Suit Challenges Restrictions on Protesters Outside Bush Ranch

The ACLU of Texas last month asked a district judge to block McLennan County officials from enforcing orders aimed at restricting anti-war protesters outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, saying the orders violate free speech rights and exceed the officials' authority.

"This suit is not about the president or politics. It is not even about the war," said Will Harrell, Executive Director of the ACLU of Texas. "It is about the County Commissioners' decision to overstep their own authority in an effort to unlawfully restrict the protected activities of a group of protesters and the media by limiting their access to space, restroom facilities, and shelter from the elements."

The ACLU is representing Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq on April 4, 2004, and became a leading voice against the war after going to Crawford last summer in the hopes of meeting with President Bush. She was joined by thousands of activists from across the country at "Camp Casey I," including plaintiff Daniel Ellsberg, author of the Pentagon Papers, and plaintiff Ann Wright, a Colonel with the U.S. Army Reserve and former Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan, who resigned from the State Department in protest of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

www.aclu.org

 

It should be noted for those that may not be as versed as they should on the Pentagon Papers that Dan Ellsberg was "The" author, but one of many contributors to that volumnous body of revelations into the modus operandi of flagrant deceit (which continues to this day) by our federal government and Military Industrial Complex.