Dave Lindorff

Bloggers are burning up their keyboards with speculation. Check out the president’s peculiar behavior during the debate, they say. On several occasions, the president simply stopped speaking for an uncomfortably long time and stared ahead with an odd expression on his face. Was he listening to someone helping him with his response to a question? Even weirder was the president’s strange outburst. In a peeved rejoinder to Kerry, he said, “As the politics change, his positions change. And that’s not how a commander in chief acts. I, I, uh — Let me finish — The intelligence I looked at was the same intelligence my opponent looked at.” It must be said that Bush pointed toward Lehrer as he declared “Let me finish.” The green warning light was lit, signaling he had 30 seconds to, well, finish.

Hot on the conspiracy trail, I tried to track down the source of the photo. None of the Bush-is-wired bloggers, however, seemed to know where the photo came from. Was it possible the bulge had been Photoshopped onto Bush’s back by a lone conspiracy buff? It turns out that all of the video of the debate was recorded and sent out by Fox News, the pool broadcaster for the event. Fox sent feeds from multiple cameras to the other networks, which did their own on-air presentations and editing.

To watch the debate again, I ventured to the Web site of the most sober network I could think of: C-SPAN. And sure enough, at minute 23 on the video of the debate, you can clearly see the bulge between the president’s shoulder blades.

Bloggers stoke the conspiracy with the claim that the Bush administration insisted on a condition that no cameras be placed behind the candidates. An official for the Commission on Presidential Debates, which set up the lecterns and microphones on the Miami stage, said the condition was indeed real, the result of negotiations by both campaigns. Yet that didn’t stop Fox from setting up cameras behind Bush and Kerry. The official said that “microphones were mounted on lecterns, and the commission put no electronic devices on the president or Senator Kerry.” When asked about the bulge on Bush’s back, the official said, “I don’t know what that was.”

So what was it? Jacob McKenna, a spyware expert and the owner of the Spy Store, a high-tech surveillance shop in Spokane, Wash., looked at the Bush image on his computer monitor. “There’s certainly something on his back, and it appears to be electronic,” he said. McKenna said that, given its shape, the bulge could be the inductor portion of a two-way push-to-talk system. McKenna noted that such a system makes use of a tiny microchip-based earplug radio that is pushed way down into the ear canal, where it is virtually invisible. He also said a weak signal could be scrambled and be undetected by another broadcaster.

Mystery-bulge bloggers argue that the president may have begun using such technology earlier in his term. Because Bush is famously prone to malapropisms and reportedly dyslexic, which could make successful use of a teleprompter problematic, they say the president and his handlers may have turned to a technique often used by television reporters on remote stand-ups. A reporter tapes a story and, while on camera, plays it back into an earpiece, repeating lines just after hearing them, managing to sound spontaneous and error free.

Suggestions that Bush may have using this technique stem from a D-day event in France, when a CNN broadcast appeared to pick up — and broadcast to surprised viewers — the sound of another voice seemingly reading Bush his lines, after which Bush repeated them. Danny Schechter, who operates the news site MediaChannel.org, and who has been doing some investigating into the wired-Bush rumors himself, said the Bush campaign has been worried of late about others picking up their radio frequencies — notably during the Republican Convention on the day of Bush’s appearance. “They had a frequency specialist stop me and ask about the frequency of my camera,” Schechter said. “The Democrats weren’t doing that at their convention.”

Repeated calls to the White House and the Bush national campaign office over a period of three days, inquiring about what the president may have been wearing on his back during the debate, and whether he had used an audio device at other events, went unreturned. So far the Kerry campaign is staying clear of this story. When called for a comment, a press officer at the Democratic National Committee claimed on Tuesday that it was “the first time” they’d ever heard of the issue. A spokeswoman at the press office of Kerry headquarters refused to permit me to talk with anyone in the campaign’s research office. Several other requests for comment to the Kerry campaign’s press office went unanswered.

As for whether we really do have a Milli Vanilli president, the answer at this point has to be, God only knows.

“Today we achieved a great victory in the campaign to win a new trial and the eventual freedom of Mumia,” said a jubilant Robert Bryan, of San Francisco, who took over as lead attorney in Abu-Jamal’s case in 2004.

Bryan said all three claims accepted for argument by the 3rd Circuit panel “are of enormous constitutional significance and go to the very essence of Mumia’s right to a fair trial, due process of law, and equal protection of the law under the Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.”

A spokeswoman for Philadelphia district attorney Lynn Abraham said her office had no comment on the court’s announcement.

Back in December 2001, U.S. District Judge William Yohn overturned Abu-Jamal’s death sentence, saying that the jury verdict form used in Abu-Jamal’s trial had been flawed and that the judge’s instructions to the jury had been confusing. That decision was immediately appealed by the district attorney’s office. At the same time, Yohn had rejected all 20 of Abu-Jamal’s claims concerning constitutional errors in his trial and state appeal process, certifying only one of those claims for appeal to the 3rd Circuit.

Under federal court rules, an appeals court is not required to consider any appeal from a defendant in a capital, or death penalty, case unless that appeal has been certified by a lower court judge.

The only appeal certified by Yohn for appeal was a claim by Abu-Jamal that the jury selection in his case had been racially biased because the prosecutor rejected 10 or 11 of 15 qualified black jurors, using peremptory challenges, for which no reason had to be given. The jury that ultimately convicted Abu-Jamal had only two black members, in a city that is 44 percent black.

The appellate court has agreed to hear defense arguments on the jury bias issue, which is known as a Batson claim.

But the 3rd Circuit also agreed to consider appeals on two other grounds. The first is a claim, rejected by Yohn and not certified for appeal, that the prosecutor in the case, Joseph McGill, had improperly attempted to reduce jurors’ sense of responsibility during the so-called guilt phase of the trial, by telling them that any guilty verdict would be vetted later. As McGill put it in his trial summation, “If you find the defendant guilty, of course there would be appeal after appeal and perhaps there could be a reversal of the case, or whatever, so that may not be final.” In other Pennsylvania cases, including one prosecuted by McGill, the 3rd Circuit has overturned capital-case convictions on the basis of the same wording used in trial summations.

The other uncertified defense appeal accepted for argument by the 3rd Circuit was a claim that the trial judge, the late Albert Sabo, was biased during the Post-Conviction Relief Act hearing. That hearing, which was held in 1995-96 to consider the validity of the facts presented at trial, as well as new evidence brought in by the defense, was controversial. At the time, the Philadelphia Inquirer stated in an editorial that the judge was displaying overt bias against Abu-Jamal.

Any one of the three claims, if upheld by the 3rd Circuit next year, could lead to a new trial for Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of the 1981 slaying of white police officer Daniel Faulkner. The most likely first action on upholding an appeal claim, however, would be an order sending the issue back to Judge Yohn for reconsideration, not an order for a new trial. A finding of bias on the part of Sabo could also lead to a reopening of the post-conviction hearing in a state court, legal experts say.

For Abu-Jamal, who has been in jail since December 9, 1981, and on Pennsylvania’s death row since July 1982, the latest turn of events represents a major breakthrough. Up to now, no court at any level has accepted his arguments that his conviction was flawed. Judge Yohn’s rejection of all the claims regarding the guilt phase of the 1982 trial had appeared to limit Abu-Jamal’s options considerably.

Now Abu-Jamal has three avenues to challenge that conviction, two of which could lead directly to a new trial, and a third that could lead to a reconsideration of evidence or presentation of new evidence.

Meanwhile, the district attorney’s appeal of the lifting of Abu-Jamal’s death penalty is also moving forward, with a brief on that appeal scheduled to be filed with the 3rd Circuit panel on Feb. 16. If the lifting of his death sentence is upheld by the 3rd Circuit, and there is no order for a new trial, the district attorney will have 180 days to decide whether to leave Abu-Jamal sentenced to life without parole or to request a new trial on just the sentencing issue, in an effort to get a jury to impose a new death sentence. The appeals court could also overturn Yohn and order the death penalty reinstated.

None of that is likely to happen, however, while the court is hearing and ruling on appeals of the conviction itself.

There has been considerable turmoil in Abu-Jamal’s case in recent years. In 1999, as his appeal was being considered by Judge Yohn, Abu-Jamal fired his attorneys, Leonard Weinglass and Daniel Williams. The cause of the dispute was a book, “Executing Justice,” written by Williams, which was critical of both his client and of some of his supporters.

Abu-Jamal then hired two attorneys, Eliot Grossman and Marlene Kamish, neither of whom had any appellate experience in death penalty cases. They drove away many of his supporters with demands that they support Abu-Jamal’s claim of absolute innocence, and their efforts to introduce into the case a man, Arnold Beverly, who claimed to be the “real killer” of Faulkner.

Abu-Jamal eventually dropped Grossman and Kamish from his case, the Beverly claim was abandoned, and Bryan was hired.

With the latest decision, a case that during the late 1990s aroused passions across the nation and around the globe, both among Abu-Jamal supporters and among police organizations and their supporters, is likely to be back in the headlines.

Now a technical expert who designs and makes such devices for the U.S. military and private industry tells Salon that he believes the bulge is indeed a transceiver designed to receive electronic signals and transmit them to a hidden earpiece lodged in Bush’s ear canal.

“There’s no question about it. It’s a pretty obvious one — larger than most because it probably has descrambling capability,” said Alex Darbut, technical and business development vice president for Resistance Technology in Arden Hills, Minn. Darbut examined photographs of the president’s back taken from the Fox News video feed at the first presidential debate in Coral Gables, Fla., as well as 2002 photos of the president driving and working in a T-shirt on his Crawford ranch, which were posted on the White House Web site.

Darbut speculates that the device the president wears is provided by the Secret Service, noting, “They’re not going to have him driving around the countryside on his ranch without being in instant contact with him.”

No one in the White House or Bush campaign, however, has offered such an explanation. In fact, the Bush camp has shed little light on the mysterious protuberance, turning aside questions with dismissive humor or rising tones of exasperation. The president is “a regular guy,” White House chief of staff Andy Card told Salon before the second debate last week. “Maybe his suit had a little lump in it or something.” Campaign spokeswoman Nicolle Devenish took the same line with the New York Times on Saturday: “It was most likely a rumpling of that portion of his suit jacket, or a wrinkle in the fabric.” But Devenish, the Times dryly noted, “could not say why the ‘rumpling’ was rectangular.” Campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel brushed aside a questioner in a Washington Post chat session by saying, “I think you’ve been spending a little too much time on conspiracy Web sites.”

On Tuesday, in response to repeated questions from Salon, the Bush camp finally issued a flat denial. Campaign spokesman Reed Dickens denied that Bush has ever used an electronic device to aid his public speaking, insisting the president was wearing “nothing during the debates.” When asked about the pictures taken at the Bush ranch, Dickens said the president has never used any devices except for cutting tools and earplugs to protect his ears from the high-decibel chainsaw. Nor has the Secret Service outfitted Bush with a hidden communications device, according to Dickens: “He doesn’t need something like that because the Secret Service is always with him. They ride in the truck in the back. Wherever he goes, they’re with him.”

Despite the official denials, the bulge brouhaha is still ballooning. On Tuesday, the New York Daily News produced a master tailor named Frank Shattuck who, after viewing photos from both debates, confirmed, “There’s definitely something there, in between the shoulder blades. I can’t say what it is, but it’s not hidden very well. They should have come to me. I can hide a pistol under the breast.”

In Orlando, Florida, TV station WFTV polled its viewers, asking, Do you believe the accusations that President George W. Bush was wired during the presidential debate? Of 35,000 respondents, only 42 percent answered no, while 36 percent replied yes, and 22 percent said possibly.

Meanwhile, blogs, chat rooms, bulletin boards — and Salon’s letters pages — continue to buzz with discussion about Bush’s possible electronic enhancement. Reports are flying around the Web about earlier televised events where audio glitches allegedly permitted TV viewers to hear someone directing what Bush to say, including his public remarks at the Sea Island G-8 summit meeting in June, his D-day anniversary speech in France, and a New York speech following 9/11.

One thing is certain: During the final presidential debate in Tempe, Ariz., on Wednesday night, all eyes will be on Bush’s back.

While the White House and the Bush campaign repeatedly blew me off when I tried to elicit some explanation from them for the obvious bulge under the president’s jacket, the Times and Post had better luck.

According to the Times, Bush’s aides first tried to claim that the photo that appeared in Salon and on the Web was “doctored.” When they were forced to admit that the image of the object was clear in the original video feeds of the debate, they changed their story, according to the paper, suggesting that it was nothing but a wrinkle in the president’s jacket. Even the Times itself noted that they failed to explain why the wrinkle had a rectangular shape. The most important piece of information obtained by the Post reporter was a statement by the Bush campaign that the president was not wearing a bullet-proof vest during the debate appearance — one of the most widely offered alternative explanations for the bulge in the jacket.

The Post reported that “Bush’s aides tried to laugh off the controversy, with one official joking about ‘little green men on the grassy knoll.’” Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt told the paper that it was preposterous to say that Bush was getting tips via a hidden receiver, although Schmidt “declined to elaborate or to suggest what could have produced the unusual photo.”

And as Salon’s Tim Grieve reported from the debate in St. Louis on Friday, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card offered a slightly odd sounding explanation: “Maybe his suit had a little lump in it or something. I’ll tell you, he was dressed for the opportunity to talk to the American people, and I am not aware of anything that was extra-ordinary in what he was wearing.”

Such feeble denials are not helping the story go away. Already a new photo from Friday night’s debate is making the rounds on the Internet. This time the photo of the president’s back reveals what appears to be an oblong hump under his jacket. Some people have noted the jacket is not particularly well fitted (the sleeves appear a little long and the back is wrinkled — both odd for a president in one of the key appearances of his presidency). Speculation that Bush is getting secret help via an electronic transmission will probably not be squelched until the president offers to be searched before the third and final debate next Wednesday. Don’t bet on it.

Local draft board volunteers, meanwhile, report that at training sessions last summer, they were unexpectedly asked to recommend people to fill some of the estimated 16 percent of board seats that are vacant nationwide.

Especially for those who were of age to fight in the Vietnam War, it is an ominous flashback of a message. Divisive military actions are ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. News accounts daily detail how the U.S. is stretched too thin there to be effective. And tensions are high with Syria and Iran and on the Korean Peninsula, with some in or close to the Bush White House suggesting that military action may someday be necessary in those spots, too.

Not since the early days of the Reagan administration in 1981 has the Defense Department made a push to fill all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots. Recognizing that even the mention of a draft in the months before an election might be politically explosive, the Pentagon last week was adamant that the drive to staff up the draft boards is not a portent of things to come. There is “no contingency plan” to ask Congress to reinstate the draft, John Winkler, the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary for reserve affairs, told Salon last week.

Increasingly, however, military experts and even some influential members of Congress are suggesting that if Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s prediction of a “long, hard slog” in Iraq and Afghanistan proves accurate, the U.S. may have no choice but to consider a draft to fully staff the nation’s military in a time of global instability.

“The experts are all saying we’re going to have to beef up our presence in Iraq,” says U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, the New York Democrat. “We’ve failed to convince our allies to send troops, we’ve extended deployments so morale is sinking, and the president is saying we can’t cut and run. So what’s left? The draft is a very sensitive subject, but at some point, we’re going to need more troops, and at that point the only way to get them will be a return to the draft.”

Rangel has provoked controversy in the past by insisting that a draft is the only way to fill the nation’s military needs without exploiting young men and women from lower-income families. And, some suggest, by proposing military service from middle- and upper-class men and women, Rangel may be trying to diminish the odds of actually using them in combat. But Rangel is hardly alone in suggesting that the draft might be needed.

The draft, ended by Congress in 1973 as the Indochina War was winding down, was long a target of antiwar activists, and remains highly controversial both in and out of the military. Most military officers understandably prefer an army of volunteers and career soldiers over an army of grudging conscripts; Rumsfeld, too, has long been a staunch advocate of an all-volunteer force.

According to some experts, basic math might compel the Pentagon to reconsider the draft: Of a total U.S. military force of 1.4 million people around the globe (many of them in non-combat support positions and in services like the Air Force and Navy), there are currently about 140,000 active-duty, reserve and National Guard soldiers currently deployed in Iraq — and though Rumsfeld has been an advocate of a lean, nimble military apparatus, history suggests he needs more muscle.

“The closest parallel to the Iraq situation is the British in Northern Ireland, where you also had some people supporting the occupying army and some opposing them, and where the opponents were willing to resort to terror tactics,” says Charles Peña, director of defense studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “There the British needed a ratio of 10 soldiers per 1,000 population to restore order, and at their height, it was 20 soldiers per 1,000 population. If you transfer that to Iraq, it would mean you’d need at least 240,000 troops and maybe as many as 480,000.

“The only reason you aren’t hearing these kinds of numbers discussed by the White House and the Defense Department right now,” Peña adds, “is that you couldn’t come up with them without a return to the draft, and they don’t want to talk about that.”

The Pentagon has already had to double the deployment periods of some units, call up more reserves and extend tours of duty by a year — all highly unpopular moves. Meanwhile, the recent spate of deadly bombings in Baghdad, Falluja and other cities, and increasing attacks on U.S. forces throughout Iraq have forced the U.S. to reconsider its plans to reduce troop deployments.

Those factors — combined with the stress and grind of war itself — clearly have diminished troop morale. And many in the National Guard and reserves never anticipated having to serve in an active war zone, far from their families and jobs, for six months or longer. Stars and Stripes, the Army’s official paper, reports that a poll it conducted found that half the soldiers in Iraq say they are “not likely” or are “very unlikely” to reenlist — a very high figure.

Consider that the total enlistment goal for active Army and Army reserves in the fiscal year ended Oct. 1 was 100,000. If half of the 140,000 troops currently in Iraq were to go home and stay, two-thirds of this year’s recruits would be needed to replace them. And that does not take into consideration military needs at home and around the globe.

“My sense is that there is a lot of nervousness about the enlistment numbers as Iraq drags on,” says Doug Bandow, another military manpower expert at Cato. “We’re still early enough into it that the full impact on recruiting/retention hasn’t been felt.”

The Pentagon, perhaps predictably, sees a more hopeful picture.

Curtis Gilroy, director of accession policy at the Department of Defense, concedes that troop morale is hurting. “There are certainly concerns about future reenlistments. Iraq is not a happy place to be,” Gilroy says. “[But] I think a certain amount of that is just grumbling. What we’re interested in is not what people are saying, but what they do.” So far, he reports, reenlistments and new enlistments remain on target.

Beth Asch, a military manpower expert at the Rand Corp. think tank, agrees that current retention and new enlistment figures are holding up. But she cautions that it may be too soon to know the impact of the tough and open-ended occupation in Iraq. “Short deployments actually boost enlistments and reenlistments,” Asch says. “But studies show longer deployments can definitely have a negative impact.”

While she thinks it is unlikely that the military will have to resort to a draft to meet its needs, Ned Lebow, a military manpower expert and professor of government at Dartmouth College, is less confident.

“The government is in a bit of a box,” Lebow says. “They can hold reservists on active duty longer, and risk antagonizing that whole section of America that has family members who join the Reserves. They can try to pay soldiers more, but it’s not clear that works — and besides, there’s already an enormous budget deficit. They can try to bribe other countries to contribute more troops, which they’re trying to do now, but not with much success. Or they can try Iraqization of the war — though we saw what happened to Vietnamization, and Afghanization of the war in Afghanistan isn’t working, so Iraqization doesn’t seem likely to work either.

“So,” Lebow concludes, “that leaves the draft.”

Purely in mechanical terms, a draft is a complicated and difficult thing to get off the ground. It would require an act of Congress, first, and then the signature of the president. Young men are already required to register with the Selective Service system, but if the bill were signed into law, it would still take half a year or more to get the new troops into the system. Federal law would require the Selective Service to immediately set up a lottery and start sending out induction notices. Local draft boards would have to evaluate them for medical problems, moral objections and other issues like family crises, and hear the appeals of those who are resisting the draft.

Under law, the first batch of new conscripts must be processed and ready for boot camp in 193 days or less after the start of the draft.

But if the mechanics of the draft are difficult, the politics could be lethal for Bush or any other top official who proposed it.

Already, the American public is almost as split today over the war in Iraq as it was about the war in Indochina nearly four decades ago, though not yet as passionately. But a new draft would likely incite even deeper resentment than it did then. In the last war fought by a conscript army, draft deferments for students meant that nobody who was in college had to worry about being called up until after graduation, and until late in that war, it was even possible, by going to grad school (like Vice President Dick Cheney), to avoid getting drafted altogether. In the Vietnam War era, college boys could also duck combat, as George W. Bush did, by joining the National Guard.

But that’s all been changed. In a new draft, college students whose lottery number was selected would only be permitted to finish their current semester; seniors could finish their final year. After that, they’d have to answer the call. Meanwhile, National Guardsmen, as we’ve seen in the current war, are now likely to face overseas combat duty, too.

“If Congress and Bush reinstitute the draft, it would be the ’60s all over again,” predicts Lebow. “It’s hard to imagine Congress passing such a bill, but then, look how many members of Congress just rolled over and played dead on the bill for $87 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan.”

New York Rep. Rangel and Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., introduced companion bills in the two houses of Congress to reactivate the draft last January, at a time when Bush was clearly moving toward an invasion. While both bills remain in the legislative hopper, neither has gone anywhere.

Even among those who think the public might support a draft, like Bandow at the Cato Institute, few believe Bush would dare to propose it before the November 2004 election. “No one would want that fight,” he explains. “It would highlight the cost of an imperial foreign policy, add an incendiary issue to the already emotional protests, and further split the limited-government conservatives.” But despite the Pentagon’s denials, planners there are almost certainly weighing the numbers just as independent military experts are. And that could explain the willingness to tune up the draft machinery.

John Corcoran, an attorney who serves on a draft board in Philadelphia, says he joined the Reserves to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. Today, he says, the Bush administration “is in deep trouble” in Iraq “because they didn’t plan for the occupation.” That doesn’t mean Bush would take the election-year risk of restarting the draft, Corcoran says. “To tell the truth, I don’t think Bush has the balls to call for a draft.

“They give us a training session each year to keep the machinery in place and oiled up in case, God forbid, they ever do reinstitute it,” he explains.

“They don’t want us to have to do it,” agrees Dan Amon, a spokesman for the Selective Service. “But they want us to be ready to do it at the click of a finger.”

He never got to display his sign for President Bush to see, though. As he stood among milling groups of Bush supporters, he was approached by a local police detective, who told him and his sister that because they were protesting, they had to move to a “free speech area,” on orders of the U.S. Secret Service.

“He pointed out a relatively remote baseball diamond that was enclosed in a chain-link fence,” Neel recalled in an interview with Salon. “I could see these people behind the fence, with their faces up against it, and their hands on the wire.” (The ACLU posted photos of the demonstrators and supporters at that event on its Web site.) “It looked more like a concentration camp than a free speech area to me, so I said, ‘I’m not going in there. I thought the whole country was a free speech area.’” The detective asked Neel, 66, to go to the area six or eight times, and when he politely refused, he handcuffed and arrested the retired steelworker on a charge of disorderly conduct. When Neel’s sister argued against his arrest, she was cuffed and hauled off as well. The two spent the president’s visit in a firehouse that was serving as Secret Service and police headquarters for the event.

It appears that the Neels’ experience is not unique. Late last month, on Sept. 23, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in a federal court in Philadelphia against the Secret Service, alleging that the agency, a unit of the new Homeland Security Department charged with protecting the president, vice president and other key government officials, instituted a policy in the months even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks of instructing local police to cordon off protesters from the president and Vice President Dick Cheney. Plaintiffs include the National Organization for Women, ACORN, USA Action and United for Justice, and groups and individuals who have been penned up during presidential visits, or arrested for refusing to go into a “free speech area,” in places ranging from California to New Mexico, Missouri, Connecticut, New Jersey, South Carolina and elsewhere in Pennsylvania.

The ACLU, which began investigating Secret Service practices following Neel’s arrest, has identified 17 separate incidents where protesters were segregated or removed during presidential or vice-presidential events, and Pittsburgh ACLU legal director Witold Walczak says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if this is just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t have the resources to follow Bush and Cheney everywhere they go.” The suit also comes at a time of mounting charges by many civil libertarians on both the left and the right that the Bush Administration and Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Justice Department are trampling on civil liberties.

“There is some history supporting the notion that all presidents dislike people who don’t like them,” says Stefan Presser, head of the ACLU of Philadelphia ACLU chapter and another lead attorney in the suit the Secret Service. “But this approach of fencing protesters in and removing them from view is unprecedented, and it’s gotten worse over the past two years.”

Well, maybe not exactly unprecedented. Pittsburgh’s Walczak notes that during Nixon administration, especially during his second term, police “made quite a practice” of tearing up protest signs and confining protesters, and at least in one case that went to court, the Secret Service admitted being behind the actions. He says there were some isolated instances of interference with protesters during the Reagan administration, and even at President Clinton’s inauguration, an attempt was made (unsuccessfully, thanks to ACLU intervention) to bar anti-abortion protesters from the inaugural march.

In its complaint, the ACLU cites nine cases since March 2001 in which protesters were quarantined. And it alleges that the Secret Service, with the assistance of state and local police, is systematically violating protesters’ First Amendment rights via two methods. “Under the first form,” the suit says, ” the protesters are moved further away from the location of the official and/or the event, allowing people who express views that support the government to remain closer. Under the second form, everyone expressing a view — either critical or supportive of the government — is moved further away, leaving people who merely observe, but publicly express no view, to remain closer.”

In either case, the complaint adds, “protesters are typically segregated into what are commonly referred to as ‘protest zones.’”

In the ACLU’s view, the strategy, besides violating a fundamental right of free speech and assembly, is damaging in two ways. “It insulates the government officials from seeing or hearing the protesters and vice-versa, and it gives to the media and the American public the appearance that there exists less dissent than there really is.”

Certainly, as television cameras follow a presidential motorcade lined with cheering supporters, the image on the tube will be distorted if protesters have all been spirited away around a corner somewhere fenced in for the duration.

Contacted by Salon, the Secret Service denied that it discriminates against protesters. “The Secret Service is message-neutral,” said spokesman John Gill. “We make no distinction on the basis of the purposes or intent of any group or the content of signs.”

Further, Gill insisted that the establishment and oversight of local viewing areas during a presidential or vice presidential visit “is the responsibility of state and local law enforcement.” In practice, it’s apparently not that simple, though. Nor is the Secret Service’s carefully worded denial of responsibility as definitive as it might appear. The “establishment of viewing areas” is indeed a local law enforcement responsibility, but local law enforcement officials say that the Secret Service has in some cases all but ordered them to pen in protesters. And it appears that the Secret Service is making recommendations about how that should be done.

Paul Wolf is an assistant supervisor in charge of operations at the Allegheny County Police Department and was involved in planning for the presidential visit to Pittsburgh last fall. He told Salon that the decision to pen in Bush critics like Neel originated with the Secret Service. “Generally, we don’t put protesters inside enclosures,” he said. “The only time I remember us doing that was a Ku Klux Klan rally, where there was an opposing rally, and we had to put up a fence to separate them.

“What the Secret Service does,” he explained, “is they come in and do a site survey, and say, ‘Here’s a place where the people can be, and we’d like to have any protesters be put in a place that is able to be secured.’ Someone, say our police chief, may have suggested the place, but the request to fence them in comes from the Secret Service. They run the show.”

The statement by Wolf, who ranks just below the Allegheny County police chief, is backed up by the sworn testimony of the detective who arrested Neel. At a hearing in county court, Det. John Ianachione, testifying under oath, said that the Secret Service had instructed local police to herd into the enclosed so-called free-speech area “people that were there making a statement pretty much against the president and his views.” Explaining further, he added: “If they were exhibiting themselves as a protester, they were to go in that area.”

Asked to respond to the accounts of Wolf and Ianachione about the Secret Service’s role in handling of protesters, spokesman Gill said only, “No comment.” Asked pointedly whether Wolf’s account was incorrect, Gill again said, “No comment.”

Wolf also raises the possibility that White House operatives may be behind the moves to isolate and remove protesters from presidential events. He says that while he cannot recall specifically whether they were present with the Secret Service advance team before last year’s presidential Labor Day visit, “I think they are sometimes part of” the planning process. The Secret Service declined to comment on this assertion, saying it would not discuss “security arrangements.” The White House declined to comment on what role the White House staff plays in deciding how protesters at presidential events should be handled, referring all calls to the Secret Service.

Asked specifically whether White House officials have been behind requests to have protesters segregated and removed from the vicinity of presidential events, White House spokesman Allen Abney said, “No comment.” But he added, “The White House staff and the Secret Service work together on a lot of things.” While the Secret Service won’t confirm that it is behind the pattern of tight constraints placed on protesters at public appearances by Bush and Cheney, the ACLU claims that mounting evidence suggests that this is exactly what is going on.

But the ACLU’s lawsuit claims that the Secret Service is responsible for the tight constraints. A number of individual plaintiffs in the suit say that when they were directed into remote “free-speech areas,” or arrested for refusing to go to such sites, they were informed that the local police were acting “on orders from the Secret Service.”

That’s the story Bill Ramsey got when he was arrested last Nov. 4 by police in St. Charles, Mo., while attempting to unfurl an antiwar banner amid a group of pro-Bush people during a presidential visit to a local airport. “The police told us if we wanted to show the banner, we’d have to go to a parking lot four-tenths of a mile away and out of sight of the president’s motorcade,” says Ramsey. When we attempted to put it up anyway, they arrested us, and said they’d been ordered to by the Secret Service.”

But Ramsey says that when his organization, the Instead of War Coalition, has sought to obtain permission to hold its demonstrations during presidential visits, they are told by the Secret Service that such matters are the responsibility of local police. “When we go to the local police, though, they say it’s up to the Secret Service.”

Efforts to obtain a comment from the St. Charles Police Department were unsuccessful.

Andrew Wimmer, another member of the Instead of War Coalition, says he was offered a similar explanation last January in St. Louis when he attempted to unfurl a sign reading “Instead of War, Invest in People” on a street full of Bush supporters. According to Wimmer, St. Louis police officers told him he’d have to leave a street full of Bush supporters and go to a protest area two blocks from the presidential motorcade route because of his protest sign. He recalls that as crowds of people walked down a thoroughfare toward the trading company that President Bush was slated to visit, “local police were pulling out people carrying protest signs and directing them to the protest area.” The 48-year-old IT worker says, “When they got to me, I said no, I’d just as soon stand with the people here. But they said the Secret Service wanted protesters in the protest area.”

In the end, Wimmer, like Ramsey and others who have refused to be caged during protests, was arrested. “They charged me with obstructing passage with my sign, which was a 2.5-foot-by-2-foot lawn sign,” he says, noting that a woman standing nearby with a similar-size sign saying “We love you Mr. President,” was left alone.

“The Secret Service keeps saying that the decision to separate protesters and remove them from view is a local police matter,” says Denise Lieberman, legal director of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri, who is representing both Ramsey and Wimmer in their arrest cases. “But these kinds of things only happen when the Secret Service is involved. We’ve had many visits to St. Louis — by the pope, by candidates, by dignitaries — and it’s only when the president or the vice president come to town that this kind of thing happens.”

“We expect to see a lot more of this heading into a campaign season,” says Chris Hansen, senior staff attorney at the ACLU and one of the lead attorneys handling the suit against the Secret Service.

Presser, the Philadelphia ACLU attorney, traces the tactic to the last Republican National Convention, which nominated Bush for the presidency in August 2000. “The GOP tried to reserve every possible space where a protest group might rally,” Presser recalls. “Part of the party’s contract with the city of Philadelphia for the convention was that they were given an omnibus permit to use ‘all available space’ for the two weeks of the convention. They basically privatized the city to block all legal protest.”

During that convention, the city attempted to require all groups seeking to protest during the convention to apply for permits to get a 15-minute protest time slot, during which they would be allowed to assemble and make their statement in a sunken “protest pit,” remote from the Convention Center. Many groups refused, and the result was a series of conflicts with local police and many arrests, most of which were later tossed out by the courts.

Since then, Presser charges, the Bush administration has continued the strategy of using the Secret Service and cooperative local police departments to keep protesters at bay, and not incidentally, out of easy range of the media. “People used to say that Ronald Reagan’s was the most scripted administration we ever had,” the attorney says, “but this Bush administration has gone way beyond that.” Presser adds that he was told by William Fisher, a senior Philadelphia police captain and head of the department’s Civil Affairs Unit, that the tight restrictions and decision to cordon off protesters during presidential visits have come “at the Secret Service’s direction.” Fisher declined to be interviewed for this article, but when asked, did not deny Presser’s account of their conversation.

Presser and the ACLU don’t question the Secret Service’s responsibility to protect the president and other key government officials. Even plaintiffs in the case agree that the president must be protected. But “putting protesters behind a fence isn’t going to help,” says Neel, the former Pittsburgh steelworker. “I mean, somebody who was going to attempt an assassination wouldn’t be carrying a protest sign. He’d be carrying a sign saying ‘I love George!’”

The ACLU’s Presser agrees. “Just as the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center were careful to blend in and stayed away from mosques,” he says, “anyone who had ill will towards the president could just put on a pro-Bush T-shirt and, under this policy, he’d be allowed to move closer to the president by the Secret Service.”

He adds, “It seems that these ‘security zones’ for protesters have very little to do with the president’s physical security, and a whole lot to do with his political security.” Asked how many times in history an attack had been made on a president or other official under Secret Service protection by someone clearly identifiable as a protester, agency spokesman Gill said, “I’m not going to comment on that.” Interestingly, Gill at no point claimed that protesters posed a special threat to the president or vice president.

Whatever the real motives behind it, the Secret Service policy of fencing off protests and protesters during presidential events may be in for a tough challenge. The judge assigned to the case, John Fullam, is an appointee of former President Lyndon B. Johnson, and back in the late 1980s issued a permanent injunction in Philadelphia — still in effect — that bars both the city of Philadelphia and the National Parks Department (the agency in charge of the city’s many federal monuments), from treating protesters or people wearing protest paraphernalia any differently from other citizens.

The ACLU, which is seeking an injunction barring the Secret Service and local police from treating protesters differently from other spectators at administration events, is hopeful that the court will act “before the presidential campaign gets into full swing next summer,” says Walczak. Meanwhile, Presser says he is optimistic that the lawsuit, simply by being filed, could make things easier for protesters during the coming campaign season.”I suspect that this suit may give the Secret Service and local police some pause in how they treat protests,” he says.