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George Mason Student Busted for Anti-Recruiting

Tariq Khan is a junior at George Mason University in Virginia. An Air Force veteran at 27, he has strong views about the Iraq War and about military recruitment on campus.

He went to the trouble of making up his own anti-recruitment pamphlet, which he entitled "Three Good Reasons Not to Join the Military." Those reasons, he says, are: first, you have to submit to authoritarianism; second, you have to commit human rights violations; and third, you have to risk your own life for leaders you might not respect or trust....

And so on September 29, when he saw the Marine recruiters had set up a table in the Johnson Center on campus, Khan decided to stand nearby.

"I got out an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper, which I had written on: 'Recruiters Lie. Don't Be Deceived.' And I taped it to my chest," Khan says. "I was standing about four feet from the Marine recruiting table. I wasn't blocking access or anything."

Khan says that someone from the Johnson Center staff came up to him and told him he couldn't be there.

"He kept telling me that I had to have a permit to table," Khan says. "But I told him I wasn't tabling. I don't need a permit just to stand there."

"Do you want me to call the police?"

"Call whoever you want but I'm not leaving."

Then Khan says a student came by, took a pamphlet, ripped it up, threw it in his face, and left. The student returned with another person, who said he was in the Marines and was just back from Iraq.

Khan says he asked him, "How many people did you kill?"

According to Khan, the Marine said: "Not enough. I want to go back and kill more."

They started to hassle Khan, calling him "a pussy and a coward," he recalls. "The guy who said he was in the Marines rips the sign off my chest. I said, 'Thanks for defending my freedom of speech.' So I took out another piece of paper and started to make a new sign."

Soon a campus police officer, Theodore Reynolds, showed up, Khan says.

"He told me the same thing: that I'm not allowed to be there unless I have a permit. I told him I don't need a permit to stand here."

When Khan wouldn't leave, Officer Reynolds threw him down and handcuffed him. Khan says that some of the students nearby were egging the police officer on, yelling, "Kick his ass! Kick his ass!"....

"All of a sudden, they started talking about 9/11," he says. "They said, 'You people are the most violent people in the world. There's no telling what you'll do.'"