[CitizensTruth] Peace Activists Literally Fenced In at 2008 Chicago Air And Water Show

[Mitchell Szczepanczyk]

http://chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/83546/index.php

CHICAGO, August 18 -- In a brazen move against freedom of speech and 
against the Chicago peace movement, Chicago Police held peace activists 
at the 2008 Chicago Air and Water Show inside a fenced-off "free speech 
zone", as one police officer termed it.

The "free speech zone", surrounded by a three-and-a-half-foot-high 
impromptu metal barrier serving as a makeshift fence, sat just south of 
eastern base of the North Avenue foot bridge, near the intersection of 
North Avenue and Lake Show Drive.

Peace activists and antiwar critics against the Air and Water Show have 
been a regular presence at the Show since 1993, who traditionally 
assemble near the North Avenue bridge. Activists and critics routinely 
decried the event's rampant commercialism and critiquing the Air and 
Water Show as being a giant commercial for the military and as a bonanza 
for military recruitment.

Until recently, activists who assembled at the Air And Water Show could 
assemble and interact with other attendees unimpeded. However, in the 
2008 Show, activists were ordered to remain within the confines of the 
"free speech zone", roughly eight feet away from the sidewalk and on a 
hard-to-walk-on sandy surface. Police said that individuals who left the 
"free speech zone" would be arrested.

The presence of the "free speech zone" made it much harder for passersby 
to interact with activists, placing the burden of effort to interact 
wholly on the passerby. Peace activists nevertheless still spoke with 
passersby who approached the fence and handed out flyers and brochures 
insofar as possible -- despite the fence and despite armed police 
officers standing guard at the fence and along the North Avenue foot bridge.

Officially stated reasons for placing the fencing for this protest are 
mixed and have roused suspicion. "[Officials] say that the corporate 
counsel determined that we represent an impediment to traffic," said 
Jane Becker, an activist with the Chicago chapter of the activist group 
World Can't Wait. "That would be about twelve of us, in a group 
officially estimated at, I don't know, half a million people. The twelve 
of us are an impediment to public safety and traffic? I don't think so." 
When this reporter asked one police officer as to why the fencing is put 
in place for the activist, the police officer responded that the 
activists didn't have a permit, even though past peace protests at the 
Air And Water Show were not fenced off despite not having a permit.

The whole situation is fraught with further double-standards. Throughout 
the Air and Water Show, displays for a host of commercial and military 
entities and services were openly available and openly distributing 
flyers, yet police questioned activists for merely handing out flyers as 
"protesting" the Air And Water Show.

Activists strongly believed that the fence and affiliated crackdown is 
connected with stifling organized opposition to the ongoing U.S. war in 
Iraq, whose costs in lives and dollars have escalated, and to the 
military, whose recruitment efforts have seen a downturn. "I think they 
want to suppress voices in opposition to the Air and Water Show, voices 
in opposition to the war," Becker also said.

Legal avenues to challenge the constitutionality of the fence and the 
"free speech zone" are not hopeful. "The ACLU has informed us that they 
have never won a free-speech-zone case. Thus, if we are arrested, we are 
on our own," said Ron Kunde of Chicago Media Action. "It would help if 
we had some legal representation. We really feel abandoned." 
[Disclosure: The author of this article is an active member of Chicago 
Media Action.]