“Free-Speech Zones”
The Bush administration has also allowed
restrictions on the rights of Americans to criticize
the government on the streets of our cities
and towns. In case after case, when President
Bush makes a public appearance, nonviolent
protesters have been harassed by law enforcement—
either Secret Service agents or local
police operating at their request—and forced
out of the president’s line of sight, to a designated
protest area known as the “free-speech
zone.” The free-speech zones are often behind
fences or obstructions such as “Greyhoundsized
buses” and far out of sight of the media
covering the affair.22 In one case, the 2004 G-8
summit on Sea Island, Georgia, protesters were
kept 10 miles away.23 If protesters fail to comply
with the order to move, they are subject to
arrest and prosecution.
“What the Secret Service does,” according to
Paul Wolf, an Allegheny County, Pennsylvania,
police supervisor involved in planning a presidential
visit to Pittsburgh in 2002, “is they 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 be put in a place that is able to be
secured.”24 During that presidential visit,
retired steelworker Bill Neel was arrested and
charged with disorderly conduct for refusing an
order to move. In an open public area, amidst a
crowd of Bush supporters, Neel unfurled a
homemade sign reading “The Bush family
must surely love the poor, they made so many
of us.” When he refused to move to a freespeech
zone in a fenced-in baseball field a third
of a mile away, he was handcuffed and arrested
by local police acting at the behest of the Secret
Service. The arresting officer testified that he
was instructed by the Secret Service to corral
“people that were there making a statement
pretty much against the president and his
views.”25 In St. Charles, Missouri, on November
4, 2002, activist Bill Ramsey was arrested by
local police when he tried to unfurl an anti-
Bush sign and refused to leave a crowd of Bush
supporters while Bush was visiting a local airport.
The police “said they’d been ordered to
[arrest them] by the Secret Service.” In January
2003, on a public street, St. Louis police arrested
IT worker Andrew Wimmer for refusing to
move his “Instead of war, invest in people” sign
to a free-speech zone three blocks away from
the presidential motorcade route.
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