In a bizarre concordance, our Estee Slaughter giveaway at the San Francisco LGBT Pride Festival turned into another encounter with Free Speech Zones.

Read about it.

Monday, May 30, 2006

All good things must end. Turns out free speech at Oakland Airport is not as free as it seemed.

Sasha, Sarah, Josie and I showed up this evening and confidently strode to the free speech table. Josie and I set up the literature, while Sasha and Sarah changed into prisoner outfits. No problem. They came back, I blindfolded them and tied their hands. Before I was finished doing that, a security guard was there asking, “Do you have authorization to do this? Who gave it to you?”

I started to explain that we had called for the permit, but not been able to reach anyone. He called a woman from Landside Operations – which turns out to be a division of the airport – who seemed to take an instant dislike to us, unless she just dislikes everyone. I asked her name and she said “Patricia.” She said, “You have to leave, you don’t have authorization.” I again went into my spiel about how we tried to get a permit, but she was not impressed in the least. “You don’t have it. You have to leave.”

I asked who was in charge, and she said she was. But I had overheard her talking about a manager, so I suggested that I’d like to talk to that person. Before too long a big man with a soft voice showed up, so I went into my rap again. His ID said “Operations Supervisor.” He was nicer and mellower than his colleague, but no more yielding on the issue of the permit.

Sarah and Sasha took off their blindfolds so they could participate in the argument, but I mentioned to them that usually it’s better if one person negotiates while the others go on with the action. They agreed. Josie ignored all of us and kept handing out fliers to the passersby, who incidentally got much more interested as soon as the confrontation started.
I kept insisting that we were there for an hour and a half on Saturday and had no problem and made no problem. The security guard said that was impossible, because as soon as he saw us, he called them. I said I had witnesses, that if he asked around I was sure someone would admit to having seen us. They were unimpressed. They kept demanding to know exactly who at Landside Operations I had talked to, what number I called. I kept reiterating that I and another member of the group had left messages at Landside but they were not returned. They basically all kept calling me a liar, saying that Landside Ops answers their phone 24/7. Which turned out not to be true when they themselves called the number and got no answer.
“But what’s the problem?” I asked. “We are not bothering anyone, just trying to give out literature.”

“The problem is that you don’t have authorization,” the woman snapped. “I told you that six times. Why do I have to keep telling you the same thing?”

I admit, I was starting to feel like I was back in the West Bank, arguing with some border police at a checkpoint.

I asked if they couldn’t give us the authorization right then. They all shook their heads.

“There’s a procedure and you didn’t follow it, so you have to go.”

“But I tried to follow it. How can I follow it if no one will tell me what it is?”

“It’s not enough that you called. You can’t just show up because they didn’t call you back,” the big guy said.

I pointed to the sign warning people that the people at the booth aren’t with the airport. “Clearly, this is an area meant for people to do this,” I objected. “And no one is using it Why can’t we?”

“Because you don’t have authorization,” they chorused.

I heard Darrell, the Ops Sup calling for the police. I went over to him and asked if we couldn’t compromise, that they could give us half an hour more and we would promise to leave then. He refused. Of course, if he had agreed, we would have ended up leaving sooner than we did.

Three cops came and stood a little ways away, doing nothing. The woman kept trying to reach her manager, to no avail. Every couple minutes, one of the civilian authorities would come and tell us we had to leave, and I would try to get them to tell me what was wrong with what we were doing, and the whole thing would start again.
Eventually, Sgt. X from the Oakland Police Department came over, introduced himself, and told me that we were being asked to leave by the Port Authority and if we didn’t, we’d be arrested. I pointed again to the free speech sign and said, “Well the law guarantees us the right to engage in free speech here.”

“Well, I’m not really sure what the law says,” he began. Then he seemed to realize that wasn’t a great tack, so he tried another – “Actually, it only guarantees freedom for religious people.”

No, I insisted, I had read the case and it covers other speech too.

“Well we have people here all the time, people from nonprofits, people expressing political opinions, lots of people.”

“Yes, that’s what we’re doing.”

“But they have a permit,” he said.

“Well we asked some of them and they told us they didn’t, that they just show up.”

“Well you’re being asked to leave, so you have to leave or you’ll be arrested.”

“But the law guarantees us the right.”

“Well, that’s the law, but if you want to enforce that law, you are going to have to get an attorney,” he said suddenly. “You aren’t an attorney and neither am I, so frankly, neither of us knows the first thing about what we are talking about.”

It was pretty hard for me not to burst out laughing at that point. It was a refreshing conversation. He was being so nice and reasonable, and you never hear cops say that they have no idea what the law is.

“How do you know I’m not an attorney?” I asked. He didn’t seem to think that was even worth dignifying with an answer, but hey – why is it so obvious I’m not an attorney? I think I look just as respectable as any of my friends who are attorneys.

We started again discussing about the permit. I explained again that I had tried and tried to get an answer, and not gotten one, and he kept saying, well, that means you don’t have permission.

“But if you can’t get permission, then that’s not free speech.”

“Well that’s something you will have to establish in court.”

“But this has already been litigated.”

“No, another case was litigated. This case, right here, you’ll have to take that one to court.”

“But I don’t want to go to court. I just want to exercise my right to free speech.”

He nearly said, well, you can forget it. Perhaps he sensed that the Landside Operations personnel standing next to us are going to make damn sure we never get the permit. Because suddenly he said, “Well, you have to keep trying, but I have to tell you, when you finally get through to someone, I think you are going to hit the same wall.”
I was astounded. Cops never tell you that the system doesn’t work. I started to argue again, but you’re virtually saying that they are breaking the law.

“Okay, look,” he said. “I am not here to debate with you. This isn’t a discussion, it’s an arrest. You either leave or you’re going to get arrested. I’ll put handcuffs on you and take you out the back – there won’t be any media, and you’ll be driven to Santa Rita and you’ll have to figure out how to get home from there.”

He knew which buttons to push. Santa Rita is a bit less the middle of nowhere than it used to be, back when we were doing actions at Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab and getting taken there, which was before BART went to Dublin. But he was right - I didn’t want to end up out there, BART or no BART. I smiled and said that certainly wouldn’t be necessary, we didn’t want to get arrested.

He said he didn’t want to make an arrest, and unfortunately for Ms. Patricia I could tell that. I said I needed a couple minutes to consult with my friends. He didn’t want to give it, but then he relented and said okay, 2 minutes. I said fine.

We all quickly agreed that we didn’t want to get arrested. But, Sgt. X had offered to write his phone number down for me, and to call and try to find out how we apply for the permit. So I went to ask him to do that, and to ask some more questions about where we are allowed to stand outside. He kept making the analogy of the police department, which people are allowed to demonstrate outside of, but not inside.

“This is private property,” he said. “It’s private property that is available for public use.”

“Really? I thought it was owned by the City.”

“If it were, they wouldn’t charge the police department rent to be here.”

“You’re paying rent to be here?”

He nodded. Maybe that is why he seemed more sympathetic to us than Landside Operations or the Port, which at one point he called “this weird other kind of thing,” as opposed to a shopping mall, which is private, or a police department, which is public.

By the time I had gotten all this information, and gathered up our stuff, we had been there more than the half hour I had asked for, and Josie had given out every flier we had left anyway. Sasha took off her jumpsuit and turned into a guard, leading the blindfolded Sarah through the terminal, while Josie and I followed with all the stuff, and the airport people – Darrell and Patricia – following us. When I would see people staring, I would go and hand them little information cards. Darrell was really upset about that, and I heard him saying into his radio, “They already got an extra half hour with all their arguing.”

I went to hand someone a card and all the cards flew out of my hands, so I had to stop and gather them up, which infuriated him. He was sure I had done it on purpose, which I really hadn’t. He started talking into his radio about “They want to get arrested,” so I thought I would not try to hand out any more, but when I saw people gaping at Sasha and Sarah, I just couldn’t help it. I gave out most of the cards we had on the way to the parking lot. When we finally arrived at the crosswalk that takes you to the lot, Darrell and Patricia seemed to decide we were gone enough, and they stood across the street and watched us make our way to where our car was.

The others were almost doubled over laughing. They hadn't seen me play the stalling game before. I am so used to doing it, I don't even think of it as any particular skill, but Sasha mentioned, "A lot of people assume that when a police officer tells you to do something, you have to do it right away."

I never made that assumption. Of course, I'm in the class of people who can more easily get away with not doing it, but most of the people who have that privilege are the least likely to try to use it. It's another example of what these airport actions are all about, to remind people to question what they are told, and what they believe about what they are told and the people who are telling them.

I don’t know how good our chances of getting a permit are now, but I’m sure gonna find out.

I stood still, or tried to, for an hour and a half today, a black nylon sheath covering my body and a black plastic bag over my head (don’t worry, there were some small airholes). Rebecca stood next to me, in an orange jump suit, a blindfold covering her eyes and duct tape binding her wrists.

We could hear travelers, hurrying by us pulling their carry-on luggage, stop short. “It’s not real,” some reassured their children while others asked each other “Is it real?” Carwil would respond, “15,000 Iraqis are held in prison without trial. Help us stop torture in Iraq and Guantanamo.”

“Thank you,” I heard quite a few people say.

“Stop torture? Oh, okay.”

Robert Fisk calls talking about the Israel lobby “Breaking The Last Taboo” (http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk04272006.html), but what we were doing comes much closer to deserving the phrase – Exercising free speech at the airport.

As we were planning this small outreach action, some members of our normally fearless bunch expressed trepidation about participating. They thought it was likely we would be arrested, interrogated, and/or physically attacked for talking about indefinite detention and torture in an airport. In fact, a virtual parade of security and police, some with dogs, walked past us without breaking stride.

As I finally took off my sweat-drenched hood, I saw a uniformed man hurrying by. “I can’t take that,” he said in response to Carwil’s outstretched flier; “I’m an airport employee.”

“You would not be the first,” Carwil said. In fact, he said, airport screeners were among the most enthusiastic consumers of our literature.

One of the amazing things about U.S.Americans is how easily we are convinced we can’t do things. Several people who approached our table said, “I don’t think we could do this in the airport in Miami.” “We couldn't get away with this in Seattle.” Carwil conducted some impromptu mini-workshops on the origins of the “free speech zones” in our nation’s airports.

A website for would-be religious proselytizers explains that “In 1992, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns and operates the Kennedy, La Guardia, and Newark airports, adopted regulations prohibiting persons or groups from soliciting money or distributing literature within terminals. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness challenged the Port Authority's regulations on the grounds that the regulations deprived the Society's members of their free speech rights under the First Amendment. The trial court ruled in favor of the Society, holding that the airports were public forums and that the regulations were too broad. The Second Circuit of Appeals concluded that the airports were not public forums and that the ban on solicitations was reasonable. The Court of Appeals, however, affirmed the trial court's ruling that the ban on distributing literature violated the First Amendment.”

The result of all these back and forth rulings in the landmark case, International Society for Krishna Consciousness v. Lee, 505 U.S. 672, 830 (1992), is that every airport in the country has to provide some form of “free speech area,” or else the entire place will be fair game for flower-sellers and prisoner-impersonators.

Free speech in the airport, as everywhere else in our beloved democracy, can be regulated as to “time, place and manner.” Some airports take that regulation to the nth extreme. San Francisco International (SFO) publishes several pages of restrictions – you have to apply for a permit and display it on your body at all times, no more than two people can engage in free speech in the same booth at the same time (apparently, they believe that some people might think an orgy is a free speech activity), you have to sign in, etc. etc. Oakland takes a more laid-back approach to this, as to many (though certainly not all) things. Carwil and I both called to find out if we needed a permit, and both of us were referred by a very nice young woman to someone or something called “Landside Operations,” where we left messages that were not returned. The nice young woman mentioned in her message to me that the permit rules were being rewritten “as we speak,” which I of course found amusing since we were not actually speaking.

For right now, the rules seem to consist of this – you show up, and you do what you want, as long as you are doing it in the vicinity of the nice plastic table they generously provide under the sign proclaiming, “The literature on this table does not necessarily express the views of the airport,” or something like that. Actually we don’t know if you have to do your thing under that sign, because we didn’t try it anywhere else. We considered it, but though we hate to be so law-abiding, the table is so nicely placed on the busy corridor that everyone who flying on any airline other than Southwest has to go through, whether they are coming or going, that to do our thing somewhere else would seem like cutting off our nose to spite our face.

I am not making light of the many harrowing tales since 9/11 of racial profiling at airports, people being kicked off planes for the books they are reading, five-year-olds being strip searched. (Though Rebecca did mention that recently she was carrying on something she had bought at a store called Bombay. The name of the store was prominently printed on the box and it wrapped around, so the front of the box said, “BOMB.” And she is here to tell the tale.) I personally know people who have been detained and told they are not allowed to fly, or taken off and interrogated when they returned from pleasure trips to Europe. But I also know many people who believe they cannot wear a t-shirt or a button in an airport.

One goal of this outreach/action was to break through this self-censorship. As Carwil put it, airports are the places where the culture of fear that has swept the country in the last years is most visible. By showing that even there, you do have the right to speak out against the abuses our government is perpetrating, we hope to embolden people, when they get back to Miami or Seattle, Chicago or New Mexico, to speak and act with a little more confidence.

Our right to self-expression is not the only thing citizens of our fine country are clueless about. Carwil reported that several people asked, “Are they supposed to be Americans being tortured in Iraq?” [In response I mentioned that a study had shown that more Americans believe the Palestinians are occupying Israeli land than vice versa. He hadn’t heard about it, so I went to look it up. Actually, it turns out that in that case, it’s the Brits that are confused – a study of Britons who get their news from TV found that 71% had no idea who the occupier was, 11% believed it was the Palestinians and 9% the Israelis. (Quoted in “Ignorance Is Strength,” http://www.medialens.org/alerts/02/020418_de_MiddleEast_Glasgow.html) I could not find any actual measure of that particular awareness here in the States (I found several things which alluded to the misconception, but I suspect they were making the same mistake I did), but I doubt that if there were one, it would come out any better.]

We only got two negative comments – one guy threw the literature back at Carwil, and near the end, I sensed some people stop and stare, and then the man said, “Attention seekers.”

Right. I want attention, so I go to Oakland airport and stand around with a bag on my head?