Beyond the Protest Cage: Blanking Out Dissent

[Guest guest]

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff09152004.html

 

September 15, 2004

Beyond the Protest Cage

Blanking Out Dissent

 

By DAVID LINDORFF

 

As the president races around the country, furiously pushing the twin

lies that things are getting better in Iraq and that the economy is on

the upswing, and ducking the reports that he hid from the draft in a

National Guard unit and then went AWOL from even that cushy post, a

huge, coordinated effort, largely unreported, is underway to insulate

him and the media from any signs of dissent.

 

The latest evidence of this shameless and brazen trampling of the

First Amendment to the Constitution is found in a lawsuit filed

yesterday by the ACLU against the White House and the Secret Service

on behalf of two West Virginia Republicans, Jeff Rank, 29, and Nicole,

30, who were arrested on July 4 at a Charleston, West Virginia, rally

for President Bush, because they refused to remove two home-made

T-shirts sporting the circle-and-slash " no " symbol superimposed over

the word " Bush. "

 

According to the suit, filed by the ACLU in federal court, even though

the Ranks had tickets to the event, which was held on the grounds of

the state capital, and were not being disruptive, city police arrested

and handcuffed them, charging them with trespassing, and held them for

several hours, on instructions of the Secret Service, the federal

police agency that is tasked with " protecting " the president.

 

Nicole, who works for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a

notorious nest of right-wing loonies, was also temporarily suspended

from her job following the arrests.

 

The charges were later thrown out, and the city council apologized to

the Ranks for the incident, saying local police would never have

bothered them had they not been ordered to act by the Secret Service.

(Bush and the White House had no apologies to offer.)

 

As outrageous as this incident is, it is hardly isolated or unique.

Back last year, I wrote an article in Salon Magazine, Keeping Dissent

Invisible (Oct. 16, 2003), which documented how the removal of all

signs of dissent from Bush and Cheney public events has been standard

operating procedure, with instructions coming from the Secret Service

and White House advance teams. Paul Wolf, a deputy police chief from

Pittsburgh, PA, where police were instructed to fence off protesters

in a remote baseball field during a 2002 visit there by President

Bush, stated on the record that his department had been told what to

do by Secret Service and White House staff. Around the country,

protesters who have been similarly removed from presidential parade

routes or rally sites, or arrested by police for simply carrying

protest signs, have reported being told that it was " on instructions

from the Secret Service. "

 

Americans need to become aware how deeply antagonistic towards, and

dangerous for American civil liberties like the right of free speech

and assembly this current administration is.

 

Our corporate media, whose highly paid and well-groomed reporters

prefer to travel with the presidential motorcade and to broadcast

promotional soundbites from the president, don't even see, much less

bother to track down and interview the many people who have the

courage and principle to come and try to protest. As a result, the

average American doesn't even know that there is a vast sea of

opposition to this president and his policies.

 

Protests, as we saw in the coverage of the Republican National

Convention, basically get reported on in the mass media only when

there is violence or arrests.

 

It is significant that the ACLU's case brought on behalf of the Ranks,

though announced in a press release that went out to all major media,

was not even reported today in the New York Times, supposedly the

nation's paper of record, which instead devoted most of its campaign

ink to covering Bush's self-aggrandizing speech to a convention of the

National Guard and to questions being raised about CBS's story

exposing the sordid story of his Guard " service. "

 

John Kerry reportedly had his campaign hire a Decatur, Alabama woman

who was fired from her private sector job because her boss didn't like

her having a " Kerry for President " bumper sticker on her car. Maybe he

should start hiring all the people who are being rounded up, herded

into " free speech pens " or arrested at Bush/Cheney campaign events.

Besides giving him a lot of local on-the-ground support across the

country, it would do wonders for his own tarnished image on civil

liberties (Kerry has had precious little to say about the USA PATRIOT

Act, for which he himself voted, and its trampling of the Bill of

Rights), and would go a long way towards making up for his failure to

condemn the use of a " protest cage " by Boston Police during his own

nominating convention.

 

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the

Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch

columns titled " This Can't be Happening! " is published by Common

Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff

can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.

 

He can be reached at: dlindorff