Exercising her First Amendment rights

The death of her son shook her into understanding that silence - her silence - the silence of those who didn’t speak out - gave credibility and substance to those who believed that war was the solution to myriad problems - foreign, domestic and political.

As co-founder of Gold Star Families for Peace with Cindy Sheehan, she stood with her friend as she camped on the side of the road to President Bush’s home during the vacation he took in August. “It was important that the media didn’t believe the anti-war protest was just a few mothers who lost their children to war,” Niederer says. With little to do while the president cut brush and took bicycle rides for almost five weeks, the body watch media focused upon those who stayed in tents outside Crawford, Texas, to protest the war. The longer the president refused to meet with Sheehan, the more the media showed this domestic conflict.

Niederer has been on a national crusade to invigorate the anti-war movement and to bring truth to those who still support the invasion and occupation of a nation that had no weapons of mass destruction but did have oil. “I may stay behind the scenes at times,” she says, “but I’m always there,” just as the death of her son is always with her. She is there at schools and universities as part of a nationwide counter-recruiting campaign, telling students there are options other than volunteering for the military. “I’m not against the military,” says Niederer, “I just want students to make an informed decision.”

She has protested in front of the Pentagon; at the Walter Reed Army Hospital, which treats many of the wounded; at Dover Air Force base, where the dead soldiers are returned from war. She was at the Republican National Convention, at President Bush’s second inaugural, and the Stop the War rally in Athens, Greece. She’s at community clubs, at small and large rallies, in rural villages and urban cities, wherever there’s an audience.

In Cape Girardeau, Missouri, as has been common at most of her speeches, she found an enthusiastic audience - and a strong counter-protest movement. Outside the Osage Community Centre were about a dozen men of Protest Warrior, a national organisation based in Austin, Texas, and whose founders say it was “created to help arm the liberty-loving silent majority with ammo - ammo that strikes at the intellectual solar plexus of the Left.” They say they are the people “who believe in the core values of this country.”

Their tactics include in-your-face confrontation. In the home town of their personal hero, conservative mega-mouth Rush Limbaugh, in one of the most conservative parts of America, they planned to make sure reporters and everyone inside the centre knew that the heartland of America was behind President Bush and his war.

On the back of one of their pick-up trucks was a banner, “Hate America Rally,” which they believed accurately portrayed the rally organised by the Southeast Missouri Coalition for Peace and Justice. On pro-war signs, they declared, “America: Freeing People Since 1776” and “Do Not Dishonor Your Son’s Valor.” There was no question in their minds - Sue Niederer, although a grieving mom, was misguided and ill-informed. They planned to guide and inform her. They were loud, aggressive, and determined to make their voices heard. To anyone who disagreed with their views of the world, they freely threw around the labels of “Communist”, “socialist”, “Marxist”, all of them, in their limited world, the same as “liberal” and “left-wing”.

During weekly anti-war protests, members of the Coalition, said Robert Pollock, its founder, “were regularly subjected to the vilest verbal abuse imaginable by some motorists: people also approached us on foot making taunts, which included everything short of physical violence”. To reduce that probability, the police placed the Warriors a comfortable distance from the rally, and made sure these militant counter-protestors knew they wouldn’t be allowed to attend the rally.

And then the woman who describes herself as a “short, fat Jew” walked into their lair. “The police looked at me like I was friggin’ nuts,” she recalls. The rally co-ordinators “looked at me like, ‘You’ve got to be joshing me’”. The Protest Warriors, shaken at first, quickly recovered. She invited them to come into the rally with her. “You have a right to speak,” she said, “a right to be heard.” They didn’t believe her. What they believed was it was a trick, that once they stepped into that hall, they would be arrested. “Oh no you won’t,” she said determined, making sure the police and the rally supporters knew. But the Warriors still weren’t convinced; they were sure not only would they be arrested, but that the people who hate America and all it stands for, would get even more media coverage for their traitorous acts. But, Niederer was just as determined. “If anything happens to you,” she said, “I will walk out of the meeting”. She meant it. “I trusted them to be peaceful,” Niederer said, “and they trusted me to my word”.

Three of her most caustic critics walked with her into the hall. They sat through what they called was a rant by the organiser, and they sat through Niederer’s inflammatory speech, sometimes chuckling their disapproval, sometimes protesting, occasionally jeering. Bobby Hunsacker, the Protest Warrior chapter leader who had said Niederer outside the Centre had “conducted herself in a respectful manner [and] was kind to us,” would later say that Niederer’s speech would reveal her to be a “stark-mad moonbat”. To him, and to his followers, everything said in that hall was nothing less than sedition, rising to levels of treason. But at least he was in the hall to hear what she said. The pretend-guerilla Warriors asked shrill questions and when others tried to shout them down, Niederer intervened, as she promised, to make sure all people knew the Founding Fathers were adamant that all views should be heard.

The Cape Girardeau Confrontation was September 16, 2005, one day short of exactly one year since Laura Bush, surrounded by a cadre of secret service agents, had gone to Hamilton, NJ - and Sue Niederer, surrounded by the secret service, local police, and some very angry Republican volunteers, was arrested for exercising her First Amendment rights.

In the year between when Niederer was arrested and when she spoke out in Cape Girardeau, 870 American sons and daughters were killed in a war begun by a series of lies and perpetuated by a cowboy jingoism. In Iraq, 14,641 Americans have been wounded, some permanently, and 1,895 have been killed. Their voices are heard in their deaths. Like Seth Dvorin, they are all our children.