The Collapsing Universe of a Dark Star Mother
Special from Hawaii Free Press
By Andrew Walden, 8/26/2005 3:42:58 PM
hawaiireporter.com
With hordes of reporters hanging on her every word and Michael Moore, Maxine Walters, John Conyers, Al Sharpton and Joe Trippi lending their support, Cindy Sheehan might appear to be winning lots of new friends.
But life hasn’t been easy for Sheehan since demanding another meeting with President George W. Bush in her roadside protest near his Crawford, Texas, ranch. On June 1, 2005, her husband of 28 years separated from her. After only two weeks in Crawford, Sheehan’s mother demanded she return to California. Sheehan has been denounced by other members of her own family. Speaking to "Dark Syde" of the Daily Kos Aug. 1, Cindy says, "I have lost almost every friend that I had before Casey died. My husband and I are separated, because he doesn't support my activities ..."
A statement, released by Casey’s aunt and godmother, Cherie Quarterolo, says, "Our family has been so distressed by the recent activities of Cindy we are breaking our silence and we have collectively written a statement for release.... We do not agree with the political motivations and publicity tactics of Cindy Sheehan. She now appears to be promoting her own personal agenda and notoriety at the expense of her son's good name and reputation. The rest of the Sheehan family supports the troops, our country, and our president, silently, with prayer and respect." Signed, Casey Sheehan's grandparents, aunts, uncles and numerous cousins.
If all of that wasn’t bad enough, Cindy’s husband Patrick Sheehan, has now filed for divorce, citing "irreconcilable differences" in documents submitted Aug. 12, in Solano County California District Court.
Sheehan Family Statement: drudgereport.com
Divorce papers: thesmokinggun.com
How Spc. Casey Sheehan Lived and Died
Spc. Casey Sheehan, was 24 years old when he died fighting in Sadr City, Iraq, April 4, 2004. He had recently reenlisted and worked as a Humvee mechanic, a non-combat position. Soldiers who was there on April 4 say, "... Word got around fast that the patrol was in trouble." ... "They had guys who normally don't fight who volunteered to help their buddies. There were guys fighting to get on that convoy."
Of that day, Cindy Sheehan told interviewers: "And the sergeant said, ‘Sheehan, you don't have to go’, because my son was a mechanic. And Casey said, ‘Where my chief goes, I go.’" Spc. Casey Sheehan posthumously received the Purple Heart and Bronze Star for his bravery in combat and his loyalty to his comrades.
Account of Casey’s battle in Sadr City 4-4-04: talkingproud.us
Cindy’s former friends knew and loved Casey and respected his dedication to service. Her new friends have another agenda. Open Michael Moore’s Web site and Cindy Sheehan’s blog is front and center. But Moore’s response to the very battle which took Casey’s life highlights his insincerity.
On April 14, 2004, as the Sheehans were burying their son, Moore wrote, "… the majority of Americans supported this war once it began and, sadly, that majority must now sacrifice their children until enough blood has been let ….The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win."
Moore, the day Casey was buried: michaelmoore.com
Cindy’s supporters in Crawford come from the Crawford Peace House and the Lone Star Iconoclast. They are really one group. Their Web sites are full of cross-links. The "Iconoclast" and the Peace Center were founded in December 2000 by radicals who parachuted into Crawford in December, 2000, after Al Gore lost the Florida election.
The Iconoclast has written a positive review of 911 In Plane Site and maintains a link to the 911 in Plane Site webpage on its home page. In Plane Site is a "documentary" which purports to show that the U.S. Air Force carried out the 9-11 attacks.
The movie’s producers are right wing extremists often featured on the anti-Semitic Web site rense.com
Iconoclast: iconoclast-texas.com
Former Ku Klux Klan leader, David Duke, also is supporting Cindy. Duke’s Web site blares out, "Cindy Sheehan is right!" Duke quotes Cindy’s recent letter to ABC Nightline where she said, "Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel."
Link: davidduke.com
In an Aug. 17, 2005, email, Sheehan admits writing a letter to ABC Nightline, then accuses ABC Nightline Executive Producer Tom Bettag of "changing it":
Says Sheehan: "Another "big deal" today was the lie that I had said that Casey died for Israel. I never said that, I never wrote that. I had supposedly said it in a letter that I wrote to Ted Koppel's producer in March. I wrote the letter because I was upset at the way Ted treated me when I appeared at a Nightline Town Hall meeting in January right after the inauguration. I felt that Ted had totally disrespected me. I wrote the letter to Ted (sic) Bettag and cc'd a copy to the person who gave me Ted's address. I believe he changed the email and sent it out to capitalize on my new found notoriety by promoting his own agenda. Enough about that."
The Crawford Peace Center and the Lone Star Iconoclast aren’t the only ones parachuting into Crawford lately. When Cindy arrived, she came with 50 activists on an aging, blue "Impeachment Tour" bus from Dallas site of the early August national convention of Veterans for Peace (VFP).
Faint Echoes of Fonda and Kerry
Veterans for Peace’s convention was a pale imitation of the "Winter Soldier Project" organized by John Kerry and Jane Fonda 34 years earlier in an effort to break military morale during the Vietnam War. Unlike Kerry and Fonda, VFP could only round up two Iraq vets to spew venom at their former comrades.
Kerry Link:
frontpagemag.com
An article posted on the Veterans for Peace Web site describes the two: "Camilo Mejia, an army staff sergeant who was sentenced to a year in military prison in May, 2004 for refusing to return to Iraq after being home on leave, talks openly about what he did there: "... I was turning ambulances away from going to hospitals, I killed civilians, I tortured guys… and I’m ashamed of that. ..." Marine Corporal Abdul Henderson adds:
"We were firing into small towns… you see people just running, cars going, guys falling off bikes … it was just sad. You just sit there and look through your binos and see things blowing up, and you think, man they have no water, living in the third world, and we’re just bombing them to hell. Blowing up buildings, shrapnel tearing people to shreds."
Article: veteransforpeace.org
Some may remember Abdul Henderson as Michael Moore’s co-star in Fahrenheit 911.
Neither Henderson nor Mejia indicated whether they felt Spc. Casey Sheehan was also a war criminal.
Cindy’s Islamist Terror Connections
The convention article’s author is Dahr Jamail. Gold Star Families for "Peace" which Cindy Sheehan founded in 2004 touts Jamail saying he, "... spent eight months in Iraq as one of only a few independent U.S. journalists in the country. His dispatches at dahrjamailiraq.com are widely recognized as an important media resource. He writes for such publications as The Asia Times, The Sunday Herald, The Nation, and The Guardian.
Dahr also serves as a special radio correspondent for the BBC, Democracy Now!, and many other stations around the globe." How close is he to Cindy?
In her Aug. 5, 2005, speech to the Veterans for Peace convention in Dallas, Sheehan says, "... like Dahr said, the war criminals in Washington, D.C., they don't even lose a night's sleep." According to his blog, Jamail entered Iraq from Jordan on the same day Casey Sheehan was killed. Describing that fateful days’ fighting in his April 5, 2004 blog entry, Jamail said, "Iraq is on fire today, and right now the flames are only growing higher as the outrage toward the occupiers has drawn the militant Al-Sadr and his huge following into the battle against the Americans."
Quoting a U.S. soldier whose tank had been attacked by stone-throwers Jamail chooses to write, "Made me feel a little uneasy. Little kids, you know? And we’re a tank! They are not afraid. The kids stone us during the day, and the men attack with guns at night." For the rest of April 6, 2005, he blogged from Moqtada al-Sadr’s office -- headquarters of those who killed Casey: "... today a non-stop stream of men were coming in to get instructions from member there about where to go post themselves, where to take their guns, etc, in preparation for the next onslaught by the Americans. When we walked out of the office we spotted a man carrying a mortar in a bag, then placing it in a truck. No wonder the soldiers were nervous and tense there when we spoke with them. It’s dark now. No more little boys with rocks. Score another one for Bremer and his bravado."
On April 7, he blogged from a mosque controlled by Sadr supporters. In his April 3 blog from Amman, he denounced the four Americans murdered in Fallujah as "mercenaries."
In Jamail’s propaganda pieces, our troops are always hapless victims put there by incompetent "chicken hawk" leaders. A typical entry in Jamail’s blog reads: "What have we done? ... the blood of US soldiers continues to drain into the hot sands of Iraq. ..."
Blog: dahrjamailiraq.com
In contrast, Jamail portrays the terrorists of al-Sadr’s militia as organized, dedicated and tough. But Jamail reserves special adulation for one figure: Abu Musab Zarqawi.
His July 5, 2005, blog is a "Tomgram" published on the "Tom Dispatch" website operated by the Nation Institute, affiliated with the Nation magazine. It reads, "Zarqawi has indeed been a strange phenomenon of the ongoing war. Sometimes he seems to be everywhere at once in that country ... He is a literal whirling dervish of an enemy ... Bush and his top officials have, in fact, made good use of him ... Given that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be based upon administration lies and manipulations, I had begun to wonder if the vaunted Zarqawi even existed. ..."
Casey knew that Zarqawi existed.
Link: tomdispatch.com
Jamail is not the only enemy propagandist hovering around Cindy’s camp. The Iconoclast, in an article covering Sheehan’s press conference at the beginning of the roadside protest says one of the speakers was, " ...Hadi Jawad of the Crawford Peace House who urged the news media to keep reporting on the Downing Street memos." Before getting his current job handing out marching orders to the media, Jawad worked with CISPI — "Citizens In Solidarity with the People of Iraq". In the midst of Saddam’s palace-building mania, CISPI -- and Jawad -- in 2002 sent a group of volunteers to Iraq under the "Iraq Water Project", to rebuild water plants in that country. The spent about $25,000—the cost of one of Saddam’s gold bath fixtures.
According to its Web site: "The Iraq Water Project (IWP) is a project of Veterans for Peace, Inc. (VFP), a national veterans Peace & Justice organization based in St. Louis, Missouri. Our principal partner in IWP is Life for Relief & Development, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, and dedicated to alleviating human suffering in Iraq and many other parts of the world." Life for Relief is an Islamic "charity" working only in five war-torn countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Palestine and diamond rich Sierra Leone. Veterans for Peace is the group which started Cindy’s Crawford protest.
Cindy’s Stalinist Friends
Cindy’s roadside protest is all planned as part of the media’s build-up to an upcoming Sept. 24-26 anti-war demonstration in Washington, DC. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center (IAC), is working hand-in-glove with the Workers World Party to organize a Sept. 24-26 national anti-war protest in Washington, DC. At a June 11 national strategy meeting held in New York to plan for the September 24, 2005, demonstration, the IAC was represented by former Workers World Party Presidential candidate, Larry Holmes.
Link: troopsoutnow.org
Camping out by the roadside in Crawford, Cindy Sheehan’s plan is to follow President Bush back to Washington when he returns in early September. There she will camp out across from the White House, pretending to demand a meeting with the President. But does she really want one? Even as her camp dwindled to as few as six ageing hippies, and Sheehan returned to California at her mother’s demand, the national media continued to beat the drums. The premise of covering a news event is wearing pretty thin. Sheehan’s Web site, meetwithcindy.org says, "Our mission is to persuade President Bush to meet with Cindy Sheehan and answer her questions about why the war that took her son's life was started and why it is being continued." But, as Sheehan told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Aug. 12, she isn’t really all that eager to meet Bush.
OLBERMANN: "The nature of the media coverage you’re getting now, the response from other families of soldiers killed in Iraq, all of that, from the perspective of your protest there, in a way, isn’t it really better if President Bush doesn’t meet with you?"
SHEEHAN: "I would think so, yes. I think it’s great. And if he would come out right now, it would really defuse the momentum, and I don’t want to give them any hints. And I think that’s something they’ve probably already thought about."
Link: msnbc.msn.com
Sheehan’s Meeting with Bush
Actually what Sheehan is demanding is another meeting. Bush met with Cindy and Pat Sheehan in June 2004.
The Sheehan’s hometown Vacaville Reporter, June 24, 2004, describes their reaction after meeting Bush:
"... Pat (Sheehan) noted that Bush wasn't stumping for votes or trying to gain a political edge for the upcoming election.
"’We have a lot of respect for the office of the president, and I have a new respect for him because he was sincere and he didn't have to take the time to meet with us," Pat said.
"Sincerity was something Cindy had hoped to find in the meeting. Shortly after Casey died, Bush sent the family a form letter expressing his condolences, and Cindy said she felt it was an impersonal gesture.
"’I now know he's sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis," Cindy said after their meeting: "I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he's a man of faith."
"The meeting didn't last long, but in their time with Bush, Cindy spoke about Casey and asked the president to make her son's sacrifice count for something. They also spoke of their faith."
Link: freerepublic.com
Lately her story has changed.
The Aug. 9 issue of Workers World focuses on what is really important to the tiny Stalinist sect, it’s headline blares, "Cuban 5 Win a New Trial" referring to five convicted Castro spies in Florida. But the busy little socialist slaves did make time for an Aug. 9 interview, where Sheehan describes her meeting with Bush a bit differently: "She recalled: ‘(Bush’s)… mouth kept moving but there was nothing in his eyes or anything else about him that showed me he really cared or had any real compassion at all. This is a human being totally disconnected from humanity and reality. His eyes were empty, hollow shells.’"
Workers World isn’t all that interested in Casey or Cindy for that matter. In spite of getting face time with the hottest media ticket in the country, most of their article is about the build-up to September 24-26. Fortunately, the June 24, 2004, Vacaville Reporter had more details about the Sheehan’s meeting with President Bush:
" ... Surreal soon seemed like an understatement, as the Sheehans - one of 17 families who met Thursday with Bush - were whisked in a matter of days to the Army post and given the VIP treatment from the military. But as their meeting with the president approached, the family was faced with a dilemma as to what to say when faced with Casey’s commander-in-chief. "We haven’t been happy with the way the war has been handled," Cindy said. "The president has changed his reasons for being over there every time a reason is proven false or an objective reached."
"The 10 minutes of face time with the president could have given the family a chance to vent their frustrations or ask Bush some of the difficult questions they have been asking themselves, such as whether Casey’s sacrifice would make the world a safer place.
"But in the end, the family decided against such talk, deferring to how they believed Casey would have wanted them to act."
On Sept. 27, 2005, the protesters will all go home from Washington. Cindy will not only have lost her son, but her husband, her home, and much of her family. When she let her Gold Star go dark and decided to no longer defer to how "Casey would have wanted them to act," did she know it would end up this way?
Sheehan link:
discoverthenetwork.org
Andrew Walden is the publisher and editor of Hawaii Free Press, a Big Island-based newspaper.
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