A big street protest is effective only for persuading other citizens that they need to change sides and be on the side of the protesters.  Usually this means abandoning the idea that we must support our president or our armed forces.  Most of us will instinctively be supportive of the President, no matter who he is, and virtually all of us support the people in our military.  But, as you noted, the majority of citizens already are on our side, so a street protest isn't a good tool to move on from here.

A far better tool is a letter writing campaign to persuade our Congressional representatives and senators that they need to join us and oppose Bush with all of the Constitutional powers they possess.  A corollary to that is an attempt to persuade the MSM that history has passed them by, and that most likely would mean orgainzed boycotts against advertisers.

It does little good for over half of us to favor or oppose a policy if we do nothing but pat each other on the back. 

 Hoppy in Sacramento

I think after the POTUS' party was thrown out of power and was replaced by the D's something better be done to change our Iraq policies.  I don't see how any politician in Washington can dispute that fact.  Is everybody in that town obsessed with some mythical Holy Grail of "winning in Iraq" to stand up to this president and his horrible policies?  I think the D's need to be given a chance to flex their muscles and affect change.  But if the D's refuse (or cannot) stand up to Bush and get him to change I think protests and mass civil disobedience should be high on the list of possible responses...

I am willing to let the D's try to use their constitutional powers before I think we as a society need to "take it to the streets".

If Bush has not called for sacrifice from the Nation, except for soldiers and their families, there are not to many spurs to street protest. In the Vietnam war there was a draft and ultimately 55,000 Americans died. Now there is a professional military and only 3,000 Americans have been killed in action.

There is another factor. The anti-war street protests of the 1960s were not isolated incidents. There was the freespeech movement at Berkeley and other schools. There were the Civil Rights marchs and then the urban riots.

This isn't the 1960s. Had Bush conducted the war competently there is no real evidence that Americans would not still be fully behind it. In other areas of government Bush has both sacrificed our rights and the Constitution and been inept. As I just discovered from my 12 year old daughter there maybe an under estimate of the willingness of Americans to fight terrorism at the sacrifice of long held rights. (This led to a big family argument and a shock about 12 year old New Yorkers). Who is in the streets about New Orleans, global warming, Darfur?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Look at it this way, the president is now set to escalate the war even though his war policy has already lost his party has already lost him control of Congress, notwithstanding the fact it may lose them more in 2008 and despite the fact that continuing the policy is endangering Republican presidential hopes in 2008 as well. If none of that matters to him, does anyone really think that more street protests would change his mind?

> Maybe, probably, street protests won’t affect what Bush thinks or does, but judging them in this way is addressing it all as pragmatic politics, and of course politics must be paid attention to if elections are to be won, but street demonstrations, at least to many, are a way of expressing the emotion behind the feeling that the war is just wrong. They are a statement to everyone in both parties that those in the street feel that there is something beyond pragmatism that they want addressed.

Americans just don't live in the kind of society we did even in 1970: a dense urban (or close suburban) and/or small town/city world where everyone is part of closeknit communities and groups. In such a society the idea of "kids" banding together outside the societal structure and physically protesting was arresting and shocking. We can argue about whether that shock had good results, but it got everyone's attention.

Today we live primarily in isolated exurban environments with air conditioners, 42" TVs, and video consoles (oh yeah, and the Internet). We aren't part of an easily-shockable closeknit community. And physically we are so far away from everything that demonstrations don't affect us in any way.

So I just don't see the point of street protests.

sPh

I think you can see what a series of massive demonstrations did before Iraq: nothing. But on a different matter, the immigration rallies and marches, the effect was palpable. A Republican issue became neutralized. Bush couldn't push through the comprehensive legislation, but neither could the Republican Congress institute their criminalizing efforts. Suddenly, people had a sense of how many households we were talking about. And the politicians, who can all count, remembered the wipeout of the Republican Party in California after Proposition 184.

What we hope to achieve is ignition of a large movement, a national street movement where large masses meet regularly in cities all across America, and effectively disrupt or shut down those cities in civil peaceful protest.

A sure recipe for reminding Mr. and Mrs. Ordinary Law-Abiding American about everything they always despised about protesters and protest movements, and sending the message that they are completely different from the people opposing the war. Yeah, that will work.

Probably because for every person willing to make the huge effort and take whatever risk is involved to actually travel to and participate in a mass demonstration there are 10, 50, 100 or more people who have similar views but are unable or un-willing to march. It is a very compelling representation of the sentiments of a large number of people, a large number of people who can be mobilized to take political action beyond answering a poll question or double clicking on an email form letter.

Also, street protests and demonstrations do a great deal of conciousness raising both for the participants and for those that are made aware of them.  

Have you ever had your mind changed personally by a street protest?

Forgive double post, but for clarity the paragraph should have read.

{Peceptions are ticklish and tricky to hold. The idea of protesters being "different" or "outsiders" or "radicals' is a vestige of the framing of those who protest by those who don't.}

And the pictures were powerful: all ages from the very young through very old, families, many different ethnicities. All waving mostly American flags and conveying how happy they are to be here. Those faces looked completely different from the images of shadowy job stealers that the likes of Lou Dobbs and Tom Tancredo have tried to implant in the public's mind.

There's much less to be gained from the images of a street protest against the war, because everyone already knows how widespread the opposition is. There is, however, something to lose -- not a lot probably, but something -- if the pictures from the march convey a lot of images that feed into the stereotype of lefties. --Greg

Yes. 

Though maybe "changed" is less an appropriate word than "awakened".  I should probably answer yes three times.

• I had it awakened by what I saw in Montgomery Alabama and Greenville, South Carolina in the early 1960s.  I saw it in black and white, on television, hours after the marches and sit-ins happened.  And it had precisely the effect on me that Martin Luther King said it was designed to have in his Letter from Birmingham Jail.
• My mind awoke further when King marched with the sanitation workers in Memphis, and I made the connection between racism, poverty, and a general disdain for those whose hand labor tidied up after white collar types far too elevated in their own self-esteem to associate with mere trash collectors.
• I had it awakened by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.  There wasn't a lot I could do, sitting in Cleveland, except boycott grapes and sign petitions in the parking lots of the local super markets, but I did that, and I wouldn't have done so without the protests in California.

Maybe we don't need street protests now.  I don't know.  There was no Internet then, no ability to raise cash quickly, sign petitions, and the like.  There wasn't a cable TV to provide at least some relief from Hannity with Olberman.  There wasn't a progressive radio presence to counter Rush Limbaugh and the mercantilists of Clear Channel (there isn't much of a one now, is there)?

Yet when I'm not reading about how icky street demonstrations are, how juvenile, how unsophisticated, and how ineffective, I'm reading about how the MSM ignores the superior wisdom of the blogosphere and doesn't show the public at large the wisdom of the left and the corruption of the right.  It seems to me there's some sort of contradiction here. . .Monday, Wednesday, and Friday we're told a public, three-dimensional presence is counter-productive.  Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday we're told that the MSM ignores us.  Sunday we watch football. 

So I'm not going to March tomorrow or the day after that.  I don't think I'll make the march on 27 January.  But will I join Ramsey Clark on the fourth anniversary of the beginnings of this stupid war?  Just maybe I might. 

aMike

What results? I must have missed them.

And I too have. I can still see the black white kinescope images of fire hoses and dogs not 25 miles from my house. My God, did that change a lot of minds. Mine was changed to a realization that things were not going to change by everyone sitting home and writing letters. 

Having marched a few times in Chicago, I wish the TV cameras would focus on just how hyper-militarized the police have become.

They were really loaded for bear, and facing down a bunch of grandmothers and familes with strollers.

I remember, the HORSES had armor.

But it was the astounding number of coppers that really amazed me - and then the cops cordon off so much of the downtown, that no one really sees the march - except the cops.
I think it was Lenny Bruce who said "They're not protesting the government - they're prostesting against the police department."

I know I'm supposed to be thrilled they threw a couple of bucks at the minimum wage, but they seem totally content to redecorate their offices for the next two years while thousands more Americans die in Iraq. We'll have at least 10% of the Senate shuttling between Iowa and New Hampshire. You call that oversight? At this point, I'm expecting precisely nothing.

70% of the public is against the war and they don't appear to intend to do anything about the war till 2009 at the earliest and I expect they'll have more offices to decorate before they get around to it then.

Class A points, Daniel.  Especially the draft.  In my mind this is determing factor - the threat of war was affecting nearly everyone in those days.

I also think this was Charlie Rangel's point about asking for the return on the draft.   

Neoboho

yes. the seattle WTO protests were very powerful. the images of the police (or, where they?) agressively pepper spraying peaceful protesters was quite sad.

if you saw the movie, "the matrix," that's what I experienced: a disruption to the argument that "our government was nice" because I saw through the smoke and mirrors a bit.

the term "blowback" also comes to mind because I've seen how society protects itself after protests.

for example, New York City and United For Peace And Justice struggled with march permits... why? Shouldn't the people paying for the war, the citizens, be able to at least march?

When I lived in the DC area, a street demonstration that tried to block the city was a fairly guaranteed way for me, even when I mostly was a telecommuter, to go to my office -- walking if necessary, and through bad parts of town if necessary. You see, I express my discontent through the structures provided by the Republic, and, after a few years, got very tired of free-lancers deciding to force me to follow their rules.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

It does little good for over half of us to favor or oppose a policy if we do nothing but pat each other on the back.

right, but there's power in public demonstrations because the media doesn't rise to the cause of reining in corporate america or revolving door governments.

when I look back through history, I am strengthened to see that other humans fought for something beyond themselves and "took a stand."

Cindy Sheehan's arrests, for example, will go down in history and help show that US policy criminalized peace.

most people have more wishbone and less backbone and prefer to live off oppression rather than end it... certainly I'm guilty of that.

I am really, really not defending a government position when I state that massive shows of force typically are the best way to deter violence. In the seventies, all too often, there were clashes when certain demonstrators thought a few cops thought they were tough, but weren't.

Apropos of horses, however, my favorite incident was quite nonpolitical. With a friend, I was crossing the street at Baltimore's Inner Harbor, when a sports car rushed through a crosswalk, almost hitting us. We were cheered to watch him get stuck in traffic.

Out of nowhere came the sound of galloping hoofbeats, and a Baltimore mounted cop ordered the sports car driver (it was open top) to pull over. The driver was utterly indignant to have his mighty machine pulled over by a horse, and complained loudly.

The cop looked down on him, and said "ONE MORE WORD, and I'm going to back the horse over your back seat, and give him a certain command. Trust me. Your upholstery will never smell the same. Feeling lucky, punk?"

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

The one thing that gives a bit of pause regarding mass demonstrations, my earlier comments notwithstanding, is that I think of mass demonstrations as a tactic not a strategy. Without a guiding strategy the protests will be less than could be hoped for. It is possible, that within the dynamics of organizing the demonstrations, a clear strategy may emerge, such are the nature of mass movements.This is not necessarily likely however.

What is clear is that a mass movement needs to be built, a movement with some coherent guidance. Petitions to redress grievances are becoming moot.

I must have confused her with Congress. Sorry about that.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I think you can see what a series of massive demonstrations did before Iraq: nothing.

one thing to remember: in the future, people will remember that politicians refused to acknowledge them.

for example, hilliary's power would be greater if she acknowledged the people instead of US policy which said: "grab the oil."

real damage to her credibility was done and we have to let her remember that...

if we forget about it, so will she... so will the people.

This might be considered self-indulgent or lazy, but I'm going to reprint my thoughts on this subject from my blog:

Andrew Sullivan describes how uncomfortable he felt in the presence of anti-war demonstrators because of "reflexive hostility to American power, partisan hatred of Bush, and blindness toward Saddam's atrocities." This is all being discussed in the context of "who was right" about Iraq back then. Most of us on the left have argued that the dirty hippies were right all along, whereas the serious journalists argued that they were courageous for recognizing evil. And the neocons, well, they were never wrong (Bush fucked it up!).

Here's what I think, if anybody cares. I agree that the antiwar demonstrators were not making cogent arguments in the streets. But when have protestors ever done so? A protest is about emotion, solidarity and sending a message. Unfortunately, the message most people got was that we were suddenly back in 1968. "No blood for oil" is not a sophisticated argument against the Iraq war but protests are not arguments, per se. So while I understand where Sullivan is coming from, I think he misses the fact that there were cogent arguments being made against the war but no one noticed either because they were in awe of Bush, terrified of the false connections the administration made between Iraq and al Qaeda, or convinced that the dirty hippies were the sole voice of the antiwar movement. I knew at the time (hell, I even wrote about it) that no protest on earth (and they were worldwide) was going to stop this war. I knew Bush did not care about world opinion, just like he does not care about world opinion today. So I supported the protests even though I knew they had neither substance nor influence because stopping the war was (is) my goal.

There are valid criticisms to be made of the antiwar left. It is true that they are reflxiveky hostile to American power, as Sullivan claims, but they don't suffer from BHS and they weren't "blind" to Saddam's atrocities (don't you see how evil he is!?). I think the protestors were wrong in describing the motivations of the Bush administration (empire, oil) but that is a moot point given no one knows why the hell we are in Iraq. I certainly don't. WMDs? Nope. Ties to terrorism? Nope. Spreading democracy? Nope. battling Islamic fanaticism? Nope. I doubt even Bush knows why he's in Iraq. I would surmise that a bunch of previously unrelated interests jelled after 9/11 that made regime change in Iraq desirable. It satisfied personal vengence for Bush (Saddam took a shot at my daddy!), intellectual hubris for the neocons, and political ambitions for the GOP. I believe these people truly believed their own bullshit. I think they honestly thought they would be greeted as liberators, free markets would flourish, tyrants everywhere would shake in their boots, and the Middle East would be on its way to democracy and peace. If you read some of what the principle proponents of the Iraq war wrote at the time, they were unequivocal on these points. They really believed it. The criticism, as many pointed out before being drowned out by the drums of war, was that this was pure fantasy. I knew you couldn't just remove the dictator that was holding an artificial country together by force and expect a Jeffersonian democracy to flourish. I knew you couldn't privatize economy before using the government to modernize it. And I knew that chaos was going to ensue in the Middle East as a result.

As I've said before, I take no pleasure in having been right about these things. It makes me sick that this war was essentially unpreventable (particularly after the one man who might have stopped it, Colin Powell, forever ruined his legacy by feeding bullshit to the UN). And it's not as though one had to perfectly, accurately predict the consequences of invading Iraq. I think the spectre of those consequences were enough to make any rational person think twice about this adventure. But people didn't think twice. They took Bush at face value as he lied to the world. The scar of 9/11 was exploited most cynically. I remember when Bush gave his ultimatum speech two days before "shock and awe" and the channel I was watching jumped to Times Square after the address. The camera dispassionately watched two fratboys whoop after the speech and say something like "go get 'em W!" before heading off to debase themselves somewhere. That was the environment we were in. The reason the hippies get singled out is because they were making an unsophisticated argument at a time when unsophisticated arguements for the war were in vogue. No one listened to the nuanced, serious arguments against invading Iraq because the Bush administration had made factuality a subjective experience and independent thought tantamount to treason. The hippies were and still are a scapegoat for the opposition. That was the world we lived in back then. And despite popular opinion turning decidedly and permanently against this president and against this war, our national conversation is shockingly slow to catch up, nearly four years later.

In a lot of ways, it doesn't help that the current large street protests have tended to be organized by groups like ANSWR who, and not to defame them needlessly here, just don't represent me. I mean, I agree with them about the war but I've met a lot of their people and I wouldn't exactly want them making policy.

I work near Union Square in New York, so I see these protests a lot. I also see them devolve into a lot of side issues and I find myself walking by thinking, "Do you REALLY think that abour Israel?" (critical as I am of Israeli policies) or "Do you really feel so strongly about Mumia?" (critical as I am about the justice system and the death penalty) or "Do you really think that Lyndon LaRouche is a good thing?" (Critical as I am of... uh... Lyndon LaRouche...)

It's just too easy to get on line and figure out who these organizers are and then to not want to be associated with them in any way. You know, I like Michael Moore and I think Cindy Sheehan is a brave, committed woman, but I have issues with both of them too.

And I'm no DLC "centrist." I'm a pretty radical lefty. It's not that these guys are more radical than I am, I just think they're wrong about too much.

And they're throwing the protests. I might attend a protest, but it has to be organized by a group that I'm at least mostly down with.

Information flows more freely now.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

We are New Yorkers. When my daughter was 6 she and her classmates weren't sure they were going to get home from school on September 11, 2001. We were not sure how we were going to get her home that day. Not only did almmost 3,000 fellow New Yorkers die that day but one of her schoolmates father's firm was virtually obliterated that day and the father only survived because he brought his daughter to school. She could smell the fumes from the World Trade Center for months.

Don't kid yourself. Americans were not brainwashed or fooled. Something massively life changing happened on 9/11/01 and the failure to get that is likely to provide an enormous political divide in the future.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Don't kid yourself. Americans were not brainwashed or fooled. Something massively life changing happened on 9/11/01...

You need to take yourself out of the city. Unfortunately, not everyone is a New Yorker, not everyone shares those horrid memories, not everyone gets to see the hole in our skyline everyday as a reminder.

Remember, our anti-terror funds were already taken away, with sites like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty not listed as terrorist targets.

The line about 9/11 changing everything is just a slogan for political expediency. 

Dissent Protects Democracy.

Probably because for every person willing to make the huge effort and take whatever risk is involved to actually travel to and participate in a mass demonstration there are 10, 50, 100 or more people who have similar views but are unable or un-willing to march.

This seems to me to miss the point.  Or maybe it doesn't.  It's not clear to me at all that the general public perceives protests in this way - extrapolating from the attendance at a demonstration to think, wow, a much larger number of my fellow citizens feel this way.  Quite the opposite: I think that most people see demonstrations in terms of how few people actually attend them, and conclude that the protestors are at the margins of political opinion (or more likely, simply yawn at the whole thing).  The act of representing these others, in other words, doesn't really accomplish anything.  

On the other hand, if democratic politics is about everybody having their say, and some sort of political direction emerging from the din - if the politics of self-expression is the right way to think about what should go on, in a democracy - then I suppose you have a point.   

Josh-

There is no magic bullet.

If the "netroots" alone was enough, Jim Webb's son's tour would not have been extended.

If the "election" would have been enough, Bush would never have ordered the surge.

It takes a commitment, more than a singular vote or an abstract blog post, to put yourself in harm's way.

Harm's way? Yes. What harm? The same one I feared when I took my then eight year old daughter to a march on Washington last year. Will I take her again for this one?

No.

As we sat and watched the SOTU tonight and she asked simple questions and I tried to provide answers ("Daddy, if everyone is against more war, why does he want more war?"), I began to realize that the election didn't matter to Bush. It didn't matter to Cheney. It didn't matter to half of the Repubs in the audience. Bush was going to do what he was going to do, period. What does that portend for "peaceful" protests? I remember looking at those guys guarding the buildings that the folk-song-singing, rhythm-section dancing "protesters" were marching past during the last DC event.

"Gimme an excuse" was what was looking back at me. I have never before encountered as many shaved head, leather-fetish, jack-boot wearing agents of social control in my life as I have seen sprout up in the last six years, from local cops to State Patrol to the myriad jurisdictions and forces here in DC. As I stopped many blocks away to get my daughter some lunch after the protest, I remember seeing an "officer", not a local cop or from an identifiable agency, off-loading his submachine gun and body armor into the trunk of his unmarked car. That's when I realized how antagonistic this government was prepared to get against unarmed citizens.

With Bush, maybe it was bad parenting. Maybe too many of Dad's pals had bailed him out of his failures before, no matter how much he insisted he was right. Whatever.

It has become very clear to me that there will only be two things that will stop him- impeachment or a bullet.

I don't want to see the bullet. I can't go through that again. Watching Kennedy's head explode, Reagan hustled off while Brady lay bleeding on the sidewalk at the "Hinckley Hilton", no, no, please not again. We traded bullets for ballots many years ago and I never want to see this country go back.

But blogs and ballots haven't stopped him. What's left?

People.

People in the streets, people talking to people, people blogging, people writing to the papers, people marching, people picketing, people resisting, people empowering lawmakers to finally end the reign of this fool that has squandered the body and soul of this nation. From every venue the call must go out to stop this man before Iran is our next focus of never ending war. Stop the war, and this fool's war powers stop with it. Let him continue and our next President will still be trying to find ways to extricate our country from a religious war.

That's why it has to happen with all the resources of a sane nation; in the street, in print, and all electronic options- to reclaim this country and it's reputation, it's honor in the best sense of the word.

Alphonse ( Al ) Kada
Iranians are fighting the Americans in Iraq so they don't have to fight them on the streets of Tehran

You make a good point about the "reason" for the Ghandi and Dr. King style protest movements in that the police state responses garner more attention and oxygen than the protest alone.

This may explain why people today resist assembling in the street en masse to protest the governments actions.

Forget about all the reasons articulated above. The fact remains that, based on history in America and everywhere on earth, there is always the haunting possibility of some kind of violence erupting. Given this reality spoken, or unspoken, I can understand why people do not believe large massive protests are viable today in America.

Obviously, since this is a primarily liberal site, and there is exceedingly little support for these types of actions, and there has yet to be any mass movement of street protests in America opposing this government for any whatever reason so far, - we are wasting time and energy discussing something that will never happen.

That said, I must leave this dicussion with two points. Thankfully for you hoppyCalif2 the police in Sacramento were of the kindler gentler variety. I was involved and have video that became part of a project called 60 Camera's against the war, to PROVE, that the police in New York were extremely agressive and provocative. The police were dressed in full riot regalia, visors down, clubs out. Horse units charging the packed crowds full of women, children, old people, fathers with baby's on their shoulders without provocation, to herd and coral the crowd into metal gated containment area's. Cops pepper spraying the crowds unprovoked to disperse protesters who were doing nothing more than shouting. The police state tacticd exhibited in all the protests I witnessed was both brutal and disappointing in that the city had largely rallied around NYPD after 9/11. All that good will was lost because of the police state tactics against peaceful, non-violent protests. And this is NYC. There were no wrecked cars, no windows broken, no disruption of streets beyond where our permits allowed. These were unproved attacks and police state tactics brutally employed to suppress protesters, and prohibit the peoples right to dissent and assembly. Miami suffered similar abuses. DC was sprayed with Tularemia.

So, again I understand why people do not want to take these chances and risk arrest, or injury to protest.

Still, the energy in these large gatherings is palpable and vibrant. America is perfectly well represented; with every age, culture, ethnicity, class, sexual persuasion, and size sharing in a unique expression of democracy. And finally, some of us will not be dissuaded, and believe that the fascist warmongers and profieers in the Bush government do not care, and will not listen to anything the American people, or congress, or anyone bi-partisan group might offer, - and that the ONLY way to be heard, is to stand up, raise our voices, and force the government to recognize our concerns and existance.

As I've mentioned before, I really find it hard to mine out your specific political points, which do exist, from what appears to be a great deal of radical rhetoric. Please take this as constructive criticism; the amount of indignation and drama, in lengthy posts, makes your points hard to follow.

I must respond to one particular point, from a standpoint of professional experience with infectious disease and biodefense.

DC was sprayed with Tularemia.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Had Bush conducted the war competently there is no real evidence that Americans would not still be fully behind it.

There is no real evidence that conducting the war competently would have led to a substantially different result. I suppose what you mean is that Americans would still be behind the war if it had been conducted successfully. Quite apart from the fact that if it had been a success it would now be over, in my opinion that was never in the cards no matter how it was conducted.

Not just New York. I was about 3-4 miles from the Pentagon, and my windows shook with the crash.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I don't regard myself as somnolent or passive regarding the political process. My experience is that I can have more effect by any number means other than street demonstrations.

I will admit that I found street demonstrations "to shut down the city" things that tended to make me hostile to the cause espoused, regardless of the issue or ideology. I also find the co-opting of the original theme intensely annoying, to the point that I will not support a demonstration for some issue I support if it means I appear to support something with which I totally disagree.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

If you refer to B and C as biological and chemical, I know of no even theoretical work on a calmative biological agent. There has been work on calmative and nonlethal chemical agents, and the US did weaponize BZ.

I reject the idea that a biological release was done to "warn" protesters. There have been detailed open literature reports of what happened, and I would note that no government buildings were evacuated or states of emergency declared. Since I can think, offhand, of at least 3 or 4 biological agent simulators that have been widely used in testing, none of them Franciscella species, I find it hard to believe such an agent would be used. Why would a threat be so obscure? Why would the details of the threat be such that anyone with a reasonable knowledge of medical microbiology would consider it a non-event?

In the case of BZ and LSD, it was realized that it would be a really bad idea to have hallucinating people near weapons controls. With others, the fundamental problem is safety.

Look at the Moscow Theater incident with an attempted "calmative", now believed to be a high-potency derivative of fentanyl. No one has ever seriously come up with a formulation that can calm large numbers of people, without seriously jeopardizing people of low body mass or in poor health. In emergency rooms, even with direct observation of a violent, one gives multiple injections of a drug such as haloperidol, so the individual effect can be judged.

I do not see a way that EMP or ELF can be used in crowd control. This is basic physics. Oh, an EMP would destroy my pacemaker, but that which is properly defined as EMP has relatively little effect on living beings. Half-wavelength ELF antennas, needed for significant power transmissions, need to be tens of kilometers long. How can this possibly be used in tactical crowd control?

Yes, microwave and acoustic pain weapons, as well as other techniques such as glue spray and isolating foam, are being worked on. I feel confident that several will be excluded due to safety concerns.

A very scary moment in my personal experience was seeing true machine guns, locked and loaded, fingers on triggers, and aimed at a door that violent demonstrators were attempting to break down. The area in question had nuclear command and control facilities in it, and, given a lack of alternatives, I have to accept that deadly force might have been the only option. Machine gun fire 18 inches off the ground would make Kent State a love-in.

So, yes, I think there is a real role for work on nonlethal agents. In the situation I mention above, it was possible to counterattack with a company of infantry.

There are real choices where American citizens are engaging in behavior that must be stopped, such as approaching nuclear weapons facilities. If the only other alternative is using an unpleasant but nonlethal weapon, I think that's a fine idea.

We may disagree, but I do not assume all actions of the government, and indeed military, are pernicious. I have enough experience with the classified side that I do not look under my bed for Men In Black. The performance of Homeland Security is far more typical than MKULTRA. Yes, I did work in totally unclassified areas of the Gorman Building, and passed the MKULTRA labs without ever suspecting what they were.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I agree that 911 changed our country. Unfortunately, it was dishonestly turned into a kind of bumper-sticker by the Bush administration, which used it as an excuse to do what they had planned all along.

I think it will take some distance to actually put it in its proper perspective. The war in Iraq is inextricably linked, not because of reality, but because of realspeak, and because of its own negative consequenses.

The chance for 911 to be considered as an attack by Saudi, Egyptian, and UAE highjackers will have to wait. The examination of who allowed a plane-load of Saudis to take off when American families could not be reunited will also wait.

But most of all, the affect on you and many other New Yorkers, as well as the rest of us who looked on feeling impotent and afraid -- postponed by the malicious mis-use of this terrible event -- will probably never come to closure.

Jan Knaus

One needs to go back further than either Ghandi or Martin Luther King to get to the most eloquent and rigorous defense of Civil Disobedience:  Henry David Thoreau.  We generally shorten the name of the essay to Civil Disobedience (as they do at the site I've linked below), but the full title is On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, and the word Duty needs careful consideration.  I've quoted Thoreau before, probably more than once.  But these words seem especially prescient relating to this discussion:

• What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give up only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man. But it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it. 

  He follows that with this...which almost seems like a rebuttal to Josh, 160 years, give or take before Josh wrote.

• All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.

I note that effectiveness or ineffectiveness doesn't come into play in Thoreau's writing. . .at least not at this point in the essay.  Later, however, he also makes an observation concerning tactics.  For Thoreau, changing minds was part of the argument, but the rest involved something modern protesters are less willing to do...use the weight of their numbers to overburden the system:

• A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.

So, sometimes we do things not because we see them immediately effective, or even effective in the long term.  We do them as a matter of conscience, and, hopefully, accept the consequences.  I do love Thoreau, and this essay especially.  I require it of my freshmen, and I commend it to everyone who hasn't read it recently.

aMike

It's fair for me to clarify what, in part, was an emotional response. An arbitrary number of demonstrators, standing on a sidewalk and allowing pedestrian traffic to flow, causes no special emotional reaction in me. I place the "shut down the city" protesters, much less those that decide to vandalize small shops, in the category of street criminals. There have been times where a street criminal attempted to detain or threaten me in search of loot, but events did not proceed quite as they planned.

Indeed, sometimes the equivalent of rearranging the anatomy of a would-be mugger may be to tell a "shut-down" demonstrator, with due regard for safety, that they have just convinced me to take every possible step against their position. In practice, I might continue to work for their position if I already agreed with it, but my specific purpose is to give the strongest possible negative feedback to someone I regard as a criminal.

I should note that what I will accept as civil disobedience is, in fact, civil. If someone wishes to go limp and be arrested, or even block a doorway and will accept being stepped upon, I give them a certain respect. It is the screaming demonstrator trying to intimidate me that draws the greatest spoken contempt for their position.

Perhaps it is most accurate to say that an obstructionist demonstration, for some position about which I am neutral, is most likely to incur real opposition on my part -- if these are its proponents, I may not want any part of it.

I offer my hand, Todd. Even a little voluntary drop of anonymity, for those for whom it is important, is something I deeply appreciate. Not reflecting on you in the slightest, I've always respected John Hancock's signature, for I do believe that personal responsibility, trust and honor are the things that make for just politics.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I admit I'm impatient but I've come to the conclusion we've all kind of lost the plot. There's a mad scramble on to move all the primaries up to January and February so the big money (Hillary!) can steam roll the nomination before St. Patrick's Day 2008.

The machine has already moved to the right in preparation for the nomination they are going to buy. By 2009 we're going to be so far right what difference does it make which party wins! The only thing left is for each party to sell corporate naming rights to the party name.

How do you make an impact on this process? I can appreciate that people believe street protests are futile but what delusion makes them think they have any other input or impact on this system.

Eyes on the Prize has a great compilation of that type of film. I use it all the time teaching about the Civil Rights Movement.

Tom

Howard,

How do you think Gandhi would (not should) respond to an attack on Iran by the US if he were in our situation today?

Tom

Could you clarify that? Gandhi in India? In the US?

I assume you are speaking of a figurative Gandhi, or a civil disobedience movement.

Personally, I don't play civil disobedience. I play inside the political system, with media, etc., but I don't do street theater. If it comes to it, I'm not invariably nonviolent.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Actually, this is going too far into paranoia for my taste, but a few responses...

Dismiss these issues if you will, but what you do not explain, though you try valiantly is why anything, any agent was released on the DC protesters.

EMP renders all electonics non revoverable. There are no possible repairs, there is no replacing components, any electrical devise, or system and I need not go into the dictionary length description of potential candidates is literally toast.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

While I fully admit that am not prepared or frankly interested in debating electronics theory with an expert,

event that was well documented

Russia is supposedly ahead of us in these fields.

The issue is not the level of weaponization, or the specifics of the weaponized agent involved, - this critical issue is - WHO released ANY agent on DC protesters and WHY?

We both can provide several hows, but that is not an issue I am questioning. Do your own and get back to me.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I really don't know, if he were limited to his techniques of civil disobedience. I believe the only thing that is likely to have any real effect is a strong position by Congress.

I don't understand how passive resistance could affect GWB. I don't understand how it would affect the bulk of the American public or the political leadership.

Part of this is that police forces understand the techniques well enough not to create martyrs. No, I'd hope to have him working the halls of Congress and organizing grassroots pressure on legislators.

In all fairness, I don't think in terms of street protest in general and nonviolent techniques in the specific. I believe in the political system eventually self-correcting. I am also sufficiently familiar with the Continuity of Government evacuation, communications and bunker plan to know that demonstrations cannot seriously inconvenience key Executive leaders.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Yes, there is active research in nonlethal weapons. It's a valid military alternative to killing people in situations like riot control, occupations, or demonstrators going into sensitive areas for which deadly force is an alternative. Of course, it could be abused against lawful protest, but I believe there are enough reasons to have such a device that it should be developed. It appears to be the safest method found, possibly excepting glue and obscuring foam sprays.

In the wild, tularemia is spread on ticks and deer flies, especially on rabbits. Natural cases most often are found in rabbit hunters or butchers. It can be transmitted in water, and for reasons no one has been able to explain, people have gotten it while mowing lawns on Martha's Vineyard (and nowhere else).

While the Sin Nombre (American Southwest) strain of hantavirus is indeed spread from the feces of a specific mouse, most rat-borne infections come from fleas and ticks they carry rather than the feces.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I agree with you that they are most important to the participants. In that context, I believe the most valuable demonstrations have moved from large ones, especially involving civil disobedience to try to trigger violence police won't use, to local ones that have the potential of improving grass-roots organizing.

If one goes to a local demonstration and finds a hundred people who write a focused letter to one's Congressional delegation, and perhaps 3-5 that are known to the Congressman and visit or write, I can see that having an enormous effect if spread across the nation, coupled with other means of communication.

The idea of multiple modes of communications, be they local demonstrations, letter writing, delegations to legislators, blogging, etc., is critical. I'm not revealing anything to reach back to the days when I worked with nuclear command and control, and say that launch orders, some to differing platforms, went out by 23 separate systems of communications. The idea was that somehow, everyone who needed to hear would hear, even in the middle of a nuclear attack. There's a lesson there.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Tony, do believe that I have not offered you any scurrilous insults. Had I chosen to do so, there would be no need for you to call them such; certain truths are self-evident.

Apparently, anyone who does not agree totally with your fantasies, the technical details of which you freely admit you don't understand, is a Bush provocateur. Most people do not consider

diversion into evidence

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*