In your recent article, “Tongue-tied,” your dismay over the use of free speech cages at the Democratic Convention is quite justified. However, I’d like to point out that these mechanisms to hide dissent from the cameras have been employed to excess throughout Bush-Cheney’s cross-country campaign efforts. A simple search for “free speech zones” at any search engine will turn up hundreds of incidents where peaceful dissent was not just corraled into far-removed protest pens, but was met with arrests for even questioning the use of such pens in our alleged free speech society.

Please do more research to discover how local law enforcement all across the country are arresting opposition voices and explaining their orders are coming from the Secret Service, who in turn deny any knowledge of such activity. Everyone, including the Secret Service, knows these activities are blatant violations of our rights to peaceful protest, but by passing the buck they manage to skirt all responsibility for it.

There is no need to repeal the First Amendment to control public dissent because the administration and Secret Service have perfected their methods to achieve the same results by claiming law enforcement authorities acted on their own, while law enforcement officials claim they were acting on orders from the Secret Service.

Please research this issue to discover how widespread this suppression of the people has become in a post-9/11 world.

In The Fray Contributor