AP: Texas

08/15/2005

By ANGELA K. BROWN  / Associated Press

Since a grieving mother started camping out near President Bush's ranch 10 days ago, vowing to remain until he talks to her about the war that killed her son, she says other issues and groups have muddied her mission.

Critics are focusing on Cindy Sheehan's comments that Bush should be impeached, that she won't pay her income taxes, and that Israel should leave Palestine. And among the Web sites running her daily blog is "Fahrenheit 9/11" filmmaker Michael Moore's.

"It's obvious that she is promoting a political agenda," said Kristinn Taylor, co-leader of the Washington, D.C., chapter of FreeRepublic.com, which holds rallies to support troops and counter anti-war demonstrations. "Mrs. Sheehan has spent the past year in the embrace of the radical left of this country."

Unrelated groups also have trekked to her makeshift campsite, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. When others handed out Communist Party leaflets Saturday, they were promptly asked to leave.

Sheehan says it's all been a distraction from her quest in Crawford: a face-to-face meeting with Bush to ask for what noble cause her 24-year-old son Casey died, and to say that the only way to honor soldiers' sacrifices is to stop the war with Iraq.

"Our message is to bring the troops home," Sheehan, of Vacaville, Calif., said Monday. "We're trying to get back to that original goal."

On Monday, the White House again issued a statement saying that Bush sympathizes with Sheehan. The president has given no indication that he will meet with her.

Sheehan and other grieving military families met with Bush in June 2004 at Fort Lewis, near Seattle. That was two months after her son's death and before reports surfaced about faulty pre-war intelligence, which enraged her.

When Sheehan arrived in Crawford on Aug. 6, the day after she spoke at the Veterans for Peace convention in Dallas, her small group started marching to Bush's ranch, then was moved by the authorities a few miles away to a triangle plot of land. They camped out in chairs the first night without a flashlight.

Then dozens more came, pitching sleeping tents and canopies along 8-foot-wide shoulders of two roads beside barbed-wire fence-enclosed cow pastures. The two side streets intersect with each other and with Prairie Chapel Road, which leads to the ranch.

Four organizations are directly part of the vigil: Veterans for Peace, Iraqi Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out and Gold Star Families for Peace, a group Sheehan helped found. Code Pink, a grassroots group initiated by women promoting peace and social justice, also has a tent there.

An array of colorful banners — "No Blood for Oil" and "Bush Lied; Casey Died" hang from a row of trees. Several portable toilets were brought in last week.

Under one tent-like canopy are tables full of food — from peanut butter and bread to fruit and a bottle of vanilla — and plastic tubs of insect repellant, sunscreen, pain relievers and toothbrushes. Cases of bottled water are stacked several feet high.

The camp also has an attorney specializing in First Amendment and civil rights cases and a public relations firm handling the numerous media calls for Sheehan.

On most days more than 100 people mill around "Camp Casey," about half sleeping there at night. The rest stay at the Crawford Peace House several miles away near downtown Crawford.

Beatriz Saldivar of Fort Worth said she joined the vigil "for all the soldiers who don't have a voice." Her nephew, Daniel Torres, was killed in Iraq last year, leaving behind an unborn daughter due next month.

"What are we fighting for?" Saldivar said. "What are we doing there?"