FREE SPEECH

Airports at vanguard of dissent-crushing

Dawn Hansen arrived at the checkpoint at Oakland International Airport wearing a navy blue jacket with two small American flag pins and two political buttons with writing on them. The larger one reads "Dissent is Patriotic." The smaller, red one bears a smiling portrait of President Bush, labeled "Daddy's Little War Criminal".

"When I went to show my boarding pass she looked at me, yanked it out of my hand, undid the rope, and said, 'Come over here!' No 'Please,' no ID check. Then she said, 'Give me your jacket!' They made me go through the metal detector twice even though I didn't set it off either time. Then this second woman said, 'You go sit down over there!' They wanded me, they made me put my legs out, they went up inside my back and around my boobs.
"They passed my jacket from person to person, each security person in turn was looking at the buttons. They asked me, 'Why are you traveling with so much reading material?'"
Dawn says she was carrying seven or eight general circulation magazines, a biography of Ben Franklin and Bob Woodward's latest book. "I did have one subversive publication; I was carrying a copy of The New York Times. ... They asked me why I was carrying so many legal documents. I'd been in California helping my brother do some legal research on a case.
"When I got home I found out they'd taken the lids off all my creams and just left them like that so they got all over everything."

[Dawn Hansen is Nevada chairman of Mothers Against the Draft]