On August 6, as her 15 minutes of fame was just 
    beginning, Cindy Sheehan used an odd term in a TV 
    interview with Mark Knoller of CBS. She referred to the 
    foreign insurgents and terrorists in Iraq as “freedom 
    fighters.” Knoller cut those words out of his report, he 
    told me, because he “really wasn’t interested.” He should 
    have left them in. In fact, alarm bells should have rung 
    in his brain. First of all, it’s startling that an 
    antiwar mother would talk that way about people who blow 
    up children and who may have killed her own son. 
    Second, “freedom fighters” in this context is the 
    telltale lingo of the hard, anti-American left. When the 
    grieving mother starts talking that way, it’s news.

    Knoller recalls that other reporters on the scene were 
    watching his interview that day in Texas, but apparently 
    they weren’t any more interested in Sheehan’s little 
    linguistic adventure than he was. Apparently none 
    bothered to report it. The “freedom fighter” remark 
    reached the public only because an antiwar group, 
    Veterans for Peace, filmed the CBS interview. It was 
    picked up by an anti-Cindy Sheehan website, sweetness-
    light.com, where bloggers and conservative commentators 
    noticed and circulated it.