BOULDER, Colorado, July 7, 2000 (ENS) - U.S. Congressman Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, has asked the federal Department of Justice to intervene in the prosecution of a Colorado reporter arrested for refusing to leave the scene of an environmental protest. The case points out the problems that journalists sometimes encounter in accessing sites of conflict between government and the people it serves.

Reporter Brian Hansen, kneeling at left, with U.S. Forest Service law-enforcement officer Chuck Dunfee, just before Hansen's arrest (Photo by Mark Slupe, courtesy Colorado Daily)

Hansen says he was just doing his job - reporting the news. The federal government says Hansen was breaking the law by refusing to leave a federal closure area.

In a letter written Wednesday to Robert Rubin, U.S. Assistant Attorney General, Congressman Udall asks the government to "take a hard look at this case and determine if its continued prosecution is absolutely necessary for justice to be properly served."

Udall stresses that he is not trying to "second guess" the arresting officials or suggest that the U.S. not take legal action to enforce proper federal orders. "But I do think that prosecutors, in considering whether to press a case, should recognize that there is public interest in such events as this protest," Udall writes, "that members of the press are likely to seek to cover them, and that a reporter could inadvertently be arrested because of misunderstandings as to his role and presence at the site."

Hansen’s arrest may have stemmed from a series of misunderstandings on Hansen’s part and that of the various federal officials involved in the early morning raid that led to the arrest of Hansen and six protesters. 

A just-released lynx in the San Juan Mountains west of Creede, Colorado, part of a reintroduction effort (Photo by Michael Seraphin courtesy DOW)

Protesters erected a road block on the main construction road and chained themselves to construction equipment. Activist Joel Lathbury of Earth First! barricaded himself in an overturned car known as a batmobile with his arm chained to a block of reinforced cement, also known as a "road dragon," embedded in the ground beneath the car. The car effectively blocked the only other official road leading to the construction site, called the Category III roadless area. 

Other protesters locked themselves to heavy equipment, or to a specially constructed tripod blocking the loggers’ passage.

At about 5:00 am July 6, dozens of USFS law enforcement officers, reportedly in full riot gear, stormed the barricades. Some of the officers were brought in from the Pacific Northwest region, where the USFS has had more experience dealing with protesters. Eagle County Sheriff’s Department officers were also on the scene.

Firefighters try to extract protester whose arms are locked in sunken concrete on Lime Creek Road near Vail ski area (Three photos courtesy Colorado Daily)

Federal officials told Hansen he would have to move about a mile down the mountain to an area where a public information officer of the USFS would keep him apprised of developments at the blockade. Hansen refused, pointing out that he would be unable to report adequately on the events from that distance, and asserting his rights as a journalist to report the news from the site.

Hansen did not leave, and was quickly arrested. He was handcuffed and placed on a bus near the blockade. From the bus, he could see other people moving about near where he had been arrested. When he asked why those people were not being arrested, Hansen was told that those people were legally behind the lines of the official federal closure area. The reporter says no one ever told him he was so close to that line - and if they had, he would gladly have moved those few feet to avoid being arrested.

"When I was taken into custody, I had absolutely no idea that the southern boundary of the enclosure was apparently just behind me," Hansen told ENS. 

Neither did the two other journalists on the scene - "Colorado Daily" photographer Mark Slupe and "Vail Daily Trail" reporter Robert Kelly Goss. 

Firefighters work to free Joel Lathbury from the concrete block to which he had chained himself 

Hansen thinks there is more to his arrest than a simple misunderstanding. Months after his arrest, he learned of a federal law that requires the notification of the U.S. attorney general prior to the filing of any criminal charges against a reporter arrested in the course of covering a story. 

On his own behalf, Hansen has sent requests to the attorney general’s office and other federal offices looking for evidence that notification had occurred in his case. In response, after several months of delay, Hansen received official word that no such documents can be found. 

Along with that response, on May 11 Hansen received a note stating, "for your further information, the decision to arrest and prosecute you was based on the fact that you were a protester not that you were a member of the news media."

Hogwash, says Hansen. "They knew days, even weeks before the raid that I was a reporter. There was absolutely no question why I was there. They knew exactly who I was."

Hansen has covered environmental issues and other topics for the "Colorado Daily" for three years 

The charge against Hansen is just one of violating a federal closure area - a mechanism used increasingly by the federal government and local police to keep protesters away from controversial scenes. At the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle last November, police set up a 50 square block "no protest zone," inside of which members of the public were arrested on little or no provocation. At the meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC this April, hundreds of protesters were arrested after being corralled between police lines during a peaceful protest. Three time Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Carol Guzy of the "Washington Post" was among those rounded up.

Just this morning, the USFS began attempting to remove a six week long road blockade at the Eagle timber sales in the Mt. Hood National Forest near Portland, Oregon. The Cascadia Forest Alliance, one of the groups opposing the timber sales, reports that more than 100 law enforcement officers appeared on the scene, some in full riot gear and camouflage, to remove about 20 protesters.

The protesters were blocking access to logging of more than 500 acres of roadless area within a drinking water watershed. "Removal of the road blockades is extremely dangerous, putting the lives of peaceful protesters at risk," said the Alliance in a statement.

Washington DC police came prepared with riot gear, gas masks and plastic handcuffs at the World Bank/IMF meetings in April (Photo © Adam Kessel)

When Hansen and the six protesters arrested at Vail first appeared in court, an attorney representing Vail Resorts prompted the prosecuting attorney to ask that all seven defendants be barred from returning to Vail until they were acquitted. The judge refused, saying that defendants - presumed innocent until proven guilty - cannot be barred from public lands, including the National Forest lands on which the Vail resort is expanding.

Hansen, still handcuffed, could not take notes at his own first court appearance. Nor were Hansen’s attorney, or the editor of the "Colorado Daily," present in the courtroom. Both had been told that Hansen would be held overnight, and would not appear in court until the following day.

Hansen feels his trial is an attempt by the federal government to shore up the legality of federal closure areas. If he is convicted, Hansen’s case could set a precedent allowing federal agencies to bar journalists from such areas across the country. 

He notes that the federal prosecutor, during evidentiary hearings, repeatedly questioned Hansen’s ability to remain unbiased in his continuing coverage of clashes between protesters and federal land managers, including the ongoing investigation of a 1998 firebombing at Vail. 

Hansen has covered the ongoing investigation of the October 19, 1998 firebombing that burned the Two Elk Restaurant and seven other sites in Vail, Colorado (Photo by Mark Mobley)

The judge in Hansen’s case seemed to agree. During closing arguments in the evidentiary hearings on May 25, Federal Magistrate Judge James Robb interrupted arguments by the federal prosecutor that Hansen was too biased to justify his presence on the basis of journalism alone, and the court "should forget the lofty, high-sounding [First Amendment] principles" that Hansen and his attorney worked to articulate. 

"Mr. Wallace, I'm reminded of Thomas Jefferson," said Judge Robb, "who once opined that 'Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the later.'"

Hansen’s lawyers have until July 17 to respond to information provided by the federal prosecutor, after which the judge will rule on Hansen’s motion to have his case dismissed. 

But more conflicts over the federal government’s right to close off controversial areas could come soon. Today activists at Mt. Hood National Forest plan a massive non-violent civil disobedience protest to defy the closure around the Eagle Creek timber sales.