What Really Happened at the State of the Union

What Really Happened at the State of the Union: "What Really Happened at the State of the Union
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by Cindy Sheehan

http://www.opednews.com

Dear Friends,

As most of you have probably heard, I was arrested before the State of the Union Address tonight.

I am speechless with fury at what happened and with grief over what we have lost in our country.

There have been lies from the police and distortions by the press. (Shocker) So this is what really happened:

This afternoon at the People's State of the Union Address in DC where I was joined by Congresspersons Lynn Woolsey and John Conyers, Ann Wright, Malik Rahim and John Cavanagh, Lynn brought me a ticket to the State of the Union Address. At that time, I was wearing the shirt that said: 2245 Dead. How many more?

After the PSOTU press conference, I was having second thoughts about going to the SOTU at the Capitol. I didn't feel comfortable going. I knew George Bush would say things that would hurt me and anger me and I knew that I couldn't disrupt the address because Lynn had given me the ticket and I didn't want to be disruptive out of respect for her. I, in fact, had given the ticket to John Bruhns who is in Iraq Veterans Against the War. However, Lynn's office had already called the media and everyone knew I was going to be there so I sucked it up and went.

I got the ticket back from John, and I met one of Congresswoman Barbara Lee's staffers in the Longworth Congressional Office building and we went to the Capitol via the undergroud tunnel. I went through security once, then had to use the rest room and went through security again.

My ticket was in the 5th gallery, front row, fourth seat in. The person who in a few minutes was to arrest me, helped me to my seat.

I had just sat down and I was warm from climbing 3 flights of stairs back up from the bathroom so I unzipped my jacket. I turned to the right to take my left arm out, when the same officer saw my shirt and yelled; "Protester." He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my seat and roughly (with my hands behind my back) shoved me up the stairs. I said something like "I'm going, do you have to be so rough?" By the way, his name is Mike Weight.

The officer ran with me to the elevators yelling at everyone to move out of the way. When we got to the elevators, he cuffed me and took me outside to await a squad car. On the way out, someone behind me said, "That's Cindy Sheehan." At which point the officer who arrested me said: "Take these steps slowly." I said, "You didn't care about being careful when you were dragging me up the other steps." He said, "That's because you were protesting." Wow, I get hauled out of the People's House because I was, "Protesting."

I was never told that I couldn't wear that shirt into the Congress. I was never asked to take it off or zip my jacket back up. If I had been asked to do any of those things...I would have, and written about the suppression of my freedom of speech later. I was immediately, and roughly (I have the bruises and muscle spasms to prove it) hauled off and arrested for "unlawful conduct."

After I had my personal items inventoried and my fingers printed, a nice Sgt. came in and looked at my shirt and said, "2245, huh? I just got back from there."

I told him that my son died there. That's when the enormity of my loss hit me. I have lost my son. I have lost my First Amendment rights. I have lost the country that I love. Where did America go? I started crying in pain.

What did Casey die for? What did the 2244 other brave young Americans die for? What are tens of thousands of them over there in harm's way for still? For this? I can't even wear a shirt that has the number of troops on it that George Bush and his arrogant and ignorant policies are responsible for killing.

I wore the shirt to make a statement. The press knew I was going to be there and I thought every once in awhile they would show me and I would have the shirt on. I did not wear it to be disruptive, or I would have unzipped my jacket during George's speech. If I had any idea what happens to people who wear shirts that make the neocons uncomfortable that I would be arrested...maybe I would have, but I didn't.

There have already been many wild stories out there.

I have some lawyers looking into filing a First Amendment lawsuit against the government for what happened tonight. I will file it. It is time to take our freedoms and our country back.

I don't want to live in a country that prohibits any person, whether he/she has paid the ulitmate price for that country, from wearing, saying, writing, or telephoning any negative statements about the government. That's why I am going to take my freedoms and liberties back. That's why I am not going to let Bushco take anything else away from me...or you.

I am so appreciative of the couple of hundred of protesters who came to the jail while I was locked up to show their support....we have so much potential for good...there is so much good in so many people.

Four hours and 2 jails after I was arrested, I was let out. Again, I am so upset and sore it is hard to think straight.

Keep up the struggle...I promise you I will too.

Love and peace soon,

Cindy

Originally published as: A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Cindy Sheehan is the founder the Camp Casey Peace Foundation, a co-founder of Gold Star Families for Peace www.gsfp.org and the author of Not One More Mothers Child available from BuzzFlash and at www.koabooks.com
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/013106C.shtml

It's worth citing in full the first paragraph of an important piece of investigative reporting last week by The Post's Jonathan Weisman: "House and Senate GOP negotiators, meeting behind closed doors last month to complete a major budget-cutting bill, agreed on a change to Senate-passed Medicare legislation that would save the health insurance industry $22 billion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office."

What's wrong with this picture? First, a group of legislators who claim to want to reduce the deficit gutted a provision designed to save taxpayers money, after heavy lobbying by the health insurance industry.

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/013106H.shtml

With its historic start between the First World War, which saw the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the Second, which inaugurated the movements of decolonization and national revolutions, Islamist ideology did not succeed in taking root in the societies of the Arab-Muslim world at the outset. Even Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan in 1947, lived as a British gentleman up to the end of his life, drinking his whisky every evening. Alcohol was not forbidden in Pakistan until much later, during the 1970s, by a demagogic decision of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Yet one is forced to observe that in the Arab-Muslim world, the graft of European governance, implanted at the time of the decolonizations and founded on the central principle of the separation of religion and politics, was rejected by the people.

How is one to explain such a transplant rejection? It derives first of all from the failure of the development models intellectually imported from Europe. In Algeria, socialism (collectivization of agriculture, creation of massive state complexes of "industrializing industries" à la USSR) has only produced poverty for everyone - with the exception of the FLN's senior nomenklatura who sent their sons to private schools in Switzerland so they could escape the appalling "Arabization" of studies decreed at home. In Syria and Iraq, nationalism was confiscated by minorities desirous of maintaining themselves in power at all costs. In Egypt, nationalism chased out the Jews, and Nasserism, the Greeks: the country has still not recovered economically from the departure of these two communities, which formed the backbone of the private sector.

The governments that emerged from decolonization all undertook a predatory relationship to power, which ended up being recognized and despised by the population. If Algerians, the first time they could freely express themselves at the ballot box (in the municipal elections of 1990), massively voted for the Islamic Salvation Front (ISF), it's because they wanted to sanction those whom they called "the FLN robbers." Yasser Arafat's Fatah, which was notoriously corrupt, never quite succeeded at redistributing the money sent by the Arab states and the European Union to the Palestinian population. On the other hand, Hamas's leaders have always lived modestly.

The simplifying power across the Muslim world of the Brotherhood's electoral slogan, "Islam is the solution," is enormous. From Cairo to Gaza to Baghdad or Algiers, who could contradict such a slogan? Who there could prefer the government of men to that of God? Doesn't Islam, a religion the power of which lies in its simplicity, forbid theft? Doesn't it preach alms to the most deprived? Hasn't the Brotherhood always shown an example? In Gaza, in Cairo, or in the southern suburbs of Beirut, it's Islamists who assure the social services there where the state fails to.

For poor people, Islam, which teaches submission to God alone, is a liberating religion. Equality before God has become an ideologically far more appealing product than the Western equality before the law, which has been experienced as hypocrisy.

Simultaneously, the image the Western world presents to the Muslim masses has been considerably tarnished. Islamists have a field day teaching their co-religionists that Westerners "don't believe in anything any more," lost as they are in their hyper-consumerism. What sort of moral model do European societies offer now, societies that are afraid to have children and that abandon their old people in nursing homes?

It would be useless for Westerners to try to interrupt this deep current. Now we need to allow the societies of the Arab-Muslim world to experiment freely with God's government, in their own countries. As for ourselves, let us continue - without any hang-ups - to demand total human democracy in our own countries.

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Renaud Girard is Le Figaro's star Foreign Service reporter.

Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/013106E.shtml

Americans who bother to imagine the situation from the Iraqi point of view - a massive foreign invasion, launched on false pretenses; a brutal occupation, with control of local oil reserves surely part of the motivation; the heartbreaking deaths of brothers, cousins, children, parents - naturally understand that an "insurgency" is the appropriate response. Its goal is simply to force the invaders and occupiers to leave. Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Kurds have intrinsic reasons to regard each other as enemies, from competition over land and oil, to ethnic hatreds, to unsettled scores. No equivalent sources of inbuilt contempt exist among these people toward America. Taken as a whole, or in its parts, Iraq is not an enemy.

President Bush would say Iraq is only one front in the so-called war on terrorism. Surely, in that realm, where the antagonist has a name and a face, the US is authentically at war. If Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda are not an enemy, what is? True enough. But the war on terrorism is not real war either, since the Pentagon has proven itself incapable of actually engaging Al Qaeda. That, of course, is because Al Qaeda is a free floating nihilism, not a nation, or even a network. Al Qaeda is a rejectionist idea to which deracinated miscreants are drawn, like filings to a magnet, but that drawing power is generated in Washington. Bin Laden was a self-mythologized figure of no historic standing until George W. Bush designated him America's equal by defining 9/11 as an act of war to be met with war, instead of a crime to be met with criminal justice. But this over-reaction, so satisfying at the time to the wounded American psyche, turned into the war for which the other party simply did not show up. Which is, of course, why we are blasting a substitute Iraq to smithereens.

Iraq is not a war, because, though we have savage assault, we have no enemy. The war on terrorism is not a war because, though we have an enemy, the muscle-bound Pentagon offers no authentic means of assault.

In each case, Bush is presiding over a self-serving delusion, in concert with a self-emasculating Congress, his partners as would-be war profiteers. Anticipating tomorrow night, one could say Bush will, on this question, be lying to the American people again. But that would presume he is not first lying to himself. State of war? No. State of the Union? Catastrophe, pure and simple.

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