Columnist Dean Juipe: Can Olympic protesters be trusted?

Dean Juipe

Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2001 | 10:47 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

With a mixture of acceptance and muscle, those charged with security for the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City have been formulating plans and amassing forces.

They met Tuesday in Washington with President Bush, and stories related to protecting the Games that will be held Feb. 8-24 have been commonplace in recent days.

One really caught my eye due to its good-natured yet arguably overly civilized approach: Eight sites in the city, including one where the athletes are dropped off from buses at Pioneer Park, have been designated as areas where protests will be permitted and silently policed.

Grandstands and microphones will be made available at no expense to the protesters, providing they do not exceed 500 in number and that they register in advance with the appropriate committee.

Mass protestations need not be spontaneous or even disruptive, yet it strikes me as somewhat whimsical that groups will actually register and limit their dissent to blocks of time that will be determined by a panel within the Olympic hierarchy. It seems too orderly, too restrictive.

How demonstrative can a protester be if he or she knows the clock is ticking and at the top of the hour you will be replaced by another faction with its own cause to promote? It's almost demeaning.

Yet that's the deal Salt Lake City has bartered with protesters and it's take it or leave it. Sign up to sing out, or run the risk of a police confrontation.

And these Olympics will be policed to the maximum as the United States finds itself hosting an event of international magnitude at a time in history when it can least afford an ugly incident or even an untimely gaffe.

The total military commitment to the Winter Games will be about 7,000 troops, including 1,900 Utah National Guard members who will be activated and assisted by 1,200 guard members from other states as well as another 2,000 from the National Guard.

The picture that comes to mind includes an armed guard on every street corner, with dozens more on call. It'll be sports amid a military or police-state setting.

Atlanta may have had a greater police presence for the 1996 Summer Games in that 16,000 troops were assigned, but Atlanta is to urban sprawl what Salt Lake City is to condoning polygamy -- each wrote the book on the subject.

Of course Atlanta still had a bomb incident, and it's one that remains unresolved to this day (thanks in part to the disappearance of supposed culprit Eric Rudolph). What that underscores is the unpredictability of a terrorist attack, which was foremost on the agenda in Washington as President Bush met with the four highest-ranking representatives of the International, U.S. and Salt Lake City Olympic committees.

Bush committed $240 million in security measures for the Winter Olympics, driving the overall security budget for the Games to some $310 million.

We all trust that's sufficient, yet it's a strange time we live in when Salt Lake City is welcoming the world and footing the bill for protesters as well, hoping they remain on their best behavior.

We'll see if that's too much to ask.