The Olympics have always been more than the world's biggest sporting event. They've been flashpoints for politics. Some of those political moments have been positive - Jesse Owens showing up the racist Nazi regime at the Berlin Olympics of 1936, for instance. Some of been tragic, like the kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972. More have been simply pathetic, like the tit-for-tat boycotts that marred the 1980 and 1984 games.
But one of the most frightening came in 1996, when a bomb went off in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park, killing two people and wounding more than 100 more. Terrorism -indiscriminate terrorism - had struck for the first time. In the wake of that tragedy, not to mention 9/11 and other attacks in the Western world, the Olympics are seen as a potentially irresistible target for terrorism.
As a result, security has become one of the most important - and expensive - aspects of hosting the Olympics. The safety of athletes and spectators has to be paramount. Who wants to see a bomb go off in B.C. Place during the opening ceremonies, in Whistler's Celebration Plaza, or on the Sea to Sky Highway, for that matter?
But one of the unfortunate type of politics that flows from the focus on security is the cost of our freedoms.
The RCMP have a difficult job to do, identifying genuine threats to public safety and preparing for them or trying to eliminate them beforehand.
But some of their efforts are coming across as heavy-handed. RCMP assistant commissioner and head of the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit (ISU) Bud Mercer's comments to Vancouver council this week, heavily hyped on the front page of a Vancouver newspaper, come to mind. So do the reports of ISU officers paying calls to anti-Olympic organizers like Chris Shaw of 2010 Watch that could easily be viewed as intimidating.
Finally, the concept of "free speech zones" for protest is simply offensive. As one of our letter writers astutely points out on page A12, we already have a free speech zone. It goes roughly from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and from the 49th parallel to the North Pole. It is more commonly known as Canada.
As we prepare to host the world, we cannot allow the line between security and criminalization of the rights to free speech and free assembly to be erased.
As Benjamin Franklin put it more than 200 years ago: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Since VANOC has already used part of our national anthem for its official motto, "With Glowing Hearts," we'd urge the ISU to take another portion for its own mission statement. "Strong and Free" would be appropriate, with heavy emphasis on the "and".
