Editor's Note: After this story was sent out we received a notice that the March to Washington, DC, will now start on July 10 in Crawford instead of July 13 in Atlanta. - smg/TO
Also see below:
Cindy Sheehan | Call Out the Instigator •
Cindy Sheehan to Lead March From Crawford to Washington
By Angela K. Brown
The Associated Press
Tuesday 03 July 2007
Fort Worth, Texas - Cindy Sheehan will return to her protest site near President Bush's ranch in Crawford this weekend to bid farewell to the peace movement - but not with an anti-war rally.
Instead, Sheehan will sell some camping items, gather with friends from previous demonstrations and celebrate her 50th birthday in Crawford, about 100 miles south of Fort Worth. Then she will hand over the deed of her 5-acre lot to its new owner, radio talk-show host Bree Walker.
"I feel great," Sheehan told The Associated Press on Tuesday by telephone en route to Texas. "I'm feeling like it was the right decision for me. I feel like it was the best thing to do."
Sheehan stunned supporters and critics in May when she announced she was leaving the anti-war movement and selling her Crawford lot, known as "Camp Casey" for the son she lost in Iraq. She said she felt that her efforts had been in vain and that she had endured smear tactics and hatred from both the left and the right.
She told the AP that she wanted to spend more time with her three children and that she wanted to change course.
Sheehan said Tuesday that she is asking people to join her in a 10-day walk from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., starting July 13 for a "people's accountability movement." On her blog, she said Bush's commuting the prison sentence of former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was "the straw that broke my camel's back of exhausted ennui."
"I tried to remove myself from the political realm of the U.S., what BushCo is turning into an Evil Empire, but the blatant audacity of George commuting Scooter's sentence ... has dragged me kicking and screaming back in," she wrote.
Sheehan first went to Crawford in August 2005 in a caravan from Dallas with protesters who had been at a Veterans for Peace convention. They marched toward Bush's ranch and were stopped at the security checkpoint, where Sheehan demanded to talk to him about the war that killed her son in 2004.
Two of Bush's top aides talked to Sheehan that first day, but Bush never did during her 26-day vigil, which started in ditches off the winding, two-lane road leading to the ranch. As the protest swelled to thousands and caused traffic jams, a sympathetic landowner let the group use his vacant lot for camping and rallies.
Sheehan, who became the face of the anti-war movement, held other rallies in Crawford the rest of that year and in early 2006. Then she bought the lot near downtown for a permanent protest site last year with $52,500 in insurance money she received after her son's death.
Walker, a former TV news anchor who hosts a weekend talk show on KTLK-AM in Los Angeles, plans to build a peace memorial on the property and keep it open to protesters.
Sheehan, who turns 50 next week, will sell camping equipment and other items. Sheehan said she plans to keep some mementoes, such as a large painting of her son. She have a copy made if Walker wants one to remain at the site, she said.
The rows of white crosses representing soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan may remain on the lot, Sheehan said, but she will remove the one bearing Casey Sheehan's name.
Despite her departure from the anti-war movement, this trip to Crawford may not be her last, she said.
"Bree is keeping it open, so I may be back to visit," Sheehan said.
Call Out the Instigator
By Cindy Sheehan
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Tuesday 03 July 2007
Call out the Instigator
Because there's something in the air
We got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution's here
You know it's right!- Thunderclap Newman
I'm not backing off. I tried to remove myself from the political realm of the US, which BushCo is turning into an Evil Empire, but the blatant audacity of George commuting Scooter's sentence (he's not ruling out a full pardon - and you know he will) has dragged me kicking and screaming back in. I can't sit back and let this BushCo drag our country further down into the murky quagmire of Fascism and violence, taking the rest of the world with them!
I have sat quietly back these past five weeks as the slaughter in Iraq sorrowfully surges along with George's bloody escalation - and as the philosophical opposition to the war has soared to almost four out of every five Americans. I have remained silent when Senator Barack Obama said that impeachment is only reserved for "grave, grave" breeches! Well, BushCo has created hundreds of thousands of graves dug by their lies and greed. For cripes' sake, George admitted to breaking the FISA Act (which is a felony) that also breeched the 4th Amendment to our Constitution that already prohibited illegal search and seizure. How was Bill Clinton's offense graver than George's, Dick's, or Scooter's? Did we ever think that the criminality and arrogance of the Nixon White House would be eclipsed in our time with nary a "baaaah" from the Sheeple in Congress?
George has said that America doesn't "do torture" when we have all seen the images of torture from Abu Ghraib (don't believe your lyin' eyes) and know that hundreds of people sold to the US Army for an immoral bounty are incarcerated within the inhumane confines of Guantanamo Prison which is right in our own back yard.
I have had to bite my tongue - HARD - as the George and Dick crime cabal, (formerly known has the executive branch) have claimed that their offices are not to be held up to the same standards of accountability and control as any other entity in the human race - governmental or private.
It has been recently reported that Nancy Pelosi said that impeachment is not "worth it." Her faulty reasoning is that impeachment would take too much time because they don't have the votes. If they could "whip" their own Democratic caucus into shape to defend and protect our Constitution and the people of Iraq and our soldiers as they whupped, cajoled, threatened and browbeat the caucus into attaching "non-binding" time lines onto the last war funding bill, then impeachment would not only be possible, but likely.
The recent commutation of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's sentence, however, was the straw that broke my camel's back of exhausted ennui. Patrick Fitzgerald is a thoughtful and thorough prosecutor who did a heroic job of bringing at least one of the Bush Crime Mob to justice. Even though we were all very pleased, we knew that it was not enough and that Mr. Fitzgerald would delve deeper into the feces-infested executive branch. The lawlessness of the Bush administration has reached Wild West proportions and the inmates definitely have control of the US(A)sylum.
A very dear friend of mine, Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus, is being harassed by the Air Force for "Conduct Unbecoming an Officer and a Gentleman" because "The Rev" fulfills his duty as an Officer and a Gentleman honorably by protesting Iraq and the Fascist Bush Regime almost constantly. The Rev is still in the Individual Ready Reserve, so the Air Force believes it is within its parameters to pursue the charges, although every "Officer and Gentleman(woman)" should be protesting the atrocious mistakes in the Middle East. After The Rev's hearing on July 12, (in Macon, Georgia) he is going to begin a "symbolic" walk from the Reverend Martin Luther King's grave (Atlanta, Georgia) to DC - I am going to be there for him and to begin the march, but I am not going to make it symbolic.
We are going to walk from Atlanta, Georgia, to Congress beginning July 13 and ending up in DC on July 23 to send the mis-leaders back home to face the music of justice in their own districts.
It is about time us "peasants" (in the eyes of the Fascist Ruling Elite) march on DC with our "pitchforks" of righteous anger and our "torches" of truth to demand the ouster of BushCo. I have a dream of the detention centers that George has built and filled being instead filled with Orange Clad neocons and neoconnettes.
If Congress won't dig BushCo's political grave, it is the People's job to do so. Thomas Jefferson said that we need a Revolution every 20 years or so, to keep our Republic honest. Over 225 years have passed since our last Revolution (if you don't count the War Between the States) and we are long overdue for one. Turn off your TVs, kiss your pets goodbye, bring the kids and flock to the federal seat of corruption, or join us on our walk there, for a People's Accountability Movement to be in the face of the Criminal BushCo and the Complicit Congress for the last week of session before they go on their undeserved vacations (why do they get vacations when the Iraqi parliamentarians don't?)
On the eve of our first revolution: You know it's right!
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