American officials plan to file a formal protest over Swiss security officers who jabbed a U.S. diplomat with a machine gun and roughed up a news photographer traveling with President Bush in Geneva. ``It's so strange - supposedly a peace-loving nation gave us the most vicious treatment I've ever seen,'' White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater told reporters Friday aboard Air Force One en route home from Switzerland. Fitzwater said the U.S. government would file a formal protest over a number of incidents that occurred when Bush arrived in Geneva for a three-hour stop and again on departure. He also said White House chief of staff John Sununu was ``verbally attacked'' when he complained. ``I've never seen that kind of brutal and vicious treatment by a security force in the last 10 years,'' Fitzwater said. American chief of protocol Joseph Reed was poked in the abdomen with a machine gun in one of the airport incidents. Fitzwater said Reed would summon Swiss Ambassador Edouard Brunner and lodge a formal protest next week after Bush returns from a trip to Mexico. ``They pulled a machine gun on Ambassador Reed ... and verbally attacked the chief of staff (Sununu),'' Fitzwater said. Officers clashed with newsmen and photographers in the president's party on arrival in Geneva, pushing and shoving them as they sought to approach the ramp on which Bush would leave the plane. Fitzwater said that at a hotel in Geneva later Sununu brought up the airport incident with the chief of security. He said Sununu was met with verbal abuse. Guards lined up shoulder to shoulder prevented reporters and photographers from approaching the president's ramp on departure. No one could see Bush at the base of the ramp, though he and Mrs. Bush were visible when they climbed the ramp to board the aircraft. White House press aides tried to get the Swiss officers to move out of the way, and a shouting match followed. It was then that Jerome Delay, a Washington-based photographer for the French news agency Agence France-Presse, was roughed up and the machine gun shoved into Reed's abdomen, Fitzwater said. Reed was trying to reboard the plane, Fitzwater said. There was no immediate word on whether Delay was hurt. The Washington bureau of the news agency said it had no word of any injuries. Fitzwater said he had not discussed the incident with Bush. There was no answer at the Swiss embassy in Washington Friday night. No separate number is listed for the ambassador.
