Category: Politics

I would like to think that this woman has suffered and is acting with the best of intentions.

President George W. Bush draws antiwar protesters just about wherever he goes, but few generate the kind of attention that Cindy Sheehan has had since she drove down the winding road toward his ranch here over the weekend and sought to tell him face to face that he must pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq now.

Sheehan’s son, Casey, was killed last year in Iraq, after which she became an antiwar activist. She says that she and her family met with the president two months later at Fort Lewis in Washington state. But when she was blocked by the police a few miles from Bush’s 1,600 acres, or 650 hectares, in Texas on Saturday, the 48-year-old Sheehan, of Vacaville, California, was transformed into a media phenomenon, the new face of opposition to the Iraq conflict at a moment when public opinion is in flux and the politics of the war have grown more complicated for the president and the Republican Party.

Sheehan has vowed to camp out on the spot until Bush will see her, even if it means spending all of August under a broiling sun by the dusty road. Early Sunday afternoon, 25 hours after she was turned back as she approached Bush’s Prairie Chapel Ranch, Sheehan stood red-faced from the heat at the makeshift campsite that she vowed would be her home until the president relented or left to go back to Washington.

A reporter from The Associated Press had just finished interviewing her. CBS was taping a segment on her. She had already appeared on CNN, and was scheduled to appear live on ABC on Monday morning. Reporters from across the country were calling her cellphone.

[…]

As the mother of an Army specialist who was killed at age 24 in the Sadr City section of Baghdad on April 4, 2004, Sheehan certainly has a compelling story. She is also articulate, aggressive in delivering her message and armed with a story most White House reporters had not heard before: how Bush handles himself when he meets behind closed doors with the families of soldiers killed in Iraq.

The White House has released few details of such sessions, which Bush conducts regularly as he travels the country, but it generally portrays them as emotional and an opportunity for the president to share the grief of the families. In Sheehan’s telling, though, Bush did not know her son’s name when she and her family met with him in June 2004 at Fort Lewis. Bush, she said, acted as if he were at a party and behaved disrespectfully toward her by referring to her as “Mom” throughout the meeting.

By Sheehan’s account, Bush said to her that he could not imagine losing a loved one like an aunt or uncle or cousin. Sheehan said she broke in and told Bush that Casey was her son, and that she thought he could imagine what it would be like because he has two daughters and that he should think about what it would be like sending them off to war.

“I said, ‘Trust me, you don’t want to go there,”‘ Sheehan said, recounting her exchange with the president. “He said, ‘You’re right, I don’t.’ I said, ‘Well, thanks for putting me there.”‘

Compelling, indeed. Down right heart-breaking. But is it accurate?

According to Sheehan’s hometown paper, her story at the time she met with the president was very different.

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.

[…]

The trip had one benefit that none of the Sheehans expected.

For a moment, life returned to the way it was before Casey died. They laughed, joked and bickered playfully as they briefly toured Seattle.

For the first time in 11 weeks, they felt whole again.

“That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together,” Cindy said.

As to not knowing the name of Sheehan’s son, this story points out that the families of seventeen lost soldiers were present in this gathering, one of many the president has willingly chosen to face for no gain of his own.

Sheehan now disavows her earlier thoughts on that meeting.

”I was still in shock then,” Sheehan said. “Now, I’m angry. I want the troops home.

As I stated at the opening, I want to think the best of Sheehan’s intentions. I owe that to her son, a volunteer who gave the ultimate sacrifice. I do, however, believe that she is being manipulated in this matter, however willingly it may be.

From the International Herald Tribune piece, the media swirl is no accident.

It did not hurt her cause that she staged her protest, which she said was more or less spontaneous, at the doorstep of the White House press corps, which spends each August in Crawford with little to do, minimal access to Bush and his aides and eagerness for any new story.

She did not go camping out at Crawford alone. Instead, she went there as part of the Veterans for Peace Impeachment Tour, so forget that spontaneous stuff. I know not of Sheehan’s politics but, from the bio page of the veterans on this tour, I can find the following gem:

This administration has committed crimes on a scale rivaling the criminals of World War II.

Sheehan has surrounded herself with people who absurdly equate the actions taken so far in the war against radical Islamist terror with the likes of the Holocaust, the rape of Nanking and the outright murder of hundreds and thousands of POWs.

I will not question Sheehan’s motivations and I will acknowledge her loss and pain. I will also ask that she look at those around her and consider if she is following the best course in her attempt to honor her son.

Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee led me to the local-paper version and gives his thoughts here.

Sentencing for the would-be millennium bomber has been handed down, and it isn’t enough for a man whose hopes and intentions were to kill thousands.

Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian man who sought to explode a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve 1999, was sentenced Wednesday to 22 years in prison.

Some considered that date the eve of the millennium.

Ressam, 38, became a key U.S. government informant on the Al Qaeda network in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but he later ended his cooperation.

He was arrested by U.S. authorities in December 1999 as he tried to pass through U.S. Customs at Port Angeles, Wash., in a car with bomb-making materials.

In April 2001, he was convicted of trying to plant a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport, but his sentencing was delayed as Ressam agreed to aid the Justice Department.

Ressam recounted a saga that took him from Algeria, to Montreal, through Europe to an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, then back to Montreal to prepare the Los Angeles bombing attempt.

He offered full or partial identities of more than 120 people he met as he embraced a jihad against the West.

[…]

But Ressam has refused to help the Justice Department move forward with prosecutions of two men suspected of being Al Qaeda operatives.

Ressam will be eligible for parole in fourteen years. I hope he doesn’t live to see it.

Left out of this version of the sentencing story was a little political play by the judge.

The sentence itself was fairly straightforward: An Algerian man received 22 years for plotting to bomb the Los Angeles airport on the eve of the millennium. It was what the judge said in imposing the term that raised eyebrows.

U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour said the successful prosecution of Ahmed Ressam should serve not only as a warning to terrorists, but as a statement to the Bush administration about its terrorism-fighting tactics.

“We did not need to use a secret military tribunal, detain the defendant indefinitely as an enemy combatant or deny the defendant the right to counsel,” he said. “The message to the world from today’s sentencing is that our courts have not abandoned our commitment to the ideals that set our nation apart.”

He added that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have made Americans realize they are vulnerable to terrorism and that some believe “this threat renders our Constitution obsolete … If that view is allowed to prevail, the terrorists will have won.”

First, there was absolutely no reason for this little bit of ankle-biting by Coughenour other than a personal need to inject his own political view. Second, while the judge is right that our court system could be used to handle the likes of the scum we currently are holding at Gitmo, that does not mean that they must be used or that military tribunals should not be used. Third and quite key in this matter, there is a major difference between Ressam and the Gitmo detainees — Ressam was snagged within our borders in the process of committing criminal, though admittedly terrorist, acts and the Gitmo folks were captured in a foreign combat theater acting not as part of a uniformed enemy force. These detainees are not even eligible to be guaranteed the protections of the Geneva conventions, much less the American legal system. That they have been subjected to military tribunals is not a threat to the Constitution of the United States of America. The same cannot be necessarily said of judges who wander from only tangentially related rulings to offer criticisms of executive-branch policies.

I must say that I missed the tonight’s speech because of work so I’m writing this off of a news report.

President Bush on Tuesday rejected calls for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq or sending more troops, counseling patience for Americans who question the war’s painful costs.

“Is the sacrifice worth it? It is worth it,” Bush told a nation increasingly doubtful about the toll of the 27-month-old war that has taken the lives of more than 1,740 U.S. troops.

Bush spoke in an evening address for a half-hour from an Army base that has 9,300 troops in Iraq, hoping to persuade the public that his strategy for victory needed only time not any changes to be successful.

I will catch a rebroadcast or read over the speech later but, frankly, I doubt I’ll hear anything that will strike me as news. Hopefully, some who are fostering doubts about our nation’s direction against the radical Islamist threat will. I’ve argued repeatedly for the need to continue our efforts because the impact of failure would be unrepairably horrendous and will haunt our nation for generations.

For this post, however, I’ll leave the argument to a MilBlogger currently serving. Chris Short at Conservative Thinking argues against those working to undermine national morale, particularly those doing so for purely political purposes. He does so from a political angle but then shifts his attack, bringing it from a different direction — the hopes of the soldiers involved.

I’m sure every soldier, sailor, Airmen, and Marine wants the MC (mission complete) in the final block in section 15, column d of their DD Form 1351-2 (travel voucher) to mean more than, “Our politicians told us to tuck tail and run.”

We, as a nation, certainly failed not only an ally but also a generation of our nation’s military in the past. For the sake of those in uniform today, like Chris Short and his comrades in arms, we cannot fail our military again in a winnable effort. The risk is theirs, and they face it bravely as they work to reduce the risk that is our society’s.