I note, the threats these world record, Peace Protests presented to the Status Quo, brought about daily spying on Americans, without warrant, and the harvesting of private information to be sold to the government, by any media Corporation you might use. Have you submitted to your TSA groping recently?
They are afraid, very very afraid, of YOU. Those laws are to protect them, not us, they do not reduce any foreign threat our military might have created for us, they are simply there to track us and make sure our actions are known to them, while we aren't to know of their actions, National Security, ya know, their Nation, not ours. Ask any Police State, Military State person about Peace Protestors, they consider them the most dangerous people on the Planet, after all they keep them from fighting wars abroad before those people get mad and come attack us here, for what we, our State Department and Military already do to them abroad when they are resistant to the Corporations that fund our Political process. Scott -------------------------------------------------------------------------- <http://world.time.com/2013/02/15/viewpoint-why-was-the-biggest-protest-in-world-history-ignored/> Ten years ago today, the world saw what was by some accounts the largest single coordinated protest in history. Roughly ten to fifteen million people (estimates vary widely) assembled and marched in more than six hundred cities: as many as three million flooded the streets of Rome; more than a million massed in London and Barcelona; an estimated 200,000 rallied in San Francisco and New York. From Auckland to Vancouverand everywhere in betweentens of thousands came out, joining their voices in one simple, global message: No to the Iraq War. I was among the anti-war contingent that swarmed Manhattans midtown on Feb. 15, 2003, a wintry Saturday. We spread across miles of city blocks, trundling past abandoned police barricades as we tried to inch toward the United Nations, where ten days earlier then Secretary of State Colin Powell had presented what we now know was illusory intelligence about Iraqs supposed weapons of mass destruction. The multitudes in New York were diverse and legion. There were anarchists and military veterans, vociferous students (I was then a freshman in college) and a motley cast of greying peaceniksmany, including one grandmother memorably puttering along in a wheelchair, had opposed American involvement in Vietnam. And there were myriad others: a band of preppy suburbanites with banners announcing themselvesSoccer Moms Against the Warmusicians, street artists, and workaday New Yorkers. My uncle, a doctor with medical practices in both the U.K. and India, had flown in for the demonstration and was just another face in a vast crowd. (JOE KLEIN: Refighting the Last Wars) The overwhelming feeling on New Yorks streets, despite the grimness of the NYPD and the bite of that February afternoon, was one of unity and hope. Word was seeping in about the scale of the demonstrations elsewhere and it was hard not to bask in our sense of collective purpose. An article in the New York Times would soon trumpet, There are two superpowers: the United States and world public opinion. Heres Sofia Fenner, then a high school senior in Seattle (now a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, currently doing dissertation work in Cairo): I was just proud to stand with all those people, proud that we as dissenting Americans were not staying home while what seemed like the whole world took up our cause. In Los Angeles, a pregnant Laila Lalami walked a mile with fellow protesters down Hollywood Boulevard. I thoughthundreds of thousands of people across the U.S. are making their voices heard. Surely they cant be ignored, the Moroccan-American novelist told TIME this week. But they were. And there it was. We failed. Slightly more than a month later, the U.S. was shocking and awing its way through Iraqi cities and Saddam Husseins defenses and bedding inthough it didnt know it yetfor a near decade-long occupation. The protests, which by any measure were a world historic event, were brushed aside with blithe nonchalance by the Bush Administration and a rubber-stamp Congress that approved the war. The U.N.s Security Council was bypassed, and the largely feckless, acquiescent American mainstream media did little to muffle Washingtons drumbeats of war. (PHOTOS: War/Photography by Geoff Dyer) A decade later, its hard to understand why the display of people power on Feb. 15 proved so ineffectual. The gun-slinging righteousness of post-9/11 America has given way to a more humble West, burdened by unwinnable wars, financial crises and a semi-permanent funk of political dysfunction. Moreover, the explosion of social media in recent years has enabled previously obscure episodes of dissent to reach and reshape the global conversation. Protests matter again. Public spacesfrom Cairos Tahrir Square to Madrids Puerta del Sol to New Yorks tiny Zuccotti Parkbecame sites of a renewed democratic vitality. Yet the mass anti-austerity protests that have rocked Europe or even the largest actions of Occupy Wall Street have not been able to match the scale of what took place on Feb. 15, 2003. There will be time yet to re-litigate the justifications behind the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, ten years after the fact. The ranks of the wars cheerleaders have thinned in the intervening years, with a host of journalists and pundits in the U.S. offering their mea culpas for supporting the war so unquestioningly. A dictator is gone, but more than 100,000 Iraqis are dead, as well as 4,804 U.S. and coalition soldiers. The U.S. spent nearly a trillion dollars on a pre-emptive war that didnt need to happen and a nation-building exercise that has achieved only fragile, uncertain gains. Far from a Mission Accomplished, the American adventure in Iraq has become a cautionary tale of hubris and poor planning. Its clear the Wests current reluctance to take more direct action in ending Syrias bloody civil war is, in part, a legacy of the U.S. experience in Iraq, where the disintegration of a regime spawned a whole new phase of sectarian slaughter and chaos. But theres no satisfaction in looking back and saying, I told you sonot with the blood that has been spilled and continues to be spilled. That profound solidarity I felt ten years ago has faded into a form of resignation and sadness. In a region as complex and politically volatile as the Middle East, fixed moral positions are difficult. Our demands were simple [on Feb. 15], and we were right, says Fenner, the University of Chicago doctoral candidate. What I didnt realize at the time was that, when the war went ahead, nothing would ever be so simple again. 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