade 
route and be injured. And that is really the reason why we set these 
places up, so we can make sure that they have the right of free speech, 
but, two, we want to be sure that they are able to go home at the end of 
the evening and not be injured in any way." Except for having their 
constitutional rights shredded.

The ACLU, along with several other organizations, is suing the Secret 
Service for what it charges is a pattern and practice of suppressing 
protesters at Bush events in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Michigan, 
New Jersey, New Mexico, Texas and elsewhere. The ACLU's Witold Walczak 
said of the protesters, "The individuals we are talking about didn't 
pose a security threat; they posed a political threat."

The Secret Service is duty-bound to protect the president. But it is 
ludicrous to presume that would-be terrorists are lunkheaded enough to 
carry anti-Bush signs when carrying pro-Bush signs would give them much 
closer access. And even a policy of removing all people carrying signs 
-- as has happened in some demonstrations -- is pointless because 
potential attackers would simply avoid carrying signs. Assuming that 
terrorists are as unimaginative and predictable as the average federal 
bureaucrat is not a recipe for presidential longevity.

The Bush administration's anti-protester bias proved embarrassing for 
two American allies with long traditions of raucous free speech, 
resulting in some of the most repressive restrictions in memory in free 
countries.

When Bush visited Australia in October, Sydney Morning Herald columnist 
Mark Riley observed, "The basic right of freedom of speech will adopt a 
new interpretation during the Canberra visits this week by George Bush 
and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao. Protesters will be free to speak 
as much as they like just as long as they can't be heard."

Demonstrators were shunted to an area away from the Federal Parliament 
building and prohibited from using any public address system in the area.

For Bush's recent visit to London, the White House demanded that British 
police ban all protest marches, close down the center of the city and 
impose a "virtual three-day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil 
disruption of the visit by anti-war protesters," according to Britain's 
Evening Standard. But instead of a "free-speech zone," the Bush 
administration demanded an "exclusion zone" to protect Bush from 
protesters' messages.

Such unprecedented restrictions did not inhibit Bush from portraying 
himself as a champion of freedom during his visit. In a speech at 
Whitehall on Nov. 19, Bush hyped the "forward strategy of freedom" and 
declared, "We seek the advance of freedom and the peace that freedom 
brings."

Attempts to suppress protesters become more disturbing in light of the 
Homeland Security Department's recommendation that local police 
departments view critics of the war on terrorism as potential 
terrorists. In a May terrorist advisory, the Homeland Security 
Department warned local law enforcement agencies to keep an eye on 
anyone who "expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. 
government." If police vigorously followed this advice, millions of 
Americans could be added to the official lists of suspected terrorists.

Protesters have claimed that police have assaulted them during 
demonstrations in New York, Washington and elsewhere.

One of the most violent government responses to an antiwar protest 
occurred when local police and the federally funded California 
Anti-Terrorism Task Force fired rubber bullets and tear gas at peaceful 
protesters and innocent bystanders at the Port of Oakland, injuring a 
number of people.

When the police attack sparked a geyser of media criticism, Mike van 
Winkle, the spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information 
Center told the Oakland Tribune, "You can make an easy kind of a link 
that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause 
that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have 
terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against 
that is a terrorist act."

Van Winkle justified classifying protesters as terrorists: "I've heard 
terrorism described as anything that is violent or has an economic 
impact, and shutting down a port certainly would have some economic 
impact. Terrorism isn't just bombs going off and killing people."

Such aggressive tactics become more ominous in the light of the Bush 
administration's advocacy, in its Patriot II draft legislation, of 
nullifying all judicial consent decrees restricting state and local 
police from spying on those groups who may oppose government policies.

On May 30, 2002, Ashcroft effectively abolished restrictions on FBI 
surveillance of Americans' everyday lives first imposed in 1976. One FBI 
internal newsletter encouraged FBI agents to conduct more interviews 
with antiwar activists "for plenty of reasons, chief of which it will 
enhance the paranoia endemic in such circles and will further service to 
get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."

The FBI took a shotgun approach toward protesters partly because of the 
FBI's "belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented 
because they were incipient steps toward the possible ultimate 
commission of act which might be criminal," according to a Senate report.

On Nov. 23 news broke that the FBI is actively conducting surveillance 
of antiwar demonstrators, supposedly to "blunt potential violence by 
extremist elements," according to a Reuters interview with a federal law 
enforcement official.

Given the FBI's expansive definition of "potential violence" in the 
past, this is a net that could catch almost any group or individual who 
falls into official disfavor.

James Bovard is the author of "Terrorism & Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, 
Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil." This article is adapted 
from one that appeared in the Dec. 15 issue of the American Conservative.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/04/INGPQ40MB81.DTL