Muzzled on the campaign trail

Progressive, The, Nov, 2004 by Matthew Rothschild

Like the Ranks, Daniel Finsel of Lehighton, Pennsylvania, went to protest a visit by President Bush in nearby Kutztown on July 9. Finsel was carrying a huge sign, three feet by four feet, that said, "U.S. Aggression Breeds Terrorism."

Finsel says he obeyed the instructions of the Pennsylvania State Troopers, who told all the activists, including Bush supporters, to go into a zoned-off area.

"One guy had a 'I Love Halliburton' T-shirt on, and he said, 'You're unpatriotic. You don't deserve to be in this country,'" Finsel recalls.

Such a reaction was not unexpected, he says. But he wasn't prepared for a trooper who told him that he couldn't stand still with his sign, even in the protest zone.

"I see this cop," says Finsel, "and he says, 'You can't stand there. You need to keep walking.' So I started walking in a six-foot circle within the protest zone. And I looked back, and he said, 'Not in circles.' And I said, 'What, you want me to walk in squares?'"

At that, says Finsel, the officer radioed for help.

"The cop puts me in cuffs and grabs my sign, and two other cops grab my arms and take me across the street," he says. "My sign is getting crumpled up by the sergeant. They take me to the cop car, and one says, 'You don't deserve to watch Bush come up the street.' "

The troopers took Finsel down to the station and locked him in a cell for three hours. "I wasn't read my rights the whole time, and not one cop told me what I was doing wrong," he says.

"He didn't stay in his designated area," says Trooper Ray Albert, public information officer for the Pennsylvania State Police. "He was arrested for not obeying the rules."

After Finsel was taken out of the cell, he was given a citation for disorderly conduct.

"On the citation where it says victim's name, they put 'society,'" Finsel says. "I was in utter shock. I thought we could walk around with signs in this country."

So did Frank Van Den Bosch. When he heard that George Bush was coming through Platteville, Wisconsin, on May 7, he knew he wanted to be there to protest.

Van Den Bosch lives only thirty miles to the north, and he and his wife had helped set up a group call Students for Peace and Justice when she was at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, he says.

Van Den Bosch considered what to write on his poster. "I couldn't think of any one particular issue I wanted to address, and I was so completely saddened and angered by what was happening that the most concise statement I could come up with was 'FUGW.'"

When Van Den Bosch arrived at the protest, he joined a group of about twenty others. But soon his sign drew attention.

"An officer came over and said, 'You can't display your sign,'" Van Den Bosch recalls. "She said she had checked with the Secret Service, and they didn't like the sign.

"And I said, 'Well, that's their problem.'"

But Van Den Bosch did agree to modify the sign. Under the F, he wrote in smaller letters "ree" to spell "Free," and under the U, he wrote "s" to spell "Us."

"But they weren't satisfied with that," he says. "A sergeant came over and tried to take the sign away from me, but I rolled it up and stood in the back a bit."