Code Pink Protest at Walter Reed Military Hospital

On September 23, I attended the Code Pink vigil outside Walter Reed Military Hospital in Northwest Washington, DC. Code Pink’s demands are: 1) an end to the Iraq occupation and withdrawal of U.S. troops; 2) proper medical care for injured troops (predominantly poor people) when they return home.

The vigil participants numbered perhaps 40-50, many of them wearing pink. Too late, I remembered I should have worn my pink shalwar kameez. Attendance was higher than usual, for the weekly vigil, with many activists in town early for the national anti-war protest the next day.

Directly across the street from the vigil was a group of counter-demonstrators, whose numbers very nearly matched those of Code Pink. These numbers were an odd contradiction of the polls, which show that an overwhelming majority of Americans now oppose the war.

Code Pink’s members are primarily Caucasian women. Many of them dress in very feminine fashion, decked out in beautiful, old-fashioned pink hats, frilly pink dresses and pink shawls. But they are very tough, for it was some of their members who lay down in the streets and refused to move, protesting the inhumanity of the war very early on.

“We wear pink,” one of them told me during a previous vigil, “because it is a peaceful and soothing color, and also to draw attention to the farce of the Code Red, Code Orange, and other alerts issued by the Bush administration post 9-11.”

I’d just walked up to the vigil when a petite, fashionably dressed brunette, with shoulder length hair, came up to me and introduced herself, “Hi, I’m Medea.”

So, this was Code Pink’s gutsy co-founder, Medea Benjamin. Earlier this year, Medea had disrupted Condoleezza Rice’s San Francisco speech. Dressed in a black hood and cloak similar to that worn by Iraqi prisoners, she’d stood up screaming, "Stop the torture. Stop the killing. U.S. out of Iraq," until she was removed from the hall by authorities. She had all my respect.

I shook her hand and thanked her for her efforts against the war. At the time, I was not aware that Medea planned to be arrested in the mass civil disobedience two days later. She exuded a tranquility that comes, perhaps, from working for justice.

The Code Pink women are very organized. Someone offered me a candle with a nice holder; someone else handed me a flier. The flier instructed me not to interact with the counter-demonstrators. Don’t talk to press members, unless they present ID, the flier said.

Don’t talk to press? That’s a little extreme, I thought.

Later, after some searching on the web, I found articles from Cybercast News Service (CNS) and other right-wing sources attacking Medea Benjamin, quoting the right wing demonstrators at length, and offering only brief quotes of questionable authenticity from Code Pink protestors. Yes, this is the same CNS which attacked Dr. Siddique at the behest of the Zionists. Now you know why not to talk to the (Zionist) media, stupid!

A few weeks ago, a young soldier had joined the Code Pink vigil. He’d returned from Iraq thoroughly disillusioned by the war. Still angry and emotional at what he’d experienced, he was provoked into a physical confrontation by the taunts of the counter-demonstrators. Police quickly broke up the incident, but the Code Pink women were determined there should be no repeat of this.

I found that young soldier and talked with him for a few minutes.

He said “Those guys across the street, look at their hair. It’s too long. They can’t have been over there. That is why they support the war. They have no idea what the U.S. is doing over there.”

A Vietnam veteran who stood with us agreed. The current administration, he said, are all cowards and draft dodgers, hiding behind their power and wealth. Most of them don’t have any military service under their belt. That is why they take war so lightly.”

I squinted to read the counter demonstrators’ signs, in an effort to understand their argument. There was none. They carried bizarre signs, such as “Code Pink Funds Terrorists,” and “America’s Armed Forces: Bringing democracy to the world, toppling one dictator at a time.” Some of them wore tee-shirts saying “Club G’itmo.”
Their main point seemed to be that Code Pink--not an illegal war--is the problem.

It was the classic propaganda tactic: when you can’t answer your opponent’s argument with facts, create as much confusion as you possibly can, with wild accusations.

A young Italian-American woman wearing camouflage pants handed me one end of a Code Pink banner. “I made this banner,” she announced proudly. It read “Money for the Wounded, Not for the War.”

A $3 billion shortfall is expected for Veterans Administration (VA) funding; many veterans hospitals (including Walter Reed) are under threat of closure. The Code Pink banner was on point, elucidating the hypocrisy of the Bush regime, in its dealings with its own fighting men and women.

While I held the banner, a conservatively dressed Code Pink woman, who appeared to be in her sixties or seventies, with entirely grey hair, darted out into traffic. As I watched in amazement, she energetically handed out fliers announcing the anti-war march the next day to passing cars as they pulled up to the Georgia Avenue traffic signal.
I chatted with two elderly woman in bright pink Stetsons. They had come from Texas for the national march the next day. One of them told me she had been in Camp Casey for several weeks, and then joined a contingent to deliver a protest letter to Laura Bush, in response to her racist comments following Hurricane Katrina.

Just as I was about to ask her if they’d been successful in delivering the letter, the entire group of Code Pink women broke out in song to the accompaniment of a banjo: “I ain’t going to study war no more,” a very creative anti-war version of “When the Saints Come Marching In”, and other well known peace songs.

(The vigil continues every Friday night at 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm outside the main entrance of Walter Reed Medical Center, in Northwest DC).

For Peace in Pasadena

Pasadena still seems very much of a Republican stronghold. In the run-up to the election, nearly every yard on one street I observed was littered with pro-Bush signs. Confederate flags are common place here. The local high school athletic center is named Cecil Rhodes Stadium (after the white supremacist leader of the former Rhodesia). A few months ago, a 15-year old black high school student was killed--allegedly by four older white males--at a party, where he dared appear with his white girlfriend. Some of the accused killers were charged only with manslaughter, and it appeared that charges against the others would be dropped, until the boy's mother raised hell, and the NAACP intervened on her behalf. Hardly the ideal town in which to hold an anti-war protest. Or so I thought.

On March 19, wonder of wonders, I attended a small but spirited protest held by local Pasadena peace activists. Yes, there is such a group! The protest marked the anniversary of the illegal war (held in conjunction with worldwide anti-war protests that day). It was held on a small, well-located bridge on one of the busiest streets in Pasadena (heavily travelled that morning, perhaps due to the football game at the nearby high school). We stood on the bridge, our placards instructing drivers to "Honk for Peace." All six of us. Not exactly the massive DC-area protest that I'm used to, but the sincerity and commitment of the participants compensated for the numbers. The slogans on the placards were rather subdued (my dissident self might have preferred a bit stronger language). But the restrained language perhaps reflected the sagacity of the organizers, who said they'd been protesting in the same spot regularly, since the beginning of the war.

Everyone in the group seemed very genuinely nice. Linda, the organizer, is a retired GWU history professor. I asked in what area of history she specialized. The answer: "Women in military history." I was intrigued and resolved to explore the subject further with her. She seemed very well informed on Middle East issues, and we chatted a bit about the courage of the Israeli "refuseniks" (conscientious objectors in the IDF). She corrected my notion that display of the Confederate Flag (displayed on many of the pickup trucks which drove by us) necessarily made one a racist and pro-war. The Confederate Flag means different things to different people, she explained. Her students were fortunate to have had a professor who made them think outside the box.

Another woman, who is also an environmentalist, had just returned from a trip to Chile. Quite an outgoing group. I felt rather humbled to be amongst these leaders, who had stood protesting on the bridge before it became fashionable to be against the war, flinching neither at eggs nor curses thrown by ignorant passersby, while I hid amongst the 100,000+ protestors in Washington, DC area actions held during the same time period.