George Bush has "
provoked a serious row with Scotland Yard" over security demands for an upcoming visit:
American officials want a virtual three-day shutdown of central London in a bid to foil disruption of the visit by anti-war protestors. They are demanding that police ban all marches and seal off the city centre.
But senior Yard officers say the powers requested by US security chiefs would be unprecedented on British soil. While the Met wants to prevent violence, it is sensitive to accusations of trying to curtail legitimate protest.
We Americans really need to teach those Brits about freedom of speech and peaceable assembly. It's really a tragedy that citizens in other democracies don't have the same strong rights and protections of free expression that we have under our First Amendment.