CODE ORANGE FAILS TO KEEP PROTESTERS AT HOME
By Heather Cottin
If the Bush administration thought it would slow down the anti-war movement by declaring a Code Orange alert the week of worldwide demonstrations, it didn't work.
The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, "Fear ... reigns with the tyrant." But fear only works when people are cowed and meek. They're not.
For one thing, there is a general distrust of anything the Bush administration says. In the South, where anti-war sentiment is growing daily, a reader wrote to the Atlanta Constitution on Feb. 14: "This is like living in a dictatorship. Our officials are telling us who to be afraid of. [It's] just a ploy to keep us as a nation of fear."
Another reader said, "It seems mighty suspicious that a high alert has been declared by the United States government just as it is trying to drum up support for a war in Iraq."
The St. Petersburg Times of Feb. 12 quoted a retiree: "It's ludicrous. I'm not going to be running around here paranoid with tape and all that kind of stuff."
He was right. Science writer Gregg Easterbrook said in the Feb. 16 New York Times, "A terrorist release of chemical weapons in an American city would probably have effects confined to a few blocks, making any one person's odds of harm far less than a million to one." Conventional explosives would do more harm than chemical or biological weapons, said Easterbrook, adding that "millions cowering behind plastic sheets as clouds of biological weapons envelop a city owes more to science fiction than reality."
The Code Orange trick raised anxiety levels to cold war highs. Administrators in schools, hospitals, railroad stations and other public buildings beefed up security and subjected ordinary folks to a circus of terror alerts.
According to ABC news on Feb. 13, the whole reason for the alert came down to the government's claim that one informant said there was going to be a "dirty bomb" attack somewhere in the country. The new Department of Homeland Security, which receives scads of false alarms every day, then encouraged public panic by broadcasting this alleged threat and calling for a Code Orange alert.
After portions of the population were driven into a state of apprehension by the news media, said ABC news, the FBI gave the informant a polygraph test. He failed, but Code Orange remained in force.
Everyone knows that a good detective looks for the motive. The government had several motives: to dissuade people from coming to the major cities where anti-war demonstrations were to take place, and to divert attention from the declining economy.
If the plan was to get people to stay away from the massive protests in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, it backfired. Opponents of Washington's war plans were infuriated by the manipulation of fear and cynical assertions that the U.S. was under attack, when in fact the Pentagon was planning a genocidal blitzkrieg of Iraq.
They turned out for the demonstrations in record numbers.
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