So much for democracy

Posted on July 27, 2004 by Gene

Despite the great speeches at the Democratic convention, I’m pretty steamed about one important thing: protestors there are being forced into a small area under a subway bridge, surrounded by razor wire. They call it the “free speech zone.”
I thought this entire county was a free speech zone, at least, until recently.
Evidently this brilliant curtailing of civil liberties, a gulag of democracy, was set up by the Secret Service and local Boston authorities. I don’t know if the Democrats had anything to do with it, but the fact that they haven’t spoken out forcefully against it makes them complicit.

The zone, surrounded by two layers of chain link fences mounted on Jersey barriers, draped with black mesh and topped with razor wire, violates the protesters’ free-speech rights, said a legal observer for the Boston chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

“You can’t have free speech inside a prison,” said the observer, Tony Naro, a recent college graduate who plans to start law school this fall.

Observers like Naro attend rallies and marches to record incidents where the authorities appear to be violating the protesters’ constitutional rights.

Naro noted that when the Boston Police union was planning to protest at the DNC over a contract dispute with Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, “there was no talk of putting them into a free-speech zone. It’s the people with the guns who get to have free speech.”

…Cameras, monitored in Washington, D.C., by the Department of Homeland Security, can be seen on many street corners in the soft zone.

Protesters will thus be scarce through the soft zone.

This is what our country has come to. This is freedom?