Yes! Yes!

An attempt to use a supposed threat of terrorism to thwart public protest has been shot down by a US Court of Appeals normally thought to be conservative.

Since 1990, SOA Watch has been staging annual demonstrations at what used to be called the School of the Americas, at Fort Benning, Georgia, which has been connected to death squads and official torture by police forces in Latin America. (It's now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Different name, same mission.) As the protests have grown over the years, officials have taken increasingly harsh steps to limit or even prevent the action.

The latest scam was to insist that all people intending to protest had to pass through a metal detector before entering the site where the protest was to be held, in effect forcing 10,000 people to file past a single point. The excuse, of course, was protecting against the "threat of terrorism" in the wake of 9/11, which, as we know, "changed everything."

But in a ringing decision handed down on Friday,

[a] three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously Friday that protesters may not be required to pass through metal detectors when they gather next month for a rally against a U.S. training academy for Latin American soldiers. ...

"We cannot simply suspend or restrict civil liberties until the War on Terror is over, because the War on Terror is unlikely ever to be truly over," Judge Gerald Tjoflat wrote for the panel. "Sept. 11, 2001, already a day of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this country."

Allowing the searches in the absence of actual evidence of a threat of actual terrorism would, the Court ruled, "eviscerate the Fourth Amendment."

While the decision, and particularly the emphasis of the language used, is certainly to be celebrated, it's still worth noting what a sorry state we have come to when a decision which is, as one legal scholar noted, in line with standard Constitutional principles, is something deserving of special note.

Even so: Yes!

Footnote: This year's demonstration is scheduled for Nov. 20-21. Information can be found at the SOA Watch site here.