Cindy Sheehan Arrested, Set Free
Thursday, February 2nd, 2006Cindy Sheehan, a mother who has made a living off of exploiting her son’s death in Iraq, was arrested at and removed from the gallery at the State of the Union Address Tuesday evening. Wednesday, the charges against Sheehan were dropped and she was allowed to return home.
WASHINGTON (AP) – Capitol Police dropped a charge of unlawful conduct against anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan on Wednesday and apologized for ejecting her and a congressman’s wife from President Bush’s State of the Union address for wearing T-shirts with war messages.
“The officers made a good faith, but mistaken effort to enforce an old unwritten interpretation of the prohibitions about demonstrating in the Capitol,” Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer said in a statement late Wednesday.
“The policy and procedures were too vague,” he added. “The failure to adequately prepare the officers is mine.”
Briefly, Sheehan arrived at the Capitol as a guest of Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif. wearing a shirt which stated: “2245 Dead. How many more?” which was covered by a jacket. After taking her seat, she unzipped the jacket and a security guard saw the shirt and removed her from the gallery for protesting. Sheehan is now preparing to file a lawsuit claiming deprivation of her civil rights.
[Sheehan] was released from custody and flew home Wednesday to Los Angeles. “They violated my civil rights, they humiliated me,” she told reporters on arrival there. “They treated me like instead of having just a T-shirt on I had a weapon.”
Never one to understate anything, Sheehan is, of course, puffing up her situation. Two other people were also removed from the gallery, one of which was the wife of a prominent Republican Congressman. Sheehan’s treatment by security personnel was no different than hers.
Part of me wants to give her the benefit of the doubt, in that I want to believe that if asked she would have simply put her jacket back on to conceal the shirt. However, in part because of her past actions, part of me believes that she was determined to embarrass the President in front of a nation-wide audience. If you read Sheehan’s posting about the whole mess on Michael Moore’s website you can see for yourself that she back to her old act of bashing the President for almost every problem under the sun.
This has got to be the longest fifteen minutes of fame ever.
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February 6th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
Anything for all that shameless publicity what else will ms sheehan try go over niagra falls in a barrel?