Breaking News: Charges Against Sheehan To Be Dropped

Capitol Police said "they screwed up":

WASHINGTON - Charges against antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan, who was arrested after an incident involving a T-shirt she wore to the State of the Union address, will be dropped, officials told NBC News Wednesday.

U.S. Capitol Police took Sheehan away in handcuffs and charged her with unlawful conduct, a misdemeanor, when she showed up to President Bush’s address Tuesday night wearing a shirt that read, “2245 Dead. How many more?” — a reference to the number of soldiers killed in Iraq.
But Capitol Police will ask the U.S. attorney's office to drop the charges, NBC News’ Mike Viqueira reported Wednesday.

"We screwed up," a top Capitol Police official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

He said Sheehan didn't violate any rules or laws.

Cindy's arrest for wearing the "anti-war slogan" t-shirt -- why is acknowledging the number of our dead soldiers immediately tagged "anti-war", anyway? -- is outrageous all by itself, but made even more so by a detail Cindy pointed out in her statement which fellow Blue Voice Marigolds linked to: if her intent was to protest and disrupt the SOTU speech, why did she reveal the t-shirt when Bush wasn't even at the Chamber yet?

I thought about this as well and led me to suspect that her being roughed up and being arrested has more to do with who she is rather than what she has done.

To those who are making an equivalency between what happened to her and Beverly Young, wife of Representative C.W. Bill Young of Florida who was asked to leave because she was wearing a "Support the Troops" shirt, note that Mrs. Young was not arrested and thrown in jail like Cindy was.

Moreover, in the same article a Capitol Official said that officers should not have even approached Mrs. Young.

Let's see. Should not have even been approaced versus being roughed up and thrown in jail. Some equivalency.

I'd like to see Cindy go through with her lawsuit regarding the violation of her First Amendment Rights. As Glenn Greenwald correctly pointed out before this too little too late oopsie admission from the Capitol Police, she has broken no laws.

There is a pattern of overzealous police and security personnel violating citizens' rights over and over in the name of protecting Bush. In reality, it's a flimsy excuse to insulate him from any type of dissent because the manchild can not tolerate anything other than slobbering adoration and thunderous applause.

I go back to Greenwald's words:

Our leaders aren't entitled to reverence and worship and aren't supposed to want it. Criticism, dissent and divergence of opinion are things which the founders did everything possible to foster, and the idea that someone is dragged out of a speech by the President for silently and peacefully wearing an anti-war t-shirt is disgraceful and embarrassing.And these attacks on dissent are particularly ironic given that they occurred in the midst of a speech by a President who loves to lecture the world on the virtues of liberty and who holds himself out as the Chief Crusader for freedom and democracy.

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