Iraq war protestor Sheehan targets Bush again

UNITED STATES: Fresh from meeting Iraqi opposition figures in Jordan, war protestor Cindy Sheehan was back in US President George W. Bush's backyard Sunday hoping to tell him in person to call US forces home.

"It was much cooler in Jordan than it is here," Sheehan, who met once with Bush shortly after her son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004, quipped as she surveyed an arid plot of land she bought as a base for her anti-war campaign.

Sheehan, who camped near Bush's Prairie Chapel ranch in August 2005, told reporters: "I'm going to go up there again today and ask for a meeting with George Bush. I think it would be neighbourly if he met with his new neighbour."

Sheehan, who traveled to Jordan August 2 and returned to this flyspeck Texas town late Saturday, said that she met there "with several factions of opposition parties to the prime minister of Iraq." "We met with Iraqi parliamentarians, elected officials, who have peace plans and goals that they want to accomplish in Iraq, and all of them said the occupation is the cause of the problem and the occupation has to end," she said.

Sheehan had a message for some Crawford residents who resent her taking over a roughly five-acre plot and say she misled the previous owner by having a third party purchase the land.

"I think they should be resentful of the presence of a president who lied to the American public and lied to the world and got us into an illegal and immoral invasion," she said. "I love Crawford and we will be good neighbors."

At the same time, she acknowledged using a third party as a way of ducking objections to having her buy land here: "I just had a third party do it because I know that they wouldn't have sold property to me."

But "if they can't put up with our presence for a few weeks, when our soldiers and the people of Iraq are suffering constantly because of what our other neighbor George Bush did, then I think they just need to relax a little bit and learn to live with us," she said.

Asked Friday whether Bush would meet with her, White House spokesman Tony Snow replied: "So far there are no plans at all, but I would advise her to bring water."

Texas, Monday, AFP