Aw, my pal Andrew made it to Boing Boing. I’m sleepy and a tad drunk at the moment so I don’t have much to add, but I just wanted to post this lest I forget.
I appreciate Andrew’s optimism (honestly, I do), but I’m not sure an $80,000 settlement will make public officials think twice about anything. But I guess after seven years of a Bush presidency, man, do peanuts taste good.
Go, Andrew! Best of luck in Connecticut.
UPDATE: Via Pam at Pandagon, here’s a link to the heavily redacted Presidential Advance Manual (pdf), which describes in detail how to deal with demonstrators — firstly, how to prevent them from attending events at all, and lastly, how to get rid of them if they do show up. As it turns out, Bush’s Advance Team didn’t follow its own manual in “dealing with” Nicole and Jeffrey Rank at President Bush’s July 4, 2004 visit to Charleston.
The manual clearly states that the roll of the Secret Service is limited to identifying people who may be a physical threat to the president.
If the demonstrators appear to be a security threat notify the Secret Service immediately. If demonstrators appear likely to cause only a political disruption, it is the Advance person’s responsibility to take appropriate action. Rally squads should be dispatched to surround and drown out demonstrators immediately.
“Rally squads” are small groups of volunteers (e.g., “college/young Republican organizations, local athletic teams, and fraternities/sororities,” the manual states) who basically run defense against demonstrators by holding up signs to block them or chanting louder than the demonstrators are.
The manual also clearly states:
As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site.
That’s not how Team Bush responded to the Ranks. The Ranks were merely standing there among the crowd wearing t-shirts with anti-Bush slogans. They had no signs, they weren’t chanting, there’s no way anyone could have thought they might be a security threat. More than three years have passed since this happened, so I may not have every detail exactly correct, but I blogged about it quite a bit at the time and the way I remember it happening is that when the Ranks were spotted in their anti-Bush t-shirts, they were asked to leave the main event area and go to the designated “free speech zone,” a roped-off area away from the main site. When they refused to move, the local police handcuffed them, removed them, and cited them for trespassing.
On the day the Ranks appeared in court to face the trespassing charges, the prosecutor dismissed the charges. The police said that they had been acting at the direction of the Secret Service and they, along with Mayor Danny Jones, issued an apology to the Ranks. Getting an apology from the police is no small thing — we all know how reluctant police are to admit wrongdoing.
Finally, a fun fact: The Ranks were from Texas, but they were in West Virginia in 2004 because Nicole Rank was working for FEMA, helping out with some major flood damage in the state. After the t-shirt incident, she was told by FEMA that she was “no longer needed in West Virginia.” They effectively fired her.
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