Civil Resistance at the White House
By David Swanson
I got to the White House around noon and found hundreds of people gathered awaiting the arrival of marchers who planned to get themselves arrested protesting the war.
I ran into Mike Ferner of Veterans for Peace, who showed me the paperwork from his arrest early this morning at the Pentagon. He said he’d been one of 41 people arrested between 6:30 and nearly 7:30 a.m. at the Pentagon. Three Veterans for Peace members had joined others from the War Resisters League. They’d shut down an entrance and the Pentagon Metro stop. They were swiftly booked and released, charged with “disobeying a lawful order” and given court dates in federal district court in Alexandria in January.
For a while people milled around in the street and the park in front of the White House. Around 12:30 or so, members of Code Pink stretched a giant banner out along Pennslvania Avenue, reading “Mothers Say No to War.” As they did so, the media swarmed and filmed every movement. Code Pink members sang a number of songs, including “The Day the Music Died,” but with lyrics something like this:
Bye bye, Mr. President, bye
You didn’t fix the levee
Now the water’s too high
You started a war based on a lie
You don’t care if poor people die