Cindy Sheehan, others, to be arrested at White House in vigil.
Cindy Sheehan and others plan to be arrested at the White House tomorrow. In so doing, they plan to turn their campaign into one of civil disobedience in the vein of King, Gandhi, and others who have fought for world peace and social justice. This is part of the huge avalanche of bad news hammering Bush this week. This is the blackest week of his presidency, in an inferno all of his own making.
David Swanson, a Sheehan supporter, plans to be arrested with her and her supporters. Here are his reasons:
- Admiration - I plan to get arrested together with Cindy Sheehan and other leaders of the movement for peace, including veterans of the war and family members of the dead. I greatly admire these people and consider it an honor to act with them.
- Honor - I want to honor and remember the people whose lives have been most directly destroyed by this war, including those who have fought in it on both sides, and those - the vast majority of the dead -- who have died in this war without ever picking up a gun. These people have been brutally attacked from behind a desk in an oval-shaped office. Children have lost limbs and minds by the tens of thousands for the greed and power of a small number of cruel people.
- Anger - I'm extremely angry. A gang of criminals blatantly lied to the world about the reasons for the slaughter. There could be no acceptable reasons for such a thing, but I would be less angry - I think - or it would be a very different anger if they had given honest reasons and my compatriots had accepted them. Instead they told lies. They concocted stories. They forged documents! [ http://www.repubblica.it/2005/j/sezioni/esteri/iraq69/bodv/bodv.html ] And many of us knew they were lying. They weren't even so much lying as going through the motions of lying - this was the level of their arrogance. This sort of arrogance may never before have seen its match outside of the profession of journalism - a profession about which I am too angry to speak.
- Disgust - I am disgusted with the debate over whether the hell that is occupied Iraq might be even worse if it were no longer occupied. What's at stake here, primarily, is the future of international law, that is: the future right of the country with the most weapons to aggressively attack and occupy weaker countries and never face justice. If this war is allowed to stand, there is no more international law and cannot be for a long long time - perhaps longer than such a planet will have for human life. The debate must begin with a demand for justice. If I break into your house and bust up half your furniture, I do not then own your house and have a moral obligation to stay the night. If I bully the police into letting me, then I have created a lawless state. And if I force you to torture your family members and then claim that you and your family will fight horribly after I leave, that still does not give me the right to remain. The only decent thing I can do is get out. When I get out, I owe you reparations and repair services and counselors and aides of your choosing. But staying helps nothing and destroys great things.
- Communication - By pretending to die on the White House sidewalk, we will symbolize the dead. By being arrested, we will symbolically play out the only decent action a police officer could perform at the White House: arresting its occupant. It is my hope that the power of nonviolent action, and the brilliance of Cindy Sheehan in working the media (you should have seen them wait in the rain for her yesterday) will communicate the force of this message to those it has not yet reached, namely the United States Congress.
- Nausea - The U.S. Congress makes me sick to my stomach. Its members routinely ignore the will of the residents of their districts. With few exceptions, they work for corporate greed, not human needs. The exceptions include Senators (they can be counted on one hand) who have taken baby steps toward ending the ongoing global crime in Iraq. The main exceptions are the approximately 75 Members of the House of Representatives who inconsistently make general motions in the direction of forming an opposition party against the war party.
The Plamegate case is only a small part of the Bush administration's moral decay and lack of respect for any kind of laws whatsoever. The Iraq War violated any kind of standard of human decency and badly damaged our prestige in the world. And the Republican cowardice in the face of all this is astounding. With a few exceptions, like Walter Jones, Chuck Hagel, and Ron Paul, hardly any Republican leaders have stood up and declared that what Bush did was wrong. They value winning over moral values and thus will not lift a finger to stand up to the President.