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CounterPunch
February
17, 2003
Scenes From the Streets of New
York
Cold But Exhilarating
by JOANNE MARINER
I started off at Union Square, where what was
probably the most boisterous of the feeder marches was gathered--lots
of NYC students. Police were everywhere. We headed over to 6th
ave and then uptown, at first sticking to the sidewalks but by
around the 20s people were taking over the street. The cops met
us full force at about 24th St. some of them had their night
sticks out, and there was lots of bluster and yelling. Suddenly
everyone was running down 24th, making a break for it, but there
were masses of cops on 5th avenue as well, including a fairly
silly looking squad on scooters, lined up in the scooter version
of battle formation. A nice moment at Madison Square, where a
double-decker tourist bus got stopped in the traffic chaos caused
by the march, tourists squealing with delight at the interruption
in their otherwise choreographed visit to the city -- lots of
photos taken -- and as their bus pulled away this group of middle-aged
presumptive midwesterners got up to their feet and gave the marchers
a standing ovation.
We headed back toward 6th Avenue but
before we reached it, on a sidestreet, the police held up the
march. Again, lots of yelling: marchers yelling at police, police
yelling at marchers, police yelling at police. The arrival of
a company of mounted police only heightened the tension. finally
they started letting people move again, but in a trickle of small,
controllable groups.
Small controllable groups, as it turned
out, were the theme the day. Not content with reducing the march
to a stationary rally, the bloomberg team apparently decided
to lessen the rally's strength by drastically limiting the density
of the crowd. Essentially, the police strategy was to divide
the east side up into a series of pens, thus breaking the crowd
into manageable chunks. One imagined that they had studied the
herding techniques of some giant texas ranching operation. I
was lucky enough to hit upon the right combination of streets
and police so that I actually reached the podium at 52nd and
1st Ave, but no one else I know got that far.
Using barricades, police blocked the
sidestreets so protesters couldn't get over to 1st avenue. Supposedly
people had to detour all the way up to about 70th St to be able
to cut over, although a couple of friends said that the police
blocking their paths wouldn't tell them anything beyond the obvious
fact that they weren't allowed to go over to 1 St.
I didn't catch that many of the speeches,
but those I did hear -- including Angela davis, Tony Kushner
and Danny Gover -- were an improvement over Washington. Unfortunately,
given the strict way that the police controlled the crowd, there
was a fair amount of empty space in the couple of blocks in front
of the stage.
I only saw one anti-anti-war protester,
with an appropriately stupid and mean-spirited sign: "Nuke
Iraq."
The general atmosphere was happy and
exhilarating, despite the police obstruction.
The rally's very best sign: "somewhere
in texas there's a village missing an idiot."
Here are a couple of accounts passed
along from friends on other blocks:
Mad Bicylclists
I joined up with a uerilla band of mad
bicyclists during the demonstration. In this band were grandmothers,
messengers, me, and everything in between. We rode around trying
to breach the police
lines and attempt to reclaim the streets for demonstrators who
were hemmed in, blocked and forced back time and again. We met
a wonderful bike activist and author from Chicago named Travis
Hugh Culley. He
is a performer and agitator in the Yippie tradition. It was inspiring
to see him close down an intersection with performances and other
antics. He got arrested and was later released. He also organizes
and curates
art shows with bike themes in Chicago. His book is called "The
Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power"
published by Random House. The group was a smart mob using cell
phones, walky talkies and IM cells. We moved quickly from place
to place trying to find spots to led the crowd out . Interesting
experience . Got some good video. -- F.S.
Give Us
Back Our Streets
We went to the march with Zoe and another
friend and their five year old. We got as far as Second Avenue
and 60th Street. They
kept trying to get us to go further north. I videotaped what
I could the highlight being a guy being arrested as the crowd
was chanting "let us
through" and "give back the streets" it was looking
like it could get ugly and so they were holed up in a Dunken
Donuts on the other side of the barricade at 3rd Avenue. We had
to leave around 2pm cuz it was too
cold for the kids. O was wondering if there was a way to
collectively put together a videotape of all the images collected?
Let me know if you know someone doing this. --B.
Joanne Mariner
is a human rights lawyer in New York. She can be reached at:
mariner@counterpunch.org
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February 15
/ 16, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Colin
Powell and the Great "Intelligence Fraud"
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
The Whole World is Watching
Edward Said
A Monumental Hypocrisy
Wouter Hijink
Report from Amsterdam
"War: Do Not Feed!"
Linda Heard
At Last! Proud to be British
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Taking a Stand on Iraq
Robert Fisk
The Case Against War
Lev Grinberg
Lessons from Israel
A War Without Legitimacy
Chris Floyd
Cold Fronts:
Bush War Profits
Ahmad Faruqui
Stepping Back from the Brink of War
Norman Madarasz
French Kisses from the Citizens of France
Adam Lebowitz
Scott Ritter in Tokyo
Kurt Nimmo
Bring Us the Head of Osama bin Laden
Forrest Hylton
The Revolt in Bolivia
Col. Dan Smith
Irrelevance and Credibility:
Bush, NATO and the UN
Wayne Madsen
The Lies of Tom Lantos
Ranjit Hoskote
The Invisible Modernities of the Islamic World
Emily Zitter-Smith
Who's Safe Now?
An American in Cairo
Rich Procter
Anybody Remember the Powell Doctrine?
Poets Basement:
Eliot
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Website of the Weekend
Anti-War
Posters
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
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and Jeffrey St. Clair
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