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Recent Stories
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The
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Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
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Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
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Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
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March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
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Cathy Breens
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Scott Handleman
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Vanessa Jones
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Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
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Blitz-Coup
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See Rome (poem)
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Shane Claiborne
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Kathy Kelly
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Michelle
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Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
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Jason Leopold
Cheney's
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Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
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William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
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John Philip Sousa
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March
24, 2003
War and Peace in New York
Against the War
at Ground Zero
By DAVID LINDORFF
New York City.
The
first thing I noticed as I walked up from the 38th Street ferry pier
towards the Broadway march assembly point was row upon row of police
buses--the paddywagons used for mass arrests--lined up along 12th Avenue.
As I walked past
the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, another jarring sight greeted my
eyes: clusters of National Guard soldiers in camouflage uniforms, M-16
assault rifles at the ready.
The image was of
a city in the grip of war.
Until I reached
Broadway. There, the mood was entirely different. Stretched from Times
Square at 42nd Street, down to almost Herald Square at 34th Street,
the entire Great White Way was jammed, elbow to elbow, with a still
growing throng of anti-war demonstrators.
The day was sunny,
the temperature was heading for the 60s, and the mood of the crowd was
upbeat but determined.
It was an astonishing
display. Even as the nation was engaged in a ferocious assault on the
nation of Iraq, and as the first reports of American casualties in that
war were coming in, what was shaping up as one of the largest peace
demonstrations in the history of the New York was getting set to march
through the heart of the very city where this new round of global violence
had started. New York, N.Y.
That the march was
happening at all was a remarkable testament to the power of protest.
A month earlier, the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, reportedly
under pressure from the Bush Administration and with the support of
a compliant federal district court and appellate court, had denied amarch
permit to the coalition seeking to march past the United Nations to
protest the looming war. That time demonstrators, who numbered between
100,000 and 400,000, had been penned in and in some cases brutalized
by police on horseback. Several hundred had been arrested.
This time the city,
which had suffered an enormous public relations black eye for its handling
of legitimate protest on a day when much larger protests had gone off
peacefully around the world, had agreed to grant a march permit,, allowing
demonstrators to walk from Times Square all the way down Broadway to
Union Square at 14th Street, and then on down to Washington Square in
Greenwich Village.
But nobody, either
the police and the city or the march organizers, had anticipated how
enormous this demonstration would prove to be. At 11 am, an hour before
the lead marchers--a group of World Trade Center Survivors and families
of trade center victims--were to step off, police, who had set up barricades
limiting the march to only half of the width of the street, realized
that this would not work. They pulled the barricades over to the sidewalks,
surrendering all of Broadway to the mushrooming throng.
In the end, when
the march finally got moving, the densely packed but orderly crowed
reportedly stretched for 40 blocks--a distance of about three miles.
There were no speakers,
either during the march or at its start or terminus. Demonstrators were
left to convey their messages via signs, which were both focussed and
creative. "Bush, pull out like your daddy should have!" was
popular. So was "Money for jobs, not for war."
Some people carried
fake tombstones with the names of young Palestinians killed in the Intifada.
Others wore berets and hoisted baguettes, in honor of the French, who
had led the successful campaign to block U.S. efforts to gain Security
Council approval for the war on Iraq. One man carried an elaborate 3-D
mural of a red, white and blue elephant defecating missiles onto a map
of Iraq.
The remarkable thing
about this march, which one police officer said police were estimating
at 100-200,000, and which CNN put at 175,000, but which rally organizers
estimated at over 400,000, was how little opposition it engendered.
From my vantage point in the rough middle-point of this stream of humanity,
during the entire course of the march I saw only three individuals along
the sidelines holding signs in support of the war or heckling marchers.
Among marchers,
the sentiment of supporting the troops was widespread. I saw no signs
criticizing American soldiers, but many signs saying things along the
lines of, "Support our troops. Bring them home."
As a veteran of
the October 1967 mass march on the Pentagon (when I and hundreds of
other peaceful protesters were arrested and carted off to the federal
prison in Occaquan, VA, where we faced criminal trespass, resisting
arrest and various other charges), I found both the sophistication of
the marchers, and the non-antagonistic, even supportive response of
bystanders, simply astounding, particularly in a city that had been
the target of such a horrendous attack only a year and a half earlier--an
attack which the U.S. government has been trying to link to America's
current wartime foe, Iraq.
While marchers expressed
support for U.S. soldiers, and appeared for the most part to get along
with local police lining the route, there was considerable unconcealed
anger at the mass media, however.
When an NBC camera
crew set up a video camera atop a van at Herald Square, for example,
demonstrators in the surrounding area pretty much deep-sixed any chance
of favorable coverage by hoisting their middle fingers and chanting
"NBC--National Bullshit Corporation!" A similar angry reception
was given to a young woman and cameraman from WB's local Channel 1 News.
Fox TV -- the network
owned by the openly pro-war News Corp. of Rupert Murdoch -- came in
for special rebuke. A reporter attempting to interview one marcher had
her microphone repeatedly brushed aside as she tried to ask him why
he was demonstrating while American troops were overseas fighting.
For the most part,
the 2000 police who lined the march route were relaxed and even, in
many cases, friendly with marchers, though at certain points, particularly
in the various open areas such as Herald and Union Squares there were
numbers of officers dressed in riot gear as if prepared for the worst.
The only incidents
came at the end of the march, when some demonstrators decided not to
disperse as ordered by police, but to remain in and around the area
of Washington Square.
At about 5 pm, an hour after the parade permit had expired, police attempted
a pincer move to trap a group of over a thousand demonstrators on the
block running along the north of the park. With police and police vans
blocking a rear escape, a large contingent of police in riot gear began
advancing on the group from the other end of the street. It started
to look tense, and some mace was sprayed (both sides accused the other
of spraying it). Then a 75-year-old woman stepped forward and confronted
the advancing officers. "Why are you doing this?" she asked
them. "We are being trapped here."
Confronted with
a choice of moving forward and arresting the woman or backing off, the
police relented, and allowed the protestors to move forward.
There were, however, several dozen arrests as the march was breaking
up. As one young black woman was dragged off, handcuffed, by police,
she shouted out several times, "I have the constitutional right
peaceably to assemble."
In New York City
on March 22, 2003, apparently, only until 4 pm. As another demonstrator
nearby me who was watching the incident commented wryly, "She obviously
hasn't heard about the changes Bush and Ashcroft have made in the Constitution."
Dave Lindorff
is the author of Killing Time. He can be reached through his
website.
Today's Features
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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