Land of the Free

You know those soldiers who are "over there" fighting for your right to disagree with your government over here? Maybe they don't know about this.

Mounted police charged in to break up an outdoor press conference and demonstration against the Iraq war in Washington on Thursday, arresting three people, organizers and an AFP reporter said.

"The police suppressed the press conference. In the middle of the speeches, they grabbed the podium" erected in a park in front of the White House for the small gathering, Brian Becker, national organizer of the ANSWER anti-war coalition, told AFP.

"Then, mounted police charged the media present to disperse them," Becker said.

The charge caused a peaceful crowd of some 20 journalists and four or five protestors to scatter in terror, an AFP correspondent at the event in Lafayette Square said. No one appeared to have been hurt.

Three people -- Tina Richards, the mother of a marine who did two tours of duty in Iraq; Adam Kokesh, a leader of the Iraq Veterans Against the War group; and lawyer Ian Thompson, who is an organizer for ANSWER in Los Angeles -- were arrested, Becker said.

  Raw Story

I’m not finding any more information on this, so I don’t know what the police were saying about violations of any kind or why they were crashing this protest. My guess is that they weren't in a "Free Speech Zone", but I don't know.

Back in the days during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq when tempers were short and many more people were in favor of the whole insane affair, I was participating in an arborists' forum on the internet that provided a space for political discussion as well. The more rabid among the crowd would, out of one side of their mouth, be telling people like me to get out of the country, move to France, while out of the other side of their mouth (or keyboard, as it were), they would be spouting "patriotic" cliches and insisting that one of the things that is great about this country that we apparently didn't appreciate was that we are free to disagree and hold our traitorous anti-war views, and that they would be willing to fight to the death for our right to speak them. I always politely suggested they run on down to the nearest recruitment center, and as the age restrictions for enlistment kept rising, that particular line of attacking us went silent and the one where we were scum because we weren't supporting the troops who were already fighting for our right to disagree was used instead.