Cindy Sheehan Cancels NM Events to Meet With Iraqi Parliament Members in Jordan

As reported in our earlier post, Cindy Sheehan was scheduled to participate in the August 5th Day of Action in Taos and the August 6th Hiroshima Day Memorial in Los Alamos. She had to cancel her attendance at those events, but plans to reschedule a visit to New Mexico sometime in September. Cindy will be a joining a delegation of peace activists from CodePINK and other groups that will travel to Jordan on August 4th to meet with Iraq Parliament members at their invitation. They'll be discussing the goal of ending the violence and bringing our troops home as soon as possible.

Here's how she describes the visit to Jordan in a Truthout post:

Recent polls showed that 72% or our troops wanted to start coming home by the end of this year and 83% of the Iraqi people want the occupation to end. Those numbers are significant if only for the fact that they are probably low - soldiers and occupied peoples have never felt at liberty, or even secure to share their feelings with the oppressors.

To this end of creating a peace plan that the Iraqi people want and can feel comfortable and secure with (it is, after all, their country), a contingent of peace activists, including myself, will travel to Amman, Jordan, to meet with Iraqi parliamentarians who don't parrot what BushCo wants them to say and would actually like coalition forces to be removed from their country. It is a historic and significant step in this abominable and shameful episode of our history. The meeting is also highly significant since our State Department has been transformed into an adjunct of the War Department and is headed by the Deputy Secretary of War, Condi Rice. We have no diplomats in our country: just warmongers who can clear brush, shop for shoes, and laugh at gullible Americans all the way to the bank while they are depositing their war profits.

We will be meeting with the Iraqi representatives in Amman on August 4th, and many of us will return to Camp Casey in Crawford on August 6th to outline the plan and present a way that Americans and Iraqis can work together to end the killing on both sides of the conflict. August 6th is also a very meaningful date for me because it is the same day, one year ago, that I originally sat in the ditch with other peacemongers and we were eventually joined by thousands of peacemongers from all over the world.

On that day, we will ask to meet with George again to brief him on our meeting with real Iraqis who live, work, and raise their families outside of the Green Zone and outside of the influence of DC. Judging by past performance, I don't think he will meet with us (not very neighborly), but I am sure he will know that we are there and we have an Iraqi-driven plan when his only plan is to kill more people because so many have already been killed - which is what "stay the course" and "honor the sacrifices of the fallen" really mean. George is so comfortable cutting and running from Crawford when he feels threatened by the truth, I wish he would cut our soldiers loose from the nightmare of occupation and allow Iraqis to run their own country.

CodePINK has been holding a Troops Home Fast protest across from the White House for almost a month. During Iraqi prime minister Maliki's recent visit to America, they also set up a Camp Maliki across from the Iraqi Embassy in an effort to set up a meeting with him. Although that didn't happen, they were treated with respect by the Iraqi delegation. The interaction led to an invitation to travel to Jordan to meet with five like-minded members of the Iraqi parliament who are working on a reconciliation plan to end the violence in their country. Several members of Congress, academics and noted journalists have also been invited to travel to the meeting with the activists. Exciting news indeed.

CodePINK also bought a full-page ad in an Iraqi newspaper in the form of an open letter to the prime minister expressing support for an Iraqi reconciliation plan that includes the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

Note: Check out the website of our Albuquerque CodePINK group and get involved locally!