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Thursday, September 23, 2004

Mr. Salt, meet Mrs. Wound
Posted by Jill | 6:42 AM
As if losing her son in Bush's Iraq clusterfuck while he was doing work for which he wasn't trained, and being arrested for asking The Stepford First Wife when the latter's own children were going to enlist, now Seth Dvorin's mother, Sue Neiderer of Hopewell Township, NJ is being investigated by the Secret Service:

he mother of a soldier killed in Iraq who was arrested last week for interrupting a speech by Laura Bush is being investigated by the Secret Service for threatening remarks she made about President Bush, a Secret Service official confirmed yesterday.

The woman, Sue Niederer, 55, who lives in Hopewell, N.J., made the comments on a Web site, according to the Secret Service official, who was reached by telephone in Washington. He referred further questions to Special Agent Tony Colgary in the Trenton office of the Secret Service, who did not respond to messages.

Mr. Colgary, however, confirmed the investigation to The Trenton Times.

Mrs. Niederer, reached by phone, said: "I don't want to talk about it. Leave it alone."

The federal officials are apparently investigating comments made by Mrs. Niederer in May on the Web site counterpunch.org, a political newsletter. In the Web postings, she is quoted as saying she "wanted to rip the president's head off" and "shoot him in the groined area."

It is a federal crime to threaten the president, though civil liberties groups are expected to argue the case on free speech grounds.

Mrs. Niederer told The Trenton Times she was upset about her son's death at the time. When asked if she wanted to threaten the president, she answered, "Absolutely not."

Mrs. Niederer is being assisted by a volunteer lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union, according to Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the civil liberties group's New Jersey chapter. Ms. Jacobs, who did not return a voice mail message left at her office late yesterday, told The Associated Press that Mrs. Niederer's comments on the Web site were protected by court precedent from a 1969 case. In Watts v. United States, the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a man who three years earlier had claimed at a public gathering that he would "set his sights" on President Lyndon Johnson if he was drafted.

The court ruled that while the nation had an interest in protecting the president, the 1917 statute on which the case was based "must be interpreted with the commands of the First Amendment clearly in mind."


There's no doubt that Sue Niederer is a problem for the Bush Administration, because she has refused to buy the Official Party Line that this is some sort of noble cause for which people should feel honored to donate their sons' lives. But saying what one would "like to do" to the president is in no way an actual threat. I am always very careful in e-mails and on this blog to qualify everything I say about removing George W. Bush from office with "via the ballot box on November 2nd" for just this reason -- because these days, any kind of dissent about Bush's policies is now regarded as a threat against Der Führer, and frankly, I don't need the aggravation.

But I'm just your ordinary garden-variety outraged citizen, I'm not a bereaved mother. It's easy for me to take a deep breath and think before posting. If I'd lost my kid to this war, it might not be so easy.

This president and the people around him are now trying to control how the families left behind from the carnage in Iraq they have produced, and continue to produce every day. If you mourn "appropriately," which means you be sure to praise Chickenshit Leader as part of your mourning, you're all right. If you dare to rage against the injustice of a man who went AWOL from his own service sending your son off on bomb defusal duty without training him how to do it, you're an enemy of the state.

This is America under George W. Bush. And if he is allowed a second term via the ballot box on November 2nd, all of us who have been trying to get people to wake up and smell the carrion, risk of the same treatment.
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