News - Protesters have rights -- even when wrong

Each of us eagerly anticipates a special event each year. For some, it’s the Super Bowl or a family vacation. For politicians, it may be a major fundraiser or an election.

For many antiwar liberals, that annual rite is a protest just before Thanksgiving at Fort Benning’s School of the Americas.

In case you don’t spend the year planning your signs and costumes for the protest, I’ll give you some quick background on the School of the Americas. The school, now officially renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, is essentially an academy for foreign soldiers, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. To the antiwar movement, it’s a training ground for torturers and assassins. To the U.S. Army, it provides an opportunity to give poorly trained military personnel from South and Central America a better background in professional soldiering, along with lessons on human rights and a generous dose of pro-American propaganda.

This year, while the rest of us eye turkeys in the grocery, more than 15,000 protesters once again will make their annual pilgrimage to the city of Columbus, which is adjacent to Fort Benning. Were it not for a recent courageous decision by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, however, those 15,000 citizens would end up spending the week before Thanksgiving doing something other than exercising their constitutionally guaranteed rights to speech, petition and assembly.

Since the fall of 2001, Columbus officials, citing fears of terrorism, have forced every protester to comply with unnecessary and cumbersome security procedures. Along with doing everything possible to make protesters’ lives miserable, the city has required all of them to walk through metal detectors.

This, despite that protesters are strictly confined to an area just outside the post’s gates and are immediately arrested if they cross into unauthorized areas. And despite that no weapons have been found in the history of the protests or that no acts of violence have ever taken place there.

Needless to say, the restrictions and harassment have provided a significant disincentive to exercise free speech in Columbus. Not only will you be treated like a terrorist, you almost certainly will end up on a terrorist watch list and be stopped at airports for the rest of your life.

The “security threat” supposedly posed by the protesters is drastically overstated. Within the massive post’s confines, the army has some 20,000 troops, along with an arsenal of aircraft, armored vehicles, tanks, rockets and machine guns sufficient to level the home countries of many of the school’s pupils. The group of protesters, while large, consists mostly of pacifists and Grateful Dead heads. What does the government really have to fear from such a crowd?

Ah, but look at the situation through the eyes of local officials. Imagine that those peaceniks might secretly be capable of launching deadly strikes from their Birkenstocks as they dance and chant in the fields outside Fort Benning. Perhaps then you could understand why city officials felt it essential for national security to funnel all 15,000 undesirables through a magnetometer. Anyway, the local officials obviously don’t like those hippies, so why not make them miserable?

Their plan was moving along nicely until Oct. 15, when a conservative three-judge panel from the federal Appeals Court weighed in. The judges unanimously concluded that our civil liberties, including the First Amendment, didn’t evaporate on Sept. 11. Unless the city of Columbus or the U.S. military is able to cite a specific security threat, which it thus far has not, the protest must be allowed to continue — without metal detectors and unnecessary searches.

The army may limit access to government property and certainly can monitor the protests to ensure order is maintained, the court said. But neither the military nor the city may place limits on the protesters that in effect make it impossible for them to exercise their constitutionally protected rights to assembly and free speech, or that violate the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure.

The ruling is right on target. Neither the Department of Defense nor a local government have any business thwarting legal protests in 2004 any more than did FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover two generations ago when he put together a dossier on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., or than did the modern-day FBI just prior to the Democratic and Republican conventions this summer when it preemptively “interviewed” members of antiwar groups without probable cause.

I happen to disagree with the protesters. I think the school is a valuable asset for protecting America’s interests; Third World armies and citizens are made safer when their officers receive training in the United States. But I don’t condone attempts by our government to use a vague, unsubstantiated threat of terrorism as an excuse for eroding the Bill of Rights.

Will I be donning a scary mask and putting a sign together for this year’s protest? Probably not. Eating turkey and watching football sounds more productive to me. But I’ll wish the protesters all the best luck in having their voices heard. After all, that’s precisely the kind of freedom our soldiers at Fort Benning and elsewhere are fighting to protect.

The terrorists on Sept. 11 were trying to stifle those freedoms. It’s nice to see a federal Appeals Court agree that we really don’t need our own government furthering that effort.

Former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr occupies the 21st century liberties chair for freedom and privacy at the American Conservative Union.