Cindy Sheehan Says 'Dry Up Canon Fodder Supply'

On a visit to Madrid, Cindy Sheehan asked the people of Spain to press their own Government and other allies of the United States to stand against the 'war criminals' in the White House. According to this article from Spain's Madrid Digital, Sheehan called for the creation of a movement of civil disobedience and said that ultimately, people must stop allowing their children to be sent to war.

By Luis Manuel Arce

December 17, 2005

Original Article (Spanish)    

Madrid: George W. Bush is the world's biggest terrorist because he has killed over 200,000 people in Iraq and Afghanistan and must be judged for war crimes, activist Cindy Sheehan demanded in Madrid.

"Mother Courage," as this anti-war American is known, who lost her 24-year-old son Casey in the war in Iraq, yesterday evening had an animated exchange of opinion with a number of pedestrians at the Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid.

Sheehan was accompanied of several antiwar activists from her country and Maria Isabel Permuy and Javier Couso, mother and brother of Jose Couso, the Spanish cameraman assassinated in Baghdad by United States troops while he filmed the invasion [].

In the United States, it must stop, they argue. We don't want Bush or his gang of neoconservatives arguing that the September 11 attacks justify their war, and the worse part of it is that they do so in name of the victims.

The 11th of September, they said, was not an act of war, but a criminal act whereby the murderers should be pursued and punished. But there should be no war. And at this moment there are criminals in the White House that should also be indicted and condemned for their acts.

Sheehan insisted that innocent people, soldiers or civilians, should not be murdered in attacks on a country that was never a threat to the United States. "'I must kill more'" seems to be Bush's mission," she said.

We want to ask of Spain, of its people, not to trust, not to relax, to remain vigilant, not to permit their Government or allies of the United States to use white phosphorus and secret aircraft to transfer prisoners, and to stand against the war criminals, said Sheehan.

She assured people that two thirds of Americans don't support Bush, who has the worst administration since Richard Nixon, and recalled that when [Nixon] had fallen to that level of unpopularity, he had to resign.

Bush is not our President, nor is he President of United States, he is simply "the president;" and if those elections [2000?] had taken place in another country today, he wouldn't even be that. What he is, is the biggest terrorist in the world, because he has caused 200,000 deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, and not the 30,000 he claims.

She denounced the use by the United States of white phosphorus and depleted uranium in Iraq, but said that more people are needed to hold them to account and that, when they managed to end this war, they would continue to work to prevent new wars.

What we lack, and what is needed, is a movement of civil disobedience to end this war - which is in the sole interest of Halliburton and those that benefit from it and is being waged for petroleum - and bring Bush to account before the courts to judge him for its crimes.

She explained that simply boycotting large businesses would not be enough to end the war. "We would like to tell the American people to only buy petroleum from Chavez, and in fact we are telling them to do that, but is not the solution." 

To end this war we will have to work together, and that is why we are in Spain and have gone to other countries.

In regard to the United States, she said, it is our burden "to dry up" the product that has fueled the war, the "canon fodder," that is to say, our children, who they recruit in schools when they are still almost children, and to tell them: no Sir! Our children will not go to war!