Up to a point, I would agree with your argument about private property. On
Commercial property, which essentially covers MOST of the United States
anymore, speech can be regulated only by the owner or agents there of. In
Mr. Bursey's case, the Secret Service is ordering the security guards of the
airport to regulate Mr. Bursey's speech. Did the security guard have the
right to refuse? Did the owner? If not then, the Secret Service, an agency
of the government IS regulating speech it does not want heard and using
"Private Property" laws to shield it from Constitutional complications.
-----Original Message-----
From: Erik Vistica [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2003 4:18 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] OT: Freedom/Free Speach/Democracy in the US of A
My understanding of freedom of speech and freedom of the press (*NOT*
freedom of 'expression') is that you can speak and print your ideas (not
obscenities and pornography) without fear of the government. You don't have
the right to say/print anything you want (slander and libel laws). You don't
have the right to force me to listen or read your ideas. You don't have the
right to deface other people's property. You don't have the right to shout
obscenities on just the other side of the property line. (If you think you
do, then I have the right to use a bull horn to preach to you day and night
from my side of the property line :-). Commercial property with public
access is still private property.
Would you be equally outraged by a lone Christian being arrested for
silently praying on public property outside of an abortion clinic? No
signs, so words, just the mere presence causes an arrest.
Michael Baier wrote:
> http://www.metrobeat.net/gbase/Expedite/Content?oid=oid%3A2248
>
> America is a Free Speech Zone
> Brett Bursey goes up against the Bush administration over what
> Americans are allowed say
>
> It wasn't the first time Brett Bursey had been arrested, nor the first
> that an act of civil disobedience landed him behind bars. In fact, he
> once served two years for spray painting "Hell No We Won't Go" on the
> walls of a draft board office during the Vietnam War. But it was this
> arrest, the one made during a visit by President George W. Bush on
> Oct. 24, 2002, to Columbia, which just might prove to be the most
> significant of his life.
>
> The matter at hand: what Americans are allowed to say and where they
> are allowed to say it. For the Bush administration, the answer is
> simple: when it comes to public appearances by the president, only
> those with something nice to say get within earshot of Dubya. As for
> the dissenting rabble, well, they get shuffled off to so-called free
> speech zones, sometimes hundreds and hundreds of yards away from the
> president.
>
> For Bursey, the answer is even simpler: America is a free speech zone.
> As long as you are on public property, you can say whatever you want.
> Even if the president doesn't like it.
>
> On that October day, sitting in the back of a paddy wagon, his hands
> cuffed behind his back, Brett Bursey watched as Air Force One touched
> down at Columbia Metropolitan Airport. Earlier, he had been holding a
> sign that read, "No War for Oil," outside of a rally at a hanger for
> then-candidates Sen. Lindsey Graham and Gov. Mark Sanford. President
> Bush was set to speak in support of the two.
>
> At the time, Bursey was the lone protester. Around him, hundreds and
> hundreds of people who had come to cheer the commander in chief and
> his Republican compatriots. The airport police approached Bursey and
> told him he couldn't stand next to the crowd with his sign. He went
> across the street. The police again approached him. He was then told
> he couldn't stand on the state right-of-way across the street from the
> airport and protest. According to Bursey, the police even went as far
> as to tell him that if he put down his sign, the one that criticized
> Bush and his drive for war, he could stay. If Bursey didn't, he would
> have to go to a designated free speech zone a half-mile away. He
> refused to move. Bursey was then arrested and charged with
> trespassing.
>
> However, he knew the charge wouldn't stick. Some 30 years earlier he
> had been arrested for protesting the president. Back then, the
> commander in chief was Richard Nixon, but the charge was the same -
> trespassing. Eventually, the state Supreme Court dropped the charges,
> ruling that protesters such as Bursey could not legally trespass on
> public property. Months after his October 2002 arrest, this new
> trespassing charge was dropped by the state.
>
> However, U.S. Attorney Strom Thurmond, Jr., an inexperienced
> prosecutor of little more than 30-years-of-age, filed federal charges
> against Bursey. The new crime - refusing to leave a restricted area
> which had been declared the temporary property of the president. This
> particular law was designed to stop would-be assassins and kidnappers.
> Bursey is neither. He now faces six months in jail and a $5,000 fine.
> The trial is set for November 12 in the U.S. District Court in
> Columbia.
>
> Bursey is not the only American who has been arrested for refusing to
> limit the expression of his dissent to so-called free speech zones.
> The ACLU recently filed a lawsuit against the federal government for
> violating the free speech rights of protesters. Their claim: "Local
> police, acting at the direction of the Secret Service, violated the
> rights of protesters in two
> ways: people expressing views critical of the government were moved
further
> away from public officials while those with pro-government views were
> allowed to remain closer; or everyone expressing a view was herded into
> what is commonly known as a 'protest zone,' leaving those who merely
> observe, but express no view, to remain closer." According to the ACLU,
> there have been over a "dozen examples of police censorship at events
> around the country."
>
> To protest the use of free speech zones by the Bush administration to
> squelch, or at least marginalize, dissent and to help publicize his
> own battle against Uncle Sam, Bursey has taken to wearing a T-shirt
> emblazoned with the phrase "Free Speech Zone" over an image of the
> United States. Below that is "www.scpronet.com," the Web address for
> the S.C. Progressive Network, a coalition of activists and advocacy
> groups of which Bursey is the director.
>
> Recently, MetroBEAT interviewed Bursey about his fateful day at the
> airport, his case and the ongoing war in Iraq.
>
>
> Let's just go through the events leading up to your arrest.
>
> I had been in a line of... people that were there to hear the
> president speak inside this hanger. Some of them were carrying signs
> for Sanford and Graham. The event was a Republican rally for
> Republican candidates, the primary Republican candidates being Lindsey
> Graham and Mark Sanford. So there's Sanford and Graham signs around,
> and I'm in line with these people. There's literally 4,000 people
> trying to get in this place. So I step out of the flow onto this
> grassy strip along the side of the main road going into the airport,
> and I am on the hanger side. As soon as I step out of line, a
> policeman comes up and tells me I have to go to the free speech zone.
> And I just ignore him. And I argue with him a little bit.
>
>
> And you're well aware of what the property lines are at this point and
> what the rules are?
>
> Yes.
>
> So this woman, who I kept referring to as the "hysterical woman,"
> comes out and starts screaming that I have to get out of there, I have
> to go to a free speech zone. And she identifies herself as Secret
> Service. And I fall back across the main road, moving further away
> from the hanger to the other side of Airport Boulevard, so I'm still
> standing on the side of the road on state right-of-way. And they
> follow me. They say, "You can't be there. You can't be there." And I
> say, "Well, I'll go back that way," and point at a road that's heading
> away from [where I'm standing] to Midlands Tech.... It's a facility
> maybe a quarter of a mile down this road, and I point back to Tech and
> say, "I'll go back down there." [They say,] "No, you can't go there.
> The only place you can go is the free speech zone."
>
> This woman, you can hear her buzzing in the background, "This is
> airport property. Get me an airport policeman." The airport police are
> the low man on the totem pole. And [the Secret Service] say, "Arrest
> him." And [the police] say, "Arrest him for what?" "He's trespassing."
>
> And now I'm talking to the arresting officer, and I say, "Is the
> problem the content of my sign?" He had told me to put the sign down
> or leave or be arrested. He gave me an option: If I put the sign down,
> I could still stand there.
>
>
> Thirty-four years ago, you were arrested at the Columbia Metropolitan
> Airport during a visit by Richard Nixon. Did you go into this event
> knowing that if you were arrested for trespassing, they would have to
> drop the charges?
>
> Well, no. I hadn't even thought of it until I'm standing there and
> they're telling me they're going to arrest me for trespassing and I'm
> basically realizing, Oh my God, here I am again. I was literally a
> hundred yards from the same location. It was part of that
> crystallization of that moment when I knew that I had to tell them,
> "No."
>
>
> And what happened after that?
>
> They put the cuffs on me. Behind my back. In a paddy wagon. And they
> moved me behind the hanger where I could see Air Force One.
>
>
> How was that?
>
> That was really bizarre. Bush gets off the plane. And I can see the
> whole tableau through the bars in the paddy wagon. He goes inside the
> hanger and gives this speech where he says they hate us because we're
> so free, and here I am handcuffed in the back of a paddy wagon,
> thinking, "No, Mr. Bush they don't hate us because we're free. They
> hate us because we're hypocrites."
>
>
> Do you think the Secret Service, perhaps under orders from someone in
> the Bush administration, and I'm quoting a statement you made in a
> press release, are trying to "to prevent the media from getting photos
> of people protesting the president or to insulate the president from
> the reality that all Americans don't support his politics"?
>
> That's what I expect to prove. We have the evidence that the Secret
> Service is ordering local police to do this. We have testimony from
> cops who have used the term, "within eyeshot of the president." [One
> officer testified that] the "Secret Service ordered me... not to allow
> any protesters to be within eyeshot." Another cop says, "No protesters
> visible." It's clear that the Secret Service is ordering local police
> to violate people's rights. The dots we have to connect is who told
> the Secret Service to do this.
>
>
> What would prompt people within the Bush administration to say, the
> president can't see these protesters? What does the president have to
> fear?
>
> Did I tell you what [Texas-based syndicated columnist] Molly Ivins'
> take was? She said they keep the protesters away from Bush because
> they're afraid he will go off on them. He's hotheaded, and they don't
> want to allow a circumstance to allow Bush to show his ass in public.
> That's one. Two, and if you are the handlers and you have the power of
> God, if you are the White House staff, you have a lot of power. If you
> give some guys this power that are packaging the president, you'll see
> things like flight suits on aircraft carriers, incredible backdrops
> that cost billions of dollars. It's made-for-TV stuff. In that package
> of presenting Bush, given the power that these people have, it's not a
> stretch at all to think that somebody in the White House advance
> [team] has just incorporated the Secret Service into their
> function.... [It] could be some lower level minion in the PR staff in
> the White House that's actually being able to use the Secret Service
> to make sure there are no protesters in any frame of picture taken of
> the president.
>
> What's the status of the case at the moment?
>
> We are expecting the judge to turn over Secret Service documents by
> Oct. 24 that he ordered the government to produce. [Note: these
> documents concern communications between the Secret Service and local
> law enforcement in regards to presidential visits.] The judge had a
> secret meeting with the Secret Service to hear their concerns about
> presidential security and decided that he would give us all but three
> documents. We are having a hard time arguing for their release, as we
> don't know what they say. We doubt that the documents are going to
> spell out that the Secret Service is ordering local police to violate
> citizens' First Amendment rights.... We are planning on issuing a
> subpoena for the White House Secret Service Liaison. We can prove that
> the Secret Service is routinely using the excuse of the president's
> physical security to protect his political security. We intend to
> prove that these orders came from the White House.
>
> The trial is scheduled to begin 9:30 a.m., November 12 in the new U.S.
> District Courthouse in Columbia. I encourage anyone concerned about
> the restrictions being placed on constitutional rights to be in the
> courtroom with me.
>
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