In many places across George Bush's America, you may
be losing your ability to exercise your lawful First Amendment rights of
speech and assembly. Increasingly, some police departments, the FBI,
and the Secret Service are engaging in the criminalization--or, at the
very least, the marginalization--of dissent.
"We have not seen such a crackdown on First Amendment activities since the Vietnam War," says Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
This crackdown took a violent turn in late November at
the Miami protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas and at
an anti-war protest at the Port of Oakland last April. In both cases,
the police used astonishing force to break up protests. But even when
the police do not engage in violence, they sometimes blatantly interfere
with the right to dissent by preemptively arresting people on specious
grounds.
Sarah Bantz is a member of the Missouri Resistance
Against Genetic Engineering. Last May, she and several hundred others
were gathering in St. Louis to protest against Monsanto and the World
Agricultural Forum, which was meeting there.
On May 16, the first day of the protest weekend, Bantz
and a small group of other activists went to the Regional Chamber and
Growth Association to give their pitch on how biotech was hurting local
farmers. After that meeting, she and her fellow activists piled into her
van, but they were able to get only about a mile down the road when
something unusual happened.
"All of a sudden there was one police car and then
another, and I was pulled over," she recalls. "One officer came around
and asked me to get out of the vehicle, which I did. The cop started to
look through the van without permission. I had some Vitamin C pills
sitting out, so they decided that was a drug and they were going to
arrest me. They put me in cuffs and put me in the back
of the car. They really had no grounds for arresting me, but I spent
ten hours in jail." One reason they cited, along with the vitamins, was
her failure to wear a seatbelt.
Bantz was scheduled to deliver three speeches at what
organizers called their Biodevastation 7 Conference. "I gave none of
them," she says. "For one, I was in jail, and for another I was talking
to the police about why they detained me. And I was too frazzled to give
the third. It was all unbelievable."
That same day, the Flying Rutabaga Bicycle Circus
expected to take part in the protests. "We are a group of concerned
bicyclists, puppeteers, musicians, farmhands, clowns, cheerleaders,
activists, eaters of food, and drinkers of water," the circus says on
its web page. "We are united
in a quest to seek out food (that's our fuel) that is not tampered with
by biotechnology companies. We ride for diversity, organic farming, and
biojustice everywhere."
But they weren't allowed to ride in St. Louis.
"We set off on our bicycles for our first performance,
a small skit, to let the protesters know about our Caravan Across the
Corn Belt tour," says Erik Gillard, one of the Flying Rutabagas, who was
riding with eight others. "We were following traffic rules when a big
police paddy wagon pulled up with its light on. Gradually, more police
officers arrived, and they told us we had to leave our bicycles. We were
all arrested for operating our bicycles without a license."
There is no such offense in St. Louis, the ACLU of
Eastern Missouri says. Afterward, Police Chief Joe Mokwa said the
arresting officer was "overenthusiastic," according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
After a while, the police changed the charge to
"impeding the flow of traffic on a bicycle," Gillard says. "It was
written up for some intersection ten blocks from where we were all
picked up." He says the police detained the group for six or seven
hours. "All of our journals that contained phone directories or e-mail
lists or information about where we were going to stay were taken and
never returned," he says.
Also on the same day, the police raided the Bolozone,
an activist group home where many of the cyclists were staying.
Reminiscent of police raids in Washington, D.C., during the 2000 World
Bank-IMF protests, this one succeeded in detaining people prior to the
demonstration.
One of the residents of the Bolozone, Kelley Meister, a
political activist and artist who identifies herself as an anarchist,
was there the morning of that raid.
"I was out in the alley painting a sign," says
Meister, "and one cop car drove up and then four more. Two officers came
toward me, and I said, 'Hi, can I help you? I live here.'
"And they said, 'This building is condemned.' And they started to walk past me.
"I said, 'Do you have a warrant? I don't give you permission to enter my house.'
"The reply was, 'We don't need a warrant. This
building is condemned.' " The St. Louis housing inspector, who came with
the police, brought a condemnation notice with him, she says.
The owner of the building, Dan Green, had been working
cooperatively with the city for months while rehabbing it, according to
Denise Lieberman, legal director of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri. The
timing of the raid makes it clear that the police used a "bogus housing
inspection to conduct a criminal search without a warrant," she says.
"They arrested me and two of the cyclists, and charged
us with occupying a condemned building," Meister says. "They put us in
handcuffs, and placed us in a police van. I could see them carrying
things out of the house, such as art from my room and bags of stuff. I
was taken to the station and held for fifteen hours. Some of the others
were held for twenty hours."
The police did not let Meister back in her home for
five days. "When we finally got inside, we realized that they had
ransacked the house from top to bottom," she says. The police also
confiscated the bikes, puppets, props, posters, and banners of the
Rutabaga Circus cyclists who had been staying at the Bolozone. When they
got their bikes back after the weekend was over, many of their tires
were slashed, Gillard says.
Meister says she's considering suing the police. And so is the ACLU of Eastern Missouri.
Richard Wilkes, public relations officer for the St.
Louis Police Department, says "the department really doesn't have a
response" to the allegations about raiding the house or detaining
protesters or cyclists. "None of those things had anything to do with
preventing people from protesting," he says.
It's not every day that a sitting judge will allege he
saw the police commit felonies. But that's what Judge Richard Margolius
said on December 11 in regard to police misconduct in Miami during the
protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in late
November.
Judge Margolius was presiding over a case that the
protesters brought against the city. In court, he said he saw the police
commit at least twenty felonies, Amy Driscoll of the Miami Herald reported.
"Pretty disgraceful what I saw with my own eyes," he said, according to
the paper. "This was a real eye-opener. A disgrace for the community."
Police used tasers, shock batons, rubber bullets,
beanbags filled with chemicals, large sticks, and concussion grenades
against lawful protesters. (Just prior to the FTAA protests, the city of
Miami passed an ordinance requiring a permit for any gathering of more
than six people for longer than twenty-nine minutes.) They took the
offensive, wading into crowds and driving after the demonstrators.
Police arrested more than 250 protesters. Almost all of them were simply
exercising their First Amendment rights. Police also seized protest
material and destroyed it, and they confiscated personal property,
demonstrators say.
"How many police officers have been charged by the
state attorney so far for what happened out there during the FTAA?" the
judge asked in court, according to the Herald. The prosecutor said none. "Pretty sad commentary, at least from what I saw," the judge retorted.
Even for veterans of protests, the police actions in
Miami were unlike any they had encountered before. "I've been to a
number of the anti-globalization protests--Seattle, Cancún, D.C.--and
this was different," says Norm Stockwell, operations coordinator for
WORT, the community radio station in Madison, Wisconsin. "At previous
events, the police force was defensive, with heavy armor hoping to hold
back protests. In Miami, police were in light armor and were poised to
go after the protesters, and that's what they did. They actually went
into the crowds to divide the protesters, then chased them into
different neighborhoods."
Stockwell says some reporters were mistreated, especially if they were not "embedded" with the Miami police.
"I got shot twice [with rubber projectiles], once in the back, another time in the leg," reported Jeremy Scahill of Democracy Now!
"John Hamilton from the Workers Independent News Service was shot in
the neck by a pepper-spray pellet." Ana Nogueira, Scahill's colleague
from Democracy Now!, was videotaping some of the police mayhem
when she was arrested, Scahill said. "In police custody, the authorities
made Ana remove her clothes because they were pepper sprayed. The
police forced her to strip naked in front of male officers."
John Heckenlively, former head of the Racine County
Democratic Party in Wisconsin, says he was cornered by the police late
in the afternoon of November 20. Heckenlively and a few companions were
trying to move away from the protest area when "a large cordon of
police, filling the entire block edge to edge, was moving up the
street," he says. "As they approached, an officer told us that we should
leave the area. We informed him that was precisely what we were
attempting to do, and seconds later, he placed us under arrest."
Police kept Heckenlively in tight handcuffs behind his
back for more than six hours, he says, adding that he was held for a
total of sixty hours.
Trade unionists were particularly outraged at the
treatment they received in Miami. John Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO,
wrote Attorney General John Ashcroft on December 3 to urge the Justice
Department to investigate "the massive and unwarranted repression of
constitutional rights and civil liberties that took place in Miami."
Sweeney wrote that on November 20, police interfered
with the federation's demonstration "by denying access to buses,
blocking access to the amphitheater where the rally was occurring, and
deploying armored personnel carriers, water cannons, and scores of
police in riot gear with clubs in front of the amphitheater entrance.
Some union retirees had their buses turned away from Miami altogether by
the police, and were sent back home."
Blocking access to the rally was the least of it.
After the march, "police advanced on groups of peaceful protesters
without provocation," Sweeney wrote. "The police failed to provide those
in the crowd with a safe route to disperse, and then deployed pepper
spray and rubber bullets against protesters as they tried to leave the
scene. Along with the other peaceful protesters, AFL-CIO staff, union
peacekeepers, and retirees were trapped in the police advance. One
retiree sitting on a chair was sprayed directly in the face with pepper
spray. An AFL-CIO staff member was hit by a rubber bullet while trying
to leave the scene. When the wife of a retired Steelworker verbally
protested police tactics, she was thrown to the ground on her face and a
gun was pointed to her head."
The ACLU of Greater Miami is planning on filing
several suits against the Miami Police Department, says Lida
Rodriguez-Taseff, president of the group. "This was a clear abuse of
power by the police, and an indiscriminate use of force," she says.
"People who were retreating were being shot in the back with rubber
bullets. One photojournalist, Carl Kesser, was filming the police, and
he was hit in the head with a beanbag above his eye socket. If it had
hit him a little bit lower, he could have lost his eye. The police were
using tasers on people who were down, who were already restrained. These
police officers were using these weapons as if they were Pez
dispensers. They acted like as long as it wasn't a firearm, they could
use the weapons to their hearts' content."
"We did what we had to do based on the situation at
the time," says Miami Police Officer Herminia Salas-Jacobson. "If anyone
has any concerns or questions, we've asked them to come forward, and we
will address each one on an individual basis."
The police used $8.5 million of the $87 billion
Congress appropriated for the Iraq War to patrol the streets of Miami.
Police Chief John Timoney thanked his officers for their "remarkable
restraint." And he won praise in some law enforcement quarters for what
is being called the Miami Model.
By the way, Timoney was the police commissioner in
Philadelphia during the 2000 Republican Convention, and his tactics then
raised questions about the violation of protesters' civil liberties.
Nonetheless, Timoney has consulted with the Democratic National
Committee on security issues for the Democratic Convention in Boston
this summer.
Seven months before the FTAA in Miami, police used
brutal force on the West Coast. At the Port of Oakland on the morning of
April 7, more than 500 anti-war demonstrators gathered to protest
against two shipping companies that were involved in George Bush's Iraq
War.
The police responded by firing rubber bullets, wooden
pellets, and tear gas into the crowd. Nine members of Local 10 of the
International Longshore and Warehouse Union were injured, as were at
least thirty-one demonstrators. These forty individuals have filed a
class action lawsuit against the city of Oakland and several Oakland
police officers.
"I was hit on the back of the right calf as I
attempted to run away from the police fire," wrote Willow Rosenthal, one
of the plaintiffs, in her statement. "The entire back of my calf was
blood red and swollen with a circular mark of broken skin about three
quarters of an inch across in the center. The calf was numb about three
inches around the point of impact, and I wasn't able to walk without
assistance."
Another plaintiff, Scott Fleming, was "shot five times
in the back, shoulder, and under his arms with wooden dowels fired
directly at him as he fled," the suit says. The police also allegedly
attacked at least two legal observers and two people videotaping the
event.
"This was the most outrageous incident of unprovoked
mass police violence the National Lawyers Guild has seen in our twenty
years of providing legal support to Bay Area demonstrations," said
National Lawyers Guild attorney Rachel Lederman, one of the lawyers for
the plaintiffs, in a press release.
This case hopes "to reestablish the constitutional
principle that the police cannot choose to impose the price of serious
physical injury on persons engaging in nonviolent protest activities,"
said Alan Schlosser, legal director of the ACLU of Northern California,
which is part of the case, as well.
"Overall, it was peaceful, but a small element began
throwing things at the officers, and that's when the command officers
decided to deploy less lethal munitions," says Officer Danielle Ashford
of the Oakland Police Department. "Our chief has launched an internal
review and has reassessed our crowd control policy to minimize injuries
to all involved parties."
What happened in St. Louis, Miami, and Oakland "comes
on the heels of more than two years of federal actions and policies that
are antagonistic to free speech," says the ACLU's Romero.
One of these was Attorney General John Ashcroft's May
30, 2002, lifting of the Justice Department's strict guidelines
curtailing domestic spying. Those guidelines dated back to the Ford
Administration, but now the FBI is free once again to spy on protesters
and to infiltrate their meetings in public places. This has raised fears
of a return to the days of COINTELPRO, the FBI's counterintelligence
program that spied on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and infiltrated
the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement.
One of the most disturbing developments, says Romero,
is "the easy conflation of dissenters with criminal suspects or even
potential terrorists." He points to the FBI Intelligence Bulletin of
October 15, 2003. This bulletin, which The New York Times exposed,
refers to "extremist elements" who engage in "aggressive tactics." But
it doesn't limit its attention to lawbreakers. "Even the more peaceful
techniques can create a climate of disorder, block access to a site,
draw large numbers of police officers to a specific location in order to
weaken security at other locations, obstruct traffic, and possibly
intimidate people from attending the events being protested," it says.
And it does not distinguish between "extremists" and "activists." It
says that "activists often communicate with one another using cell
phones"--a dazzling insight. They also may use recording equipment "for
documenting potential cases of police brutality and for distribution of
information over the Internet," it says.
Using cell phones or filming police brutality or
disseminating information over the Internet can hardly be construed as
illegal activity. But the FBI memo says, "Law enforcement agencies
should be alert to these possible indicators of protest activity and
report any potentially illegal acts to the nearest FBI Joint Terrorism
Task Force."
Equating protesters with terrorists is not confined to
FBI headquarters. Mike Van Winkle, spokesman for the California
Anti-Terrorism Information Center, told the Oakland Tribune last
year: "You can make an easy kind of 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."
On February 8, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney was
visiting Evansville, Indiana, to campaign for Representative John
Hostettler at the local civic center.
Environmentalist John Blair was walking on a public sidewalk nearby and was carrying a sign that read: "Cheney: 19th C. Energy Man."
Police ordered him to move to a "protest zone" more than a block away, and Blair refused, so they arrested him.
"I was arrested for nothing more than exercising my
rights as a citizen in what I thought was a free country," Blair wrote
in an article for Counterpunch, which broke the story.
Blair was at first charged with disorderly conduct.
Then the prosecutor increased the charge to a Class A misdemeanor of
resisting law enforcement, which could have cost him a year in jail.
But the case against Blair was quickly dropped. "I
didn't think the evidence established a case that would be successful in
court," says Stan Levco, prosecuting attorney for Vanderburgh County,
Indiana. But he adds: "I don't think they were wrong to arrest him under
the circumstances. They thought it was a safety issue, and I wouldn't
second-guess them."
Blair is suing for $50,000 in damages. "They shouldn't
even have approached me in the first place," he says. "Carrying a sign
isn't an illegal act in America. At least it wasn't before Bush-Cheney."
Blair's experience was hardly unique. Local police, on
orders of the Secret Service, have literally been marginalizing critics
of the President or Vice President into so-called protest zones far out
of earshot and eyesight, the ACLU says.
On September 23, 2003, the ACLU sued the Secret
Service for engaging in a "pattern and practice" of discriminating
against those who disagree with government policies.
On September 2, 2002, in Neville Island, Pennsylvania,
"protesters were sent to a 'designated free speech zone' located on a
large baseball field one-third of a mile away from where President Bush
was speaking," an ACLU fact sheet notes. "Only people carrying signs
critical of the President were required to enter and remain. Many people
carrying signs supporting the President and his policies were allowed
to stand alongside the motorcade route. . . . When retired Steelworker
Bill Neel refused to enter the protest zone and insisted on being
allowed to stand where the President's supporters were standing, he was
arrested for disorderly conduct and detained until the President had
departed."
Similarly, when President Bush came to St. Louis on
January 22, 2003, to tout his economic plan, one woman with a "We Love
You President Bush" sign was allowed to stand near the building where
the President was speaking. But Andrew Wimmer, who was standing next to
her, was arrested for holding a sign saying "Instead of war invest in
people."
Ann Roman, spokeswoman for the Secret Service, says,
"We don't comment on pending litigation, but we don't make any
distinction on the basis of purpose, message, or intent of any
particular group or individual."
Eleanor Eisenberg is the executive director of the
Arizona ACLU, but that did not stop police from arresting her on
September 27, 2002. That day, Bush came to the Civic Center in Phoenix
to raise money for two Republican candidates. A crowd of 1,500
protesters gathered across the street. But all of a sudden and for no
discernible reason, the police, both on horseback and on foot, charged
into the crowd, says Eisenberg.
"Shortly after the police started their charge, I saw
them dragging a young man into the street and grinding his face into the
pavement and being very abusive," she says. When Eisenberg, in her
official capacity, went over to see what was going on, "a police officer
whacked me with his horse's flank and sent me flying. And the next
thing I know, I was being arrested."
Randy Force of the Phoenix Police Department says, "We
stand by the facts in the police report on this case." That report
states that the Secret Service ordered the area cleared and that police
told Eisenberg "she was standing in a restricted area." It claims "she
started taking photographs of other citizens being involved in
disorderly conduct." After giving Eisenberg three orders to move, one
police officer gave her "a small shove with his horse to move her," the
report states.
"When you connect the dots--the FBI bulletin treating
protesters as terrorists, the pattern and practice of the Secret Service
of corralling protesters in zones far away, the actions in Miami and
San Francisco and elsewhere--you see an increasingly hostile environment
for groups that are expressing views that are divergent from the Bush
Administration's," says ACLU Executive Director Romero. "Clearly, the
government has put in place key policies and practices that try to shut
down those that disagree with it."
Lieberman of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri puts it this
way: "Law enforcement officers are telling people, if you have
dissenting views you should think twice about expressing them. And if
you don't agree to be invisible, you're going to be liable for criminal
prosecution under whatever guise we can think of."
Looking back on her experience with the police in St.
Louis at the World Agricultural Forum, Sarah Bantz strikes a
philosophical note. "I guess I learned my lesson," she says.
And what is that lesson? "That these issues I keep
hearing about--of the increased use of police and military force in this
country--are real. They're not happening in the future; they're
happening today."
Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive.
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