Salon.com: Keeping dissent invisible

The article is in the subscriber area (at this time). It is an excellent read. It is obvious that they are telling antiBush protestors to go far away for political reasons, not for reasons of protecting the "president". The Secret Service claims that it is the local police ordering protesters away, but the local police say that they are following Secret Service directions.

The ACLU has a lawsuit in progress that may keep the brownshirts at bay throughout election season, however. Now the article:

By Dave Lindorff Oct. 16, 2003 | PHILADELPHIA -- When Bill Neel learned that President George W. Bush was making a Labor Day campaign visit to Pittsburgh last year to support local congressional candidates, the retired Pittsburgh steelworker decided that he would be on hand to protest the president's economic policies. Neel and his sister made a hand-lettered sign reading "The Bushes must love the poor -- they've made so many of us," and headed for a road where the motorcade would pass on the way from the airport to a Carpenters' Union training center.

He never got to display his sign for President Bush to see, though. As he stood among milling groups of Bush supporters, he was approached by a local police detective, who told him and his sister that because they were protesting, they had to move to a "free speech area," on orders of the U.S. Secret Service.

"He pointed out a relatively remote baseball diamond that was enclosed in a chain-link fence," Neel recalled in an interview with Salon. "I could see these people behind the fence, with their faces up against it, and their hands on the wire." (The ACLU posted photos of the demonstrators and supporters at that event on its Web site.) "It looked more like a concentration camp than a free speech area to me, so I said, 'I'm not going in there. I thought the whole country was a free speech area.'" The detective asked Neel, 66, to go to the area six or eight times, and when he politely refused, he handcuffed and arrested the retired steelworker on a charge of disorderly conduct. When Neel's sister argued against his arrest, she was cuffed and hauled off as well. The two spent the president's visit in a firehouse that was serving as Secret Service and police headquarters for the event.
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the ACLU website link again: http://www.aclu.org/FreeSpeech/FreeSpeech.cfm?ID=13699&c=86

If you are desperate to read the article and are not a salon subscriber (too cheap or too poor), I suppose I could email it to you for "personal use".

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/10/16/secret_service/index.html

If you sign up for the free one-day pass you can read the entire article.

Orwellian or what:

In the ACLU's view, the strategy, besides violating a fundamental right of free speech and assembly, is damaging in two ways. "It insulates the government officials from seeing or hearing the protesters and vice-versa, and it gives to the media and the American public the appearance that there exists less dissent than there really is."

Certainly, as television cameras follow a presidential motorcade lined with cheering supporters, the image on the tube will be distorted if protesters have all been spirited away around a corner somewhere fenced in for the duration.

This is SO totalitarian yet the media are not seeing this as problematic.

Imagine if they tried to set up "2nd amendment zones"...

The good news: When authoritarian regimes have to resort to this kind of Orwellian tactic, it means they are in trouble. It means they are VERY insecure. It means they KNOW they are losers and the only way they can stay in power is to lie, distort and suppress.

There's hope!!