Home > NYPD Unplugs Cindy Sheehan

NYPD Unplugs Cindy Sheehan

by Open-Publishing - Tuesday 20 September 2005
8 comments

Edito Movement Wars and conflicts USA Cindy Sheehan

City’s Finest pulls move even Bush wouldn’t have tried

by Sarah Ferguson

Cindy Sheehan may be the Rosa Parks of the anti-war movement. But that didn’t stop members of the New York Police Department from marching into the crowd of about 150 people gathered in Union Square Monday to hear her speak and yanking away the microphone.

The NYPD pulled the plug just as Sheehan was calling on the audience not to lose heart in the fight to end the war in Iraq.

"We get up every morning, and every morning we see this enormous mountain in front of us," said Sheehan, speaking on behalf of the other parents and family members of fallen soldiers who have taken up the crusade to bring the troops home.

"We can’t go through it, we can’t go under it, so we have to go over it," she continued, just as the cops rushed the makeshift podium.

Police dragged away Paul Zulkowitz, a.k.a. Zool, an organizer with “Camp Casey New York,” the small encampment that he and other activists helped set up a month ago in Union Square in solidarity with Sheehan’s vigil outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. The New York branch existed much to the ire of the city’s Parks Department. Today, Zulkowitz was arrested for failing to obtain a sound permit-a charge that normally warrants no more than a summons.

Moments earlier, Zulkowitz had been chastising Parks officials for refusing to grant a permit to the encampment, and accusing the police of trying to harass the antiwar protest away. Contrasting the liberal Big Apple with the hostile environs Sheehan faced in Crawford, Zulkowitz told the crowd: "You would think that here in New York City, at Union Square-our Hyde Park-you would think that we would little difficulty having a 24-hour vigil to oppose the war. In fact, we’ve had two arrests and eight summonses and endless harassment from the police for doing what we do."

As the activists hustled away Sheehan and the other family members on the Bring Them Home Now tour, an enraged crowd of about 50 people stormed after the police, chanting, "Shame! Shame!" Meanwhile Iraq war veteran and now peace activist Jeff Key played "God Bless America" on his trumpet.

"Since when can’t you talk out here in Union Square?" demanded an Upper West Side social worker who identified herself as Quha, who said she’d taken her lunch break to hear Sheehan because she has a 19-year-old son who is considering enlisting. "I’ve seen everyone and their mother come out and speak nonsense out here in this park, and for them to shut down Cindy Sheehan is just not right."

"They came in like gangbusters. It was really ridiculous," said Margaret Rapp, a retired teacher from Inwood who added that she planned to file a complaint after an officer forcibly shoved her in the chest. A mother of a 19-year-old, she said she’d come to hear Sheehan because she lost her fiancee during the Vietnam War. "This is very close to home. There is a chord that Cindy hits among people that have lost people in this war and other wars, or who have draft age children like me. We’re scared to death.”

Inspector Michael McEnroy, commander of the 13th Precinct, insisted the shutdown order had nothing to do with the content of Sheehan’s speech, but was instead about the "provocation" caused by Zulkowitz. “This has been going on for much longer than today,” McEnroy said, adding of Sheehan, “I don’t even know the woman.” That last part prompted one pissed-off onlooker to shoot back: “Haven’t you watched the news or read a paper in the last three months? ”

Sheehan has been touring the country for the last month with members of Gold Star Families for Peace, Military Families Speak out, and Iraq Veterans Against the War. They will be speaking tonight at 6:30 at St. John the Divine (Amsterdam Avenue at 112th Street), part of the lead up to Saturday’s big anti-war march in Washington, D.C.

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/05...

Forum posts

  • From coast to coast the Nazis have taken over the authority on all levels. Everyone from coast to coast should be mad as hell and not willing to take it any longer.....

    • It’s is no accident that the color of NYPD’s uniforms carries the same black as the German Waffen SS.
      The American police is out of control in every state, the judges allow them to do whatever the want. Rape, theft or just shooting citizens to dead.

      American democracy did never exists. Just watch the TV or go back in to history. The old German joke why the crime rate was low during the Nazis ruled: because all the criminals are in the government - is American reality.

  • Get ready folks,a true patriot should be prepared to defend his country against its government.The puppets we call our politicians have been sent on a divide and conquer mission, militirizing the police and manipulating citizens with fear,the only way their plan of total global control will work.This is indeed The kingdom of fear.Gestapo tactics and the silencing of citizens will only increase and become more violent on the part of those who promise us "security" and that are fighting for our "freedom".On September 11, 2001 a sleeping giant was not awakened, but stunned and frightened nodding its head in agreement with trading liberty for a wicked form of salvation.

  • Image hosted by TinyPic.com
    BEFORE (photo credit and additional info at Lone Star Iconoclast)

    Image hosted by TinyPic.com
    AFTER (photo credit and additional info at Lone Star Iconoclast)

    Stealing the crosses was pretty low.

    Image hosted by TinyPic.com

    But they even stole Casey Sheehan’s boots, which were next to his cross. I am very stongly against the reprehensible occupation of Iraq and think that all soldiers have a moral and legal responsibility to refuse immoral and illegal orders. But by and large, in Amerikkka, they are just kids who signed up for the college money and don’t know any better yet. They don’t know that they are just cannon fodder for transnational global kleptocracy. So by and large their deaths - except for the psychopaths who enlisted to be able to kill people "legally" - are as tragic as those of the Iraqis they murder. But these thieves doubtless say they support the troops - I wonder what they think they mean when they say that? Stealing a dead soldier’s boots, placed there by his mother as a prayer for peace. Disgusting.

    Image hosted by TinyPic.com

    On Monday September 19, 2005, NYPD pulled the plug on Cindy Sheehan while she ws speaking at Camp Casey NYC in Union Square and confiscated the rally’s P.A. system.

    Image hosted by TinyPic.com

    Protest organizer Paul "Zul" Zulkowitz, 49, was arrested for "failing to obtain a sound permit."

    Eyewitnesses to the attack on Camp Casey NYC:

    Daily Kos

    Booman Tribune

    NYC Indymedia here and here

    video of cops pulling the plug on Cindy on Third Planet Video

    Village Voice

    Could the "Joe Welch moment" for Bushco be far away?

    "Have you no sense of decency, sir. At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" - Boston Attorney Joe Welch, bitch slapping Senator Joe McCarthy

    Or perhaps the "moment" will instead be a social explosion of pent-up rage and frustration at the festering hypocrisy and contradictions of the Amerikkkan "capitalist" system, a chain reaction that leads to a civil war/revolution hybrid? Which would demonstrate all of this current talk being bruited about regarding repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act (which supposedly "keeps the military out of domestic law enforcement") to be what it is - a legal nicety irrelevant to the practical exercise of raw power.

    There will be a substantial protest of at least 100,000 against the war in Washington D.C. on Saturday, September 24, 2005. I think the Powers That Be know that an Everywoman like Cindy Sheehan is their worst nightmare, simply because she courageously asks the questions in plain English and demands answers that cannot be provided without admitting that the Amerikkkan brand-name is defunct and the federal government itself exists almost exclusively to steal from the working and middle class.

    I wonder if the scum fucking power elite will overreact and beat up or kill these protestors and precipitate the downfall of "both" (sic) parties.

  • BE HAPPY - DON’T WORRY Cindy!

    Cindy Sheehan has more testosterone than George W. Bush, Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney put together!

    This war is about injustice and the murder of hundred’s of thousands of human beings by the NeoCon REICH Brown Shirts.

    Long after the Whitehouse "Attila" has left the whitehouse to build his 2-book (Sorry Laura, it’ll only be a part-time position!) presidential library, probably on 10 dunum’s of confiscated Palestinian soil in East "Arab" Jeruslem, and the LIKUDNIK Kosher boar Ariel Sharon does his "snaggle tooth" smile as the ribbon is cut...

    Cindy Sheehan will be telling her grandchildren how she stared dowm the Whitehouse "Attila" and he didn’t have the "huevos" to come out of his spider hole and do battle with her.

    TheAZCowBoy
    Tombstone, AZ.

  • From a Kiwi perspective, the current government in the USA is no longer one for the world to look up to, the example to the world has faded, and all that is left is rhetoric and lies. In NZ you would see a lesson in tolerance when it comes to the ability of the public to have their say, for or against the government. Our news reports are accurate, balanced and free of political spin. I just can just imagine the backlash that would be swiftly forthcoming if the NZ Police tried to cut free speech like the "MOB-Cops" in NY. Couldn’t happen as we have not curtailed our laws in the name of the "war on terrorism".
    DW McGregor

    • A 24 year old Casey Sheehan RE-ENLISTED in the Army after serving his initial 4 years. He re-enlisted after the Iraq War had already begun.

      Casey Sheehan also knew that by re-enlisting he would be going to Iraq with his Unit. He didn’t have to go to Iraq. Cindy Sheehan publicly stated, "I begged him not to re-enlist. I told him he might die in Iraq."

      While in Iraq Casey Sheehan VOLUNTEERED for a rescue mission. US Soldiers had been trapped in an ambush by terrorists and Casey Sheehan helped rescue them and saved their lives. Casey Sheehan lost his life during the rescue mission.
      Casey Sheehan was a Hero whose actions will forever speak louder than any of Cindy Sheehan’s hateful words.

    • Villify Cindy you ass hole. I notice that all of about 100 people attended the counter Cindy demonstration, and they were all sent by the GOP probably bought and paid for, so that should show you how many people side with the ass holes like you....Bush has the entire treasury , what’s left of it, the entire military, the entire court system, and the entire money power to defend him against big bad Cindy, they hardly deed a stupid little pip squeek like you.