Austin activist Kim McIntosh was at Camp Casey Saturday and Monday. She talked about it a little today via phone. Monday morning was very peaceful, “nothing much happened.” The camp population averaged 10-20 at a time as people rotated between camp and the Crawford Peace House. “There were reporters there the whole time,” says McIntosh. “When I left there were three reporters standing there.”
“It’s mostly veterans and CodePink,” says McIntosh, who is CodePink herself. The two women from L.A. (see story below) who arrived Sunday night are part of a CodePink delegation that will be rotating people into Camp Casey for the foreseeable future. Fort Worth also had a CodePink rep.
On Monday Kim joined four other Austin CodePinkers on the car trip to Crawford, taking supplies, banners, some water, and, of course, pink umbrellas with peace signs on them to shade the camp from sun and war. “We also made a big pink sheet with a peace sign on it that we could spread on the ground so it could be seen from overhead.”
She has read and viewed some media accounts of Saturday’s protest, and they seem pretty accurate, except she thinks they don’t quite convey the perception of the campers that the Secret Service was intimidating. Although she wasn’t there, she heard that their tires squealed to a stop and they got out of the car saying: “You’re not going to treat the Iraq vets the way you treated the VietNam vets are you?” But, as McIntosh says, the VietNam vets were standing with Sheehan.
Two things McIntosh says about television reports. They sometimes fail to mention that Sheehan’s request to see the President is motivated by recent pronouncements that the war is a ‘noble cause’–“that’s what spurred her,” says McIntosh. And they sometimes exploit Sheehan’s more emotional moments. “Sure, she cries now and then,” says McIntosh. “But they make her look vulnerable when she’s really not at all.”
This morning McIntosh heard a quote from Sheehan on Air America Radio that she really liked. This is what she heard: “I have more courage in my little finger than George Bush has in his whole body, and my son Casey had more courage in his whole body than the entire administration. If he thinks he’s going to intimidate me he’s wrong.”–gm
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