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Bush touts Iraq progress; protesters converge on D.C. |
By mid-morning, one arrest had been made in the McPherson Square vicinity.
“We see a considerable number of protests in D.C.,” said Metropolitan Police Department Capt. Jeffrey Herold.
Herold responded to questions from reporters after eight protesters, dressed in black and wearing death masks, lay in the street at the intersection of 17th and L streets NW. Posing as mourning women, the protesters joined themselves together with “tootsie rolls,” plastic tubes filled with foam that are allegedly more difficult to cut than handcuffs.
A special police unit cut through the tubes and removed the protesters from the street without making any arrests.
As Herold explained to reporters that it was never the police’s goal to arrest protesters, a protester accused him of pushing a woman and kicking a bicycle. Herold denied the woman’s claims.
Protesters ranged in age and agenda. Some were as young as 11, while some had protested for peace since the Vietnam War. A group of grandmothers staged a knit-in outside the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Amanda Duzak, a 21-year-old energy activist from Towson University, was part of a group that wore “No War, No Warming” signs. Duzak said she and her group “want people to see the connection between the war and [global] warming.”
She added, “We’re in the war to get oil, and oil contributes to climate change.”
Lily Hughes was one of several protesters who walked on stilts and wore blackbird costumes as “warnings of death.”
One high school freshman said she was protesting because “the war was such a disaster — so many people have died,” but admitted that she only “kind of remember[ed]” the 2003 invasion.
On Wednesday morning, hours before the protesters would march on the DNC, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) both issued statements condemning the war.
“It is for our military readiness, for the families of our brave men and women in uniform, for our national security, and for our standing in the world that America needs a new direction in Iraq,” Pelosi said, noting that nearly 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died in the conflict.
“Even as we begin the sixth year of this war, all the president seems able to offer Americans is more of the same perpetual disregard for the costs and consequences of stubbornly staying the course in Iraq,” Reid said.
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