Kidd wrote in an e-mail to HSF leaders yesterday morning that she would allow the demonstration to proceed “because of the late notice of the OCS event.” She also told the HSF leaders that they would have received permission if they “had made any attempt to contact our office in advance.”

Kidd asked the HSF leaders to “refrain from heckling, either outside the Science Center or during the presentation.”

As students filed into the OCS event, HSF leaders staged a brief rally outside the Science Center that drew about 30 protesters. The activists distributed fliers assailing the CIA’s role in the torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and blasting the INS—now a branch of the DHS—for detaining Muslim and South Asian immigrants in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

But according to HSF coordinating committee member Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky ’07, when activists gathered outside the Science Center yesterday shortly before 3 p.m., they had not yet read Kidd’s e-mail—which was sent less than four hours earlier. The protesters had planned to go ahead with their demonstration even if they had not received administrators’ permission, said Gould-Wartofsky, who is also a Crimso,n editor.

Kidd left her University Hall office and spoke in person to HSF leaders to inform them that she would indeed allow the demonstration to continue.

“We regard this as a victory for free speech at Harvard,” Gould-Wartofsky said.

—Kelly Chan contributed to the reporting of this article.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.