The antiwar protests in Washington DC ended on Monday with two symbolic civil disobedience actions at the White House and the Pentagon. 25 people were arrested at the Pentagon while attempting to barricade two entrances and over 400 were arrested at White House (including Cindy Sheehan) during an entirely symbolic action in which participants sat down on Pennsylvania Avenue and refused three police orders to disperse.

Despite the symbolic nature of the civil disobedience at the White House, many of those arrested were held in handcuffs for up to 10 hours. According to reports from arrestees, people were detained for over 12 hours before being charged with a crime and were released in the middle of the night. The United States Park Police’s conduct in handling arrestees led Michigan Congressperson John Conyers to write a letter to the Park Police asking for clarification about arrest policies.

Aside from the symbolic actions, there was little other civil disobedience or direct action targeting the occupation of Iraq during the weekend. While a few hundred protestors were able to harass World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) delegates attending the fall meetings of the World Bank and IMF, there was noticeably little participation from the hundreds of thousands people that protested the war a day earlier. This was no doubt due in part to the way the mobilization was organized as national antiwar coalitions rarely organize civil disobedience, and when they do, they generally separate such actions by holding them on different days. On September 24 there was a “black bloc,” but as has frequently been the case over the past few years, it failed to do anything of consequence.