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.
Reprinted from the Feb. 27, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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