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BILL OF WRONGS -- THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH'S ASSAULT ON AMERICA'S FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS

Chapter 1:  INDEPENDENCE DAY

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. -- First Amendment to the United States Constitution

People should watch what they say. -- White House spokesman ARI FLEISCHER, October 2001

We were wearing T-shirts, exercising our free-speech rights in the public square. And we were arrested? If you cede this, there's nothing left. -- University of Houston law student JEFF RANK, February 2007

It's July 4, 2004.

The temperature is in the mid-nineties, the humidity is high, the crowd on the West Virginia capitol grounds numbers three, or four, or six thousand, depending on the media source. George W. Bush is in a tight race with John Kerry. And a growing number of voters have already gone south on Bush's war in Iraq.

After Representative Shelley Moore Capito introduces the president, he thanks her for serving as his state campaign chair. Then takes ten more minutes to make it through the acknowledgments and howdies in his twenty-five-minute speech. He thanks the Boy Scouts. And the Girl Scouts. He thanks Charleston's Republican mayor, Danny Jones. He thanks country and western singer Aaron Tippin. He thanks the minister of Bible Center megachurch, whose service he missed that morning because of a mechanical problem on Air Force One. He thanks no one in particular for the "coal found in West Virginia." He thanks the Almighty a few times. He even thanks the West Virginia Coal Association president, whom he describes as "my friend," for getting the coal out of the ground and into the nation's power plants. He doesn't thank the coal miners, but the president is doubled over with gratitude.

The party dignitaries, Bush's state campaign chair, the planned stop at a big-box evangelical church, the Bush T-shirts worn by enthusiastic supporters, all suggest that the Fourth of July visit to Charleston is a campaign event.

It's not. It's an official visit of the president of the United States, with taxpayers picking up the tab for Air Force One, the president's security detail, and the weeks of work by the White House Advance Team. But political strategist Karl Rove is in charge, the Iraq war in question, and John Kerry slightly ahead in national polls. So the president delivers his well-rehearsed keep-fear-alive campaign stem-winder, written to drive home the message he hopes will close the deal in November: The terrorists who were plotting to attack us again are hard on the run in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Our immediate task in battlefronts like Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere is to capture or kill the terrorists. That's our immediate task. We made a decision. You see. We will engage these enemies in these countries around the world so we do not have to face them at home. (Applause) After the attacks of September the eleventh, 2001, the nation resolved to fight terrorists where they dwell. (Applause) You can't talk sense to them. You can't negotiate with them. You cannot hope for the best with these people. We must be relentless and determined to do our duty. (Applause)

But it's the Fourth of July, and just as a good country and western song requires the mention of Mama, trains, trucks, prison, and gettin' drunk, there are certain de rigueur requirements of a good Fourth of July speech. Bush touched on most of them: the Founders, George Washington ("I call him George W."), God, the Troops, abstractions like Democracy and Freedom.

On this Fourth of July, we confirm our love of freedom, the freedom for people to speak their minds, the freedom of people to worship as they so choose. (Applause) Free thought, free expression, that's what we believe. But we also understand that that freedom is not America's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty God's gift to each man and woman in this world. (Applause) And by serving that ideal, by never forgetting the values and the principles that have made this country so strong 228 years after our country's founding, we will bring hope to others and at the same time make America more secure. (Applause)

Nicole Rank had moved from Bush's home state to Charleston, West Virginia, to work on a FEMA flood control project. When agency employees were offered tickets to the president's Fourth of July event, she filled out an online application for herself and her husband, Jeff, who had followed her from their home in Corpus Christi. Neither of them was a George W. Bush supporter. But that question didn't appear on the form the Secret Service required of anyone attending the official presidential visit. Both, in fact, were opponents of the war in Iraq. Both received tickets to the event.

The Ranks showed up for the president's visit to the capitol, made their way through the security checkpoint and to a place near where Bush was to speak. Then they took off their shirts to uncover homemade T-shirts with the international symbol over the word "Bush."

A bold gesture in a rabidly pro-Bush crowd.

Team Bush believes it only takes a few antiwar protesters to muck up a pro-war speech. A sixteen-year-old volunteer spotted the Ranks and ran to warn Tom Hamm that two people were creating a problem. Thomas Donald Hamm was an unemployed thirty-year-old event volunteer who had worked on Shelley Moore Capito's campaign and in her congressional office. He's young, but he's decisive. He surveyed the situation and summarily suspended the First Amendment, telling the couple the T-shirts had to go or they had to leave.

When Jeff Rank told Hamm he was breaking no law and refused to take off his shirt, Hamm called for backup: Aaron Spork, who actually was working in Capito's D.C. office. Together they made it clear: no First Amendment protections on the Fourth of July in Charleston, West Virginia. Hamm called a capitol police officer and told him the Ranks' tickets were revoked.

At which point, the revoking got under way.

Nicole Rank was nimble enough to whip out her disposable camera and photograph everyone who confronted her. Then the Ranks sat on the ground, to indicate they were not leaving. At approximately 11:00 A.M. they were handcuffed and led from the capitol grounds by the capitol police officer who first responded and a state trooper and protective services officer who showed up as an "arrest team." Reporters who tried to speak to them were waved off by Hamm, who told them if they followed the couple out, they would not be allowed back in and would miss the president's speech.

As Jeff Rank recalled, the band on the platform played "America the Beautiful" as the Ranks were frog-marched to the police van that would take them to the Charleston municipal jail.

President Bush started speaking at exactly 12:57. By the time he got to the constitutional rights properly enshrined in the First Amendment -- "our love of freedom, the freedom for people to speak their minds.... Free thought, free expression, that's what we believe" -- Jeff and Nicole Rank already had their handcuffs removed and were sitting in separate cells in Charleston's police department building. "It was chickenshit," said Nitro, West Virginia, lawyer Harvey Peyton. "I mean these young kids, these twenty-somethings, just told the officers, 'Their tickets are revoked, get them off the capitol grounds.'"

***

It was one of several varieties of chickenshit expressly prohibited by the First Amendment, even if it took the Congress and the courts a while to make that prohibition clear. Law professor Geoffrey Stone begins his book Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime with a description of the first fight over the First Amendment. It occurred less than ten years after the Bill of Rights was ratified, during what Stone refers to as the "half war" with France, which almost happened in the 1790s after the American government stiffed the French. France had stepped in and salvaged the American Revolution. When the U.S. government refused to support the French in their war against Britain, the government in Paris declared all U.S. sailors pirates and began boarding U.S. ships.

President John Adams responded by putting the nation on war footing, adding eighteen new divisions to the Anny, and calling George Washington back from Mount Vernon to take command. Adams's Federalist majority in Congress singled out immigrants, suspending jury trials and allowing indefiuite detention of foreigoers when the nation was at war. Then they turned their attention to American citizens, passing a sedition act that provided for a two-year sentence and $2,000 fine for anyone who would "write, print, utter, or publish" scandalous, untrue, or malicious comments against either house of Congress or the president.

Vermont congressman Matthew Lyon was the first person tried under the Sedition Act. He said that under President Adams "every consideration of the public law [was] swallowed up in a continual grasp for power, in an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and selfish avarice."

Lyon got no jail time for that when he said it. But he made the mistake of quoting himself after Adams signed the Sedition Act into law. He was prosecuted by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, fined $1,000 plus $60.96 in court costs, and jailed four months in conditions we today associate with Donald Rumsfeld's extraordinary rendition. Lyon described a damp, freezing cell, which included a "necessary" with the stench "equal to the Philadelphia docks in the month of August."

Since Matthew Lyon was locked up in 1798, the notion that a citizen can be arrested for offending the president has given way to free-speech protections that are almost as sacrosanct as high school football in Texas. James Madison declared the Sedition Act unconstitutional because it returned American citizens to the status of subjects -- reinstating the "exploded doctrine that 'the administrators of the Government are the masters, and not the servants, of the people.'"

Law professor Leonard Levy -- who seems to do little else but think and write about the Constitution -- writes that seditious speech is an alien concept to American democracy. It only exists "where people are subjects rather than sovereigns and their criticism implies contempt of their master."

***

It's a bold, simple concept, spelled out in the First Amendment and shaped by two centuries of criminal and civil jurisprudence: George III was a master. George W. is a servant. On the 228th birthday of the United States, that principle got turned on its head in Charleston. In a scene that might have been lifted from a Mayberry R.F.D. script, an arrest team of officers from three jurisdictions -- the city, capitol, and state -- stood in earshot of the couple sitting in the jail cells, arguing over who was expected to charge them. And with what offense. It was the Charleston city jail, so the city of Charleston settled on criminal trespass. The real charge was the same one Matthew Lyon got popped for in 1798: seditious speech. The couple locked up in the Charleston jail were there because they insulted the president.

The Ranks were issued citations and released on their own recognizance -- with instructions to go nowhere near the capitol grounds, where President Bush was speaking. It was a little late. By the time they got back to the hotel, the local TV news was already running a clip of the president's speech -- the passage where he described "free thought, free expression." Nicole and Jeff Rank had been dragged from the capitol grounds in handcuffs, jailed, booked, released, and, as they walked from the jail to their hotel, recognized by people on the streets who had seen them on the TV news. "We were sitting in a hotel room rubbing our wrists and he's talking about freedom of expression," said Jeff Rank. "Is he kidding?"

It would get worse.

Monday, July 5, was a holiday for federal workers. On Tuesday morning, Nicole Rank was summoned from a 9:30 meeting by her supervisor's administrative assistant. FEMA's federal coordinating officer and his legal counsel were waiting for her. "They told me that, because of my actions, I had compromised FEMA's mission in West Virginia," she said. They reassured her that she wasn't fired, then ordered her to clean out her desk, turn in her rental car, and check out of the hotel where she was living on a FEMA per diem account. She would be responsible for any hotel expense incurred after July 6.

It felt like fired.

That night the Ranks left West Virginia and drove to Philadelphia, where Nicole had worked in FEMA's offices before being assigned to disaster relief in West Virginia. They spent a couple of days in a Motel 6, cleaning out their storage unit and loading what would fit in their Jeep station wagon -- along with their dog and cat. Then they started the three- day drive back home to Texas. Before they drove too far south, they stopped in Virginia to phone the court clerk in Charleston. Their citation specified that fines could be mailed in if the infraction did not involve domestic violence or DUI. The clerk told Jeff Rank they would have to make a court appearance in two weeks: "She said, 'I don't care what the ticket says, you have to come in.'"

On the drive from Roanoke, Virginia, to Charleston, West Virginia, Jeff and Nicole Rank decided they had been pushed too far. "We were wearing T-shirts," Jeff said in an interview in the couple's Houston apartment. "Exercising our freedom of speech in a public square.... And they were treating us like criminals."

"Our costs were mounting, we had to stay in Charleston until the fifteenth, so I picked up the phone and called the ACLU," said Nicole. ACLU staff attorney Terri Baur began to explain that there was a two-to three-week process that began with submitting a written request for ACLU representation. Then something clicked. "She said, 'Are you Nicole Rank? We've been looking everywhere for you.'"

Baur said that the West Virginia board members were at a meeting in San Francisco and upon their return would almost certainly vote to represent the Ranks. She even found the couple a cabin to stay in while they awaited trial. Out of work, money, and luck, Nicole Rank had made the right phone call.

Harvey Peyton was eager to take the case. The feds had trashed the Ranks' First Amendment rights and done it in a cowardly way, using local law enforcement as the heavies. "One of them is a capitol policeman," Peyton said. "One of them is a conservation officer. Two are Charleston policemen. And one is a West Virginia state trooper. They had no instruction, no training, no training about how to handle a protest.... So they give them to the Charleston Police Department, who don't know what to do with them because they didn't break the law."

Peyton looked at the municipal code and concluded that the trespassing charge wouldn't stick. "This wasn't going to be the most difficult case I'd ever tried. It was like trespassing in the public library," he said.

The Ranks' trial was scheduled for 7:00 A.M. on July 15 in municipal court.

"I walked in the city courthouse that day," Peyton said. "They got a real smart mayor in Charleston, West Virginia. His name is Danny Jones. Now, he's a Republican, but he's not a Bush Republican. His knuckles don't drag the ground. And I'm thinking, Well, the mayor's here. It's seven o'clock in the morning. It's municipal court. And the mayor's  here?"

So was the press. To get into a courthouse filled with DUI defendants, Jeff and Nicole Rank had to do a perp walk through a gauntlet of TV cameras and radio and newspaper reporters. "I felt like 0.J.," Jeff said. "And all we had done was exercise our First Amendment right of free speech."

As soon as Peyton entered the courtroom, the assistant city attorney walked over and said the city would move to drop the charges. "The mayor told them to dismiss it," Peyton said. "Then he went next Monday to the city council and had the council pass a motion apologizing to the Ranks. It took the sting out of it."

But not enough.

Jeff Rank is short and stocky. His close-cropped brown beard and gold metal-frame glasses tend to focus an intensity that becomes more evident when he leans forward to listen or talk. Nicole is quieter and more pensive, her longer Byzantine icon face framed by dark hair. "She's wicked smart," says Jeff, as he describes his wife passing the written exam and making it through the round of interviews that qualified her for a position as a Foreign Service officer -- only to be told that she failed her security clearance because she had been arrested in Charleston. (He admits he failed the written test, which they took together.)

Two and a half years after their arrest on "seditious speech" charges, they moved on. To a small apartment ten miles from downtown Houston, crammed full of bookshelves and fish tanks. Nicole's employer, FEMA, had brought her back on in Charleston. But both she and Jeff had other plans. Nicole enrolled in a master's program in social work at the University of Houston; Jeff enrolled in the University of Houston law school; Abbie, their seven-month-old daughter, enrolled in the university day-care program.

They are saving frequent flyer miles to return to Charleston, where they have filed snit against Gregory Jenkins, the deputy director of the White House Office of Presidential Advance; Secret Service director W. Ralph Basham; and John Does 1 through 4, who have since been identified because Nicole photographed everyone involved in their arrest.

From his New York office, ACLU senior attorney Chris Hansen describes what seems like a perfect fact situation: "It was an official presidential visit. It was open to the public. Our clients got their tickets in the way they were supposed to get their tickets. It's very clear that they were excluded because of the content of the message on their T-shirts."

Hansen intends to "establish responsibility." The federal government plays a shell game and is, he says, "coy about admitting that it excludes people who disagree with them, particularly from official presidential visits."

Conforming to the cowardly behavior Harvey Peyton describes, the feds claimed qualified immunity and asked the judge to dismiss the charges against them. To continue the pretrial process of discovery and keep the case alive, the Ranks had to add local police officers as defendants. "They [the federal officials] were telling them to get these people out of here," said Peyton. "And the officers had no bones about it. They were told the tickets had been revoked and the Ranks had to leave." He describes the local cops as "victims" of federal officials who refuse to stand up and defend their policy.

Jeff Rank will be out of law school before the case is decided and Nicole perhaps enrolled in one of the "dream law schools" she's applied to. Neither of the two seems inclined to back away from the lawsuit styled Jeffrey Rank and Nicole Rank v. Gregory J. Jenkins, Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States and Director of the White House Office of Presidential Advance, et al.

***

We aren't required to earn the rights defined in the first ten amendments of America's Constitution. Like God's grace, they are unconditionally conferred on all of us. W. Bush, in fact, believes they are God's grace. He often says so. He did while Nicole and Jeff Rank were being mugged and fingerprinted in the Charleston jail and he was telling an Independence Day crowd at the West Virginia capitol that the brand of democracy we enjoy in the United States is God's gift to every man and woman in every country. Even if we have to give Divine Providence a little goose once in a while -- in places like Iraq.

If free-speech rights were something we had to earn, Sue Niederer comes as close as any of us to earning them. Her twenty-four-year-old son, Seth Dvorin, was a brand-new first lieutenant in the Army, home on leave from Iraq in January 2004. While Seth and his new bride, Kelly, were staying with her, Niederer overheard her son arguing with his commander at Fort Drum. Her soft-spoken boy was shouting into the phone in a voice she had never heard, increasing in volume, repeating the same phrases:

"I need GPS security systems. I need computers. My men need these or they're going to be dead!"

Less than a month later, her son was dead. Killed by an improvised explosive device near Iskanderiya -- a Sunni town south of Baghdad that British journalist Robert Fisk describes as "throat-cutting country where insurgents man their own checkpoints beside the palm groves and canals."

On a cold Sunday morning three years after her son died in Iraq, Sue Niederer sits in a small office in a large house in New Jersey. She's a short, stout woman, with close-cropped, styled gray hair, a natural scowl, and a working-class Jersey congeniality. She says Seth enlisted after he graduated from Rutgers and was sent "on a suicide mission." After he was told by recruiters that his rank and specialty would keep him out of combat, her son was ordered to Iraq the day he arrived at Fort Drum. His commanding officer told him "they need officers in Iraq," she says.

"They say he was a hero. But they literally sent my son on a suicide mission," says Niederer. "He was murdered by this administration."

Sue Niederer seems beyond tears.

She opposed the war and regretted her son's decision to enlist. After he was killed, she converted her grief into her own small antiwar campaign, speaking and marching at protests, picketing and pamphleting outside the White House, camping and protesting near the entrance to the president's ranch in Texas.

She's vigilant. When someone from the Bush administration shows up anywhere near Trenton, New Brunswick, or Princeton, Sue Niederer is waiting to greet him. Colin Powell can confirm that.

So Niederer was surprised to get on the list for Laura Bush's mid-September 2004 campaign visit to Hamilton. She wanted to attend but knew that access to the event was controlled by the local Republican Party. She was a high- decibel critic of Bush's war in Iraq. She had just spoken at a protest in front of Republican congressman Chris Smith's district office in Hamilton. And members of Smith's staff were at the Republican Party office, inputting the information the Secret Service required of anyone attending the first lady's event.

It was a tough ticket.

There was a separate and perfectly valid reason to deny Sue Niederer admission to Laura Bush's New Jersey speech, which had nothing to do with the Bushies' peculiar interpretation of the First Amendment. Three months after her son died in Iraq, a reporter from CounterPunch had asked Niederer if she was aware of the growing body of evidence that the war was waged on misinformation. She was. In a response she says was motivated by anger and grief, Sue Niederer tore into George W. Bush: "I wanted to rip the president's head off. Curse him, yell at him, call him a self-righteous bastard, shoot him in the groined area. Let him suffer."

Not the sort of thing one says to a reporter.

Yet a woman from Congressman Smith's district office said "Hi, Sue," as one of the Mercer County Republicans volunteers handed Niederer a ticket to see the First Lady in Hamilton -- a township fifteen minutes from Niederer's Pennington, New Jersey, home. And nine miles downriver from the stretch of the Delaware George Washington crossed on Christmas Day 1776.

Once inside the Colonial Fire Hall in Hamilton, Niederer put on the desert fatigue that Seth had given her when he left for Iraq months earlier and removed a long-sleeved shirt to reveal a T-shirt bearing a photographic image of her son under bold block lettering that read:

PRESIDENT BUSH: YOU KILLED MY SON.

No one paid much attention, though a man standing nearby said his son had served in Seth's unit in Iraq. When Laura Bush began speaking about the war, Niederer stood up and shouted: "Why aren't your children serving?" She was swarmed by young volunteers carrying placards, who had instructions to surround any protester, hold up their signs, and chant: "Four more years! Four more years!"

The commotion caught the attention of the first lady's security detail.

Laura Bush might have seized that moment. Confronted by a grieving mother who had lost her son a few months earlier, she might have paused and asked Sue Niederer to meet with her in private after the event concluded. A mother -- "a mom," as George W. says -- of twin daughters two years younger than Seth Dvorin was when his life ended in Iraq might empathize.

For a moment Niederer thought that might happen. She had overestimated the compassion and agility of the first lady. "Her jaw dropped and her face froze when I spoke," Niederer said.

"Then I saw the Secret Service agents," she went on. "They came over and said, 'We want you out of here, you're trespassing.''' Niederer held up her ticket to the event and said she wanted to speak to the reporters who had gathered around her.

Agents pushed her to the exit and turned her over to local police. "They threw her in the paddy wagon like a piece of luggage," said her husband, Greg, who sat quietly for most of the interview. Niederer was handcuffed and driven to a parking lot at the police station, where she was held for what she believes was forty-five minutes. She was then led into the jail and handcuffed to a wall, while the local police puzzled over charges that would fit the crime.

"I asked them, 'What are you charging me with?'" she said. "They said, 'Truthfully, we don't know, but right now we're charging you with defiant trespassing and disrupting a public event.'"

At the firehouse, Secret Service agents had pushed Niederer past reporters and into a police van. After she was arraigned and returned to her cell to be released, the Hamilton police offered her a better deal. She could quietly depart through the back door of the station. Or, the officer on the jail desk told her, she could walk out through the front door -- "where all the media is."

"You want to go out the front door, don't you?" he asked.

With a wink and a nod, a New Jersey cop restored the frees-peech rights the U.S. Secret Service had denied Sue Niederer. She held an impromptu press conference. But Elvis had left the building. Laura Bush had concluded her remarks and was off to the airport.

Sue Niederer was ordered to appear in court one month after her arrest. Two weeks later she learned by reading The Times of Trenton that all charges against her were dropped. (In municipal court documents, we found that they were dropped the day after her arrest.)

After Niederer publicly offended the first lady, the FBI got around to investigating the comments she had made about the president months earlier. Niederer learned about that investigation by reading The Times of Trenton, though she suspected something was up because cars she'd never before seen were regularly parking in her cul-de-sac. Nothing came of the investigation. Either "shoot him in the groined area" didn't rise to the level of a threat against the president, or the prosecution of a grieving mother was too unseemly.

Niederer wanted to file suit. The New Jersey ACLU offered to represent her. But she feared a lawsuit would either end her marriage or damage her husband's relationship with his family.

In January, three years after her son spent his last few nights in his family home, Sue Niederer was preparing for a peace march in Washington at the end of the month.

"I protest," she said. "It's what I do."

***

In February 2004, the quiet of the Alpine valley that provided the setting for Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain was shattered by the growl of a squadron of Apache and Blackhawk attack helicopters escorting one larger Sikorsky assault helicopter. As the Sikorsky landed and the other aircraft circled overhead, vans with dark tinted windows appeared, and armed agents bearing American flag lapel pins and telltale earpieces poured out of the vehicles, some leading dogs on leashes. What residents of the tranquil Swiss town might have believed was an armed military assault was instead the arrival of Vice President Dick Cheney and his foreign travel security detachment.

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton; U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan; French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin; U.S. commerce secretary Don Evans; and even Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, who had already survived two assassination attempts, had all arrived with little public notice.

Cheney's arrival was different.

"It was an embarrassment," said a State Department official who witnessed Cheney landing. "It shattered the quiet of a little valley. His obsession with security is real. National security and personal security, too. He was the only head of state [sic] who needed Blackhawk helicopters to escort him to the G8 meeting. It was Switzerland, for God's sake."

In the summer of 2006, Steve Howards walked into Dick Cheney's security obsession. Howards is a Denver environmental consultant. In June 2006 his two sons were attending a piano camp in Beaver Creek Village, a ski lodge and mountain resort 120 miles west of Denver. Like 66 percent of Americans at that particular moment, Steve Howards opposed the war in Iraq. And standing in Beaver Creek Village plaza on June 7 was the man most responsible for planning, starting, and prosecuting the war. Flanked by about twenty Secret Service agents, Dick Cheney was working a small crowd. Howards walked up to the vice president and said: "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible." Then Howards and his ten-year-old son walked away. "All of this happened in less than fifty seconds," Howards said.

Ten minutes later, as Howards and his younger son were walking back to the condo where they were staying, Secret Service agent Virgil "Gus" Reichle stepped in front of him and asked if he had assaulted the vice president. When Howards said no, the agent asked him if he had touched the vice president.

Howards recounted, "He said, 'If you touched the vice president, that's tantamount to assaulting the vice president.'

"I said, 'I told Mr. Cheney how I feel about his Iraq policy. If he doesn't want to hear public criticism, you should help him avoid contact with the public.'"

As Reichle questioned him, Howards heard agents who had gathered around asking each other if anyone had witnessed him touching the vice president. Then Reichle dispatched an agent into the crowd to look for someone who might have seen Steve Howards touch the vice president. The agent returned with a man who said he had.

"After he tried to find an agent who would back up what he thought happened, he had to go into the crowd to find a witness," Howards said. "I mean, it was immediately evident that this was nothing but harassment and a very contrived effort to fabricate a case of assault."

Agent Reichle informed Howards that he was going to be charged with assaulting the vice president and placed under arrest.

As Howards was being searched and handcuffed, his son panicked and ran to his mother in the condo. "I felt like I was in Tiananmen Square," Howards said. "It was so ironic. I was in a mall in a ski resort and I was being handcuffed and taken away for speaking to the vice president."

Howards was turned over to local deputies and driven to the Eagle County jail, which had once housed celebrity defendant Kobe Bryant. While he was in custody, Reichle told Howards he was talking to the DA to make sure that assault charges were filed. Howards was charged with harassment, though Reichle pulled Howards's wife aside in the waiting area to tell her he intended to get the charges bumped up to assault.

Six weeks later, a Secret Service agent showed up at Howards's Denver office while he was out, flashed his badge to a lawyer who worked there, but refused to leave a name or phone number. "It's Gestapo-ish," Howards said. "It's harassment. When people come to your place of work, refusing to even leave their name so you can call them back."

Howards and his wife, Deborah, worried that the government would increase the charges. In late September, the Eagle County DA informed Steve Howards that all charges against him were dismissed.

"That's what really ticked me off. When they dropped the charge," Howards said. "It was their acknowledgment of how transparently abusive this was.

"I was relieved, but I was furious. They had handcuffed me in front of my kids in a public place. And they made an extraordinary effort to attack and disparage me in the media. To disparage me as a crazy on TV news in Metro Denver 8."

Howards considered filing suit but wondered about reprisals. He's a consultant and has government contracts. "I began asking my friends," he said. "Half of them said yes, because it's the right thing to do. Half said don't do it, because of the retribution it might bring." He filed suit, he said, not in response to the friends who encouraged him but in reaction to those who said not to do it.

"They are -- we are -- scared of their own government. We are scared of tax audits, of loss of contracts," Howards said. "We are, we as a people, have acquiesced on our constitutional rights because we have a very real fear of retribution if we challenge the government. What I see is this incremental sacrifice of our constitutional rights because we fear our own government."

Howards retained Denver lawyer David Lane and filed suit in federal court. The complaint Lane drafted describes the violation of his client's First and Fourth Amendment rights.

Reichle filed a response that says Howards was belligerent and said "fuck you" when he was stopped. The attorneys representing the agent also suggested that Howards might have been carrying a needle with which he could have injected some poison into the vice president's arm when he touched him -- a claim Lane dismisses as absurd: "Everybody out there was backslapping and shaking Cheney's hand. He happened to be the only person who was critical of Cheney."

The suit asks for damages, but Lane is after something larger than a monetary award. He is looking for the chain of command. Who ordered the suppression of his client's free-speech rights? Is there, within the Secret Service, a custom, practice, and policy of suppressing these rights?

Howards says it's hard to know how many people have been arrested for publicly disagreeing with the president. The stories that make the news usually involve someone filing suit. Most people hunker down and hope the charges will be dropped or pay their fines and do their time.

Some brave citizens fight back. And they change policy.

None of the lawsuits filed against the president's Secret Service and Advance Office has yet made it to trial. But Greg Jenkins on the White House Advance Team is less inclined to push local authorities to be so thuggish during presidential visits. Gus Reichle won't be so trigger-happy next time a citizen says something that annoys Dick Cheney. And when Secret Service agents leaned on him a second time, Charleston mayor Danny Jones, whose heart and head were never in the prosecution of Jeff and Nicole Rank, told them to shove it. President Bush would have to live with antiwar protesters lined up on the South Side Bridge on July 27, 2006 -- or he could find another route to Shelley Moore Capito's fundraiser.

Three years after an arrest team dragged Jeff and Nicole Rank away from their president's July 4 speech, the federal government settled. In August 2007 the government paid the Ranks $80,000 in damages, while admitting no wrongdoing. They didn't have to. A "Presidential Advance Manual," published by the Office of Presidential Advance, confirmed what the Ranks, Steven Howards, and Sue Niederer learned when they tried to exercise their free speech rights in the presence of the president or vice president. It was all spelled out in the manual -- or at least, in what wasn't redacted. All but twenty of the one-hundred-twelve pages of the manual were completely blank. Yet in the scant information available is evidence of a White House program to suppress political speech that might embarrass the president -- even when that speech is protected by the First Amendment.

Most damning are recommendations regarding the use of "rally squads" to surround potential protestors with signs or large banners to obscure them from the view of the press. "These squads should be instructed to always look for demonstrators. The rally squad's task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling out, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out protestors (USA! USA! USA!). As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site. The rally squads can include, but are not limited to, college/young republican [sic] organizations, local athletic teams, and fraternities/ sororities.... At least one squad should be 'roaming' throughout the perimeter of the event to look for potential problems."

Volunteers were urged to contact the Secret Service if they encountered anyone who represented an actual threat to the president, but to use their own resources to deal with someone who might embarrass the president or attract the media's attention.

Volunteers and advance team members were told to "decide if the solution would cause more negative publicity than if the demonstrators were simply left alone."

They clearly miscalculated with Jeff and Nicole Rank.

Steven Howards describes taking the government to court as something akin to civic duty. "If more people would respond this way, and maybe I'm naive, the Secret Service and the government would think longer about whether or not to harass people in an attempt to discourage them from exercising rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution."

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