RE: What is the truth of the anti war rallys?
James wrote: Supposedly tens of thousands turned up, forty two thousand in San Francisco Yet oddly, the photos of marches that I see look more like forty in San Francisco, and four hundred in Washington. Perhaps there were a lot more out of frame, but that is an odd way to photograph a demonstration. Does anyone know the truth from his own eyes, or a more complete set of images? I can't speak to the peace marches this time around we are in war with Oceania, but last time when Bush senior attacked Iraq a peace march of at least a thousand people went right past my apartment in San Francisco. --Lucky
Re: What is the truth of the anti war rallys?
Estimating crowd sizes is difficult even if you don't have good visibility, and for most events, there are at least two or three sets of people estimating crowd size who have axes to grind that bias their results. Washington DC's especially bad about that. According to the newsblurb we heard in San Francisco, the Washington DC park police have stopped routinely giving out estimates of crowd size, but it was in the tens of thousands, an number that stretches from about 10,000 to 1,000,000. Their estimates were often politically driven, and I don't know if their refusal to estimate is to avoid getting caught in politics (probably) or because it sounds smaller than the probable size so it's still political. I saw some CSPAN coverage of the speakers later that night, but didn't see any wide-area crowd shots, just a few near-stage ones. The San Francisco event did pack the square in front of city hall, and apparently during the march from Justin Herman Plaza to city hall, they pretty much filled the street all the way - it's about 1.5 miles. I don't know how many people it takes to fill the plaza, but 42,000 is a believable number. If you were hearing it consistently, that means that one source reported it first and everybody else copied it (probably either the police or the organizers.) We were trying to meet some people who were on Market Street, so we didn't get to see the crowd on Justin Herman plaza, and crowd dynamics made it impractical to stand on anything tall enough to see crowd size when things were getting started. The crowd stayed relatively compact until the march started - while we were looking for parking on the way there, we were hoping that it would be larger than the crowd farther down the Embarcadero who were there for the Red Bull FlugTag fair, but once we got to the main area, no worries about that :-)
RE: What is the truth of the anti war rallys?
We were at the DC march. It took two hours to pass a point, and we left before the end had appeared, in fact couldn't see the end. The Wash Post reported over 100,000 participated, largest since Vietnam. We videoed and photoed the demo, but tape and chip were confiscated Sunday by the guards at Warrenton Training Center, Site D, near Brandy Station, VA, Site D is the global comm center for State and DoD, and reportedly the CIA: http://cryptome.org/wtcd-eyeball.htm I asked if the shoulder of the road was federal property. Their answer: yes. The state trooper looked at the ground and scratched it with his shoe. I said the no trespass sign was twenty feet from the road. A guard said the road is federal property. A VA state trooper participated as well, but after checking our rental car info had nothing to say about the alleged trespass. We were on the shoulder of the road along Site D. We asked what database our (me and wife) ID stuff would be put into. The guards said it will go in our own db and will not be available to anyone else, for example, if you are pulled over by the police and a run is made on you, this incident will not appear. I asked if they were contract guards and the answer was no, we are federal employees. The golf ball antenna are giant-sized, some 80 feet in diameter and are visible from a half-mile away. An enclosing fence stops at a line of trees and the site is open thereafter. I asked why does the fence stop. A guard said it just does. I asked if the site allows visitors. Answer: no. We were told to call the site's public affairs office to check on the status of our tape and chip. Frissell, no warrant, just a command to hand over the tape and chip or the equipment. What terrorism analysts will be made of two hours of DC-demo tape is a duh.
