Park Service Plan to Add Mall Security Hits Resistance

[Rose Siding]

The National Park Service is proposing increased security at the Mall's memorials, seeking to permanently close a 70-space parking lot at the Jefferson Memorial and add anti-vehicle barriers east of the Lincoln Memorial, facing the Reflecting Pool.

Park officials say the changes are needed to secure the historic structures against the threat of car or truck bombs and will be unobtrusive. But historic preservation groups say the Park Service is limiting or altering the public's experience of the very monuments it is trying to protect.
...
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the encroachment of concrete-and-steel fortifications around the capital's best-known symbols of democracy has produced mounting complaints of overkill.

Critics say that the new proposals are more steps toward sterilizing a city whose landmarks and layout were intended to inspire.....
...
Preservationists say that the barrier designs proposed so far would mar a site of historic gatherings, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech of 1963.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39751-2004Dec31.html

[Benhurst]

1. This country is being transformed into a police state. It might

as well look like one.

[The Backlash Cometh]

2. I'm beginning to understand the last scene of that remake movie

of Planet of the Apes. The one where the Bourne guy lands at the feet of a very hairy Abraham Lincoln on the Mall? I didn't really understand that ending until you put the Chimp factor into the formula.

[Benhurst]

3. Yeah, maybe they should consider renaming it Prophecy. NT

[Stinky The Clown]

4. DC is looking for all the world like an armed camp

Barriers everywhere. Security checks to get into the damnedest places. Lots of visible "security" people. Cameras everywhere. Fences. Guard shacks. Visible rifles in some places. Purses opened. Wands in action to electronically search people. Air sampling monitors. Even missile launchers when you get near that five sided building.

I don't doubt the need for a certain level of security, but this is too much. I think it is all window dressing to keep Chimpus Khan's myth alive. Scare the shit out of the populace and keep them scared. It is any dictator's wet dream.

This simply MUST stop. I hardly recognize the country I served and for which my brothers and sisters died.

[DELUSIONAL]

5. Years ago I visited East Berlin

The descriptions I've read here remind me of all the security -- tanks hidden from the view of West Berlin but visible to anyone who was in East Berlin. Guards everywhere and restrictions about where you could go and photograph. The wall was an ever present reminder that East Germany was keeping people from escaping.

The oppressive feeling of being in prison was inescapable -- and what is happening in our Nation's capital seems to serve the same purpose -- reminding people that resistance to Der bushit gang is a waste of energy -- that wall is between Der bushita gang and the people AND between the people and the rest of the world.

[TahitiNut]

6. Imperial Rome - citizens and slaves must know their place.

"We The People" are no longer supreme - merely chattel to be herded as our Masters see fit. Dehumanize the Mall. Dehumanize the pedestrian memorials to liberalism.

The "logic" is impeccable.
(1) The value of these public monuments is based on their accessibility to The People.
(2) Terrorists would make them unavailable to The People.
(3) We'll show 'em -- and make 'em unavailable to The People before the terrorists can.

It reminds me of the "logic" of a Homeowners Association I was in not too long ago. We had saunas in the community house adjacent to the pool. Homeless people would use the saunas and make them filthy and unavailable to residents without clean-up. So the board closed the saunas - making them permanently unavailable to residents. ("We'll show them homeless people!")