Pentagon March

Yesterday, on the fourth anniversary of 9/11, the Pentagon sponsored a so-called "Freedom March" to . . . well, what exactly was the march for?

If you read this article, you'll see that lots of people had lots of reasons to attend. Some had lost loved ones in the Pentagon attack, and thus attended to remember them. But you'd have to be pretty brain-dead not to see that this was another effort to tie the Iraq War to the 9/11 attacks. The article makes that clear, but so does the following personal anecdote.

Yesterday morning, we want for our Sunday long run along the Potomac, and we chose a route that would take us near the site of the march. As the papers have reported, this was anything but a "free" Freedom March. You had to register (and be screened) in advance, and the entire route of the march was enclosed in Jersey barriers topped with orange crowd-control fencing. The west side of the Tidal Basin was completely closed off, even to joggers. (I don't know why this area was closed off, btw. It wasn't near the concert site.) There were so many cops and rent-a-cops around, probably getting time-and-a-half to secure the event. (I actually hope they were getting time-and-a-half, because they were otherwise being made to waste their time on a Sunday morning.) When we reached the end of the "free" area, we were informed by one cop/rent-a-cop that the area was closed off, for "the Iraq thing."

"The Iraq thing." That's what he said.

BTW, the Pentagon hasn't released numbers despite the pre-screening requirement and the fact that they passed out t-shirts; so the Pentagon hasn't released numbers because they aren't pleased with the attendance. The Metro says that about 4,000 people used the Pentagon Metro stop Sunday morning, which would place the crowd at about 4,000. Earlier in the week, the attendance projection was "estimated" at between 3,000 and 10,000. Looks like the Pentagon was only able to hit the low end of that range . . . .